Lonesome Traveler (3 page)

“No, Deni YOU are the funniest man I ever known—”

“Dont interrupt, dont drool, dont—” the way he answered and always talked and he's leading the way across the Red Car tracks, to a hotel, in downtown long Pedro where someone was supposed to meet us with blondes and so he bought enroute a couple of small hand cases of beer for us to portable around with, and when we got to the hotel, which had potted palms and potted barfronts and cars parked, and everything dead and windless with that dead California sad windless smoke-smog, and the Pachucos going by in a hot road and Deni says “You see that bunch of Mexicans in that car with their blue jeans, they got one of our seamen here last Christmas, about a year ago today, he was doing nothing but minding his own business, but they jumped right out that car and beat the living hell out of him—they take his money—no money, it's just to be mean, they're Pachucos, they just like to beat up on people for the hell of it—”

“When I was in Mexico it didnt seem to me the Mexicans there were like that—”

“The Mexicans in the U.S. is another matter Kerouac, if you'd a been around the world like I have you could see as I do a few of the rough facts of life that apparently with you and the poor people starving in Europe you'll never NEVER under STAAANNND …” gripping my arm again, swinging as he walks, like in our prep school days when we used to go up the sunny morning hill, to Horace Mann, at 246th in Manhattan, on the rock cliffs over by the Van Cortlandt park, the little road, going up thru English halftimber cottages and apartment houses, to the ivied school on top, the whole bunch swinging uphill to school but nobody ever went as fast as Deni as he never paused to take a breath, the climb was very sharp, most had to wind and work and whine and moan along but Deni swung it with his big glad laugh—In those days he'd sell daggers to the rich little fourth formers, in back of the toilets—He was up to more tricks tonight—“Kerouac I'm going to introduce you to two cucamongas in Hollywood tonight if we can get there on time, tomorrow for sure … two cucamongas living in a house, in an apartment house, the whole thing built clear around a swimmingpool, do you understand what I said, Kerouac? … a swimmingpool, that you go swimming in—”

“I know, I know, I seen it in that picture of you and Matthew Peters and all the blondes, great… What we do, work on em?”

“Wait, a minute, before I explain the rest of the story to you, hand me the gun.”

“I havent got the gun you fool, I was only saying that so you'd get off the ship … I was ready to help you if anything happened.”

“YOU HAVENT GOT IT?” It dawned on him he had boasted to the whole crew “My boy's out there
on the pier with the gun, what did I tell ya” and he had earler, when the ship left New York, posted a big absurd typically Deni ridiculous poster printed in red ink on a piece of letter paper, “
WARNING, THERE ARE FELLOWS ON THE WEST COAST BY THE NAMES OF MATTHEW PETERS AND PAUL LYMAN WOULD LIKE NOTHING BETTER THAN TO CLOBBER THE CARPENTER OF THE ROAMER DENI E. BLEU IF ONLY THEY COULD BUT ANY SHIPMATES OF BLEU WHO WANT TO HELP BE ON THE LOOKOUT FOR THOSE TWO EVIL SCROUNGERS WHEN THE SHIP PUTS IN AT PEDRO AND THERE WILL BE APPRECIATION SIGNED CARPT. FREE DRINKS IN THE CARPT. TONIGHT”
—and then by word in the messroom he'd loudly boasted his boy.

“I knew you'd tell everybody I had the gun, so I said I did. Didnt you feel better walking off the ship?”

“Where is it?”

“I didnt even go.”

“Then it's still there. We'll have to pick it up tonight.” He was lost in thought—it was okay.

