在路上 英文版-13

Tucson is situated in beautiful mesquite riverbed country, overlooked by the snowy Catalinarange. The city was one big construction job; the people transient, wild, ambitious, busy, gay;washlines, trailers; bustling downtown streets with banners; altogether very Californian. Fort LowellRoad, out where Hingham lived, wound along lovely riverbed trees in the flat desert. We sawHingham himself brooding in the yard. He was a writer; he had come to Arizona to work on hisbook in peace. He was a tall, gangly, shy satirist who mumbled to you with his head turned away andalways said funny things. His wife and baby were with him in the dobe house, a small one that hisIndian stepfather had built. His mother lived across the yard in her own house. She was an excitedAmerican woman who loved pottery, beads, and books. Hingham had heard of Dean through lettersfrom New York. We came down on him like a cloud, every one of us hungry, even Alfred, thecrippled hitchhiker. Hingham was wearing an old sweater and smoking a pipe in the keen desert air.His mother came out and invited us into her kitchen to eat. We cooked noodles in a great pot.Then we all drove to a crossroads liquor store, where Hingham cashed a check for five dollarsand handed me the money.There was a brief good-by. .It certainly was pleasant,. said Hingham, looking away. Beyondsome trees, across the sand, a great neon sign of a roadhouse glowed red. Hingham always wentthere for a beer when he was tired of writing. He was very lonely, he wanted to get back to NewYork. It was sad to see his tall figure receding in the dark as we drove away, just like the otherfigures in New York and New Orleans: they stand uncertainly underneath immense skies, andeverything about them is drowned. Where go? what do? what for? - sleep. But this foolish gang wasbending onward.989Outside Tucson we saw another hitchhiker in the dark road. This was an Okie from Bakersfield,California, who put down his story. .Hot damn, I left Bakersfield with the travel-bureau car and leftmy gui-tar in the trunk of another one and they never showed up - guitar and cowboy duds; you see,I’m a moo-sician, I was headed for Arizona to play with Johnny Mackaw’s Sagebrush Boys. Well,hell, here I am in Arizona, broke, and m’gui-tar’s been stoled. You boys drive me back toBakersfield and I’ll get the money from my brother. How much you want?. We wanted just enoughgas to make Frisco from Bakersfield, about three dollars. Now we were five in the car. .Evenin,ma’am,. he said, tipping his hat to Marylou, and we were off.In the middle of the night we overtopped the lights of Palm Springs from a mountain road. Atdawn, in snowy passes, we labored toward the town of Mojave, which was the entryway to thegreat Tehachapi Pass. The Okie woke up and told funny stories; sweet little Alfred sat smiling. Okietold us he knew a man who forgave his wife for shooting him and got her out of prison, only to beshot a second time. We were passing the women’s prison when he told it. Up ahead we sawTehachapi Pass starting up. Dean took the wheel and carried us clear to the top of the world. Wepassed a great shroudy cement factory in the canyon. Then we started down. Dean cut off the gas,threw in the clutch, and negotiated every hairpin turn and passed cars and did everything in thebooks without the benefit of accelerator. I held on tight. Sometimes the road went up again briefly;he merely passed cars without a sound, on pure momentum. He knew every rhythm and every kickof a first-class pass. When it was time to U-turn left around a low stone wall that overlooked thebottom of the world, he just leaned far over to his left, hands on the wheel, stiff-armed, and carried itthat way; and when the turn snaked to the right again, this time with a cliff on our left, he leaned far tothe right, making Marylou and me lean with him. In this way we floated and flapped down to the SanJoaquin Valley. It lay spread a mile below, virtually the floor of California, green and wondrous fromour aerial shelf. We made thirty miles without using gas.Suddenly we were all excited. Dean wanted to tell me everything he knew about Bakersfield aswe reached the city limits. He showed me rooming houses where he stayed, railroad hotels,poolhalls, diners, sidings where he jumped off the engine for grapes, Chinese restaurants where heate, park benches where he met girls, and certain places where he’d done nothing but sit and waitaround. Dean’s California - wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentriclovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken-down, handsome, decadent movie actors. .Man, I spent hours on that very