Classic Audiobook Collection - Big Sur by Jack Kerouac ~ Full Audiobook [drama]

Starting point is 00:00:00 Big Sur by Jack Kerwack. Preface. My work comprises one vast book like Prousts, except that my remembrances are written on the run instead of afterwards in a sickbed. Because of the objections of my early publishers, I was not allowed to use the same personae names in each work. On the road, the subterranians, the Dharma Bums,

Starting point is 00:00:24 Dr. Sachs, Maggie Cassidy, Tristessa, Desolation Angels, visions of Cody, and the others, including this book Big Sur, are just chapters in the whole work, which I call the Deleu's legend. My old age, I intend to collect all my work and reinsert my pantheon of uniform names, leave the long shelf full of books there and die happy.

Starting point is 00:00:46 The whole thing forms one enormous comedy, seen through the eyes of poor Thai Jean, me, otherwise known as Jack Deleuze, the world of raging action and folly and also of gentle sweetness seen through the key. whole of his eye. Jack Kerouac. End of preface.

Starting point is 00:01:07 Chapter 1 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This Libravox recording is in the public domain. Read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 1. The church is blowing, sad wind-blown Kathleen on the bells in the Skid Row slums as I wake up all Wobagon and Goopy, groaning from another drinking bouton, groaning from another drinking bout and groaning most of all because I had ruined my secret return to San Francisco by getting silly drunk while hiding in the alleys with bums and then marching forth into North

Starting point is 00:01:42 Beach to see everybody. Although Lorenzo Monsanto and I had exchanged huge letters outlining how I would sneak in quietly, call him on the phone using a code name like Adam Yult or Lallygie Pulver Taft, also writers. And then he would secretly drive me to his cabin in the big sewer woods, where I would be alone and undisturbed for six weeks, just chopping wood, drawing water, riding, sleeping, hiking, etc., etc. But instead I've bounced drunk into a city lights bookshop at the height of Saturday night business. Everyone recognized me, even though I was wearing my disguise like fisherman's hat and fisherman coat and pants waterproof. It all ends up, a roaring drunk in all the famous bars, the bloody king of the beatniks, his back,

Starting point is 00:02:31 in town buying drinks for everyone. Two days of that, including Sunday, the day Lorenzo is supposed to pick me up at my secret Skid Row Hotel, tomorrow is on Fourth and Howard. But when he calls for me, there's no answer. He has the clerk opened the door, and what does he see, but me out on the floor among bottles. Ben Fagan stretched out partly beneath the bed, and Robert Browning, the beatnik painter, out on the bed, snoring. So says to himself, I'm pick him up next weekend. I guess he wants to drink for a week in the city, like he always does, I guess. So off he drives to his big sewer cabin without me, thinking he's doing the right thing, but my God, when I wake up and Ben and Browning are gone, they've somehow dumped me on the bed,

Starting point is 00:03:17 and I hear I'll take you home again, Kathleen, being bell-roaked so sad in the fog winds out there that blow across the rooftops of eerie old hangover frisco. Wow, I've hit the end of the trail and can't even drag my body anymore. even to a refuge in the woods, let alone stay upright in the city a minute. It's the first trip I've taken away from home, my mother's house, since the publication erode, the book that made me famous. And in fact, so much so, I've been driven mad for three years by endless telegrams, phone calls, requests, mail, visitors, reporters, snoopers,

Starting point is 00:03:54 a big voice saying in my basement windows I prepare to write a story, Are you busy? For the time the reporter ran upstairs to my bedroom As I sat there in my pajamas Trying to write down a dream Teenagers jumping six-foot fence I'd had Built around my yard for privacy Parties with bottles

Starting point is 00:04:12 Yelling at my study window Come on out and get drunk all work and no play Makes Jack a dull boy A woman coming to my door and saying I'm not going to ask you if you're Jack to lose Because I know he wears a beard Can you tell me where I can find him I want a real beatnik at my

Starting point is 00:04:28 annual shindig party. Drunken visitors puking in my study, stealing books and even pencils. Uninvited acquaintances, staying for days because of the clean beds and good food my mother provided. Me, drunk practically all the time to put on a jovial cap to keep up with all this, but finally realizing I was surrounded and outnumbered and had to get away to solitude again or die. So Lorenzo Monsanto wrote and said, come to my cabin, no one'll know, etc. So I had sneaked into San Francisco, as I say,

Starting point is 00:05:03 coming 3,000 miles from my home in Long Island, Northport, and a pleasant roomette on the California Zephyr train, watching America roll by outside my private picture window. Really happy for the first time in three years, staying in the roomette all three days and three nights of my instant coffee and sandwiches. Up the Hudson Valley and over across New York State to Chicago, and then the plains, the mountains, the desert, the final mountains of California. All so easy and dreamlike compared to my old harsh hitchhiking

Starting point is 00:05:35 before I made enough money to take transcontinental trains. All over America, high school, and college kids thinking, Jack DeLuze is 26 years old and on the road all the time hitchhiking. While there I am almost 40 years old, bored and jaded in a roomette bunk crashing across that salt flat. But in any case, a wonderful stork. toward my retreat so generously offered by sweet old Monsanto. And instead of going through smooth and easy, I wake up drunk, sick, disgusted, frightened.

Starting point is 00:06:08 In fact, terrified by that sad song across the roofs, mingling with the lacrimose cries of a Salvation Army meeting on the corner below. Satan is the cause of your alcoholism. Satan is the cause of your immorality. Satan is everywhere working to destroy you unless you, repent now and worse than that the sound of old drunks throwing up in rooms next to mine the creeks of hall steps the moans everywhere including the moan that had awakened me i own moan in the lumpy bed a moan caused by a big roaring woo-woo in my head that had shot me out of my pillow like a ghost

Starting point is 00:06:50 End of Chapter 1 Chapter 2 A Big Sur by Jack Kerouac This Librevox recording is in the public domain Read by Ben Tucker Chapter 2 And I look around the dismal cell There's my hopeful rucksack all

Starting point is 00:07:16 Neatly packed with everything necessary to live in the woods Even unto the minutest first aid kit And diet details And even a neat little sewing kit cleverly reinforced by my good mother, like extra safety pins, buttons, special sewing needles, little aluminum scissors. The hopeful medal of St. Christopher, even which she'd sewn on the flap, their survival kit all in there, down to the last little survival sweater and handkerchief and tennis sneakers for hiking. But the rucksack sits hopefully in a strewn mess of bottles all

Starting point is 00:07:51 empty, empty poor boys of white port, butts, junk, horror. One fast move, or I'm gone, I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness, which is a physical and spiritual and metaphysical hopelessness you can't learn in school, no matter how many books on existentialism or pessimism you read, or how many jugs of vision-producing ayahuasca you drink or mescaline take or peyote goop up with. That feeling when you wake up with the delirium tremens With the fear of eerie death Dripping from your ears like those special heavy cobweb spiders

Starting point is 00:08:31 Weave in the hot countries The feeling of being a bent-back mud man monster Growning underground and hot steaming mud Pulling along hot burden nowhere The feeling of standing ankle-deep in hot-boiled pork blood Ugh Of being up to your waist and a giant pan of greasy brown dishwater, not a trace of suds left in it.

Starting point is 00:08:56 The face of yourself you see in the mirror, with its expression of unbearable anguish so haggid and awful, with sorrow you can't even cry for a thing so ugly, so lost, no connection, whatever, with early perfection, and therefore nothing to connect with tears or anything. It's like William Seward Burroughs, stranger suddenly peering in your place in the mirror. Enough!

Starting point is 00:09:20 One fast move where I'm gone, so I'd jump up. Do my head stand first to pump blood back into the hairy brain, take a shower in the hall, new shirt and socks and underwear. Pack vigorously, hoist the rucksack and run out, throwing the key on the desk and hit the cold street, and walk fast to the nearest little grocery store to buy two days of food. Sticking in the rucksack, hiked through lost alleys of Russian sorrow where bums sit head on knees

Starting point is 00:09:46 and foggy doorways in the goopy, eerie city night. I've got to escape. die and into the bus station and a half hour into a bus seat the bus says Monterey and off we go down the clean neon highway and I sleep all the way waking up amazed and well again smelling sea air the bus driver shaking me into the line Monterey and by God it is Monterey I stand sleeping in the 2 a.m. seeing vague little fishing masks across the street from the bus driveway now all the I've got to do to complete my escape is get 14 miles down the coast to the Rotton Canyon Bridge and hike in. End of Chapter 2. Chapter 3 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This Libervox

Starting point is 00:10:42 recordings in the public domain read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 3. One fast move or I'm gone, so I blow $8 on a cab to drive me down that coast. It's a foggy night, though. Sometimes you can see stars in the sky to the right where the sea is. Though you can't see the sea, you can only hear about it from the cab driver. What kind of country is it around here? I've never seen it. Well, you can't see it tonight. Rattan Canyon is say, you better be careful walking around there in the dark. Why? Well, just use your lamp, like you say. And sure enough, when he lets me off at the Rattan Canyon Bridge and counts the money, I sense something wrong somehow. There's an awful roar of surf, but it isn't coming from the right place,

Starting point is 00:11:31 like you'd expect it to come from over there, but it's coming from under there. I can see the bridge, but I can see nothing below it. The bridge continues the coast highway from one bluff to another. It's a nice white bridge with white rails, and there's a white line running down the middle, familiar and highway-like, but something's wrong. Besides, the headlights of the cab just shoot out over a few bushes, and the empty space in the direction where the canyon's supposed to be.

Starting point is 00:12:00 It feels like being up in the air somewhere, though I can see the dirt road at our feet and the dirt overhang on the side. What in the hell is this? I've got the directions all memorized from a little map Monsanto's mailed me, but in my imagination, dreaming about this big retreat back home,

Starting point is 00:12:18 there'd been something larkish, be colic, all homely woods and gladness, instead of all this aerial roaring mystery in the dark. When the cab leaves, I therefore turn on my railroad lantern for a timid peak, but its beam gets lost just like the car lights and a void. And in fact, the battery is fairly weak, and I can hardly see the bluff at my left. As for the bridge, I can't see it anymore except for graduating series of luminous shoulder buttons going off further into the low sea roar. The sea roar is bad enough, except it keeps bashing and barking at me.

Starting point is 00:12:56 like a dog in the fog down there. Sometimes it booms the earth, but my God, where is the earth, and how can the sea be underground? The only thing to do, I gulp, is to put this lantern shining right in front of your feet, kiddo, and follow that lantern and make sure it's shining on the road, rut, and hope and pray it's shining on ground

Starting point is 00:13:18 that's going to be there when it's shining. In other words, I actually fear that even my lamp will carry me astray if I dare to raise it for a minute from the ruts and the darts and the dirt. dirt road. The only satisfaction I can glean from this roaring high horror of darkness is that the lamp wobbles, huge dark shadows of its little rim stays on the overhanging bluff at the left of the road. Because to the right, where the bushes are wiggling in the wind from the sea, there ain't no shadows because there ain't no light can take hold.

Starting point is 00:13:49 So I start my trudge, pack a back, just head down following my lamp spot. head down but eyes suspiciously appearing a little up Like a man in the presence of a dangerous idiot he doesn't want to annoy The dirt road starts up a little curves to the right starts down a little Then suddenly up again and up By now the sea roar is further back and at one point I even stop and look back to see nothing I'm gonna put out my light and see what I can see I say rooted in my feet where there

Starting point is 00:14:24 rooted to that road. Fat lot of good when I put out the light, I see nothing but the dim sand at my feet. Trudging up and getting further away from the sea roar, I get to feel more confident, but suddenly I come to a frightening thing in the road. I stop and hold out my hand, edge forward. It's only a cattle crossing.

Starting point is 00:14:46 Iron bars embedded across the road. But at the same time, a big blast of wind comes from the left where the bluff should be, and I spot that way and see nothing. What the hell's going on? Follow the road, says the other voice, trying to be calm, so I do, but the next instant I hear a rattling to my right. Throw my light there, see nothing but bushes wiggling dry and mean

Starting point is 00:15:11 and just the proper high canyon wall kind of bushes fit for rattlesnakes too, which it was. A rattlesnake doesn't like to be awakened in the middle of the night by a trudging humpbacked monster with a lamp. But now the road's going down again. The reassuring bluff reappears on my left. And pretty soon, according to my memory of Laurie's map, there she is, the creek.

Starting point is 00:15:35 I can hear her lapling and gabbing down there at the bottom of the dark, where at least I'll be on level ground and done with booming air somewhere above. But the closer I get to the creek, as the road dips steeply, suddenly almost making me trot forward, the louder it roars, I began to think I'll fall right into it before I can notice it. It's screaming like a raging, flooded river right below me.

Starting point is 00:15:59 Besides, it's even darker down there than anywhere. There are glades down there, ferns of horror and slippery logs, mosses, dangerous plashings, humid mists, rising coldly like the breath of death. Big, dangerous trees are beginning to bend over my head and brush my pack. There's a noise I know can only grow. louder as I sink down, and for fear how loud it can grow I stop and listen. It rises up, crashing mysteriously at me from a raging battle among dark things. Wood or rock or something cracked, all smashed, all wet black sunken earth danger. I'm afraid to go down there. I'm afraid in the old

Starting point is 00:16:43 Edmund Spencer sense of being frayed by a whip and a wet one at that. A slimy green dragon racket in the bush, an angry war that doesn't want me poking around. It's been there million years, and it doesn't want me clashing darkness with it. It comes snarling from a thousand crevices and monster redwood roots all over the map of creation. It is a dark clinger in the rainforest and doesn't want no skid row bomb to carry to the sea, which is bad enough and waiting back there. I can almost feel the sea pulling at that racket in the trees, but there's my spot lamp, So all I got to do is follow the lovely sand road which dips and dips in rising carnage, and suddenly a flattening, a sight of bridge logs.

Starting point is 00:17:30 There's the bridge rail. There's the creek just four feet below. Cross the bridge, you woken bum and see what's on the other shore. Take one quick peek at the water as you cross. Just water over rocks, small creek at that. And now before me is a dreamy meadowland, with a good old corral gate and a barbed wire fence, the road running right on left, but this is where I get off at last. Then I crawl through the barbed wire,

Starting point is 00:17:55 and find myself trudging a sweet little sand road winding right through fragrant dry heathers, as though I'd just popped through from hell into familiar old heaven on earth. Yeah, and thank God, though a minute later my heart's in my mouth again because I see black things in the white sand ahead, but it's only piles of good old mule dung in heaven. End of chapter three. Chapter 4 Of Big Sur

Starting point is 00:18:28 By Jack Kerouac This Librivox recording is in the public domain Read by Ben Tucker Chapter 4 And in the morning, after sleeping by the creek and the white sand, I do see what was so scary about my canyon road walk The road's up there on the wall, 1,000 feet with a sheer drop sometimes,

Starting point is 00:18:49 especially at the cattle crossing, way up highest where a break in the bluff shows fog pouring through from another bend of the sea beyond. Scary enough in itself anyway, as though one hole wasn't enough to open into the sea. And worst of all is the bridge. I go ambling seaward along the path by the creek and see this awful thin white line of bridge,

Starting point is 00:19:10 a thousand unbridgeable size of height above the little woods I'm walking in. You just can't believe it. And to make things heart-thumpingly horrible, you come to a little bend in what is now just a trail, and there's the booming surf. Coming at you, white-capped, crashing down on sand, as though it was higher than where you stand, like a sudden tidal wave world, enough to make you step back or run back to the hills. And not only that, the blue sea behind the crashing high waves is full of huge black rocks,

Starting point is 00:19:41 rising like old ogresome castles, dripping wet slime, a billion years of woe right there. The moogers big clunk of it right there with its slavorous lips of foam at the base. so that you emerge from pleasant little woodpaths with a stem of grass in your teeth and drop it to see doom. And you look up at that unbelievably high bridge and feel death and for a good reason. Because underneath the bridge in the sand right beside the sea cliff, hump, your heart sinks to see it. The automobile that crashed through the bridge rail a decade ago and fell 1,000 feet straight down and landed upside down. Still there now. An upside down chassis of rust and a strewn skis.

Starting point is 00:20:23 of sea-eaten tires, old spokes, old car seats, sprung with straw, one sad fuel pump, and no more people. Big elbows of rock rising everywhere. See caves within them, seas, plowlicking all around inside them crashing out foams, the boom and pound on the sand, the sand dipping quick, no Malibu Beach here. Yet you turn and see the pleasant woods, winding up creek like a picture in Vermont. But you look up into the sky, bend way back, My God, you're standing directly under that aerial bridge with its thin white line running from rock to rock and witless cars racing across it like dreams. From rock to rock, all the way down the raging coast, so that when later I hear people say, Oh, Big Sir, must be beautiful.

Starting point is 00:21:09 I gulp to wonder why it has the reputation of being beautiful above and beyond its fearfulness. It's Blakey and groaning, rough rock creation throws, those vistas when you drive the coast highway on a sunny day, opening up the eye for miles of horrible washing, sawing. End of Chapter 5 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This Librevox recording is in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 5 It was even frightening at the other peaceful end of Rotton Canyon, the east end, where Alf, the pet mule of local settlers,

Starting point is 00:21:54 slept at night such sleepful sleeps under a few weird trees, and then got up in the morning to graze in the grass, then negotiated the whole distance slowly to the seashore, where you saw him standing by the waves, like an ancient, sacred myth character motionless in the sand. Alf, the sacred burrow I later called him. The thing that was frightening was the mountain that rose up at the east end, a strange Burmese-like mountain with levels and moody terraces,

Starting point is 00:22:21 and a strange rice-patti hat on top that I kept staring at with a sinking heart, even at first when I was healthy and feeling good. And I would be going mad in this canyon in six weeks on the full moon night of September 3rd. The mountain reminded me of my recent recurrent nightmares in New York about the mountain of mean moh, with the swarms of mooney flying horses

Starting point is 00:22:42 lyrically sweeping capes over their shoulders as they circled the peak a thousand miles high, in the dream it said. And on top of the mountain in one haunted nightmare, I'd seen the giant empty stone benches so silent in the top world moonlight as though once inhabited by gods or giants of some kind, but long ago vacated so that they were all dusty and cobwebby now, and the evil lurked somewhere inside the pyramid nearby,

Starting point is 00:23:10 where there was a monster with a big thumping heart, but also even more of sinister, just ordinary, seedy but muddy janitors cooking over small wood fires. Narrow dusty holes through which I had tried to crawl with a bar, bunch of tomato plants tied around my neck. Dreams. Drinking nightmares. A recurrent series of them all swirling around that mountain.

Starting point is 00:23:35 Seen the very first time as a beautiful but somehow horribly green, verdant mist and shrouded jungle peak rising out of green tropical country in Mexico, so-called, but beyond which were pyramids, dry rivers, other countries full of infantry enemy, and yet the biggest danger being just hootlums out throwing rocks on Sundays. So that the side of that simple sad mountain, together with the bridge and that car that had flipped over twice or so and landed flump and sand with no more sign of human elbows or shred neckties, like a terrifying poem about America you could write. Ah, ooh-hoo of owls living in old evil hollow trees in that misty tangled further part of the canyon where I was always afraid to go anyhow. That unclimably tangled, steep cliff at the base of mean mo, rising to gawky dead trees among bushes so dense and up to heathers, God knows how deep with hidden caves no one, not even I suppose the Indians of the tenth century had ever explored.

Starting point is 00:24:37 And those big, goofy, rainforest ferns among lightning-struck conifers right beside sudden black-vine cliff faces, rising right at your side as you walk the peaceful path. And as I say that, ocean coming at you higher than you are like the harbors of old wooded, cuts always higher than the towns, as Rimbaud pointed out shuddering. So many evil combinations, even unto the bat, who would come at me later while I slept on the outdoor cot on the porch of Lorenzo's cabin. Come circle my head coming real low sometimes, filling me with the traditional fear it'll get tangled in my hair. And such silent wings, how would you like to wake up in the middle of the night and see silent

Starting point is 00:25:19 wings beating over you? And you ask yourself, do I really believe in band? In fact, flying silently around my lamplit cabin at three o'clock in the mornings, as I'm reading, of all things, shudder, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Small wonder may be that I myself turned from serene Jekyll to hysterical hide in the short space of six weeks, losing absolute control of the peace mechanisms of my mind for the first time in my life. But, ah, at first there were fine days and nights, right after Monsanto drove me to Monterey, and back with two boxes of a full grub list, and left me there alone for three weeks of solitude as we'd agreed.

Starting point is 00:26:01 So fearless and happy I even spotted his powerful flashlight up at the bridge the first night, right through the fog, the eerie finger reaching the pale bottom of that high monstrosity, and even spotted it out over the farmless sea as I sat by caves in the crashing dark in my fisherman's outfit, riding down what the sea was saying. Worst of all, spotting it up at those tangled, mad cliff sides where owls hooted, hoor-lew, becoming acquainted and swallowing fears, and settling down to life in the little cabin with its warm glow of wood stove and kerosene lamp, and let the ghosts fly their asses off.

Starting point is 00:26:39 The Biku's home in his woods, he only wants peace, peace he will get. Though why, after three weeks, a perfect happy peace and adjustment in these strange woods, my soul so went down the drain when I came back with Dave Wayne and Romana and my girl Billy and her kid I'll never know. Worth the telling only if I dig deep into everything. Because it was so beautiful at first, even the circumstance of my sleeping bag suddenly erupting feathers in the middle of the night as I turned over to sleep on. So I curse and have to get up and sew it by lamplight or in the morning it might be empty of feathers. And as I bend poor motherhead over my needle and thread in the cabin, by the fresh fire

Starting point is 00:27:20 and in the light of the kerosene lamp. Here come those damned silent black wings flapping and throwing shadows all over my little home. The bloody bats come in my house. Trying to sew a poor patch of my old crumbly sleeping bag,

Starting point is 00:27:36 mostly ruined by my having to sweat out a fever inside of it in a hotel room in Mexico City in 1957, right after the gigantic earthquake there. The nylon all rotten almost from all that old sweat, but still soft, so soft I have to cut out a piece of old shirt flap and patch over the rip. I remember looking up from my middle of the night shore and saying bleakly,

Starting point is 00:27:59 They, yes, have bats in Mean Mo Valley. But the fire crackles. The patch gets sown, the creek gurgles, and thumps outside. The creek having so many voices, it's amazing. From the kettle drum basin deep bump bumps to the little gurgly feminine crickles over shallow rocks. sudden choruses of other singers and voices from the log damn, depple, dabble, dabble, all night long and all day long, the voices of the creek amusing me so much at first,

Starting point is 00:28:28 but in the later horror of that madness night becoming the babble and rave of evil angels in my head. So not minding the bad or the rip finally, ending up can't sleep because too awake now and it's 3 a.m. So the fire I stoke and I settle down and read the entire Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde novel and the wonderful little hand-sized leather book left there by Smart Monsanto, who also must have read it with white eyes on a night like that. Ending the last elegant sentences at dawn, time to get up and fetch water from gurgly creek,

Starting point is 00:28:59 and start breakfast of pancakes and syrup, and saying to myself, so I fret when something goes wrong like your sleeping bag breaking in the night, you self-reliance. Screw the bats, I add. Marvelous opening moment and fact of the first afternoon, I'm left alone in the cabin, and I make my first meal, wash my first dishes, nap, and wake up to hear the rapturous ring of silence or heaven, even within and throughout the gurgle of the creek. When you say, am alone, and the cabin is suddenly home only because you made one meal and washed your first meal dishes, then nightfall, the religious vestal lighting of the beautiful kerosene lamp after careful washing of the mantle in the creek and careful drying with toilet paper, which spoils it by.

Starting point is 00:29:45 specking it, so you again wash it in the creek, and this time just let the mantle drip dry in the sun. The late afternoon sun that disappears so quickly behind those giant, high, steep canyon walls. Nightfall, the kerosene lamp casts a glow in the cabin. I go out and pick some ferns like the ferns of a lankovatarah scripture, those hairnet ferns. Look, sir, as a beautiful hairnet. Late afternoon, fog pours in over the canyon walls. sweep, cover the sun, it gets cold, even the flies on the porch or as so sad as the fog on the peaks. As daylight retreats, the flies retreat like polite Emily Dickinson flies,

Starting point is 00:30:27 and when it's dark they're all asleep in trees or someplace. At high noon they're in the cabin with you, but edging further towards the open door sill as the afternoon lengthens. How strangely gracious! There's the hum of the bee drone two blocks away, the racket of it, you'd think it was right over the roof. When the B-drone swirls nearer and nearer, gulp again, you retreat into the cabin and wait. Maybe they got a message to come and see you all 2,000 of them.

Starting point is 00:30:56 But getting used to the B-drone, finally, which seems to happen like a big party once a week. And so everything eventually marvelous. Even the first frightening night on the beach in the fog, with my notebook and pencil, sitting there cross-legged in the sand, facing all the Pacific Fury flashing on rocks that rock, eyes like gloomy sea shroud towers out of the cove.

Starting point is 00:31:18 The Bing Bang Cove with its seas booming inside caves and slapping out. The cities of seaweed floating up and down. You can even see their dark leer in the phosphorescent sea beach nightlight. That first night I sit there, and all I know as I look up is the kitchen light is on, on the cliff to the right where somebody's just built a cabin overlooking all the horrible sir. somebody up there having a mild and tender supper, that's all I know. The lights from the cabin kitchen up there go out like a little weak lighthouse beacon, and ends suspended a thousand feet over the crashing shore.

Starting point is 00:31:56 Who would build a cabin up there, but some bored but hoary old adventurous architect, maybe got sick of running for Congress. And one of these days a big Orson Welles tragedy with screaming ghosts, a woman and a white nightgown will go flying down that sheer cliff. But actually in my mind, what I really see is the kitchen lights of that mild and tender, maybe even romantic supper up there, and all that howling fog. And here I am, way below, and the Vulcans forge itself, looking up with sad eyes, blanking my little camel cigarette on a billion-year-old rock

Starting point is 00:32:30 that rises behind my head to a height unbelievable. The little kitchen light on the cliff is only on the end of it. Behind it, the shoulders of the great sea-hound cliff go right, rising up and back and sweeping inland higher and higher, till I gasped to think. Looks like a reclining dog, big friggin' shoulders on that son of a bitch. Rizeth and sweepeth and scareth men to death, but what is death anyway in all this water and rock?

Starting point is 00:32:58 I fix up my sleeping bag on the porch of the cabin, but at 2 a.m., the fog starts dripping all wet, so I have to go indoors with wet sleeping bag and make new arrangements. But who can't sleep like a log in a solitary cabin in the water? woods. You wake up in the late morning so refreshed and realizing the universe namelessly. The universe is an angel. But easy enough to say when you've had your escape from the gooky city turn into a success, and it's finally only in the woods you get that nostalgia for cities at last. You dream of long gray journeys to cities where soft evenings will unfold like Paris,

Starting point is 00:33:35 but never seeing how sickening it will be because of the primordial innocence of health and stillness in the wilds. So I tell myself, be wise. End of chapter 5. Chapter 6. A Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This Librevox recordings in the public domain. Read by Ben Tucker.

Starting point is 00:34:03 Chapter 6. So there are faults to Monsanto's cabin, like no screened windows, to keep the flies out in the daytime, just big board windows. So that also on foggy days, when it's damp, if you leave them open, it's too cold. If you leave them closed, you can't see anything. and have to light the lamp at noon. And, but for that, no other faults. It's all marvelous.

Starting point is 00:34:26 And at first it's so amazing to be able to enjoy dreamy afternoon meadows of Heather up the other end of the canyon. And just by walking less than a half mile, you can suddenly also enjoy wild gloomy sea coast. Or if you're sick of either of these, just sit by the creek in a glady spot and dream over snags.

Starting point is 00:34:46 So easy in the woods to daydream and pray to the local spirits and say, Allow me to stay here, I only want peace. And those foggy peaks answer back mutely, yes. And to say to yourself, if you're like me with theological preoccupations, at least at that time before I went mad, I still had such preoccupations.

