The Town and the City: A Novel by Jack Kerouac
Everything that he had ever done in his life, everything there was—was haunted now by a deep sense of loss, confusion, and strange neargrief. He had known a boy’s life in Galloway, he had grown up there and played football and lived in the big house with his family, he had known all the gravities and the glees and the wonders of life. Now all that was lost, vanished, haunted and ghostly—because it was no more. And he had known youngsters like Tommy Campbell and Danny and Alexander Panos, he had known his own brothers Joe, Francis, and Charley, he had known a thousand young men like himself in Galloway who once roamed the same streets and places he roamed: but all that was lost, vanished, haunted and ghostly too—because it was no more. And there had been Liz and Ruth and Rosey, his sisters, and where were they?—what were their faces that he remembered in haunted dreams? And there had been his mother and father in the old house on Galloway Road: and now, more lost and vanished than anything could ever be, they were in Brooklyn, dark Brooklyn nearby, within a subway’s distance from where he was, yet farther and more forlorn than ever.
He had gone to Galloway like a ghost and hovered there for twenty lonely hours, sitting in the Daley Square cafeteria, walking the old streets, revisiting the Monarch Theater, Galloway Road, Pine Brook and the Rooney Street saloons. He was a ghost there, and he had slept a few restless nightmare hours in the Y.M.C.A., among the angry soldiers from all over the country who had no other place to spend their leave. He had wandered among the strange men and women who had come there to work in the munition plants in the spectral night, and it was no longer Galloway, it was no longer the place of his boyhood, it too was haunted like all the world since the war—or since some time when he had begun to realize that it was not known, nothing was known.
He got off the bus at the station and sat down on a bench and watched all the others. He could think of nothing else to do, he tingled all over from sharp, pleasurable sadnesses and exciting suspenseful thoughts. He was back from a long five-month voyage to Guam and he had weeks and weeks ahead of him with nothing to do but abide and dwell on the land. He had nothing to do but go and involve himself in all the affairs and excitements and moods and glees and absorptions of his family, his friends, and his lovers in New York. It was all new … new seasons, a new circle of unutterable sweetness and confusion to be completed among things and people, he had known all this before and he knew that it was going to continue now with the greedy eager power of life.
He sat there in the bus station with his canvas bag between his feet—the canvas bag that had traveled with him all over the spectral prodigious world—a cigarette in his mouth, his hat pushed back on his head. He sat there thinking and looking around and expecting everything suddenly to happen: because it was joyful to realize that if there were no Galloway girls in this world now, somehow, there was Judie waiting for him that very moment as he sat in the bus station. And if there was no Alexander Panos in the world any more—(he was as lost as an autumn leaf)—if not Alex and Danny and the gang, then there were Kenneth Wood, and Leon Levinsky, and Will Dennison, his friends “waiting” in the city for him. And if there were not the father and the mother he had known as a boy in Galloway, then there were the father and mother he would know now in the city, and they were “waiting” too. Saddest of all was that when they did meet again, when they came face to face at the completion of some mysterious circle of life, what an unspeakable understanding they all had of one another!
Besides all these he knew he would meet some unknown woman; he knew in the pulse of his blood that he would meet such a woman, an inevitable woman who was “waiting” too—and he thought: “She’ll just wait, she’ll be there, and when I see her we’ll both know!”
What was all the excitement and mystery and sadness in his soul? In all the world, the roaming, the going to and fro among family, friends, and lovers, he knew it was the look that was sad, the eyes of all human beings so enigmatical, so loathsome somehow, so wondrous and sweet. It never changed, it would always be like that. And what of himself, Peter Martin, his own nature: why was it so vast, false, complex, shifting, treacherous, saddened by the mere sight of life. Something complete, and wise, and brutal too, had dreamed this world into existence, this world in which he wandered haunted. Something silent, beautiful, inscrutable had made all this for sure, and he was in the middle of it, among the children of the earth. And he was glad.
He stood on the sidewalk, looked at the rain, and wondered: What is this rain falling on our houses and on our heads in this world, what is this rain?