chair in front of thatdrugstore!. He remembered all - every pinochle game, every woman, every sad night. And suddenlywe were passing the place in the railyards where Terry and I had sat under the moon, drinking wine,on those bum crates, in October 1947, and I tried to tell him. But he was too excited. .This is whereDunkel and I spent a whole morning drinking beer, trying to make a real gone little waitress fromWatsonville - no, Tracy, yes, Tracy - and her name was Esmeralda - oh, man, something like that..Marylou was planning what to do the moment she arrived in Frisco. Alfred said his aunt would givehim plenty of money up in Tulare.The Okie directed us to his brother in the flats outside town.We pulled up at noon in front of a little rose-covered shack, and the Okie went in and talked withsome women. We waited fifteen minutes. .I’m beginning to think this guy has no more money than Ihave,. said Dean. .We get more hung-up! There’s probably nobody in the family that’ll give him acent after that fool escapade.. The Okie came out sheepishly and directed us to town.99.Hot damn, I wish I could find my brother.. He made inquiries. He probably felt he was ourprisoner. Finally we went to a big bread bakery, and the Okie came out with his brother, who waswearing coveralls and was apparently the truck mechanic inside. He talked with his brother a fewminutes. We waited in the car. Okie was telling all his relatives his adventures and about the loss ofhis guitar. But he got the money, and he gave it to us, and we were all set for Frisco. We thankedhim and took off.Next stop was Tulare. Up the valley we roared. I lay in the back seat, exhausted, giving upcompletely, and sometime in the afternoon, while I dozed, the muddy Hudson zoomed by the tentsoutside Sabinal where I had lived and loved and worked in the spectral past. Dean was bent rigidlyover the wheel, pounding the rods. I was sleeping when we finally arrived in Tulare; I woke up tohear the insane details. .Sal, wake up! Alfred found his aunt’s grocery store, but do you know whathappened? His aunt shot her husband and went to jail. The store’s closed down. We didn’t get acent. Think of it! The things that happen; the Okie told us the same likewise story, the troubles on allsides, the complications of events - whee, damn!. Alfred was biting his fingernails. We were turningoff the Oregon road at Madera, and there we made our farewell with little Alfred. We wished himluck and Godspeed to Oregon. He said it was the best ride he ever had.It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland andsuddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of SanFrancisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fogbeyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time. .There she blows!. yelled Dean..Wow! Made it! Just enough gas! Give me water! No more land! We can’t go any further ‘causethere ain’t no more land! Now Marylou, darling, you and Sal go immediately to a hotel and wait forme to contact you in the morning as soon as I have definite arrangements made with Camille and callup Frenchman about my railroad watch and you and Sal buy the first thing hit town a paper for thewant ads and workplans.. And he drove into the Oakland Bay Bridge and it carried us in. Thedowntown office buildings were just sparkling on their lights; it made you think of Sam Spade. Whenwe staggered out of the car on O’Farrell Street and sniffed and stretched, it was like getting on shoreafter a long voyage at sea; the slopy street reeled under our feet; secret chop sueys from FriscoChinatown floated in the air. We took all our things out of the car and piled them on the sidewalk.Suddenly Dean was saying good-by. He was bursting to see Camille and find out what hadhappened. Marylou and I stood dumbly in the street and watched him drive away. .You see what abastard he is?. said Marylou. .Dean will leave you out in the cold any time it’s in his interest...I know,. I said, and I looked back east and sighed. We had no money. Dean hadn’t mentionedmoney. .Where are we going to stay?. We wandered around, carrying our bundles of rags in thenarrow romantic streets. Everybody looked like a broken-down movie extra, a withered starlet;disenchanted stunt-men, midget auto-racers, poignant California characters with their end-of-thecontinentsadness, handsome, decadent, Casanovaish men, puffy-eyed motel blondes, hustlers,pimps, whores, masseurs, bellhops - a lemon lot, and how’s a man going to make a living with agang like that?10010Nevertheless Marylou had been around these people - not far from the Tenderloin - and a gray-faced hotel clerk let us have a room on credit. That was