Starting point is 00:35:06 God, who is everything, possesses the eye of awakening, like dreaming a long dream of an impossible task, and you wake up in a flash, oops, no task, it's done and gone. And in the flush of the first few days of joy, I confidently tell myself, not expecting what I'll do in three weeks only. No more dissipation. It's time for me to quietly watch the world and even enjoy it. First in woods like these, then just calmly walk and talk among people of the world.

Starting point is 00:35:33 No booze, no drugs, no binges, no bouts with beatniks and drunks and junkies and everybody. No more I ask myself to question, oh, why is God torturing me? That's it. Be a loner, travel, talk to waiters only. In fact, in Milan, Paris, just talk to waiters, walk around, no more self-imposed agony. It's time to think and watch and keep concentrated on the fact that, after all, this whole surface of the world, as we know it now, will be covered with the silt of a billion years in time. Yay for this. More aloneness.

Starting point is 00:36:06 Go back to childhood. Just eat apples and read your catechism. Sit on curbstones, the hell with the hot lights of Hollywood. it. Remembering that awful time only a year earlier when I had to rehearse my reading of prose a third time under the hotlights of the Steve Allen show in the Burbank studio. One hundred technicians waiting for me to start reading, Steve Allen watching me expectant as he plucks the piano. I sit there on the dunce's stool and refuse to read a word or open my mouth. I don't have to rehearse, for God's sake, Steve! But go ahead, we just want to get the tone of your voice. Just this last time,

Starting point is 00:36:39 I'll let you off the dress rehearsal. And I sit there sweating, not the same. I'm not the same. saying a word for a whole minute as everybody watches. Finally, I say, No, I can't do it. And I go across the street to get drunk. But surprising everybody the night of the show by doing my job of reading just fine, which surprises the producers,

Starting point is 00:36:57 and so they take me out with a Hollywood starlet who turns out to be a big boar trying to read me or poetry and won't talk love because in Hollywood man love is for sale. So even that marvelous long remembrances of life all the time in the world to just sit there or lie there. or walk about slowly remembering all the details of life,

Starting point is 00:37:16 which now because a million light years away have taken on the aspect, as they must have for Proust in his sealed room, of pleasant mental movies brought up at will and projected for further study, and pleasure, as I imagine God to be doing this very minute, watching his own movie, which is us. Even one night I'm so happy sighing to turn over to resume my sleep, but a rat suddenly runs over my head. It's marvelous because I then take the folding cot and put a big wide board on it that covers both sides,

Starting point is 00:37:48 so I won't sink into the canvas confines there and place two old sleeping bags over the board, and my own on top. I have the most marvelous and rap-free and, in fact, healthy for the back bed in the whole world. I also take long, curious hikes to see what's what in the other direction inland, going up a few miles along the dirt road that leads to isolated ranches and logging camps. I come to giant sad quiet valleys Where you see 150 foot tall redwood trees With sometimes one little bird ride on the topmost peak twigs sticking straight up

Starting point is 00:38:21 The bird balances up there Surveying the fog and the great trees You see one single flower nodding on a cliffside far across the canyon Or a huge knot in a redwood tree Looking like Zeus's face Or some of God's little crazy creations Goofing around in creek pools zigzag bugs, or a sign on a lonely fence saying,

Starting point is 00:38:45 M. Pasi, no trespassing. For terraces a fern in the dripping redwood shade, and you think, a long way from the beet generation in this rainforest. So I angle back down to the home canyon and down the path past the cabin, and out to the sea where the mule is on the seashore, nibbling under that 1,000-foot bridge, or sometimes just standing, staring at me, with big brown garden of Eden eyes.

Starting point is 00:39:08 The mule being a pet of one of the families who have a cabin in the canyon And it, as I say Alf by name, just wanders from One end of the canyon where the corral fence stops him to the wild sea shore Where the sea stops him. But a strange Gogan-esque mule

Starting point is 00:39:24 When you first see him, leaving his black dung On the perfect white sand An immoral And primordial mule, owning a whole Valley. I even finally later find out where Alf sleeps Which is like a secret grove of trees in that dreaming meadow of heather. So I feed off the last of my apples, which he receives

Starting point is 00:39:43 with big far-off teeth inside his soft hairy muzzle, never biting, just muffing up my apple from my outstretched palm and chomping away sadly, turning to scratches behind against a tree with a big erotic motion that gets worse and worse till finally standing there with a rectile dong that would scare the whore of Babylon, let alone me. All kinds of strange and marvel as things like the weird Ripley's situation of a huge tree that's fallen across a creek maybe five hundred years ago and's made a bridge thereby. The other end of its trunk is now buried in ten feet of silt and foliage. Strange enough, but out of the middle trunk over the water rises straight another redwood tree looking like it's been planted in the tree trunk,

Starting point is 00:40:28 or stuck down into it by a god hand. I can't figure it out and stare at this chewing furiously on big choking handfuls of peanuts like a college boy. and only weeks before falling on my head in the bowery. Even when a rancher car goes by, I daydream mad ideas like, Here comes Farmer Jones and his two daughters, and here I am with a 60-foot redwood tree under my arm, walking slowly, pulling it along.

Starting point is 00:40:53 They are amazed and scared. Are we dreaming? Can anybody be that strong? They even ask me, and my big Zen answer is, You only think I'm strong, and I go on down the road carrying my tree. This has me laughing in Cloverfields for hours. I pass a cow which turns to look at me as it takes a big dreamy crap. Back in the cabin I light the fire and sit sighing,

Starting point is 00:41:15 and there are leaves skittering on the tin roof. It's August and Big Sur. I fall asleep in the chair, and when I wake up I'm facing the thick little tangled woods outside the door, and I suddenly remember them from long ago, even to the particular clumpness of the thickets, stem by stem, the twist of them, like an old home place. But just as I'm wondering what all this mess is,

Starting point is 00:41:37 bang, Dwyn closes the cabin door on my side of it. So I conclude, I see as much as doors will allow, open or shut. Adding as I get up, an loud English-lord voice, nobody can hear anyway, An issue broached as an issue smote, sire, pronouncing issue like issue. And this has me laughing all through supper, which is potatoes wrapped in foil and thrown on the fire, and coffee, and hunks a spam roasted on a spit and apple sauce, and cheese. And when I light the lamp of after-suffer reading, here comes the nightly

Starting point is 00:42:12 moth to his nightly death at my lamp. After I put out the lamp temporarily, there's the moth sleeping on the wall, not realizing I'll put it on again. Meanwhile, by the way, and however, every day is cold and cloudy, or damp, not cold in the eastern sense, and every night is absolutely fog, no stars whatever to be seen. But this too turns out to be a marvelous circle. I found out later. It's the damp season, and the other dwellers, weekenders of the canyon, don't come out on weekends. I'm absolutely alone for weeks on end. As later in August, when the suns conquered the fog, suddenly I was amazed to hear laughing and scratching all up and down the valley,

Starting point is 00:42:54 which had been mine, only mine, and when I tried to go to the beach to squat and write, there were whole families having outings. Some of them younger people who'd simply parked their cars up on the high bridge bluff, and climbed down. Some of them, in fact, gangs of yelling hoodlums. So the rainforest summer fog was grand. And besides, when the sun prevailed in August, a horrible development took place. Huge blasts of frightening gale-like wind came pouring into the canyon, making all the trees roar with a really frightening intensity that sometimes built up to a booming war of trees that shook the cabin and woke you up. And was, in fact, one of the things that

Starting point is 00:43:36 contributed to my mad fit. But the most marvelous day of all, when I completely forgot who I was, where I was, or the time of day, just when my pants rolled up above my knees, wading in the creek rearranging the rocks, and some of the snacks, so that the water where I stooped near the sandy shore, to get jugfuls would, instead of just sluggishly passing by shallow over mud with bugs in it, now come rushing in a pure, gurgly, clear stream, and deep, too. I dug into the white sand

Starting point is 00:44:07 And arranged underground rocks So now I could stick a jug in there And tilt the opening to the stream And it would fill up instantly with clear rushing Unstagnated Bugless drinking water Making a mill race is what it's called And because now the water rush so fast And deep right by the sandy stooping place

Starting point is 00:44:26 I had to build a kind of seawall of rocks Against that rush So that the shore would not be silted away by the race doing that, fortifying the outside of the seawall with smaller rocks. And finally it's sundown with bent head over my sniffling endeavors. The way a kid sniffles when he's been playing all day. I start inserting tiny pebbles in the spaces between the stones so that no water can sneak over to wash away the shore.

Starting point is 00:44:55 Even down to the tiniest sand, a perfect seawall, which I top with a wooden plank for everybody to kneel on when they come there to fetch their holy water. Looking up from this work of an entire day, from noon till sundown, amazed to see where I was, who I was, what I'd done, the absolute innocence, like of Indian fashioning a canoe all alone in the woods. And as I say, only weeks earlier I'd fallen flat on my head in the bowery, and everybody thought I'd hurt myself.

Starting point is 00:45:25 So I make supper with a happy song, and go out in the foggy moonlight. The moon sent its white luminescence through, and marveled to watch the new swift gurgling clear water run with its pretty flashes of light and when the fog's over and the stars and the moon come out at night it'll be a beautiful sight and such things

Starting point is 00:45:48 a whole mess of little joys like that amazing me when I came back in the horror of later to see how they'd all changed and become sinister even my poor little wood platform and mill race with my eyes and my stomach nauseous and my soul's screaming a thousand babbling words. It's hard to explain. And best thing to do is not to be false.

Starting point is 00:46:13 In Chapter 6. Chapter 7 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This Libervox recordings in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 7 Because on the fourth day I began to get bored and noted it in my journal with amazement. Already bored? Even though the handsome words of Emerson would shake me out of that, where he says in one of those little red-leather books,

Starting point is 00:46:46 in the essay on self-reliance, a man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best. Applicable both to building simple, silly little mill races, and writing big stupid stories like this. Words from that trumpet of the morning in America, Emerson, he who announced Whitman and also said, infancy conforms to nobody. The infancy of the simplicity of just being happy in the woods,

Starting point is 00:47:12 conforming to nobody's idea about what to do, what should be done. Life is not an apology. And when a vain and malicious philanthropic abolitionist accused him of being blind to the issues of slavery, he said, Thy love afar is spite at home. Maybe the philanthropist had Negro help anyway. So once I again, I'm Tai Jean the child, playing, sewing patches, cooking suppers, washing dishes.

Starting point is 00:47:40 Always cup the kettle boiling on the fire, and any time dishes need to be washed, I just pour hot, hot water in a pan with tied soap, and soak them good, and then wipe them clean, after scouring with little five-and-ten-wire scourer. Long nights, simply thinking about the usefulness of that little wire scourer, those little yellow copper things you buy in supermarkets for ten days, sense. All to me infinitely more interesting than the stupid and senseless Steppenwolf novel in the

Starting point is 00:48:11 shack which I read with a shrug, this old fart reflecting the conformity of today, and all the while he thought he was a big Nietzsche, old imitator of Dostoevsky 50 years too late. He feels tormented in a personal hell, he calls it, because he doesn't like what other people like. Better at noon to watch the orange and black princeton colors on the wings of a butterfly. Best to go hear the sound of the sea at night on the shore. Maybe I shouldn't have gone out and scared or bored or belabored myself so much, though on that beach at night which would scare any ordinary mortal. Every night around eight after supper I'd put on my big fisherman coat

Starting point is 00:48:52 and take the notebook, pencil, and lamp, and start down the trail, sometimes passing ghostly alf on the way, and go under that frightful high bridge and see through the dark fog ahead of the white mouths of ocean coming high at me. But knowing the terrain I'd walk right on, jump the beach creek, and go to my corner by the cliff not far from one of the caves,

Starting point is 00:49:14 and sit there like an idiot in the dark, writing down the sound of the waves and the notebook page, secretarial notebook, which I could see wide in the darkness, and therefore without benefit of lamps, scrawl on. I was afraid to light my lamp, for fear I'd scare the people way up there on the cliff eating their nightly tender supper, Later found out there was nobody up there eating tender suppers.

Starting point is 00:49:37 They were overtime carpenters finishing the place in bright lights. And I'd get scared of the rising tide with its 15-foot waves, yet sit there hoping in faith that Hawaii weren't sending no tidal wave I might miss seeing in the dark, coming from miles away high as groom us. One night I got scared anyway, so sat on top of ten-foot cliff at the foot of the big cliff, and the waves are going rare, and he rammed the gate, Rar,

Starting point is 00:50:05 Roo, roar, the way waves sound especially at night. The sea not speaking in sentences so much as in short lines. Which one? The one blushed. The same ma' boom.

Starting point is 00:50:21 Writing down these fantastic inanities, actually. But yet I felt I had to do it because James Joyce wasn't about to do it. No, he was dead. And figuring, next year I'll write the different sound of the Atlantic crashing, say on the night shore as a cornwall, or the soft sound of the Indian Ocean

Starting point is 00:50:38 crashing at the mouth of the Ganges, maybe. And I just sit there, listening to the waves, talk all up and down the sand and different tones of voice. Cabloom! Carplash! Arop yat of barnacle bee! Crouch! Aroop the angels in all the sea! And such. Footnote.

Starting point is 00:50:59 The complete poems written by the seer to be found at the end of this book, in the appendix, titled Sea. Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur. J.K. Into footnote. Looking up occasionally to see rare cars crossing the high bridge and wondering what they'd see on this drear foggy night if they knew a madman was down there a thousand feet below

Starting point is 00:51:20 and all that windy fury sitting in the dark riding in the dark. Some sort of sea beatnik that anybody wants to call me a beatnik for this better try it if they dare. The huge black rocks, seemed to move. The bleak, awful, roaring, isolateness. No ordinary man could do it, I'm telling you. I am a Breton, I cry, and the blackness speaks back. The poissons de la me parlons, Breton. The fishes of the sea speak Breton. Nevertheless, I go there every night, even though I don't feel like it. It's my duty,

Starting point is 00:51:56 and probably drove me mad, and write these sea sounds, and all the whole insane poem, sea. Always so wonderful, in fact, to get away from that and back to the more human woods, and come to the cabin where the fire's still red, and you can see the bodhisattva's lamp, the glass of ferns on the table, the box of jasmine tea nearby, all so gentle and human after that rocky deluge out there. So I make an excellent pan of muffins and tell myself, Blessed as the man can make his own bread. Like that, the whole three weeks' happiness.

Starting point is 00:52:32 and I'm rolling my own cigarettes too. And as I say, sometimes I meditate how wonderful the fantastic use I've gotten out of cheap little articles like the scourer. But in this instance, I think of the marvelous belongings in my rucksack, like my 25-cent plastic shaker with which I've just made the muffin batter, but also I've used it in the past to drink hot tea, wine, coffee, whiskey, and even stored clean handkerchiefs in it when I traveled. the top part of the shaker, my holy cup, and had it for five years now,

Starting point is 00:53:06 and other belongings so valuable compared to the worthlessness of expensive things I'd bought and never used. Like my black, soft sleeping sweater, also five years which I was now wearing in the damp surer summer night and day, over a flannel shirt in the cold, and just the sweater for the night's sleep in the bag. Endless use and virtue of it. And because the expensive things were of ill use, like the fancy, pants I'd bought for recent recording, dates in New York, and other television appearances, and never even wore again. Useless things like a $40 raincoat I never wore because it didn't even have slits in the side

Starting point is 00:53:42 pockets. You pay for the label and the so-called tailoring. Also an expensive tweed jacket bought for TV and never worn again. Two silly sports shirts bought for Hollywood never worn again and were nine bucks each. And it's almost tearful to realize and remember the old green t-shirt I'd found mind you, eight years ago, mind you, on the dump in Watsonville, California, mind you, and got fantastic use and comfort from it, like working to fix that new stream in the creek to flow through the convenient deep new waterhole

Starting point is 00:54:13 near the wood platform on the bank, and losing myself in this like a kid playing. It's the little things that count. Cliques are truisms, and all truisms are true. On my deathbed, I could be remembering that creek day and forgetting the day MGM bought my book. I could be remembering the old lost green dump t-shirt and forgetting the sapphireed robes.

Starting point is 00:54:37 Maybe the best way to get into heaven. I go back to the beach in the daytime to write my sea. I stand there barefoot by the sea, stopping to scratch one ankle with one toe. I hear the rhythm of those waves, and they're saying suddenly, Is virgin you trying to fathom me? I go back to make a pot of tea.

Starting point is 00:54:58 Summer afternoon, impatiently chewing the jasmine leaf. At high noon the sun always coming out at last, strong, beating down on my nice high porch where I sit with bucks and coffee, and the noon I thought about the ancient Indians who must have inhabited this canyon for thousands of years. How even as far back as the tenth century, this valley must have looked the same, just different trees. These ancient Indians, simply the ancestors of the Indians, have only been the ancestors of the Indians of recently, say 1860, how they've all died and quietly buried their grievances and

Starting point is 00:55:34 excitements, how the creek may have been an inch deeper since logging operations of the last 60 years have removed some of the watershed and the hills back there. How the women pounded the local acorns, acorns or schmaikorns. I finally found the natural nuts of the valley, and they were sweet-tasting, and men hunted deer. In fact, God knows what they did because I wasn't here. But the same valley, a thousand years of dust more or less over their footsteps of 960 AD. And as far as I can see, the world is too old for us to talk about it, with our new words. We will pass just as quietly through life, passing through, passing through, as the 10th century people of this valley only with a little more noise and a few bridges and dams and bombs that won't even last a million years.

Starting point is 00:56:23 The world being just what it is, moving and passing. through, actually all right in the long view, and nothing to complain about. Even the rocks of the valley had earlier rock ancestors, a billion, billion years ago, have left no howl of complaint. Neither the bee, or the first sea urchins, or the clam, or the severed paw. All sad, so is sight of the world, right there in front of my nose as I look. And looking at that valley, in fact, I also realize I have to make lunch, and it won't be any different than the lunch of those olden men. And besides, it'll taste good.

Starting point is 00:57:03 Everything is the same. The fog says, We are fog, and we fly by dissolving like ephemera. And the leaves say, We are leaves, and we jiggle in the wind. That's all. We come and go, grow and fall. Even the paper bags in my garbage pit say, We are man-transformed paper bags made out of wood pulp We are kind of proud of being paper bags

Starting point is 00:57:27 As long as that will be possible But we'll be mush again with our sisters The leaves come rainy season The tree stumps say We are its tree stumps torn out of the ground by men Sometimes by wind We have big tendrils full of earth That drink out of the earth

Starting point is 00:57:42 Men say we are men We pull out tree stumps We make paper bags We think wise thoughts We make lunch We look around We make a ground we make a great effort to realize everything is the same.

Starting point is 00:57:54 While the sand says, we are sand we already know. And the sea says, we are always come and go, fall, and plush. The empty blue sky of space says, Oh, this comes back to me, then goes again, and comes back again, then goes again, and I don't care, it still belongs to me. The blue sky adds, don't call me eternity. Call me God if you like, all of you talkers are in paradise. The leaf is paradise, the tree stump is paradise, the paper bag is paradise, the man is paradise, the sand is paradise, the sea is paradise, the man is paradise, the fog is paradise.

Starting point is 00:58:34 Can you imagine a man with marvelous insights like these can go mad within a month? Because you must admit all those talking paper bags and sands were telling the truth. But I remember seeing a mess of leaves suddenly go skittering in the wind and into the creek. then floating rapidly down the creek towards the sea, making me feel a nameless horror, even then of, oh my God, we're being swept away to the sea, no matter what we know or say or do. And a bird who was on a crooked branch is suddenly gone

Starting point is 00:59:05 without my even hearing him. End of chapter 7. Chapter 8 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This librivox recordings in the public domain. Read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 8. But there's moonlit. fog night, the blossoms of the fire flames and the stove. There's giving an apple to the mule,

Starting point is 00:59:39 the big lips taking hold. There's the Blue Jay drinking my canned milk by throwing his head back with a miffle of milk on his beak. There's a scratching of the raccoon or of the rat out there at night. There's the poor little mouse eating her nightly supper in the humble corner where I've put out a little delight plate full of cheese and chocolate candy For my days of killing mice are over There's the raccoon in his fog There the man to his fireside And both are lonesome for God

Starting point is 01:00:11 There's me coming back from seaside night sittings Like a muttering old bikou stumbling down the path There's me throwing my spotlight on a sudden raccoon Who clambers up a tree his little heart beating with fear but I yell in French. Hello there, little man. Allo tea bonhomme. There's the bottle of olives, 49 cents, imported pimentos. I eat them one by one, wondering about the late afternoon hillsides of Greece.

Starting point is 01:00:40 And there's my spaghetti with tomato sauce, and my oil and vinegar salad, and my applesauce relish, my deer, and my black coffee and roquefort cheese, and after-dinner nuts, my dear, all in the woods. 10 delicate olives slowly chewed at midnight Is something no one's ever done in luxurious restaurants There's the present moment frapped with tangled woods There's the bird suddenly quiet on his branch While his wife glances at him

Starting point is 01:01:12 There's the grace of an axe handle As good as an Hegelvesky ballet There's mean moa mountain In the fog illumined August moon mist Among other heights Gorgeous and misty rising and dimmer tears somehow rosy in the night, like the classic silk paintings of China and Japan. There's a bug, a helpless little wingless crawler, drowning in a water can.

Starting point is 01:01:37 I get it out, and it wanders and goofs on the porch till I get sick of watching. There's the spider in the outhouse, minding his own business. There's my side of bacon hanging from a hook on the ceiling of the shack. There's the laughter of the loon in the shadow of the moon. There's an owl hooting in weird body Dharma trees There's flowers and redwood logs There's the simple wood fire And the careful yet absent-minded feeding of it

Starting point is 01:02:04 Which is an activity that like all activities is no activity Wu Wei Yet it is a meditation in itself Especially because all woodfires like snowflakes Are different every time Yes there is the resinous purge of a flame-inveloped redwood log Yes the cross-salled redwoods The wood log turns into a coal and looks like a city of Gondarva's or like a western butt at sunset.

Starting point is 01:02:31 There's the Bikus broom, the kettle, there's the laced soft fud over the sand, the sea. There's all these avid preparations for decent sleep like the night I'm looking for my sleeping socks, so as not to dirty the sleeping bag inside. And find myself singing, Adonde esmei succibus. Yes, and down in the valley there's my burrow. Alf, the only living being in sight. There's in mid of sleep the moon appearing. There's universal substance, which is divine substance, because where else can it be? There's the family of deer on the dirt road at dusk.

Starting point is 01:03:09 There's the creek coughing down the glade. There's the fly on my thumb rubbing its nose, then stepping to the page of my book. There's the hummingbird swinging his head from side to side like a hoodlum. There's all that. And all my fine thoughts, even unto my ditty, written to the sea. I took a pee into the sea, acid to acid, and me to ye. Yet I went crazy inside three weeks. For who could go crazy that could be so relaxed as that?

Starting point is 01:03:40 But wait, there are the signposts of something wrong. End of Chapter 8. Chapter 9 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This Librevox recording is in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 9 The first signpost came after that marvelous day I went hiking up the canyon road again To the highway at the bridge

Starting point is 01:04:10 Where there was a rancher mailbox where I could dump mail A letter to my mother And saying in it, give a kiss to Tyke, my cat And a letter to old buddy Julian dressed to Coley Rustnut From Runty One Nut And as I walked way up there I could see the peaceful roof of my cabin way below And half mile away in the old trees

Starting point is 01:04:30 could see the porch, the cot where I slept, and my red handkerchief on the bench beside the cot. A simple little sight of my handkerchief a half-mile way, making me unaccountably happy. And on the way back, pausing to meditate in the grove of trees where out the sacred burrow slept, and seeing the roses of the unborn in my closed eyelids, just as clearly as I had seen the red handkerchief

Starting point is 01:04:55 and also my own footsteps in the seaside sand from way up on the bridge. saw or heard the words roses of the unborn as I sat cross-legged in soft meadow sand heard that awful stillness at the heart of life but felt strangely low as though premonition of the next day when I went to the sea in the afternoon and suddenly took a huge deep yogic breath to get all that good sea air in me but somehow just got an overdose of iodine or of evil maybe the sea caves maybe the seaweed cities something. My heart suddenly beating, thinking I'm going to get the local vibrations. Instead, here I am almost fainting, only it isn't an ecstatic swoon by St. Francis. It comes over me in the form of horror of an eternal condition of sick mortality in me, in me and in everyone.

Starting point is 01:05:49 I felt completely nude of all poor protective devices, like thoughts about life or meditations under trees, and the ultimate and all that shit. In fact, the other pitiful devices of making supper are saying, What do I do now next? Chop wood? I see myself as just doomed, pitiful. An awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going.

Starting point is 01:06:18 And actually, I'm just a sick clown, and so is everybody else. All of it. Pitiful as it is, not even really any kind of common sense, animate effort to ease. the soul in this horrible sinister condition of mortal hopelessness. So I'm left sitting there in the sand after having almost fainted and stare at the waves which suddenly are not waves at all, with, I guess, what must have been the goopiest downtrodden expression, God if he exists, must have ever seen in his movie career.

Starting point is 01:06:47 Evas! I hate to write. All my tricks laid bare, even the realization that they're laid bare itself laid bare is a lot of bunk. The sea seems to yell to me, Go to your desire, don't hang around here. For after all, the sea must be like God. God isn't asking us to mope and suffer and sit by the sea in the cold at midnight for the sake of writing down useless sounds. He gave us the tools of self-reliance, after all, to make it straight through bad life mortality towards paradise, maybe, I hope.

Starting point is 01:07:18 But some miserables like me don't even know it. When it comes to us, we're amazed. Ah, life is a gate. Away, a path to paradise anyway. Why not live for fun and joy? and love or some sort of girl by a fireside, why not go to your desire and laugh? But I ran away from that seashore and never came back again without that secret knowledge. That it didn't want me there, that I was a fool to sit there in the first place. The sea has its waves. The man has his fireside, period.

Starting point is 01:07:50 That being the first indication of my later flip. But also on the day of leaving the cabin to hitchhite back to Frisco and see everybody, and by now I'm tired of my food forgot to bring jello you need jello after all that bacon fat and cornmeal in the woods every woodsman needs jello or coax or something but it's time to leave

Starting point is 01:08:09 I'm now so scared by that iodine blast by the sea and by the boredom of the cabin I take $20 worth of perishable food left and spread it out on a big board below the cabin porch for the Blue Jays and the raccoon and the mouse and the whole lot pack up and go But before I go I realize this isn't my own cabin

Starting point is 01:08:29 Here's the second signpost of my madness I have no right to hide Monsanto's rat poison As I've been doing Feeding the mouse instead as I said So like a dutiful guest in another man's cabin I take the cover off the rat poison But compromise by simply leaving the box on the top shelf So nobody can complain

Starting point is 01:08:49 And go off like that But during my absence But you'll see End of Chapter 9 Chapter 10 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac This Libervox recording is in the public domain Read by Ben Tucker Chapter 10

Starting point is 01:09:16 With my mind even and upright and abiding nowhere As Hui Ning would say I go dancing off like a fool from my sweet retreat Rucksack on back After only three weeks and really after only three or four days of boredom And go hankering back for the same city. You go out in joy and in sadness you return, says Thomas A. Kempis, talking about all the fools who go forth for pleasure like high school boys on Saturday night, hurrying, clacking down the sidewalk to the car,

Starting point is 01:09:47 adjusting their ties, and rubbing their hands with anticipatory zeal, only to end up Sunday morning, groaning and bleary beds that mother has to make anyway. It's a beautiful day as I come out of that ghostly canyon road and step out. on the coast highway, just the side of Rattan Canyon Bridge. And there they are, thousands and thousands of tourists, driving by slowly on the high curves, all ooing and eyeing at all that vast blue panorama of seas, washing and raiding at the coast of California.