[3]
He wandered into Times Square. He stood on the sidewalk in the thin drizzle falling from dark skies. He looked about him at the people passing by—the same people he had seen so many times in other American cities on similar streets: soldiers, sailors, the panhandlers and drifters, the zoot-suiters, the hoodlums, the young men who washed dishes in cafeterias from coast to coast, the hitch-hikers, the hustlers, the drunks, the battered lonely young Negroes, the twinkling little Chinese, the dark Puerto Ricans, and the varieties of dungareed young Americans in leather jackets who were seamen and mechanics and garagemen everywhere.
It was the same as Scollay Square in Boston, or the Loop in Chicago, or Canal Street in New Orleans, or Curtis Street in Denver, or West Twelfth in Kansas City, or Market Street in San Francisco, or South Main Street in Los Angeles.
The same girls who walked in rhythmic pairs, the occasional whore in purple pumps and red raincoat whose passage down these sidewalks was always so sensational, the sudden garish sight of some incredible homosexual flouncing by with an effeminate shriek of general greeting to everyone, anyone: “I’m just so knocked out and you all know it, you mad things!”—and vanishing in a flaunt of hips.
And then the quiet men with lunchpails hurrying off to work across these blazing scenes, seeing nothing, stopping for nothing, hurrying for busses and trolleys, and vanishing. The occasional elderly gentleman wearing a look of fear and indignation at having to endure the proximity of such “riff-raff.” The cops strolling by with nightsticks, stopping to chat with newsvenders and cab-drivers. The dishwashers who leaned in steamy kitchen doorways, all tattooed and muscular. The occasional crooks and thieves and murderous hoodlums who passed in silent, arrogant, gum-chewing groups.
This was the way Peter had seen it everywhere in these years of the war, but nowhere was it so dense and fabulous as on Times Square. All the cats and characters, all the spicks and spades, Harlem-drowned, street-drunk and slain, crowded together, streaming back and forth, looking for something, waiting for something, forever moving around.
Through all this passed occasional out-of-town visitors, in gaping happy families, the father and the mother grinning expectantly because “it’s Times Square,” and the young daughter clinging to her brother’s or her fiancé’s arm with gleeful excitement, and the young man himself glaring defiantly about because he burned at the thought of the word “hick” or the word “square” that must be on the minds of a thousand hoodlums.
Peter knew all these things. By this time he was on familiar terms with many of the young drifters who haunted Times Square day and night. Some of them he had met in other cities thousands of miles away but he was always certain of running into them again at Times Square in New York, the sum and crown of every marqueed square and honky-tonk street in America. It was the one part to which all the “characters” eventually migrated across the land at one time or another in their lone-wolf scattering lives. On Times Square he could meet a Norwegian seaman he had drunk with in the alleys of Picadilly, or a Filipino cook who had borrowed ten dollars from him in the Arctic Sea, or a young wrangler-poolshark he had gambled with in some San Francisco poolroom. On Times Square he would suddenly see a familiar face he had seen somewhere in the world for dead certain. It was always a wonder to see such a face and hauntingly expect to see it again years later in some other night’s-market of the world.