Deni had big plans for what was going to happen at the hotel, which was the El Carrido Per to Motpaotta Calfiornia potator hotel as I say with potted palmettos and seamen inside and also hotrod champion sons of aircraft computators of Long Beach, the whole general and really dismal California culture a palpable hangout for it, where you saw the dim interiors where you saw the Hawaiian shirted and be-wristwatched, tanned strong young men tilting long thin beers to their mouths and leering and mincing with broads in fancy necklaces and with little white ivory things at their tanned ears and a whole blank blue in their eyes that you saw, also a bestial cruelty hidden and the smell of the beer and smoke and smart smell of the cool inside plush cocktail lounge all that Americanness that in my youth had me get wild to be in it and leave my home
and go off be big hero in the American romance-me-jazz night.—That had made Deni lose his head too, at one time he had been a sad infuriated French boy brought over on a ship to attend American private schools at which time hate smoldered in his bones and in his dark eyes and he wanted to kill the world—but a little of the Sage and Wisdom education from the Masters of the High West and he wanted to do his hating and killing in cocktail lounges learned from Franchot Tone movies and God knows where and what else.—We come up to this thing down the drear boulevard, phantasm street with its very bright street lamps and very bright but somber palms jutting out of the sidewalk all pineapple-ribbed and rising into the indefinable California night sky and no wind.— Inside there was no one to meet Deni as usual mistaken and completely ignored by everyone (good for him but he dont know it) so we have a couple beers, ostensibly waiting, Deni outlines me more facts & personal sophistries, there aint no one coming, no friends, no enemies either, Deni is a perfect Taoist, nothing happens to him, the trouble runs off his shoulders like water, as if he had pig grease on em, he dont know how luck he is, and here he's got his boy at his side old Ti Jean who'll go anywhere follow anyone for adventure.— Suddenly in the middle of our third or so beer he whoops and realizes we missed the hourly Red Car train and that is going to hold us up another hour in dismal Pedro, we want to get to the glitters of Los Angeles if possible or Hollywood before all the bars closed, in my mind's eye I see all the wonderful things Deni has planned for us there and see, incomprehensible, unrememberable what the images were I was now inventing ere we got going and arrived at the actual scene, not the screen but the dismal four-dimensional scene itself.— Bang, Deni wants to take a cab and chase the Red Car also with our beer cans in hand
cartons we go jogging down the street to a cab stand and hire one to chase the Red Car, which the guy does without comment, knowing the egocentricities of seamen as a O how dismal cabdriver in a O how dismal pierhead jumpin town.— Off we go—it's my suspicion he isnt really driving as fast as he ought to actually catch the Red Car, which hiballs right down that line, towards Compton and environs of L.A., at 60 per.—My suspicion is he doesnt want to get a ticket and at the same time seem to go fast enough to satisfy the whims of the seamen in the back—it's my suspicion he's just gonna gyp old Den out of a 5 dollar bill.— Nothing Den likes better than throw away his 5 dollar bills, too—He thrives on it, he lives for it, he all take voyages around the world working belowdecks among electrical equipment but worse than that take the abuse off officers and men (at four o'clock in the Morning he's asleep in his bunk, “Hey Carptenter, are you the carpenter or are you the chief bottlestopper or shithouse watcher, that goddam forward boom light is out again, I dont know who is using slingshots around here, and but I want that goddam light fixed we'll pulling into Penang in 2 hours and goddam it if it's still dark at that time and I, and we dong got no light it's your ass not mine, see the chief about it”) so Deni has to get up, and I can just see him do it, rub the innocent sleep from his eyes and wake to the cold howling world and wish he had a sword so he could cut the man's head off but at the same time he doesnt want to spend the rest of his life in a prison either, or get his own head partially cut off and spend the rest of his life paralyzed with a shoe brace in his neck and people bring him crap pans, so he crawls outa bed and does the bidding of every beast that has every yell to throw at him for every reason in the thousand and one electrical apparati on the goddamn stinking steel jail which as far as I'm
concerned, and floating on water too, is what they call a ship.— What is 5 dollars to a martyr?—“Step on the gas, we gotta catch that car.”

“I'm going fast enough you'll get it.” He passes right through Cucamonga. “At exactly 11:38 in 1947 or 1948, one, now I cant remember which one exactly, but I remember I done this for another seaman couple years ago and he passed right through—” and he goes on talking easing up so's not to pass through the insulting part of just barely beating a red light and I lay back in the seat and say:

“You coulda made that red light, we'll never make it now.”

“Listen Jack you wanta make it dontcha and not get fined by some traffic cop.”

“Where?” I say looking out the window and all over the horizon at those marshes of night for signs of a cop on a motorcycle or a cruiser—all you see is marshes and great black distances of night and far off, on hills, the little communities with Christmas lights in their windows blearing red, blearing green, blearing blue, suddenly sending pangs thru me and I think, “Ah America, so big, so sad, so black, you're like the leafs of a dry summer that go crinkly ere August found its end, you're hopeless, everyone you look on you, there's nothing but the dry drear hopelessness, the knowledge of impending death, the suffering of present life, lights of Christmas wont save you or anybody, any more you could put Christmas lights on a dead bush in August, at night, and make it look like something, what is this Christmas you profess, in this void? … in this nebulous cloud?”

“That's perfectly alright” says Deni. “Move right along, we'll make it.”—He beats, the next light to make it look good but eases up for the next, and up the track and back, you can't see any sign of the rear or the
front of no Red Car, shoot—he comes to his place where coupla years ago he'd dropped that seaman, no Red Car, you can feel its absence, it's come and gone, empty smell—You can tell by the electric stillness on the corner that something just was, & aint.

“Well I guess I missed it, goldang it,” says the cabdriver pushing his hat back to apologize and looking real hypocritical about it, so Deni gives him five dollars and we get out and Deni says:

“Kerouac this means we have an hour to wait here by the cold tracks, in the cold foggy night, for the next train to L.A.”