Starting point is 01:10:23 I figure I'll get a ride into Monterey real easy and take the bus there and be in Frisco by nightfall for a big ball of Wino yelling with the gang. I feel, in fact, Dave Wayne ought to be back by now, or Cody will be ready for a ball, and there'll be girls and such and such, forgetting entirely that only three weeks previous I'd been sent fleeing from that gooky city by the horrors. But really, hadn't the sea told me to flee back to my own reality? But it is beautiful, especially to see up ahead north a vast expanse of curving sea-coast with inland mountains, dreaming under slow clouds. Like a scene of ancient Spain, or properly, really, like a scene of the real essentially Spanish

Starting point is 01:11:10 California, the old Monterey pirate coast right there. You can see what the Spaniards must have thought when they came around the bend in their magnificent sloopsies and saw all that dreaming fat land beyond the seashore white-cap doormat. Like the land of gold. The old Monterey and Big Sur and Santa Cruz magic. So I confidently adjust my pack straps and start. Start trudging down the road looking back over my shoulder to the thumb. This is the first time I've hitchhiked in years,

Starting point is 01:11:39 and I soon began to see that things have changed in America. You can't get a ride anymore. But of course, especially on a strictly tourist road like this coast highway with no trucks or business. Sleak long station wagon after wagon comes sleering by smoothly all colors of the rainbow, and pastel at that, pink, blue, white. The husband is in the driver's seat with a long, ridiculous, vacationist, with a long baseball visor, making him look witless and idiot. Beside him sits Wifey, the boss of America, wearing dark glasses and sneering.

Starting point is 01:12:13 Even if he wanted to pick me up or anybody up, she wouldn't let him. But in the two deep back seats are children, children, millions of children. All ages, they're fighting and screaming over ice cream, they're spilling vanilla all over the tartan seat covers. There's no room anymore anyway for hitchhiker, though conceivably, the poor bastard might be allowed to ride like a meek gunman or silent murderer in the very back platform of the wagon. But here, no, alas, here is 10,000 racks of dry cleaned and perfectly pressed suits and dresses of all sizes for the family to look like millionaires every time they stop at a roadside die for bacon and eggs. Every time the old man's trousers

Starting point is 01:12:55 start to get creased a little in the front, he's made to take down a fresh pair of slacks from the back rack and go on like that, bleakly. though he might have secretly wished just a good old time fishing trip alone or with his buddies for this year's vacation. But the PTA has prevailed over every one of his desires by now, 1960s. It's no time for him to yearn for big two-hearted river and the old sloppy pants and the string of fish in the tent for the wood fire with bourbon at night.

Starting point is 01:13:26 It's time for motels, roadside drive-ins, bringing napkins to the gang in the car, having the car washed before the return trip. And if he thinks he wants to explore any of the silent secret roads of America, it's no go. The lady in the sneering dark glasses has now become the navigator, and sits there sneering over her previously printed blue-lined road map distributed by happy executives and neckties to the vacationists of America, who would also wear neckties after having come along so far.

Starting point is 01:13:57 But the vacation fashion is sports shirts, long visored hat, dark glasses, pressed slacks, and baby's first shoes dipped in gold oil, dangling from the dashboard. So here I am standing in that road with that big woeful rucksack, but also probably with that expression of horror on my face, after all those nights sitting in the seashore under giant black cliffs. They see in me the very apotheosical opposite of their every vacation dream and, of course, drive on. That afternoon I say about 5,000 cars or probably 3,000 past me. Not one of them ever dreamed of stopping. Which didn't bother me anyway because at first, seeing that gorgeous long coast up to Monterey, I thought,

Starting point is 01:14:41 Well, I'll just hike right in, it's only 14 miles, I ought to do that easy. And on the way, there's all kinds of interesting things to see anyway, like the seals barking on rocks below, or quiet old farms made of logs on the hills across the highway, or sudden upstretches that go along dreamy seaside meadows where cows grace and grays and full side of endless blue Pacific. But because I'm wearing desert boots

Starting point is 01:15:09 with their fairly thin soles and the sun is beating hot on the tar road, the heat finally gets through the soles and I begin to deliver heat blisters in my sucky booze. I'm limping along wondering what's the matter with me when I realize I've got blisters. I sit by the side of the road and look. I take out my first aid kit from the pack and apply undluence and put on corn pads and carry on.

Starting point is 01:15:36 But the combination of the heavy pack and the heat of the road increases the pain and the blisters until finally I realize I've got to hitchhike a ride or never make it to Monterey at all. But the tourists bless their hearts after all they couldn't know. Only think I'm having a big happy hike with my rucksack and they drive on. even though I stick out my thumb. I'm in despair because I'm really stranded now, and by the time I've walked seven miles, I still have seven to go, but I can't go on another step.

Starting point is 01:16:07 I'm also thirsty, and there are absolutely no filling stations or anything along the way. My feet are ruined and burned. It develops now into a day of complete torture. From nine o'clock in the morning till four in the afternoon, I negotiate those nine or so miles when I finally have to stop and sit down and wipe the blood off my feet. And then when I fix the feet and put the shoes on again to hike on, I can only do it mincingly with little twinkle-toe steps like Babe Ruth, twisting footsteps every way I can think of not to press too hard on any particular blister.

Starting point is 01:16:40 So that the tourists, listening now as the sun starts to go down, can now plainly see that there's a man on the highway limping under a huge pack and asking for a ride. But still they're afraid he may be the Hollywood hitchhiker with the hidden, gone. And besides, he's got a rucksack on his back as though he'd just escape from the war in Cuba. Or has got dismembered bodies in the bag anyway. But as I say, I don't blame him. The only car that passes that might have given me a ride is going in the wrong direction, down to Sir. And it's a riddley old car of some kind with a big bearded South Coast as a lonely coast footsinger in it, waving at me. But finally a little truck pulls up and waits for me 50 yards ahead.

Starting point is 01:17:25 and a limp run that distance on daggers in my feet. It's a guy with a dog. He'll drive me to the next gas station. Then he turns off. But when he learns about my feet, he takes me clear to the bus station in Monterey, just as a gesture of kindness. No particular reason. And I've made no particular plea about my feet.

Starting point is 01:17:45 Just mentioned it. Offered to buy him a beer, but he's going on home for supper. So I go into the bus station and clean up and change and pack things away, stow the bag in the locker, buy the bus ticket, and go limping quietly in the blue fog streets in Monterey evening, feeling light as a feather and happy as a millionaire. The last time I ever hitchhiked, and no rides a sign.

Starting point is 01:18:12 End of Chapter 10. Chapter 11 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. The Slibervox recording is in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 11 The next sign is in Frisco itself Where after a night of perfect sleep In an old Skid Row hotel room

Starting point is 01:18:36 I go to see Monsanto at his City Lights bookstore And he's smiling and glad to see me Says, we were coming out to see you next weekend You should have waited But there's something else in his expression When we're alone he says Your mother wrote and said your cat is dead Ordinarily the death of a cat means little to most men

Starting point is 01:18:57 a lot to fewer men. But to me and that cat, it was exactly, and no lie, and sincerely like the death of my little brother. I loved Tyke with all my heart. He was my baby who, as a kitten, just slept in the palm of my hand with his little head hanging down or just purring for hours, just as long as I held him that way, walking or sitting.

Starting point is 01:19:26 He was like a floppy fur, wrap around my wrist. I just twist him around my wrist or drape him and he just purred and purred. Even when he got big, I still held him that way. I could even hold this big cat in both hands with my arms outstretched, right over my head, and he just purr. He had complete confidence in me, and when I'd left New York to come to my retreat in the woods, I'd carefully kissed him and instructed him to wait for me. I tawned to pull. but my mother said in the letter he had died the night after i left but maybe you'll understand me by seeing for yourself by reading the letter sunday july 20th nineteen sixty dear son i'm afraid you won't like my letter because i only have sad news for you right now i really don't know how to tell you this

Starting point is 01:20:21 but brace up honey i'm going through hell myself little tyke is gone saturday all day he was fine and seemed to pick up strength. But late at night I was watching TV, a late movie. Just about 1.30 a.m. when he started belching and throwing up, I went to him and tried to fix him up, but to no avail. He was shivering like he was cold, so I wrapped him up in a blanket. Then he started to throw up all over me. And that was the last of him.

Starting point is 01:20:49 Needless to say how I feel and what I went through. I stayed up till daybreak and did all I could to revive him, but it was useless. I realized at 4 a.m. he was gone, so at 6 I wrapped him up good in a clean blanket, and at 7 a.m. went out to dig his grave. I never did anything in my whole life, so heartbreaking as to bury my beloved little tyke, who was as human as you and I. I buried him under the honeysuckle vines, the corner of the fence. I just can't sleep or eat. I keep looking and hoping to see him, come through the cellar door calling, Mauo! I'm just plain sick, and the weirdest thing happened when I buried Tye. I just can't sleep or eat. I keep looking and I keep looking to see him, I keep looking to see him, I keep looking to see him, come through the cellar door calling, my wow. I'm just plainly. I'm just plainly I'm just plainly I'm just plainly I'm just Tyke, all the blackbirds I fed all winter seemed to have known what was going on. Honest son, this is no lies. There was lots and lots of them flying over my head and chirping, and settling on the fence for a whole hour after Tyke was laid to rest. That's something I'll never forget.

Starting point is 01:21:45 I wish I had a camera at the time, but God and me knows it and saw it. Now, honey, I know this is going to hurt you, but I had to tell you somehow, I'm so sick, not physically, but heart-sick. I just can't believe or realize that my beautiful little tyke is no more, and that I won't be seeing him come through the little shanty or walking through the green grass. P.S. I've got to dismantle Tyke's shanty. I just can't go out there and see it empty, as is. Well, honey, write soon again, and be kind to yourself. Pray the real God. Your old mom, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X, X. So when Monsanto told me the news and I was sitting there, smiling with happy,

Starting point is 01:22:26 the way all people feel when they come out of a long solitude, either in the woods or in a hospital bed, bang, my heart sink. It sank, in fact, with the same strange, idiotic helplessness as when I took the unfortunate deep breath on the seashore. All the premonitions tying in together. Monsanto sees that I'm terribly sad. He sees my little smile. The smile that came over me in Monterey just so glad to be back in the world after the solitudes and I had walked around the streets just bemusedly monoleseing at the side of everything.

Starting point is 01:23:03 He sees now how that smile has slowly melted away into a mock of chagrin. Of course he can't know since I didn't tell him, and hardly want to tell it now that my relationship with my cat and the other previous cats has always been a little doughty, some kind of psychological identification of the cats with my dead brother Gerard who taught me to love cats when I was. I was three and four, and we used to lie on the floor on our bellies and watch them lap up milk.

Starting point is 01:23:32 The death of little brother Tyke indeed. Man Santo, seeing me so downcast, says, Maybe you ought to go back to the cabin for a few more weeks. Or are you just going to get drunk again? I'm going to get drunk, yes. Because anyway, there are so many things brewing. Everybody's waiting. I've been daydreaming, a thousand wild parties in the woods.

Starting point is 01:23:54 In fact, it's fortunate I've heard of this. death of Tyke in my favorite exciting city of San Francisco. If I'd been at home when he died, I might have gone mad in a different way. But though I now ran out to get drunk with the boys and still once in a while, that funny little smile of joy came back as I drank. I melted away again because now the smile itself was a reminder of death. The news made me go mad anyway at the end of the three-week binge, creeping up on me finally on that terrible day of St. Carolyn by the sea,

Starting point is 01:24:24 as I can also call it. All, all confusing till I explain. Meanwhile, anyway, poor Monsanto, a man of letters wants to enjoy big news swappings with me about writing and what everybody's doing, and then Fagan comes into the store, downstairs to Monsanto's old roll-top desk, making me also feel chagrin because it always was the ambition of my youth

Starting point is 01:24:48 to end up a kind of literary businessman with a roll-top desk, combining my father image with the image of myself as a writer, which Monsanto, without even thinking about it, has accomplished at the drop of a hat. Monsanto with his husky shoulders, big blue eyes, twinkling, rosy skin, that perpetual smile of his that earned him the name, Smiler in college, and a smile you often wondered,

Starting point is 01:25:13 is it real until you realized, if Monsanto should ever stop using that smile, how could the world go on anyway? It was that kind of smile too, inseparable from him to be believably allowed to disappear. Words, words, words, but he is a grand guy, as I'll show you. And now, with real manly sympathy, he really felt I should not go on big benches if I felt so bad.

Starting point is 01:25:38 At any rate, says he, you can go back a little later, huh? Okay, Lori. Did you write anything? I wrote the sounds of the sea. I'll tell you all about it. It was the most happy three weeks of my life, damn it. And now this has to happen. Poor little Tyke. You should have seen him. A big beautiful, yellow Persian, the kind they call Calico. Well, you still have my dog Homer. And how was Alf out there? Alf, the sacred burrow. He-ha. He stands in groves of trees in the afternoon. Suddenly, you see him, it's almost scary. But I've fed him apples and shredded wheat and everything. And animals are so sad and patient, I thought, as I remembered Tyke's eyes and Alf's eyes. Ah, death.

Starting point is 01:26:22 And to think this strange, scandalous death comes also to human beings. Yeah, to smile her even. Poor Smiler. And poor Homer's dog and all of us. I'm also depressed because I know how horrible my mother now feels all alone without her little chum in the house back there 3,000 miles. And indeed, by Jesus, it turns out later some silly beatniks trying to see me broke the window pane in the front door trying to get in

Starting point is 01:26:49 and scared her so much she barricaded the door with furniture all the rest of that summer. But there's old Ben Fagan puffing and chuckling over his pipe, so what the hell? Why bother grown-up men and poets at that with their own troubles? So Ben and I and his chum, Jonesy, also a chuckling pipe smoker, go out to the bar, Mike's place, and sip a few beers. At first I vow, I'm not going to get drunk, after all. We even go out to the park to have a long talk in the warm, sun that always turns to delightful, cool, foggy dusk in that town of towns.

Starting point is 01:27:25 We're sitting in the park of the big Italian white church watching kids play and people go by. For some reason, I'm bemused by the sight of a blonde woman, hurrying somewhere. Where's she going? Does she have a secret sailor lover? Is she only going to finish her typing after hours in the office? What if we knew, Ben, what every one of these people going by is headed for, some door, some restaurant, some secret romance. They sound like you stored up a lot of energy and interest and life in those woods. And Ben knows that for sure, because he's been months in the wilderness too, alone. Old Ben, much thinner than he used to be in our matter-dharma-bum days of five years ago.

Starting point is 01:28:08 A little gaunt, in fact, but still the same old Ben who stays up late at night, chuckling over the lankovata scripture and writing poems about raindrops and he knows me very well he knows i'll get drunk tonight and for weeks on in just on general principles and that a day will come in a few weeks when i'll be so exhausted i won't be able to talk to anybody and he'll come and visit me and just silently at my side be puffing his pipe as i sleep the kind of guy is i try to explain about tyke to him but Some people are cat lovers and some ain't. The bin always has a little kitty around his pad. His pad usually has a straw rug on the floor,

Starting point is 01:28:53 with a pillow upon which he sits cross-legged by a smoking teapot, his bookshelves full of Stein and Pound and Wallace Stevens, a strange quiet poet who was only beginning to be recognized as a big rosy secret sage. One of his lines, when I leave town all my friends go back on the sauce, and I'm on my way to the sauce right now because anyway old Dave Wayne is back and Dave I can see him rubbing his hands in anticipation of another big wild binge with me

Starting point is 01:29:26 like we had the year before when he drove me back to New York from the west coast with George Bezo the little Japanese Zen master Hepcat sitting cross-legged on the back mattress of Dave's Jeepster Willie the Jeep A terrific trip through Las Vegas St. Louis

Starting point is 01:29:43 stopping off at expensive motels and drinking nothing but the best scotch out of the bottle all the way. And what better way to go back to New York? I could have blown $190 on an airplane, and Dave's never met the great Cody, and we'll be looking forward to that. So me and Ben leave the park and slowly walk to the bar on Columbus Street, and I order my first double bourbon and ginger ale. The lights are twinkling on outside in that fantastic toy street. I can feel the joy rise in my side,

Starting point is 01:30:13 soul. I now remember Big Sur with a clear piercing love and agony and even the death of Tyke fits in with everything. But I don't realize the enormity of what's yet to come. We call up Dave Wayne, who's back from Reno, and he comes blatting down to the bar with his jeepster driving that marvelous way he does, once he was a cab driver, talking all the time and never making a mistake, in fact as good a driver as Cody, although I can't imagine anybody being that good, and asked Cody at the next day. But old jealous drivers always point out faults and complain. Ah, well, that Dave Wayne of yours doesn't take his curves right. He eases up and sometimes even pokes the brake a little, instead of just riding that old curve around on increased power. Man, you've got to work those curves.

Starting point is 01:31:01 Obvious at this time now, by the way, and parenthetically that there's so much to tell about the fateful following three weeks it's hardly possible to find any place to begin. Like life, actually. and how multiple it all is. And what happened to little old George Bezo, boy? Little old George Bezo is probably dying a TB in a hospital outside Tulare. Gee, Dave, we got to go see him. Yes, sir, let's do that tomorrow. As usual, Dave has no money, whatever.

Starting point is 01:31:31 But that doesn't bother me at all. I've got plenty. I go out the following day and cash $500 worth of traveler checks, just so as me and old Dave can really have a good time. Dave likes good food. and drink and so do I. But he's got this young kid he brought back from Reno called Ron Blake, who's a good-looking teenager with blonde hair,

Starting point is 01:31:51 who wants to be a sensational new Chet Baker singer, and comes on with that tiresome hipster approach that was natural five or ten and even 25 years ago, but now in 1960 is a pose. In fact, I dug him as a conman conning Dave, though for what I don't know. But Dave Wayne, that lean, rangy redhead welchman with his penchant for going off and willy to fish in the rogue river up in Oregon

Starting point is 01:32:18 where he knows an abandoned mining camp, or for blatting around the desert roads, for suddenly reappearing in town to get drunk, and a marvelous poet himself, has that certain something that young-hipped teenagers probably want to imitate. For one thing is one of the world's best talkers. And funny, too, as I'll show, it was he and George Bezo who hit on the fantastically simple truth

Starting point is 01:32:42 that everybody in America was walking around with a dirty behind. But everybody, because the ancient ritual of washing with water after the toilet had not occurred in all the modern anticepticism, says Dave, people in America have all these racks of dry, clean clothes like you say on their trips. They spatter Ode-Cologne all over themselves. They wear band and aid or whatever it is under their armpits. But they get a gas to see a spot on a shirt or a dress. They probably change underwear and socks, maybe even twice a day. They go around all puffed up and insolent, thinking themselves the cleanest people on earth,

Starting point is 01:33:18 and they're walking around with dirty assholes. Isn't that amazing? Give me a little nip on that tit, he says, reaching for my drink, so I order two more. I've been engrossed. Dave can order all the drinks he wants any time. The President of the United States, the big minister's estate, the great bishops and shmishaps and big shot. everywhere, down to the lowest factory worker with all his fierce pride, movie stars, executives and great engineers,

Starting point is 01:33:47 and presidents of law firms and advertising firms with silk shirts and neckties and great expensive traveling cases in which they place these various expensive English imported hair brushes and shaving gear and pomades and perfumes are all walking around with dirty assholes.

Starting point is 01:34:05 All you got to do is simply wash yourself with soap and water. It hasn't occurred to anybody in America at all. It's one of the funniest things I ever heard of. Don't you think it's marvelous that we're being called filthy,

Starting point is 01:34:20 unwashed beatniks? But we're the only ones walking around with clean assholes. The old azole shot, in fact, had spread swiftly, and everybody I knew, and Dave knew from coast to coast had embarked on this great crusade, which I must say is a good one.

Starting point is 01:34:37 In fact, in Big Sur, I had instituted a shelf in Montanto's outhouse where the soap must be kept, and everyone had to bring a can of water there on each trip. Monsanto hadn't heard about it yet. Do you realize that until we tell poor Lorenzo Monsanto, the famous writer that he is walking around with a dirty asshole, he will be doing just that? Let's go tell him right now. Well, of course, if we wait another minute. Besides, do you know what it does to people to walk around with a dirty asshole? It leaves the great yawning guilt. that they can't understand all day.

Starting point is 01:35:13 They go to work all cleaned up in the morning, and you can smell all that freshly laundered clothes and ode to Cologne in the commute train. Yet there's something gnawed at them. Something's wrong. They know something's wrong. They don't know just what. We rushed to tell Monsanto at once in the bookstore around the corner.

Starting point is 01:35:32 By now we're beginning to feel great. Fagan has retired, saying typically, Okay, you guys, go ahead and get drunk. I'm going home and spend a quiet evening and a hot bath with a book. Home is also where Dave Wayne and Ron Blake live. It's an old rooming house of four stories on the edge of the Negro district of San Francisco, where Dave Ben Jonesy, a painter called Lanny Meadows, a mad French-Canadian drinker called Pascal, and a Negro called Johnson,

Starting point is 01:36:01 all live in different rooms with their clutter of rucksacks and floor mattresses and books and gear. Each one taking turns one day a week to go out and do all the shopping and come back and cook up a big communal dinner in the kitchen, all ten or twelve of them sharing the rent. And with that rotation of dinner, they end up living comfortable lives, with wild parties and girls rushing in, people bringing bottles all at about a minimum of $7 a week, say. It's a wonderful place, but at the same time a little maddening. In fact, a whole lot maddening because the painter, Lanny Meadows, loves music and has installed his hi-fi speaker in the kitchen, although he applies the records in a back room, so the daily cook may be concentrating

Starting point is 01:36:44 on his mulligan stew and all of a sudden, Stravinsky's dinosaurs start dinning overhead. And at night there are bottle-crashing parties, usually supervised by Wild Pascal, who is a sweet kid, but crazy when he drinks. A regular nut house, actually, and just exactly the image of what the journalists want to say about the beat generation. Nevertheless, a harmless and pleasant arrangement for young bachelors and a good idea in the long run. Because you can rush into any room and find the expert, like say Ben's room, and ask, hey, what did Bodhi Dharma say to the second patriarch?

Starting point is 01:37:19 He said, go fuck yourself. Make your mind like a wall. Don't pant after outside activities and don't bug me with your outside plans. So the guy goes out and stands on his head in the snow? No, that was Fubar. Or you go running into Dave Wayne's room and there he is sitting cross-legged on his mattress on the floor reading Jane Austen, you ask,

Starting point is 01:37:41 What's the best way to make Beef Stroganoff? Beef stroganoff is very simple. It ain't nothing but a good well-cooked beef and onion stew that you let cool afterwards. Then you throw in mushrooms and lots of sour cream. I'll come down and show way as soon as I finish this chapter in this marvelous novel. I want to find out what happens next. Or you go into the Negroes room and ask if you can borrow his tape recorder, because right at the moment some funny things are being said in the kitchen by Deleuze and McLeer and Monsanto and some newspaper man

Starting point is 01:38:11 Because the kitchen was also the main talking room where everybody sat in a clutter of dishes and ashtrays and all kinds of visitors came The year before a beautiful 16-year-old Japanese girl had come there just to interview me for instance But chaperoned by a Chinese painter The phone rang consistently even wild negro hepcats from around the corner came in with bottles Edward Kuhl and several others. There was Zen, jazz, booze, pot, and all the works, but it was somehow obviated, as a supposedly degenerate idea,

Starting point is 01:38:44 by the side of a beatnik, carefully painting the wall of his room, and clean white, with nice little red borders around the door and window frames, or someone is sweeping out the living room. Itinerant visitors, like me or Ron Blake, always had an extra mattress to sleep on. End of chapter.

Starting point is 01:39:03 11. Chapter 12 A Big Sir by Jack Kerwack The Slibervox Recordings in the Public Domain Read by Ben Tucker Chapter 12 But Dave is anxious and so am I to see great Cody Who is always the major part of my reason for journeying to the West Coast So we call him up at Las Gatos 50 miles away down the Santa Clara Valley

Starting point is 01:39:32 And I hear his dear sad voice saying Ben waiting for you old buddy Come on down right down right. away, but I'll be going to work at midnight, so hurry up and you can visit me at work as soon as the boss leaves round two, and I'll show you my new job of tire recapping, and see if you can't bring a little something like a girl or something. Just kidding, come on down, pal. So there's old Willie waiting for us down on the street, parked across from the little pleasant Japanese liquor store, where as usual, according to our ritual, I run and get Pernod or Scotch or anything good.

Starting point is 01:40:05 while Dave wheels around to pick me up at the store door and I get in the front seat right after Dave's right where I belong all the time like old honored Samuel Johnson while everybody else that wants to come along is to scramble back there on the mattress a full mattress the seats are out and squat there or lie down there and also generally keep silent because when Dave's got the wheel of Willie in his hand and I've got the bottle in mine and we're off on a trip

Starting point is 01:40:31 the talking all comes from the front seat by God yells Dave all glad again. It's just like old times, Jack. Gee, old Willie's been sad for you, waiting for you to come back. So now I'm going to show you how old Willie's even improved with age. Had him reconditioned in Reno last month. Here he goes, are you ready, Willie? And off we go, and the beauty of it,

Starting point is 01:40:55 and all this particular Sumner is that the front right seat is broken and just rocks back and forth gently to every one of Dave's driving moves. It's like sitting in a rocking chair on a porch. Only this is a moving porch and a porch to talk on at that. And instead of watching old men pitch horseshoes from this here talking porch, it's all that fine white clean line in the middle of the road as we go flying like birds over the Harrison ramps and whatnot. Dave always used to sneak out of Frisco real fast and avoid all the traffic.

Starting point is 01:41:25 Soon we're set straight and pointed head on down, beautiful four-lane Bayshore Highway to that lovely Santa Clara Valley. But I'm amazed that after only a few years, The damn thing no longer has prune fields and vast beet fields like at Lawrence when I was a brakeman on the Southern Pacific and even after. It's one long row of houses right down the line 50 miles to San Jose, like a great monstrous Los Angeles, beginning to grow south of Frisco. At first it's beautiful to just watch that white line reel into Willie's snout. But when I start looking around out the window, there's just endless housing tracks. and new blue factories everywhere, says Dave.

Starting point is 01:42:09 Yeah, that's right. The population explosion is going to cover every bit of backyard dirt in America someday. In fact, they'll even have to start piling up friggin' levels of houses and others over that like your city, city, city, till the houses reach 100 miles in the air in all directions of the map. And people looking at the earth from another planet with super telescopes will see a prickly ball hanging in space. It's like real horrible when you come to the... think of it. Even us with all our fancy talks. Shit, man, it's all millions of

Starting point is 01:42:39 people and events piling up almost unimaginable now. Like raving baboons will all be piled on top of each other. Or one another. Or whatever you're supposed to say. Hundreds of millions of hungry mouths raving for more,

Starting point is 01:42:55 more, more. And the sadness of it all is that the world hasn't any chance to produce, say, a writer whose life could really actually touch all this life in every detail like you always say. Some writer who could bring you sobbing through the bad fucking bed-cribbs of moon to see it all even unto the goddamn last gory detail of some dismal robbery of the heart at dawn when no one

Starting point is 01:43:19 cares like Sinatra sings. When no one cares, he sings in his low baritone but resumes. Some strict sweeper sweeping it all up. I mean, the incredible helplessness I felt, Jack, when Celine ended his journey, to the end of the night by pissing in the sign river at dawn. There I am thinking, my God, there's probably somebody pissing in the Trenton River at dawn right

Starting point is 01:43:43 now. The Danube, the Ganges, the Frozen Obie, the yellow, the Parania, the Willamette, the Mary Mac and Missouri, too. The Missouri itself, the Yuma, the Amazon, the Tames, the Po and so-and-so. It's so frigging endless, like poems endless everywhere. No one knows any better, no Buddha.

Starting point is 01:44:00 You know where he says. It's like, they're immeasurable star, misty eons, a universe, is more numerous than the sands and all the galaxies multiplied by a billion lot years of multiplication. In fact, if I were to go on, you'd be scared and couldn't comprehend and you'd despair so much, you'd drop dead. That's what he just about said in one of those sutras. Macrocosms and microcosms and chillycosms and microbes,

Starting point is 01:44:25 and finally you've got all these marvelous books and man ain't even got time to read them all. What you're going to do in this already piled up multiple world where you can have to think of the book of songs. Faulkner, Cesar Barreto, Shakespeare, satiricons, Dantes, in fact, long stories, guys to tell you in bars, in fact the sutures themselves, Sir Philip Sidney, Stern, Ibn El Robbie, the copious lopoeia, and the uncopious goddamn Servantes. Then there's all those catalysts and Davids and radio-listening Skid Row Sages to contend with

Starting point is 01:45:01 because they've all got a million stories too. And you too, Ron Blake in the backseat. Shut up! Down to everything, which is so much that it is of necessity, don't you think? Nothing anyway, huh? Expressing exactly the way I feel, of course. And to corroborate all that about the too muchness of the world, in fact, there's Stanley Popovich also in the back mattress next to Ron.