To Peter the course of his life now seemed to cross and re-cross New Y
He could stand on Times Square and watch a Park Avenue millionaire pass in a limousine at the same moment that some Hell’s Kitchen urchin hurried out of its path. The gay group of young Social Register revelers piling into a cab, and some young bitter-fierce John Smith tempered by Public School No. 16 standing at a hotdog stand watching them, before going into an all-night movie to see them on the screen. The trio of influential businessmen, fresh from the convention dinner, strolling by absorbed in high conversation, and the tattered young Negro from 133rd Street dodging meekly out of their way. The meditative Communist committeeman brushing shoulders with the sullen secret Bundist from Yorkville. The Greenwich Village intellectual looking down his nose at the Brooklyn machinist reading the Daily News. The Broadway weisenheimer-gambler glancing at the old farmer with bundles wrapped in newspaper who gapes and bumps into everyone. The sartorial First Nighter frantically trying to hail a cab while the crowds swarm out of the second-run double-feature movie. The mellow gentleman in the De Pinna suit headed for the Ritz bar, and the mellow gentleman staggering by and sitting down in the gutter, to spit and groan and be hauled off by cops. The young Bohemian writer who couldn’t pay his rent, always arguing about his art, and the sleek, smoothly-attired zooter twirling his key chain and eying the girls on the corner. The robust rosy-cheeked young priest from Fordham, with some of his jayvee basketballers on a night of “good clean fun,” and the cadaverous morphine-addict stumbling by full of shuddering misery in search of a fix. The plug-ugly thuggish panhandler with the beery breath bumming a nickel from the embarrassed Methodist preacher waiting for his luggage in front of the Dixie Hotel. The hairy old Babylonian gliding lecherously towards an evening of pleasure in the Turkish Baths, and the trim little shopgirl hurrying home from work to take care of her aged father. The lissome blonde Hollywood “starlet” in dark glasses and mink in a Cadillac with her bald-headed “producer,” and the two Vassar girls from Westchester with best-seller novels. Then the bleak young Negress who swept floors, in an old coat and cotton stockings, shambling along. The sad young soldier-boy, Private John Smith, U.S.A., wearing campaign ribbons, lonely and haunted, and the Lieutenant Commander, Third Naval District, Navy “E” for excellence in procurement, glancing at his watch impatiently, then waving at his blonde (he met her last month at the Waldorf bar) as she arrives in a cab, calling, “Here I am, darling!” Private Smith watched all this from the sidewalk in front of the White Rose bar and grille.
Peter watched too: he knew all these things and they were impressed in his heart, they horrified him. These were only some of the lives of the world, yet all the lives of the world came from the single human soul, and his soul was like their souls. He could never turn away in disgust and judgment. He could turn away angrily, but he would always come back and look again.
As Peter stood there, he recognized three young men strolling up the street. They were a strange trio: one was a hoodlum, one was a dope addict, and the third was a poet.
The hoodlum—Jack—was a sleek, handsome youngster from Tenth Avenue, who claimed that he was born “on a barge in the East River” eighteen years before. He was well-dressed, seemingly composed in his bearing and quiet, almost dignified, in his manner. It was only that he could never concentrate; he was always looking around as though anticipating something. His eyes were hard and blank, almost elderly in their stony meaningless calm. He talked in a swift, high-pitched, nervous voice, and kept looking away stonily, twirling his key chain.
The dope addict, whose only known name was Junkey, was a small, dark, Arabic-looking man with an oval face and huge blue eyes that were lidded wearily always, with the huge lids of a mask. He moved about with the noiseless glide of an Arab, his expression always weary, indifferent, yet somehow astonished too, aware of everything. He had the look of a man who is sincerely miserable in the world.
The poet—Leon Levinsky—had been a classmate of Peter’s at college, and was now a merchant seaman of sorts, sailing coastwise on coalboats to Norfolk or New Orleans. He was wearing a strapped raincoat, a Paisley scarf, and dark-rimmed glasses with the air of an intellectual. He carried two slim volumes under his arm, the works of Rimbaud and W. H. Auden, and he smoked his cigarette stuck in a red holder.
They came along the sidewalk, Jack the hoodlum swaggering slowly, Junkey padding along like an Arab in the Casbah, and Leon Levinsky, lip-pursing, meditative, absorbed in thought, twinkling along beside them with his Charley Chaplin feet flapping out, puffing absently on the cigarette-holder. They strolled in the lights.
Peter walked up and greeted them.
“So you’re back finally!” cried Levinsky, grinning eagerly. “I’ve been thinking of you lately for some reason or other—actually I guess it’s because I’ve so much to tell you!”
“Why don’t we go and sit down?” proposed Junkey wearily. “Let’s sit in the cafeteria window there and we can talk and keep an eye on the street.”