“That's okay” I say “we got beer aint we, open one up” and Deni fishes down for the old copper churchkey and up comes two cans of beer spissing all over the sad night and we up end the tin, and go slurp—two cans each and we start throwing rocks at signs, dancing around to keep warm, squatting, telling jokes, remembering the past, Deni's going “Hyra rrour Hoo” and again I hear his great laugh ringing in the American night and I try to tell him “Deni the reason I followed the ship all the way 3,200 miles from Staten Island to goddam Pedro is not only because I wanta get on and be seen going around the world and have myself a ball in Port Swettenham and pick up on gangee in Bombay and find the sleepers and the fluteplayers in filthy Karachi and start revolutions of my own in the Cairo Casbah and make it from Marseilles to the other side, but because of you, because, the things we used to do, where, I have a hell of a good time with you Den, there's no two ways about… I never have any money that I admit, I already owe you sixty for the bus fare, but you must admit I try—I'm sorry that I dont have any money ever, but you know I tried with you, that time … Well goddam, wa ahoo, shit, I want get drunk tonight.—” And Deni says “We dont have to hang
around in the cold like this Jack, look there's a bar, over there” (a roadhouse gleaming redly in the misty night) “it may be a Mexican Pachuco bar and we might get the hell beat out of us but let's go in there and wait the half hour we got with a few beers … and see if there're any cucamongas” so we head out to there, across an empty lot. Deni is meanwhile very busy tellin me what a mess I've made of my life but I've heard that from every body coast to coast and I dont care generally and I dont care tonight and this is my way of doing and saying things.

A COUPLA DAYS LATER the S.S.
Roamer
sails away without me because they wouldnt let me get on at the union hall, I had no seniority, all I had to do they said was hang around a couple of months and work on the waterfront or something and wait for a coastwise ship to Seattle and I thought “So if I'm gonna travel coasts I'm going to go down the coast I covet.”—So I see the Roamer slipping out of Pedro bay, at night again, the red port light and the green starboard light sneaking across the water with attendant ghostly following mast lights, vup! (the whistle of the little tug)—then the ever Gandharva-like, illusion-and-Maya-like dim lights of the portholes where some members of the crew are reading in bunks, others eating snacks in the crew mess, and others, like Deni, eagerly writing letters with a big red ink fountain pen assuring me that next time around the world I will get on the Roamer.— “But I dont care, I'll go to Mexico” says I and walk off to the Pacific Red Car waving at Deni's ship vanishing out there …

Among the madcap pranks we'd pulled after that first night I told you about, we carried a huge tumbleweed up the gangplank at 3 A M Christmas Eve and
shoved it into the engine crew foc'sle (where they were all snoring) and left it there.— When they woke up in the morning they thought they were somewhere else, in the jungle or something, and all went back to bed. So when the Chief Engineer is yelling “Who the hell put that tree on board!” (it was ten feet by ten feet, a big ball of dry twigs), way off across and down the ship's iron heart you hear Deni howling “Hoo hoo hoo!
Who the hell put that tree on board!
Oh that Chief Engineer is a very funny m-a-h-n!”

WHEN YOU GO ACROSS THE BORDER at Nogales Arizona some very severe looking American guards, some of them pasty faced with sinister steelrim spectacles go scrounging through all your beat baggage for signs of the scorpion of scofflaw.— You just wait patiently like you always do in America among those apparently endless policemen and their endless laws
against
(no laws
for
)—but the moment you cross the little wire gate and you're in Mexico, you feel like you just sneaked out of school when you told the teacher you were sick and she told you you could go home, 2 o'clock in the afternoon.— You feel as though you just come home from Sunday morning church and you take off your suit and slip into your soft worn smooth cool overalls, to play—you look around and you see happy smiling faces, or the absorbed dark faces of worried lovers and fathers and policemen, you hear cantina music from across the little park of balloons and popsicles.—
In the middle of the little park is a bandstand for concerts, actual concerts for the people, free—generations of marimba players maybe, or an Orozco jazzband playing Mexican anthems to El Presidente.— You walk thirsty through the swinging doors of a saloon and get a bar beer, and turn around and there's fellas shooting pool, cooking tacos, wearing sombreros, some wearing guns on their rancher hips, and gangs of singing businessmen throwing pesos at the standing musicians who wander up and down the room.— It's a great feeling of entering the Pure Land, especially because it's so close to dry faced Arizona and Texas and all over the South-west—but you can find it, this feeling, this fellaheen feeling about life, that timeless gayety of people not involved in great cultural and civilization issues—you can find it almost anywhere else, in Morocco, in Latin America entire, in Dakar, in Kurd land.—