Starting point is 01:45:25 Stanley Popovich of New York suddenly arrived in San Francisco with Jamie, his Italian beauty girl. but's going to leave her in a few days to go work for the circus. A big tough Yugoslav kid who ran the Seven Arts Gallery in New York with big bearded beatnik readings, but now comes the circus and a whole big on the road of his own. It's too much. In fact, right this minute, he's starting to tell us about circus work.

Starting point is 01:45:50 On top of all that, old Cody is up ahead with his thousand stories. We all agree it's too big to keep up with, that we're surrounded by life, that we'll never understand it. So we center it all in by swigging scotch from the bottle. And when it's empty, I run out of the car and buy another one. Period. End of Chapter 12.

Starting point is 01:46:19 Chapter 13 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. The Sliberbox recordings in the public domain. Read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 13. But on the way to Cote's, my madness already began to manifest itself in a stranger way. Another one of those signposts of something wrong I mentioned a ways back. I thought I saw a flying saucer in the sky over Las Gatos from five miles away. I look and I see this thing flying along and mention it to Dave who takes one brief look and says,

Starting point is 01:46:53 Ah, it's only the top of a radio tower. It reminds me the time I took a mescaline pill and thought an airplane was a flying saucer. A strange story is this. A man has to be crazy to ride it anyway. But there's old Cody in the living room of his fine Ranchito home, sitting over his chest set pondering a problem, and right by the fresh wood fire in the fireplace his wife's set out, because she knows I love fireplaces. She a good friend of mine, too. The kids are sleeping in the back. It's about 11, and good old Cody shakes my hand again.

Starting point is 01:47:29 I haven't seen him for several years because mainly he's just spent two years in San Quentin on a stupid charge of possession of marijuana. He was on his way back to work on the railroad one night And was short on time and his driving license had been already revoked for speeding So he saw two bearded blue-jean beatniks parked Asked them to trade a quick ride to work at the railroad station for two sticks to tea They complied and arrested him They were disguised policemen For this great crime he spent two years in San Quentin

Starting point is 01:47:58 In the same cell with a murderous gunman His job was sweeping out the cotton mill room I expect him to be all bitter and out of his head because of this, but strangely and magnificently he's become quieter, more radiant, more patient, manly, more friendly even. And though the wild frenzies of his old road days with me have banked down, he still has the same, taut, eager face, and supple muscles, and looks like he's ready to go any time. But actually, he loves his home, paid for by railroad insurance when he broke his leg trying to stop a box car from crashing. Loves his wife in a way, though they fight some, loves his kids, and especially his little son Timmy John, partly named after me. Poor old, good old Cody, sitting there with his chest set, wants immediately to challenge somebody to a chess game, but only has an hour to talk to us before he goes to work supporting the family by rushing out and pushing his Nash Rambler down the quiet Las Gato suburb street, jumping in, starting the motor. In fact, his only complains that the Nash won't start without a push.

Starting point is 01:49:06 No better complaints about society whatever from this grand and ideal man who really loves me, moreover, as if I deserve it. But I'm bursting to explain everything to him. Not even Big Sur, but the past several years. But there's no chance with everybody yacking. And in fact, I can see in Cody's eyes that he can see in my own eyes the regret we both feel, that recently we haven't had chances to talk, whatever. like we used to driving across America and back in the old road days.

Starting point is 01:49:36 Too many people now want to talk to us and tell us their stories. We've been hemmed in and surrounded and outnumbered. The circles closed in on the old heroes of the night, but he says, However, you guys, come on down round about one when the boss leaves and watch me work and keep me company a while before you go back to the city. I can see Dave Wayne really loves him at once,

Starting point is 01:50:00 and Stanley Popovich, too, who's come along on this trip just to meet the fabled Dean Moriarty, the name I give Cody in on the road. But, oh, it breaks my heart to see he's lost his beloved job on the railroad, and after all the seniority he'd piled up since 1948, and now has reduced to tire recapping and dreary parole visits, offered two sticks of wild local weed that grows by itself in Texas because God wanted it. And there over the bookshelf is the old photo of me and Cody, arm in the early days on a sunny street.

Starting point is 01:50:36 I rushed to explain to Cody what happened the year before when his religious advisor at the prison had invited me to come to San Quentin to lecture the religious class. Dave Wayne was supposed to drive me and wait outside the prison walls as I'd go in there alone, probably with a pep-up nip bottle hidden in my coat, I hoped. And I'd be led by big guards to the lecture room in the prison, and there would be sitting a hundred or so cons, including Cody, probably all proud in the front row. And I would begin by telling them I had been in jail myself once,

Starting point is 01:51:09 and that I had no right nevertheless to lecture them on religion. But they're all lonely prisoners and don't care what I talk about. The whole thing arranged in any case, and on the big morning I wake up instead dead drunk on a floor. It's already noon, too late. Dave Wayne is on the floor also. Willie's parked outside to take us to Quentin for the lecture, but it's too late.

Starting point is 01:51:31 But now Cody says, It's all right, old buddy, I understand. Although our friend Irwin had done it, lectured there, but Erwin can do all sort of things like that, being more social than I am, incapable of going in there as he did and reading his wildest poems, which set the prison yard humming with excitement,

Starting point is 01:51:49 though I think he shouldn't have done it after all, because I say just to show up for any reason except visiting inside a prison is still signifying. And I tell this to come. Cody who punders a chest problem and says, Drinking again, hey? If there's anything he hates is to see me drink. We help him push his Nash down the street,

Starting point is 01:52:08 then drink a while, and talk with Evelyn, a beautiful blonde woman that young Ron Blake wants, and even David Wayne wants. But she's got her mind on other things and taking care of the children who have to go to school and dancing glasses in the morning, and hardly gets a word in edgewise anyway, as we all yak and yell like fools to impress her.

Starting point is 01:52:28 of all she really wants is to be alone with me to talk about Cody in his latest soul, which includes the fact of Billy Dabney's mistress, who has threatened to take Cody away completely from Evelyn, as I'll show you later. So we do go out to the San Jose Highway to watch Cody recap tires. There he is, wearing goggles, working like Vulcan at his forge, throwing tires all over the place with fantastic strength, the good ones high up on a pile.

Starting point is 01:52:56 This one's no good, down on another. Bing, bang, talking all the time along fantastic lecture on tire recapping, which has Dave Wayne marvel with amazement. My God, he can do all that and even explain while he's doing it. But I just mention in connection with the fact that Dave Wayne now realizes why I've always loved Cody. Expecting to see a bitter ex-con he sees instead a martyr of the American Night in goggles in some dreary tire shop at 2 a.m., making fellows laugh with joy with his funny explanation. yet at the same time to a tea performing every bit of the work he's being paid for.

Starting point is 01:53:35 Rushing up and ripping tires off carwheels with a jic-low cling, throwing it on the machine, starting up big roaring steams but yelling explanations over that, darting, bending, flinging, flaying, till Dave Wayne said he thought he was going to die laughing or crying right there on the spot. So we drive back to town and go to the mad boarding house to drink some more, and I pass out dead drunk on the floor as usual in that house, waking up in the morning, groaning far from my clean cot on the porch in Big Sur. No Blue Jays yacking for me to wake up anymore. No gurgling Creek.

Starting point is 01:54:14 I'm back in the goofy city and I'm trapped. End of Chapter 13. Chapter 14 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This Liberbox recordings in the public domain. read by Ben Tucker Instead there's the sound of bottles crashing in the living room Where poor Lex Pascal is holding forth yelling It reminds of the time a year ago when Jerry Wagner's future wife got sore at Lex

Starting point is 01:54:48 And threw a half-gallon full of toque across the room And hooked him right across the eye Thereupon sailing to Japan to marry Jerry In a big Zen ceremony That made coast-to-coast papers but all old Lex's got is a cut which I try to fix in the bathroom upstairs saying, Hey, that cut's already stopped bleeding. You'll be all right, Lex. I'm French Canadian too, he says proudly.

Starting point is 01:55:16 And when Dave and I and George Bezo get ready to drive back to New York, he gives me a St. Christopher Medal as a going-away gift. Lex, the kind of guy, shouldn't really be living in this wild-beat boarding house. Should hide on a ranch somewhere. powerful, good-looking, full of crazy desire for women and booze and never enough of either. So as the bottles crash again and the high-fi is playing Beethoven's solemn mass, I fall asleep on the floor. Waking up the next morning, we're owning, of course, but this is the big day when we're going to go visit poor George Bezo at the TB hospital in the valley. Dave pricks me up right away bringing coffee or wine optional. I'm on Ben Fagan's floor somehow.

Starting point is 01:56:03 Apparently I've harangued him till dawn about Buddhism. Some Buddhist. Complicated already, but now suddenly appears Joey Rosenberg, a strange young kid from Oregon with a full beard and his hair growing right down to his neck like Raul Castro, once the California high school high jump champ, who was only about five foot six, but had made the incredible leap of six foot nine over the bar.

Starting point is 01:56:28 And shows his high jump ability, too, by the way he dances around on light feet. A strange athlete who suddenly decided instead to become some sort of beat Jesus, and in fact you see perfect purity and sincerity, his young blue eyes. In fact, his eyes are so pure you don't notice the crazy hair and beard. And also he's wearing ragged but strangely elegant clothing. One of the first of the new beat dandies, McLeer told me a few days later. Did you hear about that?

Starting point is 01:57:01 There's a new strange underground group of Beatnik or whatever who wear special smooth dandy clothes, even though it may just be a jean jacket with Shino slinks. They'll always have strange beautiful shoes or shirts, or turn around and wear fancy pants, unpressed, of course, but with torn sneakers. Joey's wearing something like brown soft garments, like a tunic or something,

Starting point is 01:57:26 and his shoes look like Las Vegas sports shoes. The moment he sees my battered, blue little sneakers that I'd used at Big Sur when my feet go sore. That is in case my feet got sore on a rocky hike. He wants them for himself. He wants to swap the snazzy Las Vegas sports shoes, pale leather untooled, for my silly little tight-fitting, though perfect sneakers, that in fact I was wearing because the Monterey hike blisters were still hurting me.

Starting point is 01:57:55 So we swap. And I asked Dave Wayne about him, Dave says. He's one of the really strangest, sweetest guys I've ever known. Showed up about a week ago, I hear tell. They asked him what he wanted to do, and he never answers, just smiles. He just sort of wants to dig everything, and just watch and enjoy, and says nothing particular about it. If someone wants to ask him, let's drive to New York, he'd jump right for it without a word. On a sort of pilgrimage, see, with all that youth, us old fuck ought to take a lesson from him.

Starting point is 01:58:27 And faith, too. He has faith. I can see it in his eyes. He has faith in any direction he may take with anyone, just like Christ, I guess. It's strange that in a later reverie I imagined myself, walking across a field to find the strange gang of pilgrims in Arkansas. And Dave Wayne was sitting there saying, Shh, he's sleeping. He being Joey and all the disciples are following him on a march to New York,

Starting point is 01:58:53 after which they expect to keep going, walking on water to the other shore. But, of course, my reverie even, I scoff and don't believe it. The kind of story daydreaming I often do. But in the morning, when I look into Joey Rosenberg's eyes, I instantly realize it is him, Jesus. Because anyone, according to the rules of my reverie, who looks into those eyes, is instantly convinced and converted. So the reverie continues into a long, far-fetched story ending with thinking IBM machines trying to destroy the, this second coming, etc. But also in reality, a few months later,

Starting point is 01:59:33 I threw away his shoes in the ash can back home because I'd felt they had brought me bad luck and wishing I'd kept my blue sneakers with the little holes in the toes. So anyway, we get Joey and Ron Blake, who's always following Dave, and go off to see Monsanto at the store, our usual ritual, then across the corner to Mike's place

Starting point is 01:59:52 where we start off the 10 a.m. with food, drink, and a few games at pool at the tables along the bar. Joey winning the game And a stranger pool shark you never saw With his long biblical hair bending The slide the cues stick Smoothly through completely professionally content Binger stance

Starting point is 02:00:09 And smashing home long straight drives Like seeing Jesus shoot pool of course And meanwhile all the food these poor starved kids All three of them do pack in and eat It's not every day there with a drunken novelist With hundreds of dollars to splurge on them They order everything, spaghetti Follow that up with jumbo hamburgers

Starting point is 02:00:30 Follow that up with ice cream and pie and puddings Dave Wayne has a huge appetite anyway But adds Manhattons and martinis to the side of his plate I'm just wailing away on my old fatal double bourbons and ginger ale And I'll be sorry in a few days Any drinker knows how the process works The first day you get drunk is okay The morning after means a big head

Starting point is 02:00:53 But so you can kill that easy with a few more drinks and a meal But if you pass up the meal and go on to another night's drunk and wake up to keep the toot going and continue on to the fourth day, there'll come one day when the drinks won't take effect because you're chemically overloaded and you'll have to sleep it off, but can't sleep anymore because it was alcohol itself that may just sleep those last five nights. So delirium sets in. Sleeplessness, sweat, trembling, a groaning feeling of weakness where your arms are numb and useless. Nightmares. Nightmares of death.

Starting point is 02:01:26 Well, there's more of that up later. About noon, which is now the peak of a golden, blurry new day for me, we pick up Dave's girl, Ramana Swartz, a big Romanian monster beauty of some kind. I mean, with big purple eyes and very tall and big, but May West big. Dave whispers in my ear, You ought to see her walking around that Zen East House and those purple panties of hers. Nothing else on.

Starting point is 02:01:53 There's one married guy lives there who goes crazy every time she goes down, on the hall, though I don't blame him, would you? She's not trying to entice him or anybody. She's just a nudist. She believe in nudism. And by God, she's going to practice it. The Zen East House being another sort of boarding house. But this one, for all kinds of married people and single and some small bohemian-type families, all races, studying sub-ud or something, I never was there.

Starting point is 02:02:19 She's a big, beautiful brunette anyway, in the line of taste you might attribute to every slaky, hungry sex slave in the world. but also intelligent, well-read, writes poetry, is a Zen student. Knows everything. Is, in fact, just simply a big, healthy, Romanian Jewish who wants to marry a good, hearty man, and go live on a farm in the valley. That's it.

Starting point is 02:02:43 The TB Hospital is about two hours away through Tracy and down the San Joaquin Valley. Dave drives beautiful with Romana between us and me holding the bottle again. It's bright, beautiful California sunshine and prune orchards out there zipping by. It's always fun to have a good driver and a bottle and dark glasses on a fine, sunny afternoon,

Starting point is 02:03:04 going somewhere interesting. And all the good conversation, as I said. Ron and Joey are on the back mattress, sitting cross-legged just like poor George Bezo had sat on that trip last year from Friscoe, New York. But the main thing I'd liked it once about that Japanese kid was what he told me the first night I met him in that crazy kitchen to the Buchanan Street House.

Starting point is 02:03:26 From midnight to 6 a.m. in his slow, methodical voice, he gave me his own tremendous version of the life of Buddha, beginning with infancy and right down to the end. George's theory, he has many theories and has actually run meditation classes with bells, just really a serious young lay priest of Japanese Buddhism when all is said and done. It is that Buddha did not reject amorous love life with his wife

Starting point is 02:03:53 and with his harem girls because he was sexually disinterested, but on the contrary had been taught in the highest arts of lovemaking and eroticism possible in the India of that time, when great tombs like the Kama Sutra were in the process of being developed. Tomes that give you instructions on every act, fast at approach, movement, trick, lick, lock, bang, and slurp of how to make love with another human being, male or female, insisted George. He knew everything there is to know about all kinds of sex,

Starting point is 02:04:26 so that when he abandoned the world of pleasure to go be an ascetic in the forest, everybody, of course, knew that he wasn't putting it all down out of ignorance. It served to make people of those times feel a marvelous respect for all his words. And he was just no simple Casanova with a few frigid affairs across the years. Man, he went all the way. He had ministers and special eunuchs and special women who taught him love, Special virgins were brought to him. He was acquainted with every aspect of perversity and non-perversity,

Starting point is 02:04:58 and as you know, he was also a great archer, horseman. He was just completely trained in all the arts of living by his father's orders, because his father wanted to make sure he'd never leave the palace. They used to trick in the books to entice him to a life of pleasure, and as you know, they even had him happily married to a beautiful girl called Yasodara, and he had a son with her, Rahula, and he also had his harem, which included dancing boys and everything in the books.

Starting point is 02:05:27 Then George will go into every detail of this knowledge, like, he knew that the phallus is held with the hand and moved inside the vagina with a rotary movement. But this was only the first of several variations, where there is also the lowering down of the gal's hips, so that the vulva you see recedes, and the phallus is introduced with a fast, quick movement, like stinging of a wasp,

Starting point is 02:05:49 or else the vulva is protruded by means of lifting up the hips high so that the member is buried with a sudden rush right to the basis, or that he can withdraw real teasing-like or concentrate on right or left side. And then he knew all the gestures, words, expressions, what to do with a flower, what not to do with a flower, how to drink the lip and all kinds of kissing, or how to crush kiss or soft kiss. Man, he was a genius in the beginning. And so on. George went all the way telling me this till 6 a.m. It being one of the most fantastic Buddha Shakitas

Starting point is 02:06:26 I'd ever heard ending with George's own perfect denunciation of the law of 12 Nerdanas, whereby Buddha just logically disconnected all creation and laid it bare for what it was, under the bow tree, a chain of illusions. And on the trip to New York with Dave and me up front talking all the way, poor George just sat there,

Starting point is 02:06:46 on the mattress for the most part, very quiet, and told us he was taking this trip to find out if he was traveling to New York or just the car. Willie the Jeep was traveling to New York, or was it just the wheels were rolling, or the tires, or what? A zen problem of some kind. So that when we'd see grain elevators on the plains of Oklahoma, George would say quietly, well, it seems to me that grain elevator is sort of waiting for the road to approach it. Or he'd say suddenly, While you guys was talking just then about how to mix it good, Pernaud Martini, I just saw a white horse standing in an abandoned storefront.

Starting point is 02:07:26 In Las Vegas, we'd taken a good motel room and gone out to play a little roulette. In St. Louis, we'd gone to see the great bellies of the East St. Louis Hucci-Cucci joints, where three of the most marvelous young girls performed smiling directly at us, as though they knew all about George and his theories about erogenous Buddha. there sits the monarch observing the dancing girls. And as though they knew anyway all about Dave Wayne, who, whenever he sees a beautiful girl, as licking his lips,

Starting point is 02:07:59 Yum, yum! But now George has TB, and they tell me he may even die, which adds to that darkness in my mind. All these death things piling up suddenly. But I can't believe old Zen Master George is going to allow his body to die. just now, though it looks like it when we pass through the lawn and come to a ward of beds and see him sitting dejected on the edge of his bed with his hair hanging over his brow, where before it was always combed back.

Starting point is 02:08:30 He's in a bathrobe and looks up at us, almost displeased. But everybody is displeased by unexpected visits from friends or relatives in a hospital. Nobody wants to be surprised on their hospital bed. He sighs and comes out to the warm lawn with us and the expression on his face. says, well, so you've come to see me because I'm sick, but what do you really want? As though all the old humorous courage of the year before has now given way to a profoundly deep Japanese skepticism, like that of a samurai warrior in a fit of suicidal depression. Surprising me by its abject, gloomy, fearful frown.

Starting point is 02:09:10 End of Chapter 14. Chapter 15 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. The Sliberbox Recordings in the Public Domain Read by Ben Tucker Chapter 15 I mean, it was like my first frightened realization of what to be Japanese really meant.

Starting point is 02:09:36 To be Japanese and not to believe in life anymore and to be gloomy like Beethoven, yet to be Japanese in gloom, the gloom of Basho, behind it all, the huge thunderous scowl of Issa or of Shiki, kneeling in the frost with the bowed head like the bowed head oblivion of all the old horses of Japan, long dust. He sits there on the lawn bench, looking down, and when Dave asks him,

Starting point is 02:10:04 Well, you're going to be all right soon, George? He says simply, I don't know. He really means, I don't care. And always warm and courteous with me, he now hardly pays any attention to me. He's a little nervous because the other patients, GI vets, we'll see that he's received a visit from a bunch of ragged beatniks, including Joey Rosenberg, who was bouncing around the lawn looking at flowers with that bemuse sincere smile. But little neat, George, just five feet five and a few pounds over that and so clean,

Starting point is 02:10:39 with a soft feathery hair like the hair of a child, his delicate hands, he just stares at the ground. His answers come like an old man's. He's only thirty. I guess all the Darmat talk about everything is nothing is just sort of sinking in my bones. He concedes, which makes me shudder. On the way Dave's been telling us to be ready because George's changed, so... But I try to keep things going. Do you remember those dancing girls in St. Louis?

Starting point is 02:11:11 Yeah, whore candy. He's referring to a piece of perfumed cotton one of the girls threw at us in her dance. which we tacked up later to a highway-accident cross, we'd yanked out of the ground one blood-red sunset in Arizona. Tacking this perfumed beautiful cotton right where the head of Christ was, so that when we brought the cross to New York, naturally we had everybody smelling it. But George pointed out how beautiful we'd done all this subconsciously

Starting point is 02:11:39 because the net result was that all the hip-cats of Greenwich Village, who came in to see us, were picking up the cross and putting their heads, noses to it. But George doesn't care anymore. And anyway, it's time to leave. But as we're leaving and waving back at him and he's turned around tentatively to go into the hospital, I linger behind the others and turn around several times to wave again.

Starting point is 02:12:06 Finally, I start to make a joke of it by ducking around a corner and peeking out and waving again. He ducks behind a bush and waves back. I dart to a bush and peek out. Suddenly, we're two crazy, hopeless sages goofing on a long. on. Finally, as we part further and further and he comes closer to the door, we are making elaborate gestures and down to the most infinitesimal, like when he steps inside the door, I wait till I see him sticking a finger out. So from around my corner, I stick out a shoe. So from

Starting point is 02:12:36 around his door, he sticks out an eye. So from my corner, I stick out nothing, but just yell, Woo! So from his door, he sticks out nothing and says nothing. So I hide in a corner and do nothing. But suddenly I burst out, and there he is bursting out, and we start waving gyrations and duck back to our hiding places. Then I pull a big one by simply walking away rapidly, but suddenly I turn and wave again. He walking backwards and waving back. The further I go now also walking backwards, the more I wave. Finally, we're so far apart by about a hundred yards. The game is almost impossible, but we continue somehow.

Starting point is 02:13:15 Finally, I see a distant, sad little, zen. wave of hand. I jump up into the air and gyrate both arms. He does the same. He goes into the hospital, but a moment later he's peeking out, this time from the ward window. I'm behind a tree trunk, thumbing my nose at him. There's no end to it, in fact. The other kids are all back at the car, wondering what's keeping me. What's keeping me is that I know George will get better and live and teach the joyful truth, and George knows I know this. That's why he's playing the game with me. The magic game of glad freedom, which is what Zen, or for that matter, the Japanese soul ultimately means, I say. And someday I will go to Japan with George, I tell myself, after we've made our last little wave,

Starting point is 02:14:04 because I've heard the supper bell ring and see the other patients rush for the chow line, and knowing George's fantastic appetite wrapped in that little frail body, I don't want to hang him up, though he nevertheless does one last trick. He throws a glass of water out the window, and a big frouche of water. and I don't see him anymore. What does he mean by that? I'm scratching my head, going back to the car. End of Chapter 15.

Starting point is 02:14:38 Chapter 16 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This liverbox recordings in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 16. To complete this crazy day at 3 o'clock in the morning, here I am sitting in a car, being driven 100 miles an hour around the sleeping streets and hills and waterfing. fronts of San Francisco. Dave's gone off to sleep with Ramana, and the others are passed out, and this crazy next-door neighbor

Starting point is 02:15:04 of the rooming house, himself a bohemian, but also a laborer, a house painter who comes home with big muddy boots and has his little boy living with him. The wife has died. I've been in his pad listening to booming loud Stan Getz jazz on his hi-fi, and happened to mention I thought Dave Wayne and Cody Pomeray were the two greatest drivers in the world. What? He yells, a big blonde husky kid with a strange fixed smile. Man, I used to drive the getaway car.

Starting point is 02:15:33 Come on down, I'll show you. It's almost dawn, and here we are cutting down Buchanan, and around the corner on screeching wheels, and he opens her up, goes zipping towards a red light, so takes a sudden screeching left and goes up a hill full blast. When we come to the top of the hill, I figure he'll pause a while to see what's over the top, but he goes even faster and practically flies off the hill, and we head down one of those incredibly stancholy.

Starting point is 02:15:57 steep San Fran streets with our snout pointed to the waters of the bay, and he steps on the gas. We go sailing down 100 miles per hour to the bottom of the hill, where there's an intersection, luckily, with the light on green, and through that we blast with just one little bump where the road crosses, another bump, where the street is dipping downhill again. We come down to the waterfront and screech right. In a minute we're soaring over the ramps around the bridge entrance, and before I can gulp up a shot or two from my life, we're, and last late bottle were already parked back outside the pad on Buchanan. The greatest driver in the world, whoever he was, and I never saw him again.

Starting point is 02:16:37 Bruce something or other. What a getaway. End of chapter 16. Chapter 17 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. Slivervox recordings in the public domain. Read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 17. I end up groaning drunk on the floor.

Starting point is 02:17:02 this time beside Dave's floor mattress, forgetting that he's not even there. But a strange thing happened that morning, I remember now, before Cody's call from Down Valley. I'm feeling hopelessly, idiotically depressed again, groaning to remember Tyke's dead, and remembering that sinking beach but at the side of the radiator in the toilet lies a copy of Boswell's Johnson, which we'd been discussing so happy in the car. I opened to any page, then, one more page, and start reading from the top left, and suddenly, I'm in an entirely perfect world again. Old Doc Johnson and Boswell are visiting a castle in Scotland

Starting point is 02:17:39 belonging to a deceased friend called Rory Moore. They're drinking sherry by the great fireplace, looking at the picture of Rory on the wall. The widow of Rory is there, Johnson suddenly says, Sir, here's what I would do to deal with the sword of Rory Moore. The portrait shows old Rory with his highlands flinger. I'd get inside him with a dirt and stab him to my part, pleasure like an animal.

Starting point is 02:18:04 And blary with hangover, I realize that if there was any way for Johnson to express his sorrow to the widow of Rory Moore on the unfortunate circumstance of his death, this was the way. So pitiful, irrational, yet perfect. I rushed down to the kitchen where Dave Wayne

Starting point is 02:18:20 and some others are already eating breakfast of sorts and start reading the whole thing to the lot of them. Jones E. looks at me askance over his pipe, for being so literary, so early in the morning. but I'm not being literary at all. Again, I see death, the death of Rory Moore, but Johnson's response to death is ideal.

Starting point is 02:18:41 And so ideal, I only wish old Johnson be sitting in the kitchen now. Help, I'm thinking. The call comes from Cody and Las Gatos that he lost his job tire recapping. Because we were there last night? No, no, something entirely different. He's got to lay off some in because his mortgage is bleeding him and all that, and some girl is. trying to sue him for forging a check and all that.

Starting point is 02:19:05 So, man, I've got to find another job, but I have to pay the rent and everything's all fucked up down here. Oh, buddy, how about, can't you... I plead or I don't plead or, honestly, Jack, lend me $100, will you? My God, Cody, I'll be right down and give you $100. You mean you'll really do that? Listen, just to lend to me is enough, but if you insist...

Starting point is 02:19:29 Fluttering his eyelashes over the phone because he knows I mean it. You old lover boy, you, how are you going to get down here there and give me that money there, son, and make my old heart glad? I'll have Dave drive me down. Okay, I'll pay the rent with it right away. And because it's now Friday, why, Thursday or whatever, that's all right, Thursday. Well, I don't have to be looking for a new job till next Monday.