the first step. Then we had to eat, and didn’tdo so till midnight, when we found a nightclub singer in her hotel room who turned an iron upsidedown on a coathanger in the wastebasket and warmed up a can of pork and beans. I looked out thewindow at the winking neons and said to myself, Where is Dean and why isn’t he concerned aboutour welfare? I lost faith in him that year. I stayed in San Francisco a week and had the beatest timeof my life. Marylou and I walked around for miles, looking for food-money. We even visited somedrunken seamen in a flophouse on Mission Street that she knew; they offered us whisky.In the hotel we lived together two days. I realized that, now Dean was out of the picture, Marylouhad no real interest in me; she was trying to reach Dean through me, his buddy. We had arguments inthe room. We also spent entire nights in bed and I told her my dreams. I told her about the big snakeof the world that was coiled in the earth like a worm in an apple and would someday nudge up a hillto be thereafter known as Snake Hill and fold out upon the plain, a hundred miles long and devouringas it went along. I told her this snake was Satan. .What’s going to happen?. she squealed;meanwhile she held me tight..A saint called Doctor Sax will destroy it with secret herbs which he is at this very momentcooking up in his underground shack somewhere in America. It may also be disclosed that the snakeis just a husk of doves; when the snake dies great clouds of seminal-gray doves will flutter out andbring tidings of peace around the world.. I was out of my mind with hunger and bitterness.One night Marylou disappeared with a nightclub owner. I was waiting for her by appointment in adoorway across the street, at Larkin and Geary, hungry, when she suddenly stepped out of the foyerof the fancy apartment house with her girl friend, the nightclub owner, and a greasy old man with aroll. Originally she’d just gone in to see her girl friend. I saw what a whore she was. She was afraidto give me the sign, though she saw me in that doorway. She walked on little feet and got in theCadillac and off they went. Now I had nobody, nothing.I walked around, picking butts from the street. I passed a fish-n-chips joint on Market Street, andsuddenly the woman in there gave me a terrified look as I passed; she was the proprietress, sheapparently thought I was coming in there with a gun to hold up the joint. I walked on a few feet. Itsuddenly occurred to me this was my mother of about two hundred years ago in England, and that Iwas her footpad son, returning from gaol to haunt her honest labors in the hashery. I stopped, frozenwith ecstasy on the sidewalk. I looked down Market Street. I didn’t know whether it was that orCanal Street in New Orleans: it led to water, ambiguous, universal water, just as 42nd Street, NewYork, leads to water, and you never know where you are. I thought of Ed Dunkel’s ghost on TimesSquare. I was delirious. I wanted to go back and leer at my strange Dickensian mother in the hashjoint. I tingled all over from head to foot. It seemed I had a whole host of memories leading back to1750 in England and that I was in San Francisco now only in another life and in another body. .No,.that woman seemed to say with that terrified glance, .don’t come back and plague your honest,hard-working mother. You are no longer like a son to me -and like your father, my first husband.‘Ere this kindly Greek took pity on me.. (The proprietor was a Greek with hairy arms.) .You are nogood, inclined to drunkenness and routs and final disgraceful robbery of the fruits of my ‘umblelabors in the hashery. O son! did you not ever go on your knees and pray for deliverance for all yoursins and scoundrel’s acts? Lost boy! Depart! Do not haunt my soul; I have done well forgetting you.Reopen no old wounds, be as if you had never returned and looked in to me - to see my laboring101humilities, my few scrubbed pennies - hungry to grab, quick to deprive, sullen, unloved, mean-minded son of my flesh. Son! Son!. It made me think of the Big Pop vision in Graetna with Old Bull.And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which wasthe complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleaknessof the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantomdogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into theholy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright MindEssence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear anindescribable seething roar which wasn’t in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do withsounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn’t rememberespecially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magicalaction for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness anddeep ignorance of it. I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that theseripples of birth and death took place, like the action of wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-likewater. