jack kerouac - on the road, Książki
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JACK
KEROUAC
ON THE ROAD
COPYRIGHT © 1955, 1957 BY JACK KEROUAC
PART ONE
1
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a
serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do
with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the
coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road.
Before that I'd often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely
planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he actually
was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926,
in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles. First reports of him came to me through Chad
King, who'd shown me a few letters from him written in a New Mexico reform school. I
was tremendously interested in the letters because they so naively and sweetly asked
Chad to teach him all about Nietzsche and all the wonderful intellectual things that
Chad knew. At one point Carlo and I talked about the letters and wondered if we would
ever meet the strange Dean Moriarty. This is all far back, when Dean was not the way
he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery. Then news came that
Dean was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first time; also
there was talk that he had just married a girl called Marylou.
One day I was hanging around the campus and Chad and Tim Gray told me Dean
was staying in a cold-water pad in East Harlem, the Spanish Harlem. Dean had arrived
the night before, the first time in New York, with his beautiful little sharp chick
Marylou; they got off the Greyhound bus at 50th Street and cut around the corner
looking for a place to eat and went right in Hector's, and since then Hector's cafeteria
has always been a big symbol of New York for Dean. They spent money on beautiful
big glazed cakes and creampuffs.
All this time Dean was telling Marylou things like this: "Now, darling, here we are in
New York and although I haven't quite told you everything that I was thinking about
when we crossed Missouri and especially at the point when we passed the Booneville
reformatory which reminded me of my jail problem, it is absolutely necessary now to
postpone all those leftover things concerning our personal lovethings and at once begin
thinking of specific worklife plans ... " and so on in the way that he had in those early
days.
I went to the cold-water flat with the boys, and Dean came to the door in his shorts.
Marylou was jumping off the couch; Dean had dispatched the occupant of the
apartment to the kitchen, probably to make coffee, while he proceeded with his love-
problems, for to him sex was the one and only holy and important thing in life,
although he had to sweat and curse to make a living and so on. You saw that in the
way he stood bobbing his head, always looking down, nodding, like a young boxer to
instructions, to make you think he was listening to every word, throwing in a thousand
"Yeses" and "That's rights." My first impression of Dean was of a young Gene Autry --
trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent -- a sideburned hero of the
snowy West. In fact he'd just been working on a ranch, Ed Wall's in Colorado, before
marrying Marylou and coming East. Marylou was a pretty blonde with immense ringlets
of hair like a sea of golden tresses; she sat there on the edge of the couch with her
hands hanging in her lap and her smoky blue country eyes fixed in a wide stare
because she was in an evil gray New York pad that she'd heard about back West, and
waiting like a longbodied emaciated Modigliani surrealist woman in a serious room.
But, outside of being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing
horrible things. That night we all drank beer and pulled wrists and talked till dawn, and
in the morning, while we sat around dumbly smoking butts from ashtrays in the gray
light of a gloomy day, Dean got up nervously, paced around, thinking, and decided the
thing to do was to have Marylou make breakfast and sweep the floor. "In other words
we've got to get on the ball, darling, what I'm saying, otherwise it'll be fluctuating and
lack of true knowledge or crystallization of our plans." Then I went away.
During the following week he confided in Chad King that he absolutely had to learn
how to write from him; Chad said I was a writer and he should come to me for advice.
Meanwhile Dean had gotten a job in a parking lot, had a fight with Marylou in their
Hoboken apartment -- God knows why they went there -- and she was so mad and so
down deep vindictive that she reported to the police some false trumped-up hysterical
crazy charge, and Dean had to lam from Hoboken. So he had no place to live. He came
right out to Paterson, New Jersey, where I was living with my aunt, and one night
while I was studying there was a knock on the door, and there was Dean, bowing,
shuffling obsequiously in the dark of the hall, and saying, "Hello, you remember me --
Dean Moriarty? I've come to ask you to show me how to write."
"And where's Marylou?" I asked, and Dean said she'd apparently whored a few
dollars together and gone back to Denver -- "the whore!" So we went out to have a
few beers because we couldn't talk like we wanted to talk in front of my aunt, who sat
in the living room reading her paper. She took one look at Dean and decided that he
was a madman.
In the bar I told Dean, "Hell, man, I know very well you didn't come to me only to
want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except you've got
to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict." And he said, "Yes, of course, I know
exactly what you mean and in fact all those problems have occurred to me, but the
thing that I want is the realization of those factors that should one depend on
Schopenhauer's dichotomy for any inwardly realized ... " and so on in that way, things
I understood not a bit and he himself didn't. In those days he really didn't know what
he was talking about; that is to say, he was a young jailkid all hung-up on the
wonderful possibilities of becoming a real intellectual, and he liked to talk in the tone
and using the words, but in a jumbled way, that he had heard from "real intellectuals"
-- although, mind you, he wasn't so naive as that in all other things, and it took him
just a few months with Carlo Marx to become completely
in there
with all the terms
and jargon. Nonetheless we understood each other on other levels of madness, and I
agreed that he could stay at my house till he found a job and furthermore we agreed
to go out West sometime. That was the winter of 1947.
One night when Dean ate supper at my house -- he already had the parking-lot job
in New York -- he leaned over my shoulder as I typed rapidly away and said, "Come on
man, those girls won't wait, make it fast."
I said, "Hold on just a minute, I'll be right with you soon as I finish this chapter,"
and it was one of the best chapters in the book. Then I dressed and off we flew to New
York to meet some girls. As we rode in the bus in the weird phosphorescent void of the
Lincoln Tunnel we leaned on each other with fingers waving and yelled and talked
excitedly, and I was beginning to get the bug like Dean. He was simply a youth
tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning
because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would
otherwise pay no attention to him. He was conning me and I knew it (for room and
board and "how-to-write," etc.), and he knew I knew (this has been the basis of our
relationship), but I didn't care and we got along fine -- no pestering, no catering; we
tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends. I began to learn from him as
much as he probably learned from me. As far as my work was concerned he said, "Go
ahead, everything you do is great." He watched over my shoulder as I wrote stories,
yelling, "Yes! That's right! Wow! Man!" and "Phew!" and wiped his face with his
handkerchief. "Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How
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