Starting point is 02:19:54 So you can stay here and we'll have a long weekend, just goofing and talking, boy, like we used to. I can demolish you at chess or we can watch a bunch of. baseball game and then whisper. And we can sneak into the city, see, and see my pretty baby. So I asked Dave Wayne and, yes, he's ready to go any time. He's just following me like I often follow people myself. And so off we go again.

Starting point is 02:20:18 And on the way, we drop in on Monsanto at the bookstore, and the idea suddenly comes to me for Dave and me and Cody to go to the cabin and spend a quiet crazy weekend. Hell. But when Monsanto hears this idea, he'll come too. In fact, he'll bring his little Chinese buddy, Arthur Ma, and we'll catch McLeer at Santa Cruz and go visit Henry Miller, and suddenly another big huge ball has begun. So there's Willie, waiting down on the street.

Starting point is 02:20:44 I go to the store, by the bottle, Dave wheels Willie around, Ron Blake and now Ben Fagan are on the back mattress. I'm sitting in my front seat rocking chair as now and broad afternoon. We go blatant again down that Bay Shore Highway to see old Cody and Monsanto's and back of us in his Jeep with Arthur Ma. Two jeeps now. And about to be two more as I'll show. Coming to Cody's in mid-afternoon,

Starting point is 02:21:08 his own house already filled with visitors, local Las Gatos literaries, and all kinds of people. The phone there ringing continually too. And Cody says to Evelyn, I'll just spend a couple of days with Jack and the gang, like the old days, and look for a job Monday.

Starting point is 02:21:24 Okay. So we all go to a wonderful pizza restaurant in Las Gatos, where the pizzas are piled an inch high with mushrooms and meat and anchovies or anything you want. I cashed a traveler's check at the supermarket. Cody takes the hundred and cash, gives it to Evelyn and the restaurant, and later that day, the two jeeps resumed down to Monterey,

Starting point is 02:21:42 and down that blasted road I walked on blistered feet back to the frightful bridge at Rotton Canyon. And I thought I'd never see the place again. But now I was coming back, loaded with observers. The side of the canyon down there as we renegotiated the mountain road made me bite my lip with marvel and sadness. End of Chapter 17. Chapter 18 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac.

Starting point is 02:22:14 This Lipper Vox recording is in the public domain. Read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 18. It's as familiar as an old face and an old photograph, as though I'm gone a million years from all that sun-shaded brush on rocks, and that heartless blue of the sea, washing wide on yellow sand. those rills of yellow arroyo running down mighty cliff shoulders,

Starting point is 02:22:39 those distant blue meadows, that whole ponderous groaning upheaval, so strange to see after the last several days of just looking at little faces and mouths of people, as though nature had a gargantuan leprous face of its own with broad nostrils and huge bags under its eyes and a mouth big enough to swallow 5,000 jeepster station wagons. and 10,000 Dave Wains and Cody Pomerase without a sigh of reminiscence or regret. There it is, every sad contour of my valley, the gaps, the mean moe-cap-top mountain again, the dreaming woods below our high-shelf road, suddenly, indeed, the sight of poor Alph again far away grazing in the mid-afternoon by the corral fence.

Starting point is 02:23:25 And there's the creek, bouncing along as though nothing had ever happened elsewhere, and even in the daytime somehow dark and hungry looking in its deeper tangled grass. Cody's never seen this country before, although he's an old Californian by now. I can see he's very impressed and even glad he's come out on a little jaunt with the boys, and with me and his seeing a grand sight. He's like a little boy again now for the first time in years, because he's like let out of school, no job, the bill's paid. Nothing to do but gratefully amused me. His eyes are shining.

Starting point is 02:23:59 In fact, ever since he's come out of San Quentin, there's been something hauntedly boyish about him, as though prison walls had taken all the adult dark tenseness out of him. In fact, every evening after supper in the cell he shared with the quiet gunman, he'd bent his serious head to a daily letter, or at least every other day letter full of philosophical and religious musings to his mistress Billy. And when you're in bed in jail after lights out and you're not sleepy, there's ample time to just remember the world and indeed savour its sweetness, if any, although it's always sweet to remember it in jail, though harder in prison, as Jeannes shows.

Starting point is 02:24:40 With the result that he had not only come to a chastisement of his bashing bitternesses, and of course it's always good to get away from alcohol and excessive smoking for two years, and all that regular sleep. He was just like a kid again, but as I say, that haunting kid-likeness I think all like cons seem to have when they've just come out. In seeking to severely penalize criminals, society by putting the criminals away behind safe walls actually provide them with the means of greater strength

Starting point is 02:25:08 for future atrocities, glorious and otherwise. Well, I'll be damned, he keeps saying as he sees those bluffs and cliffs and hanging vines and dead trees. You mean to tell me you've been alone here for three weeks? Why, I wouldn't dare that? Must be awful at night. Look at that old mule. down there. Man, dig the Redwood country way back in. Reminds me of old Colorado, but God, when I used to steal a car every day and drive out to hills like this with a fresh little high school something.

Starting point is 02:25:40 Yum, yum, says Dave Wayne emphatically, turning that big goofy look to us from his driving wheel with his big mad feverish shining eyes full of yum yumb and yob yom too. Smarter with you boys, not making extensive plans to bring a bevy a school. girls down here to while away our conversation pieces are, says Cody real relaxed and talking sadly. Behind us, the Monsanto Jeepster follows doggedly. Passing through Monterey, Monsanto is already called Pat McLeer, staying for the summer with his wife and kid in Santa Cruz. McLeer with his own jeepster is following us a few miles down the highway.

Starting point is 02:26:19 It's a big, big sir day. We wheeled downhill to cross the creek at the corral fence. I proudly get out to officially open the gate and let the cars through. We go bumping down the two-rutted lane to the cabin and park. My heart sinks to see the cabin. To see the cabin so sad and almost human waiting there for me as if forever, to hear my little neat gurgling creek resuming its song just for me, to see the very same Blue Jays still waiting in the tree for me.

Starting point is 02:26:50 And maybe mad at me now they see I'm back because I haven't been there to lay out their Cheerios along the porch rail every blessed morning. And in fact, first thing I do is rush inside and get them some food and lay it out. But so many people around now, they're afraid to try it. Monsanto, all decked out in his old clothes and looking forward to a wine and talk fest weekend in his pleasant cabin, takes the big sweet axe down from the wall nails and goes out and starts hammering at a huge log. In fact, it's really a half of a tree that fell there years ago and has been hammered at intermittent. but now he's bound he's going to crack it in half and again in half so we can then start

Starting point is 02:27:27 splitting it down the middle for huge bonfire type logs meanwhile little arthur ma who never goes anywhere without his drawing paper and his yellowjack felt-tip pencils is already seated in my chair on the porch wearing my hat now too drawing one of his interminable pictures he'll do 25 a day and twenty-five to next day too he'll talk and go on drawing he has felt tips of all colors, red, blue, yellow, green, black. He draws marvelous, subconscious glurbs and can also do excellent objective scenes or anything he wants onto cartoons. Dave is taking my rucksack and his rucksack out of Willie and throwing them into the cabin. Ben Fagan is wandering around near the creek, puffing on his pipe with a happy Biku smile. Ron Blake is unpacking the stakes we bought

Starting point is 02:28:18 en route in Monterey, and I'm already flicking the plastics off the top of bottles with that expert twitch and twist you only get to learn after years of winnowing in alleys east and west. Still the same. The fog is blowing over the walls of the canyon, obscuring the sun, but the sun keeps fighting back. The inside of the cabin, when the fire finally going, is still the dear lovable abode now as sharpened my mind as I look at it as an unusually well-focused snapshot. The sprig of ferns still stands in a glass of water. The books are there, The neat groceries ranged along the wall shelves. I feel excited to be with the gang, but there's a hidden sadness, too,

Starting point is 02:29:01 and which is expressed later by Monsanto, when he says, This is the kind of place where a person should really be alone, you know? When you bring a big gang here, it somehow desecrates it, not that I'm referring to us or anybody in particular. There's such a sad sweetness to those trees as though yell shouldn't insult them or conversation only. Which is just the way I feel too. In a gang we all go down the path towards the sea, passing underneath that son of a bitch bridge, Cody calls it, looking up with horror.

Starting point is 02:29:32 That thing's enough to scare anybody away. Worst of all, for an old driver like Cody and Dave, too, is to see that upended old chassis in the sand. They spend a half hour poking around the wreckage and shaking their heads. We kick around the beach a while and decide to come back at night with bottles and flashlights and build a huge bonfire. Now it's time to get back to the cabin and cook those steaks and have a ball. And there's McLeer's Jeep already arrived and parked,

Starting point is 02:30:00 and there's McLeer himself and that beautiful blonde wife of his and her tight blue jeans that makes Dave say yum, yum, yum, and Cody just say, Yeah, that's right, yes, that's right. Ah, honey, honey, yes. End of chapter 18. Chapter 19 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This Librevox recordings in the public domain. read by Ben Tucker

Starting point is 02:30:30 Chapter 19 A roaring drinking bout begins deep in the canyon Fog nightfall sends cold seeping into the windows So all these softies demand that the wood windows be closed So we all sit there in the glow of the one lamp coughing and the smoke But they don't care They think it's just the stakes smoking over the fire I have one of the jugs in my hand and I won't let go

Starting point is 02:30:53 McLeer is the handsome young poet Who's just written the most fantastic poet in America called Dark Brown, which is every detail of his and his wife's body described in ecstatic union and communion and inside out and every which way, and not only that, he insists on reading it to us. But I want to read my C poem, too.

Starting point is 02:31:15 But Cody and Dave Wayne are talking about something else and that silly kid Ron Blake is singing like Chet Baker, Arthur Ma is drawing in the corner, and it sort of goes like this generally. That's what old men do, Cody. They drive slowly backwards. and Safeway supermarket parking lots. Yeah, that's right.

Starting point is 02:31:32 I was telling you about that bicycle of mine, but that's what they do, yes, you see. That's because while the old woman is shopping in that store, they figure they'll park a little closer to the entrance, and so they spend a half hour to think their big move out, and they back out slowly from their slot, and can hardly turn around to see what's in back, usually nothing there. Then they wheel real slow and trembling to that slot they picked,

Starting point is 02:31:55 but all of a sudden some cat jumps in it with his pickup, And them old men is scratching their heads, saying, and whining, all these young fellers nowadays, and all that obvious. Ah, yes, but that bicycle of mine in Denver, I tell you, I had it twisted, and that wheel used to wobble, so by necessity I had to invent a new way to maneuver them handlebars, see. Hey, Cody, have a drink. I'm yelling in his ear, and meanwhile, McLeer is reading. Kiss my thighs in darkness, the pit of fire.

Starting point is 02:32:24 And Monsanto was chuckling, saying to Fagan, So this crazy character comes downstairs and asking for a copy of Alistair Crowley, and I didn't know about that till you told me the other day. Then on the way out, I see him sneak a book off the shelf, but he puts another one in its place. Then he got out of his pocket, and the books is a novel by somebody called Denton Welch, all about this young kid in China, wandering around the streets like real romantic young Truman Capote. Only, it's China.

Starting point is 02:32:50 And Arthur Ma suddenly yells, "'Hold still, you bunch of bastards! I got a hole in my eye!' and generally the way parties go and so on ending with the steak dinner I don't even touch a bite but just drink on Then the big bonfire on the beach to which we march all in one arm swinging gain I've got the idea in my head I'm the leader of a guerrilla warfare unit And I'm marching ahead the lieutenant giving orders

Starting point is 02:33:15 With all their flashlights and yells we come swarming down the narrow path Going up one two three And challenging the enemy to come out of hiding Some guerrillas Monsanto, that old woodsman, starts a huge bonfire on the beach that can be seen flaring from miles away. Cars passing across the bridge way up there can see there's a party going on in the whole of night. In fact, the bonfire lights up the eerie, weird beams and staunches of the bridge, almost all the way up. Giant shadows dance on the rocks.

Starting point is 02:33:47 The sea swirls up, but seems subdued. It's not like being alone down in the vast hell riding the sounds of the sea. The night ending with everybody passing out exhausted on cots and sleeping bags outside, McLeer goes home with his wife. But Arthur Ma and I, by the late fire, keep up yelling spontaneous questions and answers right till dawn, like, Who told you you had a hat on your head? My head never questions hats.

Starting point is 02:34:14 What's the matter with your liver training? My liver training got involved in kidney work. And here again, another great gigantic little oriental friend for me, an Eastcoaster who's never known Chinese or Japanese kids. On the West Coast, it's quite common, but for an East Coaster like me, it's amazing. And what, with all my earlier studies in Zen and Chan and Tao? And Arthur also being a gentle, small, soft-yard seemingly soft little Oriental goofnik. And we come to great chanted statements, taking turns without a pause to think,

Starting point is 02:34:45 just one, then the other, bing and bang, the beauty of them being that, while one guy is yelling, like me, tonight the full apogee August moo, will, out early with a jaundiced tent and pop angels all over my rooftop along with Davis sprinkled flowers. Any kind of nonsense being the rule. The other guy has time not only to figure the next statement, but can take off from the subconscious arousment of an idea from angels all over my rooftop. And so can yell without thinking and answer the stupider, or rather the more unexpectedly insaneer, sillier, brighter.

Starting point is 02:35:20 It is the better. Pilgrims dropping turds and sweet and immacular nameless rindexam. Elro trains from heaven, with omnipotent youth-bearing monkey women that will stop through the stage, waiting for the moment when by pinching myself, I prove that a thought is like a touch. But this is only the beginning, because now we know the routine and get better and better. Till at dawn, I seem to recall we were so fantastically brilliant, while everyone snored. The skies must have shook to hear it, and not just foil. Let's see if I can recreate at least the style of this game.

Starting point is 02:35:52 Arthur, when are you going to become the end? Patriarch. Me. As soon as you give me that old moth-eaten sweater. Much better than that. Forget this for now, because I want to talk first about Arthur Ma

Starting point is 02:36:04 and try again to duplicate our feet. End of chapter 19. Chapter 20 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This Libervox recording is in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker. As I say, my first little Chinese friend, I keep saying, little George,

Starting point is 02:36:30 little Arthur, but the fact is they were both small anyway. Although George talked slowly and was a little absent from everything in the way of a Zen master, actually, who realizes that everything is indifferent anyway. Arthur was friendlier, warmer in a way, curious and always asking questions more active than George with his constant drawing. And of course Chinese instead of Japanese. He wanted me to meet his father the following weeks. He was Monsanto's best friend at the time, and they made an extremely strange pair going down the street

Starting point is 02:37:00 together. The big ruddy, happy man with the crew cut and corduroyd jacket and sometimes pipe and mouth. Little childlike Chinese boy who looked so young, most bartenders wouldn't serve him, though he was actually 30 years old. Nevertheless, the son of a famous Chinatown family in Chinatown is right back there behind the fabled Beatnik streets of Frisco. Also, Arthur was a tremendous little lover boy who had fabulously beautiful girls on the line and however just separated from his wife, a girl I never saw but my Santo told me she was the most beautiful Negro girl in the world. Arthur came from a large family, but as a painter and a bohemian, his family disapproved of him. Now, so he lived alone in a comfortable old hotel in North Beach, though sometimes he went around the corner in the Chinatown to visit his father,

Starting point is 02:37:47 who sat in the back of his Chinese general store, brooding among his countless poems written swiftly in Chinese stroke on pieces of beautiful colored paper, which he then hanged from the ceiling of his little cubicle. There he sat, clean, neat, almost shiny, wondering about what poem to write next. But his keen little eye is always jumping to the street door to see who's going by, and if someone came into the shop itself, he knew at once who it was, and for what. He was, in fact, the best friend and trusted advisor of Chiang Kai Shek in America, true and no lie. But Arthur himself was in favor of the red Chinese, which was a family matter,

Starting point is 02:38:25 and a Chinese matter I had nothing to say about and didn't interest me except in so far. as it gave a dramatic picture of father and son in an old culture. The pint of the matter anyway being that he was goofing with me just like George had done, and making me happy somehow like George had done. Something anciently familiar about his loyal presence made me wonder if I had ever lived before in some other lifetime in China, or if he'd been an Occidental himself in a previous lifetime of his own, involved with mine somewhere else than China.

Starting point is 02:38:58 The pity of it is that I have no record. of what we were yelling and announcing back and forth as the birds woke up outside. But it went generally like this. Me. Unless someone's sicks a hot iron in my heart or heaps up evil karma like tit and tat the pile of that and pulls my mother out of her bed to slay her before my damning human eyes. Arthur. And I break my hands on heads.

Starting point is 02:39:21 Me. Every time you throw a rock at a cat from your glass house, you heap upon yourself the automatic Stanley Gould winter, so dark of death after death and growing old. Arthur. Because lady those ash cans will bite you back and be cold, too. Me. And your son will never rest in the imperturbable knowledge that what he thinks he thinks, as well as what he does he thinks, as well as what he feels, he thinks, as well as future that, Arthur, future that my damn old sword-cutter, Paisan Pasha, lost the pritness again. Me. Tonight the moon shall witness angels trooping at the baby's window, where inside he

Starting point is 02:40:00 gurgles and his puk, looking with mulling eyes for baby's side waterfall, lambic-in, hillside the day the little Arab shepherd boy hugged the baby lamb to heart while the mother bleated at his bay heel. Arthur. And so Joe, the silics kill it, no not. Me. Shiaw gra, Arthur, wind and car start. Me. The angels, divas, monsters, Asaras, Devadatas, Vendantas, McLaughlin, stones Will hue and hurl in hell if they don't love the lamb, the lamb, the lamb of hell, Lamb chop? Arthur.

Starting point is 02:40:35 Why did Scott Fitzgerald keep a notebook? Me, such a marvelous notebook, Arthur. Comey de Nera Nespata, Soutiamp, Anda Wanda, Vesnaki Shadakhiro, Pario Mimga, Sikorim, Nora, Sarkadiam, Baron Roy Kellejium, Mi Yorki, Hayastuna, Haydana Sitazel, Ampho, Andiam, Yerka, Yama, Chelsamford, Alia Bonifantz, Karum Simanda, Versil. Me. The 26th annual concert of the Armenian Convention. End of Chapter 20.

Starting point is 02:41:20 Chapter 21, Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. The Slivervox Recordings in the public domain. Read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 21. Incidentally, I forgot to mention that during the three weeks alone, the stars had not come out at all, not even for one minute on any night. It was the foggy season, except the very last night when I was getting ready to leave. Now the stars were out every night.

Starting point is 02:41:51 The sun shone considerably longer, but a sinister wind accompanied the autumn and Big Sur. It seemed like the whole Pacific Ocean was blowing with all its might right into Riton Canyon, and also over the high gap from another end, causing all the trees to shudder as the big groaning howl came newsing and noising from down canyon. When it hit there was raised a roar of noise I didn't like. It seemed ill-omened to me somewhere. It was much better to have fog and silence and quiet trees. Now the whole canyon by one blast could be led screaming and waving in all directions

Starting point is 02:42:28 in such a confused mass that even the fellow was with me were a little surprised to see it. It was too big a wind for such a little canyon. The development also prevented the constant hearing of the reassuring creek. One good thing was that when jet planes broke the sound barrier overhead. The wind dispersed the clap of empty thunder they caused, because during the foggy season the noise would come down into the canyon, concentrate there, and rock the house like an explosion,

Starting point is 02:42:59 making me think the first time alone that somebody'd set off a blast of dynamite nearby. When I woke up groaning and sick, there was plenty of wine right there to start me off with the hounds of hair. So okay. But Monsanto had retired early and typically, sensibly to sleep by the creek, and now he was awake singing, swooshing his whole head into the creek and going,

Starting point is 02:43:22 and rubbing his hands for a new day. Dave Wayne made breakfast with his usual lecture. Now the real way to fry eggs is to put a cover over them So that they can have that neat-based white look on the yellows Soon as I get this pancake batter ready, we'll start on them My list of groceries were so all-inclusive in the beginning It was now feeding guerrilla troops A big axe chopping contest began after breakfast

Starting point is 02:43:49 Some of us sitting watching on the porch And the performers down below hacking away at the tree trunk Which was over a foot thick They were chopping off two-foot chunks. No easy job. I realized you can always study the character of a man by the way he chops wood. Monsanto, an old lumberman up in Maine, as I say, now showed us how he conducted his whole life, in fact, by the way he took neat little

Starting point is 02:44:14 short-handled chops from both left and right angles, getting his work done in reasonably short time without too much sweat. But his strokes were rapid, whereas old Fagan, pipe and mouth, slogged away, I guess, the way he learned in Oregon and in the Northwest fire schools. Also getting his job done, silently, not a word. Bocody's fantastic fiery characters showed in the way he went at the log with horrible force.

Starting point is 02:44:42 When he brought down the axe with all his mind and holding it far at the end, you could hear the whole tree trunk groaning the whole length inside. Runk sometimes you could hear a lengthwise cracking going on. He is really very very very. very strong, and he brought that axe down so hard his feet left the earth when it hit. He chopped off his log with the fury of a Greek god. Nevertheless, it took him longer and much more sweat than Monsanto. Used to do this in a work gang in southern Arizona, he said,

Starting point is 02:45:14 whopping one down that made the whole tree trunk dance off the ground. But it was like an example of vast but senseless strength, a picture of poor Cody's life, and in a sense my own. I too chopped with all my might and got madder and went faster and raked the log, but took more time than Monsanto, who watched us smiling. Little Arthur thereupon tried his luck, but gave up after five strokes. The axe was like to carry him away anyway. Then Dave Wayne demonstrated with big, easy strokes,

Starting point is 02:45:46 and in no time we had five huge logs to use. But now it was time to get in the cars. McLeer had re-arrived, and go driving south down the coast. highway to a hot springs bathhouse down there, which sounded good to me at first. But the new big sun autumn was now all whiny, sparkling blue, which made the terribleness and giantness of the coast all the more clear to see in all its gruesome splendor. Miles and miles of it snaking away south. Our three jeeps twisting and turning, the increasing curves,

Starting point is 02:46:21 sheer drops at our sides, further ghostly high bridges to cross with smashing's below. Though all the boys are wowing to see it, to me it's just an inhospitable madhouse of the earth, I've seen it enough and even swallowed it in that deep breath. The boys reassure me the hot springs bath will do me good. They see I'm gloomy now, hung over for good. But when we arrive, my heart sinks again, as McAlear points out to see from the balcony of the outdoor pools. Look out there floating in the seaweeds, a dead otter. And sure enough, it is a dead otter, I guess.

Starting point is 02:46:59 A big brown, pale lump floating up and down mournfully, with the swells and ghastly weeds. My otter, my dear otter, I'd written poems about. Why did he die? I asked myself in despair. Why do they do that? What's the sense of all this? All the fellows are shading their eyes to get a better look at the big peaceful, tortured hunk of sea cow out there.

Starting point is 02:47:26 as though it's something of passing interest. While to me it's a blow across the eyes and down into my heart. The hot water pools are steaming. Fagan and Monsanto and the others are all sitting peacefully up to their necks. They're all naked, but there's a gang of fairies also they're naked, all standing around in various bathhouse postures that make me hesitate to take my clothes off, just on general principles. In fact, Cody doesn't even bother to do anything but lie down with his clothes on in the sun.

Starting point is 02:47:56 on the balcony table, and just smoke. But I borrow McLeer's yellow bathing suit and get in. What you're wearing a bathing suit in a hot springs pool for, boy? said Fagan, chuckling. With horror, I realize there's spermatozoa floating in the hot water. I look, and I see the other men, the fairies, all taking good long looks at Ron Baker, who stands there facing the sea with his arse for all to behold,

Starting point is 02:48:22 not to mention McLeer and Dave Wayne, too. but it's very typical of me and Cody that we won't undress in this situation. We were both raised Catholics. Supposedly the big sex heroes of our generation, in fact, you might think, but the combination, the strange, silent watching fairy men and the dead otter out there, and the spermata zoa in the pools,

Starting point is 02:48:46 makes me sick, not to mention that when somebody informs me, this bathhouse is owned by the young writer Kevin Kudai, whom I knew very well in New York. And I ask one of the younger strangers, where's Kevin Kudahy? He doesn't even deign to reply. Thinking he hasn't heard me, I ask again. No reply, no notice.

Starting point is 02:49:06 I ask a third time. This time he gets up and stalks out angrily to the locker rooms. It all adds up to the confusion that's beginning to pile up in my battered drinking brain anyway. The constant reminders of death, not the least of which was the death of my peaceful love of Rattan Canyon. now suddenly becoming a horror. From the baths, we go to Nipinth, which is a beautiful cliff-top restaurant with vast outdoor patio, with excellent food, excellent waiters, and management,

Starting point is 02:49:35 good drinks, chess tables, chairs and tables to just sit in the sun and look at the Grand Coast. Here we all sit at various tables, and Cody starts playing chess with everybody will join, while he's chomping away at those marvelous hamburgers called. Heaven Burgers, huge with all the sideworks. Cody doesn't like to just sit around and lightly chat away. He's the kind of guy if he's going to talk. He has to do all the talking himself for hours,

Starting point is 02:50:07 till everything is exhaustedly explained. Sands that he just wants to bend over a chessboard and say, He, he, hey? Oh, Scrooge is saving up a pawn, hey? I got you. But while I'm sitting there discussing literature with McLeer and Monsanto, suddenly a strange couple of gentlemen nearby, strike up an acquaintance. One of them is a youngster who says he is a lieutenant in the army.

Starting point is 02:50:31 I instantly, drunk on Fifth Manhattan by now, going to my theory of guerrilla warfare based on my observations the night before, when it did seriously occur to me that if Monsanto, Arthur, Cody Dave Ben, Ron Blake, and I were all members of one fighting unit and all carrying canteens of booze on their belts, it would be very difficult for the enemy to hurt any of the enemy to hurt any of the enemy. of us, because we'd be, as dear friends, watching so desperately closely over one another, which I tell the first lieutenant, which attracts the interest of the older man, who admits that

Starting point is 02:51:04 he's a general in the army. There are also some further homosexuals at a separate table, which prompts Dave Wayne to look up from the chess game at one quiet drowsy point, and announce in his dry twing, under redwood beams people talking about homosexuality and war. Call it my my nipent haiku. Yes, says Cody, checkmating him. See what you can coo about that, my boy, and get out of there, and I'll nuis you with my queen, dear. I mentioned the general, only because there are also something sinister about the fact that

Starting point is 02:51:38 during this long binge, I came across him and another general. Two strange generals, and I'd never met any generals in my life. This first general was strange because he seemed too polite, and yet there was something sinister about his steely eyes behind goof-dark glasses. Something sinister, too, about the first lieutenant who guessed who we were. The San Francisco poets, a major nucleus of them indeed. And didn't seem at all pleased, though the general seemed amused. Nevertheless, in a sinister way, the general seemed to take great interest in my theory

Starting point is 02:52:16 about buddy units for guerrilla warfare, and when President Kennedy, about a year later, ordered just such a new scheme for part of our armed forces, I wondered. Still crazy even then, but for new reasons. If the general had got an idea from me. The second general, even stranger, coming up, occurred when I was even more far gone. Manhattan's and more Manhattan's, and finally when we got back to the cabin in late afternoon, I was feeling good, but realized I was going to be finished tomorrow. But poor young Ron Blake asked me if he could stay with me in the cabin. the others were all going back to the city in the three cars. I couldn't think of any way to reject his request in a harmless way, so said yes.