They went in the cafeteria, got coffee, and sat down by the windows, where Junkey could resume his pale vigil of Forty-Second Street—a vigil that went on a good eighteen hours a day, and sometimes, when he had no place to sleep, twenty-four hours around the clock. It was the same with Jack—the same anxious vigil of the street, from which the watchers of the Street could never turn their eyes without some piercing sense of loss, some rankling anguish that they had “missed out” on something. Junkey always sat facing the street, and when he talked, sometimes with intense earnestness, his eyes kept nevertheless going back and forth as he combed the street sweepingly under drooping eyelids. Even though Peter and Leon Levinsky sat with their backs to the window, they could not help turning now and then just to see.
Leon Levinsky was about nineteen years old. He was one of the strangest, most curiously exalted youngsters Peter had ever known. He was not unlike Alexander Panos, in a sense, and Peter had been drawn to him for this reason. Levinsky was an eager, intense, sharply intelligent boy of Russian-Jewish parentage who rushed around New York in a perpetual sweat of emotional activity, back and forth in the streets from friend to friend, room to room, apartment to apartment. He “knew everybody” and “knew everything,” was always bearing tidings and messages from “the others,” full of catastrophe. He brimmed and flooded over day and night with a thousand different thoughts and conversations and small horrors, delights, perplexities, deities, discoveries, ecstasies, fears. He stared gog-eyed at the world and was full of musings, lippursings, subway broodings—all of which rushed forth in torrents of complex conversation whenever he confronted someone. He knew almost everyone Peter knew, a few thousand others Peter did not know. Like young Panos, Leon Levinsky was also likely to show up suddenly morose and brooding, or simply disappear from the “scene” for months and Peter liked that too. He lived alone in some rooming house downtown. Before that he had lived with his family in the Lower East Side, where he had read a thousand books late at night and dreamed of becoming a great labor leader someday. That was all over with now, that was his “poor little Jew’s past,” as he put it.
“But just one thing, Pete,” said Levinsky now, holding his chin judiciously and gazing at Peter with glittering eyes, “I wanted to talk to you about that Alexander friend of yours, the poet in the Army who sends you his social conscience bleatings about the brotherhood of man. I wanted to ask you not to class me with that—that sentimental fool, you might say. Don’t be offended. As a matter of fact I understand and even appreciate your reverence for him—which is so gone for a person like you, really. On top of that I’m even honored that you should consider me an Alexander. But there are things so much more important now, at least more complex and interesting and illuminated you see, really, things going on right now, more penetrating and more intelligent somehow than your Alexander, your smalltown R
But Peter was about three years older than Levinsky and therefore he listened to all this with smiling indulgence. The young hoodlum Jack never had any idea what Levinsky was talking about, he just sat and looked around. Junkey, with his eyes sarcastically lidded, his mouth turned down at the corners in a mask-like expression of weary indifference and misery, listened to everything with earnest attentiveness and knowledge. He was wise in his own right.
Ever since Peter had known Levinsky, it was a matter of listening to his gentle torrential chastisements about his own ignorance and blindness to things. Levinsky was always urging him to “get psychoanalyzed” or to “come down” from his “character heights” and so on—a continual attempt to convert him to his, Levinsky’s, point of view, for what reasons Peter could never understand.
“I do admit that there’s a certain dignity to your soul,” said Levinsky, jiggling his knee, “but it’s not a sadness of understanding, it’s really a neurotic failure to see yourself clearly. One more thing, Pete, I wanted to ask when I can meet your family, I’d like to meet your father again and some of your brothers … especially Francis.
“And now,” he went on in the same breath, sticking a fresh cigarette in the holder, “I must tell you everything.” He lit the cigarette avidly. “A lot of things, have been happening since you’ve been gone. I see quite a bit of Judie—your Judie—and sometimes she is most charming to me, although for the most part she is not. I’ve had many long conversations with Kenneth Wood—yes, I know him now, I met him through Dennison: and of course I’ve got so much to tell you about Dennison, but first we’ll talk of Kenneth Wood. In the first place I wanted to ask you a few questions about him: you met him in the merchant marine, didn’t you? I want to know what kind of family he has.”