Lonesome Traveler. Jack Kerouac
work, sea work, mysticism, mountain work, lasciviousness, solepsism, self-indulgence, bullfights, drugs, churches, art museums, streets of cities, a mishmosh of life as lived by an independent educated penniless rake going anywhere.
Its scope and purpose is simply poetry, or, natural description.
CONTENTS
1. PIERS OF THE HOMELESS NIGHT
HERE DOWN ON DARK EARTH
before we all go to Heaven
VISIONS OF AMERICA
All that hitchhikin
All that railroadin
All that comin back
to America
Via Mexican & Canadian borders …
Less begin with the sight of me with collar huddled up close to neck and tied around with a handkerchief to keep it tight and snug, as I go trudging across the bleak, dark warehouse lots of the ever lovin San Pedro waterfront, the oil refineries smelling in the damp foggish night of Christmas 1951 just like burning rubber and the brought-up mysteries of Sea Hag Pacific, where just off to my left as I trudge you can see the oily skeel of old bay waters marching up to hug the scummy posts and out on over the flatiron waters are the lights ululating in the moving tide and also lights of ships and bum boats themselves moving and closing in and leaving this last lip of American land.— Out on that dark ocean, that wild dark sea, where the worm invisibly rides to come, like a hag flying and laid out as if casually on sad sofa but her hair flying and she’s on her way to find the crimson joy of lovers and eat it up, Death by name, the doom and death ship the S.S. Roamer, painted black with orange booms, was coming now like a ghost and without a sound except for its vastly shuddering engine, to be warped & wailed in at the Pedro pier, fresh from a run from New York through the Panamy canal, and aboard’s my ole buddy Deni Bleu let’s call him who had me travel 3,000 miles overland on buses with the promise he will get me on and I sail the rest of the trip around the world.— And since I’m well and on the bum again & aint got nothing else to do, but roam, longfaced, the real America, with my unreal heart, here I am eager and ready to be a big busted nose scullion or dishwasher on the old scoff scow s’long as I can buy my next fancy shirt in a Hong Kong haberdashery or wave a polo mallet in some old Singapore bar or play the horses in Australian, it’s all the same to me as long as it can be exciting and goes around the world.
For weeks I have been traveling on the road, west from New York, and waiting up in Frisco at a friend’s house meanwhile earning an extra 50 bucks working the Christmas rush as a baggagehandler with the old sop out railroad, have just now come the 500 miles down from Frisco as an honored secret guest in the caboose of the Zipper first class freight train thanx to my connections on the railroad up there and now I think I’m going to be a big seaman, I’ll get on the Roamer right here in Pedro, so I think fondly, anyway if it wasnt for this shipping I’d sure like it maybe to be a railroad man, learn to be a brakeman, and get paid to ride that old zooming Zipper.— But I’d been sick, a sudden choking awful cold of the virus X type California style, and could hardly see out the dusty window of the caboose as it flashed past the snowy breaking surf at Surf and Tangair and Gaviota on the division that runs that moony rail between San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara.—I’d tried my best to appreciate a good ride but could only lay flat on the caboose seat with my face buried in my bundled jacket and every conductor from San Jose to Los Angeles had had to wake me up to ask about my qualifications, I was a brakeman’s brother and a brakeman in Texas Division myself, so whenever I looked up thinking “Ole Jack you are now actually riding in a caboose and going along the surf on the spectrallest railroad you’d ever in your wildest little dreams wanta ride, like a kid’s dream, why is it you cant lift your head and look out there and appreciate the feathery shore of California the last land being feathered by fine powdery skeel of doorstop sills of doorstep water weaving in from every Orient and bay boom shroud from here to Catteras Flapperas Voldivious and Gratteras, boy,” but I’d raise my head, and nothing there was to see, except my bloodshot soul, and vague hints of an unreal moon shinin on an unreal sea, and the flashby quick of the pebbles of the road bed, the rail in the starlight.—Arriving in L.A. in the morning and I stagger with full huge cuddlebag on shoulder from the L.A. yards clear into downtown Main Street L.A. where I laid up in a hotel room 24 hours drinking bourbon lemon juice and anacin and seeing as I lay on my back a vision of America that had no end—which was only beginning—thinking, tho, “I’ll get on the Roamer at Pedro and be gone for Japan before you can say boo.”—Looking out the window when I felt a little better and digging the hot sunny streets of L.A. Christmas, going down finally to the skid row poolhalls and shoe shine joints and gouging around, waiting for the time when the Roamer would warp in at the Pedro pier, where I was to meet Deni right at the gangplank with the gun he’d sent ahead.
More reasons than one for the meeting in Pedro—he’d sent a gun ahead inside of a book which he’d carefully cut and hollowed out and made into a tight neat package covered with brown paper and tied with string, addressed to a girl in Hollywood, Helen something, with address which he gave me, “Now Kerouac when you get to Hollywood you go immediately to Helen’s and ask her for that package I sent her, then you carefully open it in your hotel room and there’s the gun and it’s loaded so be careful dont shoot your finger off, then you put it in your pocket, do you hear me Kerouac, has it gotten into your heskefuffle frantic imagination—but now you’ve got a little errand to do for me, for your boy Denny Blue, remember we went to school together, we thought up ways to survive together to scrounge for pennies we were even cops together we even married the same woman,” (cough) “I mean,—we both wanted the same woman, Kerouac, it’s up to you now now to help defend me against the evil of Matthew Peters, you bring that gun with you” poking me and emphatically pronouncing each word and poking me with each word “and bring it on you and dont get caught and dont miss the boat whatever you do.”—A plan so absurd, so typical of this maniac, I came of course without the gun, without even looking up Helen, but just in my beatup jacket hurrying, almost late, I could see her masts close in against the pier, night, spotlights everywhere, down that dismal long plaza of refineries and oil storage tanks, on my poor scuffledown shoes that had begun a real journey now—starting in New York to follow the fool ship but it was about to be made plain to me in the first 24 hours I’d never get on no ship—didnt know it then, but was doomed to stay in America, always, road rail or waterscrew, it’ll always be America (Orient-bound ships chugging up the Mississippi, as will be shown later.)—No gun, huddled against the awful winter damp of Pedro and Long Beach, in the night, passing the Puss n’ Boots factory on a corner with little lawn out front and American flagpoles and a big tuna fish ad inside the same building they make fish for humans and for cats—passing the Matson piers, the Lurline not in.— Eyes peeled for Matthew Peters the villain who was behind the need for the gun.
It went back, maniacally, to further earlier events in this gnashing huge movie of earth only a piece of which here’s offered by me, long tho it is, how wild can the world be until finally you realize “O well it’s just repetitious anyway.”—But