Starting point is 02:52:58 So when they all left, suddenly I was alone with this mad beatnik kid singing me songs and all I want to do is sleep. But I've got to make the best of it and not disappoint his believing heart. Because after all, the poor kid actually believes that there's something noble and idealistic and kind about all this beat stuff. And I'm supposed to be the king of the beatniks. according to the newspapers. So, but at the same time, I'm sick and tired of all the endless enthusiasms of new young kids trying to know me

Starting point is 02:53:29 and pour out all their lives into me so that I'll jump up and down and say, yes, yes, that's right, which I can't do anymore. My reason for coming to Big Sur for the summer being precisely to get away from that sort of thing. Like those pathetic five high school kids who all came to my door in Long Island one night wearing jackets that said Dharma Bums on them,

Starting point is 02:53:50 all expecting me to be 25 years old according to a mistake on a book jacket and here I am old enough to be their father but no hep swinging young jazzy Ron wants to dig everything go to the beach run and romp and sing talk write tunes write stories climb mountains go hiking see everything do everything with everybody but having one last quart of port with me I agree to follow him to the beach we go down the old sad path of the beach we go down the old sad path of the beach and suddenly I see a dead mouse in the grass.

Starting point is 02:54:24 A wee dead mousy, I say cleverly poetically, but suddenly I realize and remember now for the first time how I've left the cover off the rat poison in Monsanto's shelf, and so this is my mouse. It's lying there dead, like the otter in the sea. It's my own personal mouse that I've carefully fed chocolate and cheese all summer, but once again I've unconsciously sabotaged. all these great plans of mine to be kind to living beings, even bugs.

Starting point is 02:54:56 Once again, I've murdered a mouse one way or the other. And on top of that, when we come to the place where the garter snake usually lies sunning itself, and I bring it to Ron's attention, he suddenly yells out, Look out! You never can't tell what kind of snake it is! Which really scares me. My heart pounds with horror. My little friend the garter snake turns, therefore, with my head from a living being with a long green body, into the evil serpent of Big Sur. On top of that at the surf,

Starting point is 02:55:25 where long streamers of hollow seaweed always lie around drying in the sun, some of them huge, like living bodies with skin, pieces of living material that always made me sad somehow. Here's the young Hepcat, lifting them up and dancing a dervish

Starting point is 02:55:40 around the beach with them, turning my sir into something sea change, something brain change. All that night by lamplight we sing and yell songs, is okay but in the morning the bottle is gone and I wake up with the final horrors again precisely the way I woke up in the Frisco Skid Row room before escaping down here. It's all caught up with me again. I can hear myself again whining, why does God torture me? But anybody who's never had delirium tremens even in their early stages may not understand

Starting point is 02:56:13 that it's not so much a physical pain but a mental anguish indescribable to those ignorant people who don't drink and accuse drinkers of irresponsibility. The mental anguish is so intense that you feel you have betrayed your very birth. The efforts, nay, the birth pings of your mother when she bore you and delivered you to the world. You've betrayed every effort your father ever made to feed you and raise you and make you strong and, my God, even educate you for life! You feel a guilt so deep you identify yourself with the devil, and God seems far away abandoning you to your sick.

Starting point is 02:56:49 silliness. You feel sick in the greatest sense of the word, breathing without believing in it. Sick, sick, sick. Your soul groans. You look at your helpless hands as though they were on fire. And you can't move to help. You look at the world with dead eyes. There's on your face an expression of incalculable repining, like a constipated angel on a cloud. In fact, it's actually a cancerous look you throw on the world. Through brown-gray wool fuds over your eyes. Your tongue is white and disgusting. Your teeth are stained. Your hair seems to have dried out overnight. There are huge mucks in the corners of your eyes, greases on your nose, froth at the sides of your mouth. In short, that very disgusting and well-known hideousness. Everybody knows who's walked past a city-street

Starting point is 02:57:40 drunk in the boweries of the world. But there's no joy at all. People say, oh, well, Well, he's drunk and happy. Let him sleep it off. The poor drunker is crying. He's crying for his mother and father and great brother and great friend. He's crying for help. He tries to pull himself together by moving one shoe nearer to his foot, and he can't even do that properly. He'll drop the shoe or knock something over. He'll do something invariably that'll start him crying again. He'll want to bury his face in his hands and moan for mercy that he knows there is none. Not only because he doesn't deserve it, but there's no such thing anyway. Because he looks up at the blue sky, and there's nothing there but empty space making a big face at him. He looks at the world, it's sticking its tongue out at him, and once that mask is removed, it's looking at him with hollow big red eyes like his own eyes. He may see the earth move, but there's no significance of any particular kind to attach to that. One little unexpected noise behind him

Starting point is 02:58:46 Will make him snarl and rage He'll pull and tug at his poor stained shirt He feels like rubbing his face into something that isn't His socks are thick, tired, moisty slimes The beard on his cheeks itches the running sweats And annoys the tortured mouth There's a twisted feeling of no more, never again Ah

Starting point is 02:59:08 What was beautiful and clean yesterday is Irrationably and unaccountably changed into a big dreary crock of shit. The hairs on his fingers stare at him like tomb hairs. The shirt and trousers have become glued to his person as though he was to be drunk forever. The ache of remorse sinks in

Starting point is 02:59:28 as though somebody was pushing it in from above. The pretty white clouds in the sky hurt his eyes only. The only thing to do is turn over and lie face down and weep. The mouth is so blasted there's not even a chance to gnash the teeth. There's not even strength to tear the hair.

Starting point is 02:59:48 And here comes Ron Blake, starting off his new day, singing at the top of his voice. I go down by the creek and throw myself in the sand and lie looking with sad eyes at the water, which no longer affriends me but sort of wants me to go away. There isn't a drop to drink left in the cabin. All the goddamn jeeps are gone with all its healthy cargo of people, and I'm alone with an enthusiastic.

Starting point is 03:00:12 kid on a lark. The little bugs I'd saved from drowning just because I was bemused and alone and glad now drowned unnoticed within my reach anyway. The spider is still minding his own business in the outhouse. Al flows mournfully in the valley far away to express just the way I feel. The Blue Jays yak around me as though because I'm too tired and helpless to feed them anymore. They're figuring on trying me if they can. "'They're friggin' vultures, anyway,' I moaned with my mouth in the sand.

Starting point is 03:00:48 The once pleasant thump-thump-thuggle slap of the creek is now an endless jabbering of blind nature, which doesn't understand anything in the first place. My old thoughts about the slit of a billion years covering all this in all cities and generations eventually is just a dumb old thought. Only a silly, sober fool could think of it. Imagine gloating over such nonsense Because in one sense The drinker learns wisdom

Starting point is 03:01:14 In the words of Goethe or Blake Or whichever it was The pathway to wisdom lies through excess But in this condition You can only say Wisdom is just another way to make people sick I'm sick I yell emphatically to the trees

Starting point is 03:01:30 To the woods around To the hills above Looking around desperately Nobody cares I can even hear Ron singing at his lunch inside. What's even more horrible, he tries to show compunction and wants to help me.

Starting point is 03:01:44 Anything I can do? Later he goes for a lone walk, so I go in the cabin and lie on the cotton, spend about two hours groaning out a lament. Oh, my dear, why do me laise? Fere malade come so. Papa, papa, and de mouet.

Starting point is 03:02:02 Oh, it's mal, oh, fe mal, I envy to go toilette pier, "'That'm interest not, or shoe malade. "'Aow, wow, wow, wow. "'I go into a long, ow, ow, wow, wow, "'that I guess lasted a whole minute. "'I toss over and find new reasons to groan. "'I think I'm alone,

Starting point is 03:02:23 "'and I'm letting it all go a whole lot like I'd heard my father do "'when he was dying of cancer in the night and the bed next to mine. "'When I do manage to stagger up and go lean on the door, "'I realize it was double upon double horror "'that Ron Blake has been sitting there all this, his time, listening to everything over a book. I wonder now what he told people about this later. He must have sounded horrible.

Starting point is 03:02:47 Idiotic, too. Creteness even. Maybe only French-Canadian. Who knows? Ron, I'm sorry you had to hear all that. I'm sick. I know, man, it's okay. Lie down and try to sleep. I can't sleep.

Starting point is 03:03:00 I yell in a rage. I feel like yelling, fuck yourself, you little idiot. What do you know what I'm going through? but then I realize how old man disgusting and hopeless all that is. And here he is, enjoying his big weekend with the big rider. He was supposed to tell all his friends what a great swinging ball it was and what I did and said. But methinks and mayhap he took away a lesson in temperance,

Starting point is 03:03:24 or a lesson in beatness, really. Because the only time I've ever been sicker and madder was a week later when Dave and I came back with the two girls leading to the final horrible night. End of Chapter 21. Chapter 22 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This Libre Fox recording is in the public domain. Read by Ben Tucker.

Starting point is 03:03:56 Chapter 22. But look at this. In the afternoon, restless youngster Ron wants to go hitchhiking, Monterey of all things, to go see McLeer. And I say, okay, go ahead. Ain't you coming with me? He asked surprised to see the champion on the road or one even hitchhike anymore.

Starting point is 03:04:16 No, I'll stay here and get better. I gotta be alone. Which is true, because as soon as he's gone and has yelled one final hoot from the canyon road directly above and gone on, and I have sat in the sun alone on the porch, fed my birds finally again, washed my socks and shirt and pants,

Starting point is 03:04:34 and hung them up to dry on bushes, slurped up tons of water, kneeling at the creek race, stared silently at the trees, As soon as the sun goes down, I swear on my arm I'm as well as I ever was. Just like that, suddenly. Can it be that Ron and all these other guys,

Starting point is 03:04:54 Dave and McLeer or somebody, the other guys earlier, are all a big bunch of witches out to make me go mad? I seriously consider this, remembering that childhood reverie I always had, which I used to ponder seriously as I walked home from St. Joseph's parochial school, or sat in the parlor of my home.

Starting point is 03:05:15 That everybody in the world is making fun of money me, and I don't know it because every time I turn around to see who's behind me, they snap back into place with regular expressions. But soon as I look away again, they dart up to my nape of neck and all whisper there, giggling and plotting evil silently. You can't hear them. And when I turn quickly to catch them,

Starting point is 03:05:36 they've already snapped back perfectly in place, and they're saying, now the proper way to cook eggs is, or they're singing Chet Baker songs, looking the other way, or they're saying, Did I ever tell you about Jim that time? But my childhood reverie also included the fact that everybody in the world was making this fun of me, because they were all members of an eternal secret society, or heaven society that knew the secret of the world and were seriously fooling me, so I'd wake up and see the light, i.e. becoming enlightened, in fact. so that I, Tai Gene, was the last Tai Gene left in the world.

Starting point is 03:06:16 The last poor, holy fool, those people at my neck were the devils of the earth, among whom God had cast me, an angel, baby, as though I was the last Jesus, in fact. And all these people were waiting for me to realize it, and wake up and catch them peeking, and we'd all laugh in heaven suddenly. But animals weren't doing that behind my back. My cats were always adornments licking their paws sadly. And Jesus, he was a sad witness to this, somewhat like the animals. He wasn't peeking down my neck.

Starting point is 03:06:54 There lies the root of my belief in Jesus. So that actually the only reality in the world was Jesus and the lambs, the animals. And my brother Gerard, who had instructed me. Meanwhile, some of the peekers were kindly and sad like my men. my father, but had to go along with everybody else in the same boat. But my waking up would take place, and then everything would vanish except heaven, which is God. And that was why later in life, after these rather strange, you must admit, childhood reveries, after I had that fainting vision of the golden eternity in others before and after it, including

Starting point is 03:07:32 Samadis during Buddhist meditations in the woods, I conceived of myself as a special solitary angel sent down as a messenger from heaven to tell everybody or show everybody by example that their peaking society was actually the satanic society and they were all on the wrong track with all this in my background now at the point of adulthood disaster of the soul

Starting point is 03:07:57 through excessive drinking all this was easily converted into a fantasy that everybody in the world was witching me to madness. And I must have believed it subconsciously because, as I say, as soon as Ron Blake left, I was well again, and in fact content. In fact, very contented. I rose that following morning with more joy and health and purpose than ever, and there was me, old Big Sur Valley all mine again. Here came good old Alf, and I gave him food and patted his big rough neck with its various coquots manes There was the mountain of mean mo in the distance

Starting point is 03:08:38 Just a dismal old hill with funny bushes Around the sides and a peaceful farm on top And nothing to do all day But amused myself undisturbed by witches and booze And I'm singing ditties again My soul ain't snow, wouldn't you know The color of my soul is Interpol And such silly stuff

Starting point is 03:08:58 And I yell, If Arthur Ma's a witch He sure is a funny witch, har-har! And there's the Blue Jay idiot, with one foot on the bar of soap on the porch rail, pecking at the soap, and eating it, leaving the cereal unattended. And when I laugh and yell at him, he looks up cute with an expression that seems to say, What's the matter? What I do wrong? Whoa, whoa, got the wrong place, said another Blue Jay, landing nearby and suddenly leaving again. And everything in my life seems beautiful again.

Starting point is 03:09:30 I even start remembering the nutty things of the binge, and go back even farther and remember nutty things all through my life. It's just amazing how inside our own souls we can lift out so much strength. I think it would be enough strength to move mountains at that, to lift our boots up again and go clumping long, happy out of nothing but the good source power in our own bones. And when I visit the sea, it doesn't scare me anymore. I just sing out,

Starting point is 03:10:00 70,000 skimmers in the sea, and go back to my cabin and just quietly pour my coffee in the cup. Afternoon. How pleasant. I make a wood run, axe and yank logs out of every witch-aware, and leave them by the side of the road to leisurely carry home. I investigate a cabin down the creek that has 15 wood matches in it for my emergency. Take a shot of sherry. Hate it.

Starting point is 03:10:27 Find an old San Francis Chronicle with my name in it all over. Hack a giant redwood log in half in the middle of the creek. That kind of day. Perfect. Ending up sewing my holy sweater singing. There is no place like home. Remembering my mother. I even plunge into all the books and magazines around.

Starting point is 03:10:49 I read up on pataphysics and yell contemptuously in the lamplight. It's on an intellectual excuse for facetious joking. throwing the magazine away, adding peculiarly attractive to certain shallow types. Then I turn my rumbling attention to a couple of unknown fin de seacla poets called Theo Marseals and Henry Harland. I take a nap after supper and dream of the U.S. Navy, a ship anchored near a war scene at an island, but everything is drowsy as two sailors go up the trail with fishing poles and a dog between them to go make love quietly in the hills. The captain and everybody know they're queer, and rather than being infuriated, however, they're all drowsily enchanted by such gentle love.

Starting point is 03:11:34 You see a sailor peeking after them with binoculars from the poop. There's supposed to be a war, but nothing happens, just laundry. I wake up from this silly but strangely pretty dream, feeling exhilarated. Besides now, the stars come out every night, and I go out on the porch and sit in the old canvas chair, and turn my face up to all that mooching going on up there. Star-mooched firmament. All those stars crying with happy sadness. All that ream and cream of mocky ways with alleyways of light years old as Dame May Witty in the hills.

Starting point is 03:12:10 I go walking towards Mean Moe Mountain and the moon illuminated August night. See gorgeous misty mountains rising the horizon. And like saying to me, you don't have to torture your consciousness with endless thinking. So I sit in the sand and look inward and see those old roses of the unborn again. Amazing, and in just a few hours this change. And I have enough physical energy to walk back to the sea, suddenly realizing what a beautiful oriental silk scroll painting this whole canyon would make. Those scrolls you open slowly at one end,

Starting point is 03:12:44 and keep unrolling and unrolling as the valley unfolds toward sudden cliffs. Sudden bodhisattvas, sitting alone, and lamplit huts, sudden creeks, rocks, trees, then sudden white sand, sudden sea, out to sea, and you've reached the end of the scroll. And with all those misty rose darknesses of varying tent and tuckaway shades to express the actual ephemerality of night. One long roll unfurling from the range fence among the misty hills, moon meadows, even the hayrick near the creek, down to the trail, the narrowing creek, and the mystery.

Starting point is 03:13:23 of the awe, sea. So I investigate the scroll of the valley, but I'm singing, Man is a busy little animal, a nice little animal, his thoughts about everything, don't amount to shit. In fact, back at the cabin to make my bedtime hot oval teen, I even sing Sweet Sixteen like an angel,

Starting point is 03:13:42 by God better than Ron Blake. In all the old memories of Ma and Pa, the upright piano in old Massachusetts, the old Summer Night sings. That's how I go to say. sleep under the stars on the porch, and at dawn I turn over with a blissful smile on my face, because the owls are calling, and answering from two different huge dead trunks across the valley, who, who, who.

Starting point is 03:14:07 So maybe it's true what Milarepa says. Though you youngsters of the new generation dwell in towns infested with deceitful fate, the length of truth still remains. And said this in 890, When you remain in solitude Do not think of the amusements in the town You should turn your mind inwardly And then you'll find your way

Starting point is 03:14:27 The wealth I found is The inexhaustible holy property The companion I found is the bliss A perpetual voidness Here in the place of Yulmo Tag Pug Singh Dzon The Tigris howling with a pathetic trembling voice reminds me that her

Starting point is 03:14:41 piteous cubs are playing lively Like a madman I have no pretension and no hope I am telling you the honest truth These are the crazy words of mine. Oh, you innumerable mother-like beings by the force of imaginary destiny, you see a myriad visions and experience endless emotions. I smile.

Starting point is 03:15:02 To a yogi, everything is fine and splendid. In the goodly quiet of this self-benefiting sky enclosure, the timely sounds I hear are all my fellow's sounds. At such a pleasant place, in solitude, I, Milarepa, happily remain. meditating upon the void, illuminating mind. The more ups and downs, the more joy I feel, the greater the fear, the greater the happiness I feel. End of Chapter 22.

Starting point is 03:15:40 Chapter 23 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This Labor Vox recordings in the public domain read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 23. But in the morning, and I'm no Melarapa who could also. sit naked in snow and was seen flying on one occasion. Here comes Ron Blake back with Pat McLeer and Pat's wife, the beautiful one. And by God, they're a little sweet five-year-old girl who is such a pleasant sight to see as she goes jongling and jiggling through the fields to look for flowers.

Starting point is 03:16:15 Everything to her is perfectly new, beautiful, primordial Garden of Eden morning here in this tortured human canyon. And a rather beautiful morning develops. There's fog, so we close the blinds and light the fire and the lamp, me and Pat, and sit there drinking from the jug he brought talking about literature and poetry, while his wife listens and occasionally gets up to eat more coffee and tea, or goes out to play with Ron and the little girl. Pat and I are in a serious talkative mood, and I feel that lonely shiver in my chest, which always warns me. You actually love people, and you're glad Pat is here. Pat is one, if not the most handsome man I've ever seen. Strange that he's announced in a preface to his poems that his heroes,

Starting point is 03:17:00 his triumvirate are Jean Harlow, Rembaugh, and Billy the Kid, because he himself is handsome enough to play Billy the Kid in the movies. That same dark-haired handsome, slightly slid-eyed look you expect from the myth appearance of Billy the Kid. I suppose not the actual real-life William Bonnie, who's said to have been a Pimpley Cretan monster. So we launch on a big discussion of everything in the comfortable gloom of the cabin by the warm red glow of the girly fire. I'm wearing dark glasses anyway for fun. Pat says,

Starting point is 03:17:33 Well, Jack, I didn't have a chance to talk to you yesterday or even last year, or even ten years ago when I first met you. I remember I was terrified of you. And Pomeray, when you ran up my steps one night with sticks of tea, you looked like a couple of car thieves or bank robbers. And you know a lot of this, sneery stuff. they've written against us. Against San Francisco or beat poetry and writers is because a lot of us don't look like writers or intellectuals or anything. You and Pomeray, I must say, look awful in a way.

Starting point is 03:18:02 I'm sure I don't fit the bill either. Man, you ought to go to Hollywood and play Billy the Kid. Man, I'd rather go to Hollywood and play Rimbaud. Well, you can't play Gene Harlow. I'd really like to just get my dark brown published in Paris. Do you know that when you think it's possible a word from you to Gallimard or Giraudius would help? I don't know. Do you know that when I read your poems, Mexico City Blues, I immediately turned around and started writing a brand new way.

Starting point is 03:18:34 You enlightened me with that book. But it's nothing like what you do. In fact, it's miles away. I'm a language spinner, and you're an idea, man. And so on, we talk till about noon, and Ron's been in and out. It's made jaunts to the beach With the little ladies And Pat and I don't realize the sun has come out

Starting point is 03:18:52 But still sit there deep in the cabin by now Talking about Villal and Servante Suddenly, boom The door of the cabin is flung open With a loud crash and a burst of sunlight illuminates the room And I see an angel standing arm outstretched in the door It's Cody

Starting point is 03:19:09 All dressed in his Sunday best In a suit Beside him arranged several Graduating golden angels from Evelyn, golden beautiful wife, down to the most dazzling angel of them all, little Timmy with the sun striking off his hair and beams. It's such an incredible sight and surprise

Starting point is 03:19:28 that both Pat and I rise from our chairs involuntarily, like we've been lifted up in awe or scared, though I don't feel scared so much as ecstatic, amazed, as though I've seen a vision. And the way Cody stands there not saying a word with his arm outstretched for some reason, struck a pose of some sort of surprises, or warn us.

Starting point is 03:19:49 He's so much like St. Michael at the moment. It's unbelievable, especially, as I also suddenly realize what he's just actually done. He's had wife and kitties sneak up ever so quiet up the porch steps, which are noisy and creaky, across the wooden plinks, easy and tiptoeing, stood there a while while he prepared to fling the door open. All lined up and stood straight,

Starting point is 03:20:13 then pow! He's opened the door and thrown the golden universe, into the dazzled mystic eyes of big hip Pat McLear and big amazed grateful me. It reminds me in the time I once saw a whole tiptoeing gang of couples, sneaking into our back kitchen door on West Street and Lowell, the leader telling me to shush as I stand there nine years old, amazed, then all bursting in on my father, innocently listening to the Primo-Carnera-Ernie Shaft fight on the old 1930s radio for a big roaring toot.

Starting point is 03:20:45 But Cody's old-fashioned family tiptoe sneak carries that strange apocalyptic burst of gold. He somehow always manages to produce. Like I said elsewhere, the time in Mexico, he drove an old car over a rutted road very slowly as we were all high on tea, and I saw gold in heaven. For the other times, he's always seemed so golden-like, as I say in a Davenport of some sort in heaven and the golden top of heaven. Not that he means to produce this effect. He's just standing there with innate traumatic mystery, holding forth his arm as if to say, Behold the sun and behold the angels, sort of pointing at all the golden heads of his family and Pat and I stand aghast. Happy birthday, Jack, yells Cody or some such ordinary crazy inane greeting.

Starting point is 03:21:32 I've come to you with good news. I brought Evelyn and Emily and Gabi and Timmy because we're all so grateful and glad because everything is worked out absolutely dead perfect or living perfect boy. with that little old $100 you gave me, let me tell you the fantastic story of what happened. To him, it was utterly fantastic. I went out and traded in my Nash that, as you know, won't even start. But I have to have my old buddies push it down the road for me. This guy had a perfect gym of a purple, or what color is it,

Starting point is 03:22:03 well, maginty, slammeltie, a jeepster, station wagon, Jack, but a perfect beauty, mind you, listen with a beautiful radio, A brand new set of backup lights. This is that down to the perfect new tires and that wonderful shiny paint job, that color will knock you out. That's what it is. Grape, as Evelyn murmurs the color. Grape color for all the old grape wine jacks. So we've come here to not only thank you and see you again, but to celebrate this.

Starting point is 03:22:31 And on top of all that occasion, go me and I'm all so gushy and girly. Yes, that's right. Come on in, children, and then go out and get that gear in the car and get ready to sleep. outdoors tonight and get that good open fresh air. Jack on top of all that and my heart is just overflow and I got a new job along with that splissy little old beautiful new Jeep. A new job right downtown in Los Gatos. In fact I don't even have to drive to work anymore. I can walk it just half a mile. Now Ma, you come in here. Meet old Pat McClure here. Startup's Megs or some of that steak we brought. Open up that Vain Rossi wine we brought for drunk old Jack.

Starting point is 03:23:11 that good old boy, will I personally private take him to walk with me back down the road where the Jeep is parked. Unlock that gate. You got the Corral Key Jack. Okay. And we'll talk and walk just like old times and drive back real slow at my new slow boat to China. So it's a whole new day, a whole new situation the way it is with Cody. In fact, a whole new universe is suddenly where, alone again, really, for the first time in ages,

Starting point is 03:23:37 walking rapidly down the road to go get the car. and he looks at me with that hand-rubbing wicked look like he's about to spring a surprise on me. That's the top surprise of them all. You guessed it, old buddy, I have here the last, the absolutely last, yet most perfect of all black-haired, seated, packed type super-bomber joints in the world, which you and I are now going to light up. So I didn't want you to bring any of that wine right away. My boy, we got time to drink wine and wine and dance. And here he is, lighting up, says, Now don't walk too fast.

Starting point is 03:24:13 It's time to stroll along like we used to do. Remember sometimes when our days off on the railroad are walking across that third and towns and tar, like you said, and the time we watch the sun go down so perfect holy purple over that mission cross. Yes, sir, slow and easy, looking at this gone valley. So we start to puff the pot. But as usually, it creates doubtful paranoias in both our minds. and we actually sort of fall silent on the way to the car,

Starting point is 03:24:40 which is a beautiful grape color at that, a brand new, shiny jeepster with all the equipments, and the whole golden reunion deteriorates in the Cody's matter-of-fact lecture on why the car is going to be such a honey, the technical details. And even yells at me to hurry up with that corral gate. Can't wait here all day, ho, ho, ho!

Starting point is 03:25:00 But that's not the point about pop paranoia, yet maybe it is at that. I've long given it up because it bugs, me anyway. But so we drive back slowly to the shack and Evelyn and Pat's wife have met and her having woman talk and McLeer and I and Cody talk around the table planning excursions with the kids to the beach. And there's Evelyn and I haven't had a chance to talk to her for years either. Oh, the old days when we'd stay up late by the fireplace as I say discussing Cody's soul. Cody this and Cody that. You could hear the name Cody ringing under the roofs of America from

Starting point is 03:25:36 coast to coast, almost to hear his women talking about him, always pronouncing Cody with a kind of anguish, yet there was girlish squealing pleasure in it. Cody has to learn to control the enormous forces in him, and Cody will always modify his little white lies so much that they turn into black ones. And according to Irwin Garden, Cody's women were always having transcontinental telephone talks about his dong, which is possible. Because he was always tremendously, generated towards complete relationship with his women to the point where they ended up in one convoluted octopus mess of souls and tears and fallatio and hotel room schemes and rushing in and out of cars and doors and great crises in the middle of the night. Wow, that madman you can

Starting point is 03:26:22 at least ride on his grave someday he lived, he's sweated. No halfway house is Cody's house. Though now, as I say, sort of sweetly chastised and a little bored at last with the world after the crummy injustice of his arrest and sentence. He sort of quieted down, and where he'd launch into a tremendous explanation of every one of his thoughts for the benefit of everybody in the room, as he's putting on his socks and arranging his papers to leave, now he just flipped it aside and may make a stale shrug, a Jesuit at work. Though I remember one crazy moment in the shack that was typically Cody-like, complicated and simultaneously with a million nuances, as though the whole of creation suddenly exploded and imploded together in one moment. At the moment that Pat's pretty little angel daughter is coming in to hand me an extremely tiny flower.

Starting point is 03:27:15 It's for you, she says, direct to me. For some reason, the poor little thing thinks I need a flower, or else her mother instructed her for charming reasons like adornment. Cody is furiously explaining to his little son, Tim, never let the right hand know what your left hand is doing. And at that moment I'm trying to close my palm around the incredibly small flower. And it's so small I can't even do that. Can't feel it.

Starting point is 03:27:40 Can't hardly see it. In fact, such a small flower only that little girl could have found it. But I look up to Cody, and he says that to Tim, and also to impress Evelyn who's watching me. I announced, Never let the left hand know what the right hand is doing, but this right hand can't even hold his flower. And Cody only looks up, yes, yes.

Starting point is 03:28:02 So what's started as a big holy reunion and surprise party in heaven deteriorates to a lot of show-off talk, actually at least on my part. But when I get to drink the wine, I feel lighter, and we all go down to the beach. I walk in front with Evelyn, but when we get to the narrow path, I walk in front like an Indian to show her what a big Indian I've been all summer. I'm bursting to tell her everything. See that grove there once in a while, you'll be surprised out of your shoes to see the mule quietly standing there, with locks a hair like Ruth's over his forehead.