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine latein the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very nextmoment. But I didn’t die, and walked four miles and picked up ten long butts and took them back toMarylou’s hotel room and poured their tobacco in my old pipe and lit up. I was too young to knowwhat had happened. In the window I smelled all the food of San Francisco. There were seafoodplaces out there where the buns were hot, and the baskets were good enough to eat too; where themenus themselves were soft with foody esculence as though dipped in hot broths and roasted dryand good enough to eat too. Just show me the bluefish spangle on a seafood menu and I’d eat it; letme smell the drawn butter and lobster claws. There were places where they specialized in thick redroast beef au jus, or roast chicken basted in wine. There were places where hamburgs sizzled ongrills and the coffee was only a nickel. And oh, that pan-fried chow mein flavored air that blew intomy room from Chinatown, vying with the spaghetti sauces of North Beach, the soft-shell crab ofFisherman’s Wharf - nay, the ribs of Fillmore turning on spits! Throw in the Market Street chilibeans, redhot, and french-fried potatoes of the Embarcadero wino night, and steamed clams fromSausalito across the bay, and that’s my ah-dream of San Francisco. Add fog, hunger-making rawfog, and the throb of neons in the soft night, the clack of high-heeled beauties, white doves in aChinese grocery window . . .10211That was the way Dean found me when he finally decided I was worth saving. He took me hometo Camille’s house. .Where’s Marylou, man?..The whore ran off.. Camille was a relief after Marylou; a well-bred, polite young woman, andshe was aware of the fact that the eighteen dollars Dean had sent her was mine. But O where wentthou, sweet Marylou? I relaxed a few days in Camille’s house. From her living-room window in thewooden tenement on Liberty Street you could see all of San Francisco burning green and red in therainy night. Dean did the most ridiculous thing of his career the few days I was there. He got a jobdemonstrating a new kind of pressure cooker in the kitchens of homes. The salesman gave him pilesof samples and pamphlets. The first day Dean was a hurricane of energy. I drove all over town withhim as he made appointments. The idea was to get invited socially to a dinner party and then leap upand start demonstrating the pressure cooker. .Man,. cried Dean excitedly, .this is even crazier thanthe time I worked for Sinah. Sinah sold encyclopedias in Oakland. Nobody could turn him down.He made long speeches, he jumped up and down, he laughed, he cried. One time we broke into anOkie house where everybody was getting ready to go to a funeral. Sinah got down on his knees andprayed for the deliverance of the deceased soul. All the Okies started crying. He sold a complete setof encyclopedias. He was the maddest guy in the world. I wonder where he is. We used to get nextto pretty young daughters and feel them up in the kitchen. This afternoon I had the gonest housewifein her little kitchen - arm around her, demonstrating. Ah! Hmm! Wow!..Keep it up, Dean,. I said. .Maybe someday you’ll be mayor of San Francisco.. He had thewhole cookpot spiel worked out; he practiced on Camille and me in the evenings.One morning he stood naked, looking at all San Francisco out the window as the sun came up.He looked like someday he’d be the pagan mayor of San Francisco. But his energies ran out. Onerainy afternoon the salesman came around to find out what Dean was doing. Dean was sprawled onthe couch. .Have you been trying to sell these?..No,. said Dean, .I have another job coming up...Well, what are you going to do about all these samples?..I don’t know.. In a dead silence the salesman gathered up his sad pots and left. I was sick andtired of everything and so was Dean.But one night we suddenly went mad together again; we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisconightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who’s always saying, .Right-orooni.and .How about a little bourbon-orooni. In Frisco great eager crowds of young semi-intellectuals satat his feet and listened to him on the piano, guitar, and bongo drums. When he gets up warmed up hegets off his shirt and undershirt and really