Starting point is 03:28:33 A big biblical mule meditating or over there, but up here. And look at that bridge. Now, what do you think of that? All the kids are fascinated by the upside-down car wreck. At one point, I'm sitting in the sand as Cody walks up my way. I say to him, him imitating Wallace Beery and scratching my armpits, Cuss a man for dying in Death Valley. The last lines of that great movie, 20 Mule Team. And Cody says,

Starting point is 03:28:58 That's right. If anybody can imitate old Wallace Beery, that's the only way to do it. You had just the right timber there, and the tone of your voice there. Cuss a man for dying in Death Valley. Yes. But he rushes off to talk to McLeer's wife. Strange, sad, desultory, the way families and people sort of scatter around a beach and look vaguely at the sea. All disorganized and picnic sad. At one point, I'm telling Evelyn that a tidal wave from Hawaii could very easily come some

Starting point is 03:29:28 day, and we'd see it miles away a huge wall of awful water, and, boy, it would take some doing to run back and climb up those cliffs, huh? But Cody hears this and says, what? And I say, they would wash over us and take us all to Salinas, I bet. And Cody says, what? That brand new Jeep? I'm going back and move it, an example of his strange humor. How strange rule here, says I to Evelyn to show her what a big poet I am. She really loves me.

Starting point is 03:30:00 Used to love me in the old days like a husband. For a while there she had two husbands, Cody and me. We were a perfect family till Cody finally got jealous, or maybe I got jealous. It was wild for a while. I'd be coming home from work on the railroad all dirty with my lamp, and just as I came in for my Joy Bubble Bath, old Cody was rushing off on a call,

Starting point is 03:30:20 so Evelyn had her new husband in the second shift. Then when Cody come home at dawn all dirty for his Joy Bubble Bath, ring the phones run and the cruise clerk asked me out and I'm rushing off to work both of us using the same old clunker car and shifts and Evelyn always maintaining that she and I were really made for each other but her karma was to serve Cody in this particular lifetime which I really believe and I believe she loves him too but she'd say I'll get you Jack in another lifetime and you'll be very happy

Starting point is 03:30:52 what I'd yell to joke me running up the eternal halls of karma trying to get away from you, hey? It'll take you eternities to get rid of me, she adds sadly, which makes me jealous. I want her to say I'll never get rid of her. I want to be chased for eternity till I catch her. Ah, Jack, she says putting her arm around me on the beach. It's nice to see you again. Oh, I wish we could be quiet again and just have our suppers of homemade pizza altogether and watch TV together.

Starting point is 03:31:23 You have so many friends and responsibilities now, it's sad. "'And you get sick drinking and everything, "'why don't you just come stay with us a while and rest?' "'I will.' "'But Ron Blake is red-hot for Evelyn "'and keeps coming over to dance with seaweed's an impressor. "'He's even asked me to ask Cody to let him spend some time alone with Evelyn.' "'Cody said,

Starting point is 03:31:44 "'Go ahead, man.' "'Having run out of liquor, in fact, Ron does get his opportunity "'to be alone with Evelyn as Cody and me and the kids in one car "'and McLeer and the family and the other start for Monterey to stock up for the night and also more cigarettes. Evelyn and Ron lied a bonfire on the beach to wait for us. As we're driving along, little Timmy says to Paul, we should have brought Mommy with us, her pants got wet in the beach.

Starting point is 03:32:09 By now they ought to be steaming, says Cody matter-effectily in another one of his fantastic puns as he lock-wallops that awful narrow dirt canyon road like a getaway car in the mountains and a movie. We leave poor McLear-Miles back. When Cody comes to a narrow tight curve with all our death staring us in the face down that hole he just swerves the car saying the way to drive in the mountains is boy no failing around these roads don't move you're the one that moves and we come out on the highway and go right batten up to monterey and the big sir dusk we're down there on the faint gloomy frothing rocks you can hear the seals cry

Starting point is 03:32:44 end of chapter twenty three chapter twenty four of big sir by jack carrowack this liverbox recordings in the public domain read by ben tucker McLear exhibits another strange facet of his handsome but faintly, decadent, rimboed type personality at his summer camp by coming out in the living room with a goddamn hawk on his shoulder. It's his pet hawk, of all things. The hawk is black as night and sits there on his shoulder, pecking nastily at a clump of hamburger, he holds up to it. In fact, the sight of it, that is so rarely poetic, McLeer, whose poetry is really like a black hawk, he's always writing about darkness, dark brown,

Starting point is 03:33:33 dark bedrooms, moving curtains, chemical fire, dark pillows, love and chemical fiery red darkness, and writes all that in beautiful long lines that go across the page irregularly and aptly somehow. Handsome Hawk McLeer. In fact, I suddenly yell out, now I know your real name. It's Malir. Malir, the Scotch Highland, Moorhaunter, with his hawk about to go mad and tear his white hair and a tempest. or some such silly thing. Feeling good again now we've got new wine.

Starting point is 03:34:07 Time to go back to the cabin and fly down that dark highway the way only Cody can fly. Even better than Dave Wayne, but you feel safer with Dave Wayne. Though the reason Cody gives you a sense of dooming boom as he pushes the night out of the wheels is not because he'll lose perfect control of the car, but you feel the car will take off suddenly up to heaven, or at least just up into what the Russians call the dark cosmos. There's a booming, rushing sound out the window When Cody bats are down the white line at night

Starting point is 03:34:38 The day Wayne, it's all conversation and smooth sailing With Cody, it's a crisis about to get worse. And now he's saying to me, Not only the day, but the other day with the boys, That beautiful McLeer woman there? Wow, with their tight blue jeans, Man, I cried under a tree to see that popping around so innocent like, Ooh!

Starting point is 03:34:58 So I tell you what, we're going to do all, buddy. tomorrow we go back to Las Gatos, the whole family, and we've dropped Evelyn and the kids home after the hissed the villain play. We're all going to see at seven. Oh, the what? It's a play, he says, suddenly imitating the tired, whiny voice of an old PTA committee woman. You go there and you sit down and out comes this old 1910 play about villains, foreclosing the mortgage, mustaches, you know, calico tears. You can sit there, you see and hiss the villain all you want, even for all I know, yell obscenities or something. I don't know, but it's Evelyn's world, you know. She's designing the sets, and that's the work she's done while I was in the can.

Starting point is 03:35:36 So I can't begrudge her that. In fact, I ain't got a word in edgewise. When you're the father of a family, you go along with the little woman, of course. And the kids enjoy it. After that plan, and after you've hissed the villain, we'll drop them home, and then, old buddy. Zooming up the car, even of all, thinks, the hawk is black as night and sits there, faster in lieu of rubbing his hands with zeal, so to say, zoom. You and me gonna go flying down that Bayshore highway

Starting point is 03:36:02 And as usual, you're gonna ask your usual dumb almost Okiwino questions Hey Cody, whining like an old drunk I believe we're coming in the Berlin game ain't it And you're always wrong Oh crazy dumb fucking old Jack Then we go rubbing shoulders into that city And go popping right up to my sweet little baby Willamene

Starting point is 03:36:24 That I want you to meet in as much And also I want you to go dig because she's going to dig you, my dear old some bitch, Jack. And I'm going to leave you two little lovebirds together for days on end alone. You can live there and just enjoy that gone little woman because also, his tone-nail businesslike, I want her to dig as much as possible everything you got to tell her about what you know. Hear me?

Starting point is 03:36:50 She's my soulmate and confidant and mistress, and I want her to be happy and learn. What she looked like. I ask grossly, and I see the grimace on his face. He really knows me. Well, she looks all right. She has a gone little body, that's all I can say, and in bed she is by far the first and only and last possible, greatest everything you dig. This being just another of a long line of occasions when Cody gets me to be a sub-bow for his beauties so that everything can tie in together. He really loves me like a brother, and more than that. He gets annoyed at him. me sometimes, especially when I fumble and blumble, like with a bottle, for the time I almost strip the gears of the car because I forgot I was driving. In which case, actually, I remind him of

Starting point is 03:37:36 his old wino father. But the fantastic thing is that he reminds me of my father, so that we have this strange eternal father image relationship that goes on and on sometimes with tears. It's easy for me to think of Cody and almost cry. Sometimes I can see the same tearful expression in his eyes when he sometimes looks at me. He reminds me of my father, because he too blusters and hurries and fills all his pockets with racing forms and papers and pencils, and we're all ready to go on some mission in the night. He takes with ultimate seriousness, as though we were going on a last trip of them all. But it always ends up being a hilarious, meaningless Mark's brother's adventure, which gives me even more reason to love him, and my father too. That way, and finally in the book I wrote about us,

Starting point is 03:38:25 on the road, I forgot to mention two important things, that we were both devout little Catholics in our childhood, which gives us something in common, though we never talk about it. It's just there in our natures. And secondly, most important, that strange business when we shared another girl, Mary Lou, for that is, let's call her Joanna. And Cody at the time announced, That's what we'll be, old buddy, you and me, double husbands, later on we'll have whole harem and reams of haremes, boy, and we'll call ourselves. Or that is, Flutter, our self, Dulomeree. See, Deleuze and Pomeray. Doleu Maree. See? Though he was younger then and really silly, but that gives an indication of the way he felt about me.

Starting point is 03:39:11 Some kind of new thing in the world, actually, where men can really be angelic friends and not be homosexual and not fight over girls. But alas, the only thing we'd ever thought about was money, or the ridiculous time we fought about a little line of marijuana of dust running down the middle of a page where we were separating our shares with a knife. When I objected I wanted some of the dust, he yelled, Our original agreement had nothing to do with the dust.

Starting point is 03:39:35 And he slumps it all into his pocket and stalks off, red-faced. So I jump up and pack and announce I'm leaving, and Evelyn drives me to the city, but the car won't start. This is years ago. So Cody red-faced and crazy and his shame now has to push us with the clunker. There we go down San Jose Boulevard with Cody behind us, pushing us and bumping us, not just to give us a start, but to chastise me for being so greedy, and I shouldn't leave it all.

Starting point is 03:40:01 In fact, he'd back up and come up on our rear and really wham us, that night ending me dead drunk on Mao Damlet's floor on North Beach, and in case the whole question of us, the two most advanced men, friends in the world, still fighting over money after all being, as Julian says in New York, indication of the fact that money is the only thing Kennecks ever fight about, and Oakey's too, I guess. But Julian, I supposed, imagining and fantasizing himself as a noble Scotsman who fights about honor.

Starting point is 03:40:31 Though I tell him, ah, you Scotchman saviour's spit in your watch pocket. Lacramee rerum, the tears of things, all the years behind me and Cody, the way I always say, me and Cody instead of Cody and I are some such. And Irwin watching us across the world night now with a bite of marvel on his lower lip saying, Ah, angels of the West Companions in Heaven And writing letters asking

Starting point is 03:40:55 What now? What's the latest? What visions? What arguments? What sweet agreements? And such That night the kids end up sleeping in the Jeep anyway Because they're afraid of the big black woods And I sleep by the creek in my bag And in the morning we're all set to go back to Las Gatos and see the villain play Frustrated Ron is casting sad eyes at Evelyn Apparently she's put him off because she says to me And I don't blame her

Starting point is 03:41:20 "'Really, the way Cody presses people on me, it's awful. "'At least I should have my own choice.' "'But she's laughing because it's funny, and it is funny, "'the way Cody does it, anxious and harried, "'wondering if that's what she really wants and wants no such thing. "'At least not with utter strangers,' says I to be funny. "'She... "'Besides, I'm so sick of all this sex business.

Starting point is 03:41:42 "'That's all he talks about. "'His friends, here they are all open channels to do good as co-creators with God, "'and all they think about is behind. That's why you're so refreshing, she adds. But I ain't so refreshing as all that, hey? That's my relationship with Evelyn. We're real pals, and we can kid about anything, even the first night I met her in Denver in 1947,

Starting point is 03:42:06 when we danced and Cody watched anxiously. A kind of romantic pair, in fact. And I shud her sometimes to think of all that stellar mystery of how she is going to get me in a future lifetime. Wow. And I seriously do believe. that will be my salvation too. A long way to go.

Starting point is 03:42:26 End of chapter 24. Chapter 25 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This liverbox recordings in the public domain. Read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 25. The silly, stupid, hissed the villain play is all right in itself, but just as we arrive at the scene of the chuck wagons and tents all done up real old western style,

Starting point is 03:42:54 there's a big fat sheriff type with two six shooters standing at the admission gate. Cody says, That's to give it color, see? But I'm drunk. And as we all pile out of the car, I go up to the fat sheriff and start telling him a southern joke. In fact, just the plot of an Erskine Calwell short story. Which he receives with a witless smiling expression, or really like the expression of an executioner or a southern constable listening to a Yankee talk.

Starting point is 03:43:23 So naturally I'm surprised later when we go into the cute old West Saloon and the kids start banging on the old piano and I join them with big loud Stravinsky chords. Here comes two guns, sheriff fatty coming in and saying in a menacing voice like TV Western movies, You can't play that piano! I'm surprised, turning to Evelyn to learn that he's the blasted proprietor the whole place and if he says I can't play the piano, there's nothing I can do about it legally. But besides that, he's got actual bullets in those six guns.

Starting point is 03:43:53 He's going all out to play the part. But to be yanked from joyful piano thumping with kids to see that awful dead face of negative horror, I just jump up and say, All right, the hell with it, I'm leaving anyway. So Cody follows me to the car where I take another swig of white port. Let's get the hell out of here, I say. Just what I was thinking about, says Cody. In fact, I've already arranged with the director of the play to drive Evelyn and the kids home,

Starting point is 03:44:19 so we'll just go to the city now. Great. and I've told Evelyn we're cutting out, so let's go. I'm sorry, Cody, I screwed up your little family party. No, no, he protests. Man, I have to come to these things, you know, and be a big hubby and father type. And, you know, I'm on parole, and I got to put up appearances, but it's a drag. To show what a drag it is, we go scooting down that road, passing six cars easy as pie.

Starting point is 03:44:45 And I'm glad this happened because it gave us an excuse, you know, to get out of there. I was thinking for an excuse when it happened. That old fart is crazy, you know. He's a millionaire, you know. I've talked to him, that little beady brain, and you'd be glad you missed hanging around to that performance man and that audience. Ow, ugh. I almost wish I was back in San Quentin, but here we go, son.

Starting point is 03:45:09 So, of course, we're alone in a car at night bashing down the line to a specific somewhere. Nothing, nowhere, about it, whatever, especially this time in a way. That white line is feeding into our fender like an ink. impatient electronic quiver, shuddering in the night. And how beautifully sometimes it curves one side or the other as he smoothly swerves for passing or for something else, avoiding a bump or something.

Starting point is 03:45:35 And on the big highway bay shore, how beautifully he just swings in and out of lanes, almost effortlessly, and completely unnoticeable, passing to the right and to the left without a flaw, all kinds of cars with anxious eyes turning to us, although he's the only one on the road who knows how to drive completely well. It's blue dusk all up and down the California world. Frisco glitters up ahead. Our radio plays rhythm and blues as we pass the joint back and forth in jut-jawed silence,

Starting point is 03:46:04 both looking ahead with big private thoughts now so vast we can't communicate them anymore. And if we tried, it would take a million years and a billion books. Too late, too late. The history of everything we've seen together and separately has become a library in itself. The shelves pile higher. They're full of misty documents or documents of the mist. The mind is convoluted in every tuckaway, every witch away, tuckered hole, till there's no more the expressing of our latest thoughts let alone old.

Starting point is 03:46:33 Mighty, genius of the mind, Cody, whom I announces the greatest writer the world will ever know if he ever gets down to writing again like he did earlier. It's so enormous we both sit here, sighing, in fact. No, the only writing I done, he says, A few letters to Willemead. In fact, quite a few. She's got them all wrapped in ribbons there.

Starting point is 03:46:53 I figured if I tried to write a book or something, or prose or something, they'd just take it away from me when I left, so I wrote her about three letters a week for two years. And the trouble, of course, as I say, you've heard a million times is the mind flows, the mind rises, and nobody can buy any possible... Oh, hell, I don't want to talk about it. Besides, I can see from glancing at him that becoming a rider holds

Starting point is 03:47:18 no interest for him because life is so holy for him there's no need to do anything that live it writing is just an afterthought or a scratch anyway at the surface but if he could if he would there i am riding in california miles away from home where my poor cats buried and my mother grieves and that's what i'm thinking it always makes me proud to love the world somehow hates so easy compared but here i go flattering myself, Helling head-bent to the silliest hate I ever had. End of Chapter 25. Chapter 26 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This here, Libervox recordings in the public domain.

Starting point is 03:48:07 Read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 26. Although Cody said these things, I'm very well aware that the real arrangement of the evening is that we're just going to see Billy together so she can get her kicks meeting me. after hearing about me from him and after reading my books, etc. And in fact, Cody has already conferred with Evelyn about how I'm going to be staying at their house in Las Gatos for a month,

Starting point is 03:48:32 as of old, sleeping in my bag in the backyard, not because they don't want me to sleep in the house, but it's my idea. But it's beautiful anyway to sleep under the stars, and any way I therefore keep out of the way of the family when they get up to go to work and school. At noon they see me shambling and from the big backfield yard, for coffee. And I'm in line for that. I, that's what I want to do, and that's my plan. But when we run upstairs to Willamine's apartment and come bursting in to this neat little,

Starting point is 03:49:03 well-arranged pad with goldfish bowl books, strange doodads, neat kitchen, the whole clean as a pin, and there's Billy yourself, a blonde with arched eyebrows, exactly like the male Julian blonde with arched eyebrows. And I yell out, it's Julian, by God, it's Julian! And by now I'm drunk anyway because we've, as of old, picked up an old hitchhiker on Bayshore who says his name is Joe Enat. We bought him a bottle, and I bought me one too. Never well forget old Joe E. Nat. In fact, somehow because he said he was a Russian, and his was an ancient Russian name. When I wrote out our names, he said my name was an ancient Russian name also, though it's Breton.

Starting point is 03:49:47 And also told us he'd just been beaten up by a young Negro for no reason in a public. toilet and Cody gasps and says to me, I have met those negroes that beat up old men. They're called the strong arms in San Quentin. They're all put away among themselves away from the other prisoners. They're all negroes and it seems all they want to do is beat up old defenseless men. He's telling the absolute truth. But why do they do that?

Starting point is 03:50:11 Oh man, I don't know. They just want to hit up on some old man. They can't hit back and just beat him and beat him until he's dead. And, oh, the horrid. of Cody's knowledge of the world when all is said and done. So now we're sitting with Billy and her pad outside the window. You see the glittering lights of the city again. Ah, Irby Irma, the world again.

Starting point is 03:50:34 And she's got these mad blue eyes, arched eyebrows, intelligent face, just like Julian. I keep saying, Julian, God damn it. And I see, even in my drunkenness, a little worried flutter in Cody's eyes. The fact of the matter being, Billy and I go, for each other like two tons of bricks right there in front of Cody, so that when he rises and announce he's going back to Las Gatos to get some sleep to go to work, it's already well

Starting point is 03:50:59 agreed I'm staying right where I am, and not only for tonight but for weeks, months, years. Poor Cody. Yet you see, I've already explained why actually subconsciously this is what he really wants to happen, but he won't admit it ever, and always invents reasons around this to get mad at me and call me a bastard. But aside from Cody, I find Billy to be a bit. a very companionable, strange kid in this lonesome night, and actually need to stay with her a while. In fact, both Billy and I explained to Cody why. But there's nothing evil, man against man, or sinister about any of it.

Starting point is 03:51:36 It's just a strange innocence. A spontaneous burst of love, in fact. And Cody understands that better than anybody else anyway. So he leaves at midnight saying he'll be back tomorrow night. And all of a sudden I'm alone with a chariot. woman, and we're talking a blue streak sitting cross-legged facing each other on the floor and a litter of books and bottles. It gives me a pang of pain and remorse really now, to recall that on this first night her apartment was so neat and clean and charming. The chair by the goldfish

Starting point is 03:52:07 bowl, which I quickly appropriated as my old man chair, where I sat constantly sipping port for a whole week, the kitchen with its intelligent arrangements of spices and eggs in the icebox. And for that madder too, the poor little son of Billy, sleeping in a well-arranged back room, her son from her deceased husband, who was also a railroad man. Elliot's the child's name, and I didn't get to see him till later that night. And with a huge packet of Cody's San Quentin letters in her hand, she launches forth on her theories about Cody in eternity. But all I can keep saying as I swig from my bottle is,

Starting point is 03:52:44 Julian, you're talking too much. Julian, Julian, my God, who'd ever dream I'd run into a woman who looks like Julie? You look like Julian, but you're not Julian, and on top of that, you're... A woman. How goddamn strange! In fact, she had to pack me off to bed drunk, but not before our first lovely undertaking of love and everything Cody said about her being absolutely true. But the main thing being that though she looked like Julian, etc., and had Cody's big sad,

Starting point is 03:53:14 abstract letters about karma and a ribbon, and actually went out in the morning and earned a hundred a week in fashion modeling. She had the most musical, beautiful, and sad voice I've ever heard in my life. Things she's saying are really rather inane, because after all, her education is based on really Californian hysterias, like the earlier mistress of Cody, Rose Marie, who also was thin, pale-haired, and crazy, and kept talking abstract. Like she's saying, I thought I could do something to ease the contradiction between eminent and universal ethics,

Starting point is 03:53:49 which I thought was my problem and was what I hoped to gain through therapy like any evolution presupposes an involution and all that kind of thinking as I sigh but she does say something interesting once in a while like while Cody was in prison my main occupation

Starting point is 03:54:05 was praying for him I had an all day going there was also a bit we did together every evening from 9 to 909 but he's out now and something else is happening I'm not sure what but I'm sure we aid the storm when we transcend time in one

Starting point is 03:54:19 respect and can't even keep up with it in others. But also all kinds of, to me, unimportant and uninteresting crap about channels, about people being either closed or open channels, and Cody is a big open channel pouring out all as holy jism on heaven. I really can't remember. Or the destinies, the size, the rooftops of all that. The stars are shining down on their poor heads as they draw breath to explain inanities, really. Like the letters to her, I glance at them, are all about how they've met and their souls

Starting point is 03:54:54 have collided in this dimension because of some unfulfilled karma on another planet, and in another plane, that is. And now they have to gird themselves to assume this big responsibility to meet some measure of this and that. I don't even want to go into it. Because also the fact of the matter being, when Willamine talks to me, I'm utterly bored. I'm only interested in the sad music of her voice. and in a strange circumstance. I guess karma-like, too, that she looks like poor Julian. Her voice is the main point. She talks with a broken heart.

Starting point is 03:55:30 Her voice lutes brokenly like a heart lost, musically too, like in a lost grove. It's almost too much to bear sometimes, like some fantastic, futuristic Jerry Southern singer in a nightclub who steps up to the mic and the spotlight in Las Vegas, but doesn't even have to sing. Just talk. To make men sigh and women wonder, I guess. If women ever wonder.

Starting point is 03:55:54 So that, as she trying to explain all that nonsense to me, all that philosophy of hers and Cody's and Cody's new buddy Perry coming up the next day, I just sit and marvel and stare at her mouth wondering where all the beauty is coming from and why. And we end up making love sweetly, too. A little blonde, well-experienced in all the facets of love-making, and sweet with compassion, and just too much so that Badan were already going to get married

Starting point is 03:56:22 and fly away to Mexico in a week. In fact, I can see it now. A great big four-way marriage with Cody and Evelyn. For she is the great enemy of Evelyn. She's not satisfied just to be Cody's lover and soul heart. She wants to go right over there and lay Evelyn down on the line and take Cody away with her forever. And to do this, she'll even have a dead-end, heaven, deep love affair

Starting point is 03:56:46 with old Jack. Same pattern of old. There's not much difference between her and Evelyn, when you listen to their talk about Cody, except in Evelyn's case I'm always fascinatedly interested. Billy actually bores me, though, of course, I can't tell her that. Evelyn is still the champ, and I wonder about Cody. Oh, the ups and downs and dows and juggling of women,

Starting point is 03:57:09 blondes at that, all in the great magical city of the Gondarvas of San Francisco, and here I am a little. on a magic carpet with one of them. We. At first, of course, it's a great ball, a great new eye-shattering explosion of experience. Not dreaming I, what's to come.

Starting point is 03:57:29 For with sad musical, Billy in my arms, and my name Billy too now. Billy and Billy, arm in arm, oh, beautiful, and Cody has given his consent in a way. We go roaming the gingus con clouds of soft love and hope and anybody who's never done that. this is crazy, because a new love affair always gives hope. The irrational, mortal, loneliness is always crowned. That thing I saw, that horror of snake emptiness, when I took the deep

Starting point is 03:58:00 iodine death breath on Big Sur Beach, is now justified in hosaned, and raised up like a sacred urn to heaven in the mere fact of the taking off of clothes and clashing wits and bodies in the inexpressibly nervously sad delight of love. Don't let no old fogies tell you otherwise, and on top of that, nobody in the world ever even dares to write the true story of love. It's awful. We're stuck with a 50% incomplete literature and drama. Lying mouth to mouth, kiss to kiss, and the pillow dark.

Starting point is 03:58:32 Loin to loin and unbelievable surrendering sweetness, so distant from all our mental, fearful abstractions, it makes you wonder why men have termed God anti-sexual somehow. The secret underground truth of mad desire, hiding under fenders, under buried junkyards throughout the world, never mentioned in newspapers, written about haltingly and like corn by authors

Starting point is 03:58:54 and painted tongue-in-cheek by artists. Just listen to Tristan and Usuled by Wagner, and think of him in a Bavarian field with his beloved naked beauty under the fall leaves. How strange in all in making everything that's happened in the past weeks, the backs and forths and paint of me and city and sir, all piled up now rationally like a big construction whereon could

Starting point is 03:59:17 be built a diving board, which would enable me clumsily to dive into belly's soul, and therefore why complain? In the middle of the night, she fetches a little four-year-old boy to show me the spiritual beauty of her son. He is one of the weirdest persons I've ever met. He has large, liquid brown eyes, very beautiful, and he hates anybody who comes near his mother and keeps asking her questions constantly like, Why do you stay with him? Why is he here? Who is he? Or why is it dark

Starting point is 03:59:49 outside? Or why does the sunshine every day? Or anything. He'll just ask questions about everything and she answers every one of them with extreme delight and patience. Till I say, doesn't he bother you with all these questions? Why don't you let him croon and goof like a little child? He's tugging at your knee asking everything, man. Why don't you just let him sing song? She answers, I answer him because I may be missing his next question. Everything he asks me and says to me represents something important about the absolute I may be missing.

Starting point is 04:00:22 What do you mean the absolute? You yourself said everything is the absolute. But of course she's right and I realize that in my dirty old soul I'm already jealous of Elliot. End of Chapter 26. Chapter 27 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This Libravox recordings in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 27

Starting point is 04:00:53 The mad of night admits the groaning glory God-like love, I guess, but at the same time it's also boring in a way, and we both laugh to discuss that. We stay awake that first night till dawn, discussing everything in the books from Cody in every detail, down to me in every detail, to her in every detail, to Evelyn, to books and philosophies, and religions and the absolute, and I end up whispering her poems. Poor kid has to get up in the morning and go to work, and I'm left there snoring drunk, but she makes her neat breakfast and takes Elliot off to the daily babysitter lady, and I wake up at one in the afternoon, alone, and take a swig of wine, and get in the hot bath

Starting point is 04:01:40 to read a book. The phone keeps ringing, everybody from Monsanto to Fagan, to McLeer, to the moon man has somehow found out where I am and what the number is. Though none of them have previously even met Billy, let alone seen her, I shudder to realize Cody will get mad for making his secret life so public. But here comes Perry. Like me, Perry has that strange brotherly relationship with Cody, whereby he gets to be confidant and sometimes lover of all Cody's gals. And I can see why.

Starting point is 04:02:15 He looks just like me. Only he's young and looks like I did when first Cody met me. But the point is not that so much. He is a tempestuous loss-tossed soul just out of Soledodd State Prison for attempted robbery with a boyish face and black hair falling over it. But powerful, thick, muscular arms that I realize he could break a man in half with. His name is strange too. Perry Eterbide.