goes. He does and says anything that comes into his head.He’ll sing .Cement Mixer, Put-ti, Put-ti,. and suddenly slows down the beat and broods over hisbongos with fingertips barely tapping the skin as everybody leans forward breathlessly to hear; youthink he’ll do this for a minute or so, but he goes right on, for as long as an hour, making animperceptible little noise with the tips of his fingernails, smaller and smaller all the time till you can’thear it any more and sounds of traffic come in the open door. Then he slowly gets up and takes themike and says, very slowly, . Great-oroooni... fine-ovauti... hello-orooni... bourbon-orooni... allorooni...how are the boys in the front row making out with their grils-orooni... vauti...oroonirooni... . He keeps this up for fifteen minutes, his voice getting softer and softer till you can’thear. His great sad eyes scan the audience.Dean stands in the back, saying, .God! Yes!. - and clasping his hands in prayer and sweating.103. Sal, Slim knows time, he knows time.. Slim sits down at the piano and hits two notes, two Cs,then two more, then one, then two, and suddenly the big burly bass-player wakes up from a reverieand realizes Slim in playing .C-Jam Blues . and he slugs in his big forefinger on the string and the bigbooming beat begins and everybody starts rocking and Slim looks up just as sad as ever, and theyblow jazz for half an hour, and then Slim goes mad and grabs the bongos and plays tremendousrapid Cubana beats and yells crazy things in Spanish, in Arabic, in Peruvian dialect, in Egyptian, inevery language he knows, and he knows innumerable languages. Finally the set is over; each settakes two hours. Slim Gaillard goes and stands against a post, looking sadly over everybody’s headas people come to talk to him. A bourbon is slipped in his hand. .Bourbon-orooni - thanky-ouovauti.... Nobody knows where Slim Gaillard is. Dean once had a dream that he was having a babyand his belly was all bloated up blue as he lay on the grass of a California hospital. Under a tree, witha group of colored men, sat Slim Gaillard. Dean turned despairing eyes of a mother to him. Slim said.There you go-orooni.. Now Dean approached him, he approached his God; he thought Slim wasGod; he shuffled and bowed in front of him and asked him to join us ; .Right-orooni,. says Slim;he’ll join anybody but he won’t guarantee to be there with you in spirit. Dean got a table, boughtdrinks, and sat stiffly in front of Slim. Slim dreamed over his head. Every time Slim said . Orooni, .Dean said, .Yes!. I sat there with these two madmen. Nothing happened. To Slim Gaillard thewhole world was just one big orooni.That same night I dug Lampshade on Fillmore and Geary Lampshade is a big colored guy whocomes into musical Frisco saloons with oat, hat, and scarfs and jumps on the bandstand and startssinging; the veins pop in his forehead; he heaves back and blows a big foghorn blues out of everymuscle in his soul. He yells at people while he’s singing: .Don’t die to go to heaven, start in onDoctor Pepper and end up on whisky!. His voice booms over everything. He grimaces, hewrithes, he does everything. He came over to our table and leaned over to us and said, .Yes!. Andthen he staggered out to the street to hit another saloon. Then there’s Connie Jordan, a madman whosings and flips his arms and ends up screaming like a woman; and you see him late at night,exhausted, listening to wild jazz sessions at Jamson’s Nook with big round eyes and limp shoulders,a big gooky state into space, and a drink in front of him. I never saw such crazy musicians.Everybody in Frisco blew. It was the end of the continent; they didn’t give a damn. Dean and Igoofed around San Francisco in this manner until I got my next GI check and got ready to go backhome.What I accomplished by coming to San Francisco I don’t know. Camille wanted me to leave;Dean didn’t care one way or the other. I bought a loaf of bread and meats and made myself tensandwiches to cross the country with again; they were all going to go rotten on me by the time I gotto Dakota. The last night Dean went mad and found Marylou somewhere downtown and we got inthe car and drove all over Richmond across the bay, hitting Negro jazz shacks in the oil flats.Marylou went to sit down and a colored guy pulled the chair out from under her. The galsapproached her in the John with propositions. I was approached too. Dean was sweating around. Itwas the end; I wanted to get out.At dawn I got my New York bus and said good-by to Dean and Marylou. They wanted some ofmy sandwiches. I told them no. It was a sullen moment. We were all thinking we’d never see oneanother again and we didn’t care.104PART THREE1051In the spring of 1949 I had a few dollars saved from my GI education checks and I went toDenver, thinking of settling down there. I saw myself in Middle America, a patriarch. I waslonesome. Nobody was there - no Babe Rawlins, Ray Rawlins, Tim Gray, Betty Gray, RolandMajor, Dean Moriarty, Carlo Marx, Ed Dunkel, Roy Johnson, Tommy Snark, nobody. I wanderedaround Curtis Street and Larimer Street, worked awhile in the wholesale fruit market where I almostgot hired in 1947 - the hardest job of my life; at one point the Japanese kids and I had to move awhole boxcar a hundred feet down the rail by hand with a jack-jet that made it move a quarter-inchwith each yank. I lugged watermelon crates over the ice floor of reefers into the blazing sun,sneezing. In God’s name and under the stars, what for?At dusk I walked. I felt like a speck on the surface of the sad red earth. I passed the WindsorHotel, where Dean Moriarty had lived with his father in the depression thirties, and as of yore Ilooked everywhere for the sad and fabled tinsmith of my mind. Either you find someone who! lookslike your father in places like Montana or you look] for a friend’s father where he is no more.At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching] among the lights of 27th and Welton in theDenver colored | section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the] white world had offeredwas not enough ecstasy for me, not 。 enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night. Istopped at a little shack where a man sold hot red chili in paper containers; I bought some and ate it,strolling in the : dark mysterious streets. I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a pooroverworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a .white man. disillusioned. All my life I’d hadwhite ambitions; that was why I’d abandoned a good woman like Terry in the San Joaquin Valley Ipassed the dark porches of Mexican and Negro homes; soft voices were there, occasionally thedusky knee of some mysterious sensual gal; and dark faces of the men behind rose arbors. Littlechildren sat like sages in ancient rocking chairs. A gang of colored women came by, and one of theyoung ones detached herself from motherlike elders and came to me fast - .Hello Joe!. - andsuddenly saw it wasn’t Joe, and ran back, blushing. I wished I were Joe. I was only myself, SalParadise, sad, strolling in this violet dark, this unbearably sweet night, wishing I could exchangeworlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic | Negroes of America. The raggedy neighborhoodsreminded] me of Dean and Marylou, who knew these streets so well from] childhood. How I wishedI could find them.Down at 23rd and Welton a softball game was going on under floodlights which also illuminatedthe gas tank. A great 1 eager crowd roared at every play. The strange young heroes of all kinds,white, colored, Mexican, pure Indian, were on the field, performing with heart-breaking seriousness.Just sandlot kids in uniform. Never in my life as an athlete had I ever permitted myself to perform likethis in front of families and girl friends and kids of the neighborhood, at night, under lights; always ithad been college, big-time, sober-faced; no boyish, human joy like this. Now it was too late. Nearme sat an old Negro who apparently watched the games every night. Next to him was an old whitebum; then a Mexican family, then some girls, some boys - all humanity, the lot. Oh, the sadness ofthe lights that night! The young pitcher looked just like Dean. A pretty blonde in the seats looked justlike Marylou. It was the Denver Night; all I did was die.Down in Denver, down in DenverAll I did was die106Across the street Negro families sat on their front steps, talking and looking up at the starry nightthrough the trees and just relaxing in the softness and sometimes watching the game. Many carspassed in the street meanwhile, and stopped at the corner when the light turned red. There wasexcitement and the air was filled with the vibration of really joyous life that knows nothing ofdisappointment and .white sorrows. and all that. The old Negro man had a can of beer in his coatpocket, which he proceeded to open; and the old white man enviously eyed the can and groped inhis pocket to see if he could buy a can too. How I died! I walked away from there.I went to see a rich girl I knew. In the morning she pulled a hundred-dollar bill out of her silkstocking and said, .You’ve been talking of a trip to Frisco; that being the case, take this and go andhave your fun.. So all my problems were solved and I got a travel-bureau car for eleven dollars’