Starting point is 04:02:43 I immediately say, I know what you are. Basque. "'Bask? Is that it? I never found out. Let's call my mother long distance in Utah and tell her that.' And he rings up his mother way over there on Billy's phone bill. And here I am, bottle of port wine in one hand and butt and mouth talking to a Basque ex-Conn's mother in Utah, telling her, in fact, reassuring her. "'Yes, I believe it's a Basque name,' she's saying, "'Hey, what do you say? Who are you?'

Starting point is 04:03:14 And there's Perry smiling all glad. A very strange kid. It's been a long time, in fact, in my literary sort of life, that I've met a real tough umbrae like that out of jails, and with those arms of steel, and that fevered concern that scares governments and makes officials pale. That's why he's always put away in prison this type of man. Yes, yet.

Starting point is 04:03:37 The type of man the country always needs when there's a little old war started by an aging governor. A real dangerous character, in fact, Perry, because though I appreciate his poetic soul and everything, I realize looking at him, he's capable exploding and killing somebody for an idea, maybe, or for love. Some of his own friends ring Billy's doorbell. Everybody seems to know I'm there. They come up.

Starting point is 04:04:05 They are strange, anarchistic negroes and ex-cons. It seems to be some sort of gang, I begin to wonder. Like a ring of fevered sages. The Negroes are in teard. intense and crazy and intellectual, but they've all got those strong muscular arms again. And all have jail records, yet they all talk as though the end of the world depended on their words. Hard to explain, but we'll do. Billy and her gang, in fact.

Starting point is 04:04:35 With all that fancy rigmarole about spiritual matters, I wonder if it isn't just a big secret hustler outfit, though I realize that I've noticed it before in San Francisco. A kind of ephemeral hysteria that hides in the air over the rooftops among certain circles there, leading always to suicide and maim. Me, just an innocent, lost-hearted meditator, and goop among strange intense criminal agitators of the heart. It reminds me, in fact, of a nightmare I had just before coming out to the coast.

Starting point is 04:05:09 In the dream, I'm back in San Francisco, but there's something funny going on. There's dead silence throughout the entire city, Men like printers and office executives and house painters are all standing silently in second floor windows, looking down on the empty streets of San Francisco. Once in a while some beatniks walk by below, also silent. They're being watched, but not only by the authorities, but by everybody. The beatniks seem to have the whole street system to themselves, but nobody's saying anything. And in this intense silence, I take a ride on a self-propelled platform, right downtown and out to the farms,

Starting point is 04:05:51 where a woman running a chicken farm invites me to join her and live with her. The little platform rolling quietly as the people are watching from windows and groups of profile, like the profiles in old Van Dyke paintings, intense, suspicious, momentous. This billy business reminding me of that, but because to me the only thing, that matters as the conception in my own mind, there has to be no reality anyway to what I suppose is going on. But this also, an indication of the coming madness in Big Sur. End of Chapter 27. Chapter 28 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This Librevox recording is in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 28. Strange. And Perry E. Turbide that first day while Billy's at work and we

Starting point is 04:06:52 you've just called his mother, now wants me to come with him to visit a general of the U.S. army. Why? And what's all these generals looking out of silent windows, I say? But nothing surprises Perry. We'll go there because I want you to dig the most beautiful girls we ever saw. In fact, we take a cab. But the beautiful girls turn out to be eight and nine and ten years old.

Starting point is 04:07:16 Daughters of the general. Or maybe even cousins or daughters of a next-door strange general. But the mother is there. There are also boys playing in a back room. We have Elliot with us, whom Perry has carried on his shoulders all the way. I look at Perry and he says, I wanted you to see the most beautiful little cans in town. And I realize he's dangerously insane.

Starting point is 04:07:39 In fact, he then says, See this perfect beauty? A ponytail, ten-year-old daughter of the general, who ain't home yet. I'm going to kidnap her right now. And he takes her by the hand and they go out on the street for an hour. while I sit there over drinks talking to the mother. There's some vast conspiracy to make me go mad anyway.

Starting point is 04:07:59 The mother is polite as ordinarily. The general comes home and he's a rugged, big bald-headed general, and with him is his best friend, a photographer called Shea, a thin, well-combed, well-dressed, ordinary downtown commercial photographer of the city. I don't understand anything. But suddenly little Elliot is crying in the other room, and I rush in there and see that the two boys, have whacked him or something because he did something wrong,

Starting point is 04:08:25 so I chastise them and carry Elliot back into the living room on my shoulders like Perry does. Only, Elliot wants to get down off my shoulders at once. In fact, he won't even sit on my lap. In fact, he hates my guts. I call Billy desperately at her agency, and she says she'll be over to pick us all up and adds, How's Perry today? He's kidnapping little girls.

Starting point is 04:08:48 He says are beautiful. He wants to marry 10-year-old girls with ponytails. That's the way he is. Be sure to dig him. And her musical, sad voice over the phone. I turn my poor tortured attention to the general who says he was an anti-fascist fighter with the maquis during World War II. And also a gorilla in the South Pacific. And no is one of the finest restaurants in San Francisco, where we can all go feast.

Starting point is 04:09:15 A Filipino restaurant near Chinatown. I say, okay, great. He gives me more booze. Seeing the amusing Irish face of Shea, the photographer, I yell, You can take my picture any time you want. And he says, sinister, not for propaganda reasons, anything but propaganda reasons. What hell do you mean propaganda reasons? I ain't got nothing to do with propaganda.

Starting point is 04:09:39 And here comes Perry back through the door with poo-poo holding his hand, and they've gone to dig the street and have a Coke. And I realize everybody is just living their lives quietly, but it's only me that's insane. In fact, I yearn to have old Cody around to explain all this to me, though it soon becomes apparent to me not even Cody could explain. I'm beginning to go seriously crazy, just like subterranean Irene went crazy,

Starting point is 04:10:04 though I don't realize it yet. I'm beginning to read plots into every simple line. Besides, the general scares me even further by turning out to be a strange, affluent, well-dressed citizen who doesn't even help me to pay the tab for the Filipino Duffalo. dinner, which we have. Meeting Billy at the restaurant, and the restaurant itself is weird, especially because of a big, raunchy, mad, thick-lipped, sloppy young Filipino woman, sitting alone at the end of the restaurant, gobbling up her food obscenely and looking at us

Starting point is 04:10:34 insolently, as though to say, fuck you, I eat the way I like, splashing gravy everywhere. I can't understand what's going on. Because, also the general has suggested this dinner, but I have to pay for everybody. Him, Shea, Perry, Billy, Elliot, me, others. Strange apocalyptic madness is now shuddering in my eyeballs, and I'm even running out of money in their apocalypse which they themselves have created in this San Francisco silence anyway. I yearn to go hide and cry in Evelyn's arms, but I end up hiding in Billy's arms, and here she goes again, the second evening, explaining all her spiritual ideas. But what about Perry? What's he up to? And who's that strange general? What are you? A bunch of communists?

Starting point is 04:11:19 End of Chapter 28. Chapter 29 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This Libra Box recordings in the public domain. Read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 29. The little child refuses to sleep in his crib, but has to come trotting out and watch us make love on the bed. But Billy says, That's good.

Starting point is 04:11:46 He'll learn what other way will he ever learn? I feel ashamed. But because Billy is there and she's the mother, I must go along and not worry. Another sinister fact. At one point the poor child is drooling long, slavers of spit from his lips watching. I cry, Billy, look at him, it's not good for him. But she says again, Anything he wants he can have, even us.

Starting point is 04:12:10 But, kid, it's not fair. Why doesn't he just sleep? He doesn't want to sleep. He wants to be with us. Oh, and I realize Billy is insane, and I'm not as insane as I thought, and there's something wrong. I feel myself skidding. Also because during the following week I keep sitting in that same chair by the goldfish bowl,

Starting point is 04:12:32 drinking bottle after bottle of port like an automaton, worrying about something. Monsanto comes to visit, McLeer, Fagan, everybody. They call to me, dashing up the stairs, and we have long drunken days talking, but I never seem to get out of that chair. I never even take another delightful warm bath reading books. and at night Billy comes home and we pitch into love again like monsters who don't know what else to do and by now I'm too blurry to know what's going on anyway though she reassures me everything is all right and meanwhile Cody has completely disappeared in fact I call him up and say are you going to come back and get me here

Starting point is 04:13:11 yes yes yes in a few days stay there as though maybe he wants me to learn what's happening like putting me through an ordeal to see what I have to say about it because he's been through the ordeal himself. In fact, everything is going crazy. Perry's visits scare me. I began to think he must be one of those strong armors who beat up old men. I watch him warily.

Starting point is 04:13:35 All this time he's pacing back and forth, saying, Man, you don't appreciate those sweet little cans? What does it matter how old a woman is? Nine or nineteen? Those little ponytails. Jiggle as they walk with those little jiggling cans. Did you ever kidnap one? You had a wine.

Starting point is 04:13:51 I'll make a run for you to get some more. Or would you rather have pot or something? What's wrong with you? I don't know what's going on. You're drinking too much, maybe. Cody told me you're falling apart, man. Don't do it. But what's going on?

Starting point is 04:14:07 Who cares, Pops? We're all swinging in love and trying to go from day to day with self-respect while all the squares are putting us down. Who? The squares? Putting down us. We want to swing.

Starting point is 04:14:21 and live and carry across the night like when we get to L.A. I'm going to show you the maddest scene some friends of mine down there. In my drunkenness, I've already projected a big trip with Billy and Elliot and Perry to Mexico, but we're going to stop in L.A. to see a rich woman Perry knows who's going to give him money. And if she doesn't, he's going to get it anyway. And as I say, Billy and I are going to get married to. The insaneest week of my life. Billy at night saying,

Starting point is 04:14:48 You're worried that I can't handle marrying you, but of course we can't. can. Cody wants it too. I'll talk to your mother and make her love me and need me. Jack! She suddenly cries with anguished, musical voice, because I've just said, Ah, Billy, go get yourself a He-Man and get married. You're my last chance to marry a He-Man. What do you mean, He-Man? Don't you realize I'm crazy? You're crazy, but you're my last chance to have an understanding with a He-Man. What about Cody? "'Cody will never leave Evelyn.' "'Very strange.

Starting point is 04:15:26 "'But more, though, I don't understand it.' "'End of Chapter 29. "'Chapter 30 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac, "'this Livervox recordings in the public domain,' read by Ben Tucker. "'I do understand the strange day Ben Fagan "'fin finally came to visit me alone, "'bringing wine, smoking his pipe, and saying, "'Jack, you need some sleep,

Starting point is 04:15:56 "'that chair you see, you've been sitting in for days. Have you noticed the bottom is falling out of it? I get on the floor and, by God, look, and it's true, the springs are coming out. How long have you been sitting in that chair? Every day, waiting for Billy to come home and talking to Perry and the others all day. My God, let's go out and sit in the park, I add. In the blur of days, McLeer has also been over on a forgotten day when, on nothing but his chance mentioned that maybe I could get his book published in Paris.

Starting point is 04:16:25 I jump up and dial a long distance for Paris and call Claude Gallimard and only get his butler, apparently, in some Parisian suburb, and I hear the insane giggle on the other end of the line. Is this the home? C. Leche de Monsieur Gallimard? Giggle. Where is Monsieur Galemarde? Giggle.

Starting point is 04:16:48 A very strange phone call. Clear waiting there expectantly to get his dark brown published. So in a fury of madness, I then call London to talk to my old buddy Lionel, just for no reason at all. And I finally reach him at home, he's saying on the wire, You're calling me from San Francisco, but why? Which I can't answer any more than the giggling butler. And to add to my madness, of course, why should a long distance call to Paris to a publisher end up with a giggle and a long distance call to an old friend in London end up with a friend getting mad?

Starting point is 04:17:22 So Fagan now sees I'm going overboard crazy and I need sleep. sleep. Well, get a bottle, I yell. But end up, he's sitting in the grass of the park smoking his pipe from noon till 6 p.m. And I'm passed out, exhausted, sleeping in the grass, bottle unopened, only to wake up once in a while wondering where I am, and, my God, I'm in heaven with Ben Fagan watching over men and me. And I say to Ben when I wake up in the gathering 6 p.m. dusk, oh, Ben, I'm sorry. I ruined our day by sleeping like this. But he says, you needed the sleep, I told you. And you mean to tell me you've been sitting all afternoon like that?

Starting point is 04:18:03 Watching unexpected events, says he. Like there seems to be sound of a Bacchanal in those bushes over there. And I look and hear children yelling and screaming and hidden bushes in the park. What they're doing? I don't know. Also, a lot of strange people went by. How long have I been sleeping? Ages. I'm sorry

Starting point is 04:18:25 Why, I should be sorry I love you anyway Was I snoring? You've been snoring all day And I've been sitting here all day What a beautiful day Yes, it's been a beautiful day How strange

Starting point is 04:18:43 Yes, strange But not so strange either You're just tired What do you think of belly He chuckles over? his pipe. What do you expect me to say? That the frog bit your leg? Why do you have a diamond in your forehead? I don't have a diamond in my forehead, damn you, and stop making arbitrary conceptions, he roars. But what am I doing? Stop thinking about yourself, will you? Just float with the

Starting point is 04:19:12 world. Did the world float by the park? All day, you should have seen it. I've smoked a whole package of edgewood. It's been a very strange day. Are you sad? I didn't talk to you. Not at all. In fact, I'm glad. We better be starting back. He adds, Billy be coming home from work soon now. Oh, Ben. Oh, Sunflower. Ah, shit, he says. It's strange. Who said it wasn't?

Starting point is 04:19:44 I don't understand it. Don't worry about it. Hmm, holy room, sad room. Life is a sad room. All sentient beings realize that, he says sternly. Benjamin, my real Zen master, even more than all our Georges and authors, actually. Ben, I think I'm going crazy. You said that to me in 1955. Yeah, but my brain's getting soft from drinking and drinking and drinking. What you need is a cup of tea, I'd say, if I didn't know that you're too crazy to know how really crazy you are.

Starting point is 04:20:20 But why? What's going on? Did you come 3,000 miles to find out? Three thousand miles from where, after all? From whiny old me? That's all right. Everything is possible. Even Nietzsche knew that. Ain't nothing wrong with old Nietzsche.

Starting point is 04:20:38 Except he went mad too. Do you think I'm going mad? Ho! Hardy laugh. What's that mean? Laughing at me? Nobody's laughing at you. Don't get excited.

Starting point is 04:20:51 What'll we do now? let's go visit the museum over there. There's a museum of some sort across the grass of the park, so I get up wobbly and walk with old Ben across the sad grass. At one point I put my arm over his shoulder and lean on him. Are you a ghoul? I ask. Sure, why not? I like ghouls that let me sleep.

Starting point is 04:21:14 Deleuze, it's good for you to drink in a way, because you're awful stingy with yourself when you're sober. You sound like Julian. I never met Julian, but I understand Billy looks like him. You kept saying that before you went to sleep. What happened while I was asleep? Oh, people went by and came back and forth and the sun sank and finally sank down and gone now, almost as you can see. What you want, just name it, you got it.

Starting point is 04:21:41 Well, I want sweet salvation. What's supposed to be sweet about salvation? Maybe it's sour. It's sour in my mouth. Maybe your mouth is too big or too small. Salvation is for little kitties, but only for a while. Did you see any little kitties today? Sure, hundreds of them came to visit you while you were sleeping.

Starting point is 04:22:03 Really? Sure, didn't you know you were saved? Now, come on. One of them was real big and roared like a lion, but he had a big wet snout and kissed you and said, Ah! What's this museum up here? Let's go in and find out.

Starting point is 04:22:20 That's the way Ben is. He doesn't know what's going on either, but at least he waits to find out maybe. But the museum is closed. We stand there on the steps looking at the closed door. Hey, I say, the temple is closed. So suddenly in Red Sundown, me and Ben Fagan, arm in arm, are walking slowly, sadly, back down the broad steps, like two monks going down the esplanade of Kyoto,

Starting point is 04:22:46 as I imagine Kyoto somehow. And we're both smiling, Happily, suddenly. I feel good because I've had my sleep, but mainly I feel good because somehow old Ben, my age, has blessed me by sitting over my sleep all day, and now with these few silly words, arm in arm we slowly descend the steps without a word.

Starting point is 04:23:07 It's been the only peaceful day I've had in California, in fact, except alone in the woods, which I tell him, and says, Well, who said you weren't alone now? making me realize the ghostliness of existence, though I feel his big bulging body with my hands and say, You sure some pathetic ghosts with all that ephemeral, heavy crock of flesh? I didn't say nothing, he laughed. Whatever I say, Ben, don't mind it, I'm just a fool.

Starting point is 04:23:36 You said in 1957 in the grass, drunk on whiskey, you were the greatest thinker in the world. That was before I fell asleep and woke up. Now I realize I'm no good at all, and that makes me feel free. You're not even free being no good. You better stop thinking, that's all. I'm glad you visited me today.

Starting point is 04:23:54 I think I might have died. It's all your fault. What are we going to do with our lives? Oh, he says. I don't know, just watch them, I guess. Do you hate me? Well, do you like me? Well, how are things?

Starting point is 04:24:10 The hicks are all right. Anybody hex you lately? Yeah. With cardboard games? Carboard games? I ask. Well, you know, they build cardboard houses and put people in them. And the people are cardboard, and the magician makes the dead body twitch,

Starting point is 04:24:27 and they bring water to the moon. And the moon has a strange ear and all that. So I'm all right, goof. Okay. End of Chapter 30. Section 31 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This Livervox recordings in the public domain. Read by Ben.

Starting point is 04:24:52 Tucker. Chapter 31 So there I am as it starts to get dark standing with one hand on the window curtain, looking down on the street as Ben Fagan walks away to get the bus on the corner. His big, baggy corduroyo pants and simple blue Goodwill work shirt going home to the bubble bath and a famous poem, not really worried or at least not worried about what I'm worried about, though he too carries that anguishing guilt, I guess, and hopeless remorse, but the pot-boiler of time hasn't made his early primordial dawns over the pines of Oregon come true.

Starting point is 04:25:30 I'm clutching at the drapes of the window, like the Phantom of the Opera behind the mask, waiting for Billy to come home and remembering how I used to stand by the windows like this in my childhood, and look out on dusky streets and think how awful I was in this development everybody said was supposed to be my life in their lives. Not so much that I'm a drunker that I feel guilty about, but that others who occupy this plane of life on earth with me don't feel guilty at all. Crooked judges, shaving and smiling in the morning on the way to their heinous indifferences, respectable generals, ordering soldiers by a telephone to go die or drop dead,

Starting point is 04:26:12 pickpockets, nodding in cells, saying, I never heard anybody. That's one thing you can say for me, yes, sir. Women who regard themselves, saviors of men simply stealing their substance because they think their swan-rich necks deserve it anyway. Though for every swan-rich neck you lose, there's another ten waiting,

Starting point is 04:26:33 each one ready to lay for a lemon. In fact, awful, huge-faced monsters of men just because their shirts are clean, Daining to control the lives of working men by running for governor, saying, Your tax money in my hands will be aptly used. You should realize how valuable I am and how much you need me. Without me, what would you be, not led at all?

Starting point is 04:26:57 Forward to the big, designed, mankind cartoon of a man, standing facing the rising sun with strong shoulders, with a plow at his feet. The necktide governor is going to make hay while the sun rises. I feel guilty for being a member of the human race. Drunkard, yes, and one of the worst fools on earth. In fact, not even a genuine drunkard, just a fool. But I stand there with hand on curtain, looking down for Billy who's late.

Starting point is 04:27:29 Ah, me. I remember that frightening thing, Milarepa said, which is other than those reassuring words of his I remembered in the cabin of sweet loneliness on Big Sur. When the various experiences come to light in meditation, do not be proud and anxious to tell other people else to goddesses and mothers you will bring annoyance. And here I am a perfectly obvious fool American rider doing just that, not only for a living, which I was always able to glean anyway from railroad and ship and lifting boards and sacks with humble hand. But because if I don't write what actually I see happening in this unhappy glit, which is rounded by the contours of my death skull, I think I'll have been sent on earth by poor God for nothing. Though being a phantom of the opera, why should that worry me?

Starting point is 04:28:20 In my youth leaning my brow hopelessly on the typewriter bar, wondering why God ever was anyway. Or biting my lip in brown glooms in the parlor chair in which my father has died, and we've all died a million deaths. Only Fagan can understand now he's got his bus, And when Billy comes home with Elliot, I smile and sit down in the chair, and it utterly collapses under me. Blang! I'm sprawled on the floor with surprise.

Starting point is 04:28:47 The chair has gone. How'd that happen? Wonders Billy. And at the same time, we both look at the fishbowl and both the goldfishes are upside down, floating dead on the surface of the water. I've been sitting in that chair by that fishbowl for a week. Drinking and smoking and talking, and now the goldfish are dead. What killed them? I don't know.

Starting point is 04:29:11 Did I kill them because I gave them some Kellogg's cornflicks? Maybe you're not supposed to give them anything but their fish food. But I thought they were hungry, so I gave them a few flicks of corn flakes. Well, I don't know what killed them. But why don't anybody know? What happened? Why do they do this? Otters and mouses and every damn thing died on all sides, Billy?

Starting point is 04:29:36 I can't stand it. It's all my goddamn fault every time. Who said it was your fault, dear? Dear. You call me deer? Why do you call me deer? Ah, let me love you, kissing me. Just because you don't deserve it, chastised. Why don't I deserve it? Because you say so.

Starting point is 04:29:58 But what about the fish? I don't know, really. Is it because I've been sitting in that crumbling chair all week, blowing smoke on their water? and all the others smoking and all the talk. But the little kid Elliot comes crawling up his mommy's lap and starts asking questions. Billy, Billy, he calls her. Billy, Billy, Billy. Feeling her face, I'm almost going mad from the sadness of it all.

Starting point is 04:30:23 What did you do all day? I was with Ben Fagan and slept in the park. Billy, what are we going to do? Anytime you say, like you said, we'll get married and fly to Mexico with Perry and Elliot. I'm afraid of Perry and I'm afraid of Elliot He's only a little boy Billy I don't want to get married I'm afraid

Starting point is 04:30:44 Afraid I want to go home and die with my cat I can be a handsome thin young president in a suit Sitting in an old-fashioned rocking chair No instead I'm just the phantom of the opera Standing by a drape among dead fish and broken chairs Can it be that no one cares who made me or why Jack, what's the matter? What are you talking about?

Starting point is 04:31:09 But suddenly she's making supper, and poor little Elliot is waiting there with spoon upended and fist. I realize it's just a little family home scene, and I'm just a nut in the wrong place. And in fact, Billy starts saying, Jack, we should be married and have quiet suppers like this with Elliot. Something would sanctify you forever, I'm positive. What have I done wrong? What you've done wrong is withhold your love from, a woman like me, and from previous women, and future women like me. Can you imagine all the fun we'd have being married, putting Elliot to bed, going out to hear

Starting point is 04:31:45 jazz, or even taking planes to Paris suddenly, and all the things I have to teach you, and you teach me? Instead, all you've been doing is wasting life, really, sitting around, sad, wondering where to go, and all the time it's right there for you to take. supposing I don't want it. That's part of the picture where you say you don't want it. Of course you want. But I don't.

Starting point is 04:32:10 I'm a creepy, strange guy. You don't even know. Queepy, what's creepy, Billy? What's creepy? Is asking poor little Elliot. And meanwhile, Perry comes in for a minute and I point blank say to him, I don't understand you, Perry. I love you, dig you, you're wild.

Starting point is 04:32:27 But what's all this business where you want to kidnap little girls? But suddenly as I'm asking that, I see tears in his eyes, and I realize he's in love with Billy, and has always been. Wow. I even say it. You're in love with Billy, ain't you? I'm sorry, I'm cutting out. What are you talking about, man?

Starting point is 04:32:47 It's a big argument then about he and Billy are just friends, so I start singing just friends like Sinatra. Two friends, but not like before. But good-hearted Perry seeing me sing runs downstairs to get another bottle for me. But nevertheless, the fish are dead and the chair is broken. Perry, in fact, is a tragic young man with enormous potentials, who's just let himself swing and float to hell, I guess, unless something else happens to him soon.

Starting point is 04:33:19 I look at him and realize that besides loving Billy secretly, and truly, he must also love old Cody as much as I do. and all the world better than I do yet he is the character who is always being put away behind bars for this. Rugged, covered with woe, he sits there with his black hair always over his brow, over his black eyes, his iron arms hanging helplessly like the arms of a powerful idiot in the madhouse, with the beauty of lostness pasted all over him. Who is he, in fact? And why doesn't blonde Billy washing the homey dishes there

Starting point is 04:33:54 acknowledge his love. In fact, me and Perry end up We're both sitting with hanging heads When Billy comes back in the living room And sees us like that Like two repentant catatonic's in hell Some Negro comes in and says If I give him a few dollars, he'll get some pot

Starting point is 04:34:11 But as soon as I give him five dollars, he suddenly says Well, I ain't going to get nothing. You got five dollars, go out and get it. I ain't sure I can get any. I don't like him at all. I suddenly realized I can't. leap up and throw him on the floor and take the five dollars away from him. But I don't even care about the money.

Starting point is 04:34:30 But I am mad about him doing that. Who is that guy? I know that if I start fighting in me as a knife, and we'll wreck Billy's living room too. But suddenly, another negro comes in and turns out a sweet visit talking about jazz and brotherhood, and they all leave, and me and Jackie are lone to wonder some more. Oh, the muscular gum of sex is such a bore.

Starting point is 04:34:54 But Billy and I have such a fantastic sex ball anyway. That's why we're able to philosophize like that and agree and laugh together in sweet nakedness. Oh, baby, we're together crazy. We could live in an old log cabin in the hills and never say anything for years. It was meant that we'd meet. She's saying all kinds of things as an idea begins to dawn on me. Say, I know, Billy. Let's leave the city and take Elliot with us and go to Monsanto's cabin in the woods for a week or two.

Starting point is 04:35:23 and forget everything. Yes, I can call up my boss right now and get a couple of weeks off. Oh, Jack, let's do it. Then it'll be good for Elliot. Get away from all these sinister friends of yours, my God. Perry ain't sinister. We'll get married and go away and have a lodge in the Adirondacks. At night by the lamp, we'll have simple suppers with Elliot.

Starting point is 04:35:46 I'll make love to you always. But you won't even have to because we both realize we're bugs. our lodge will have truth written all over it. But though the whole world comes smear it with big black paints of hate and lies, we'll be falling dead drunk in truth. Have some coffee. My hands will grow numb and I won't be able to handle the axe. But still I'll be the truth man.

Starting point is 04:36:10 I'll stand by the drape of the window. Night listening to the babble of all the world. And I'll tell you about it. But Jack, I love you. And that's not the only reason why. Don't you see that we're meant for each other from the beginning? Didn't you see that when you came in with Cody and started calling me Julian for that silly reason you told me about

Starting point is 04:36:30 where I looked like some old buddy you know in New York? Who hates Cody's guts and Cody hates him? But don't you see what a waste it is? But what about Cody? You want me to marry you, but you love Cody and in fact Perry loves you too. Sure, but what's wrong with that? We're all that.

Starting point is 04:36:49 There's perfect love between you. us forever, there's no doubt about it, but we only have two bodies. A strange statement. I stand by the window looking out on the glittering San Francisco night, with its magic cardboard houses, saying, and you have Elliot who doesn't like me, and I don't like him, and in fact, I don't like you, and I don't like myself either. How about that? Billy says nothing to this, but only stores up an anger that comes out later. But we can call Dave Wayne, and he'll drive us up to big sir cabin and will be alone in the woods at least i'm telling you that's what i want to do call him now i tell her the number and she dials it like a secretary oh the sad music of it all i've done it all seen it all done everything with everybody i say phone in hand the whole world's coming on like a high school sophomore eager to learn what he calls new things mind you the same old sing song sad song truth of death Because the reason I yell death so much is because I'm really yelling life.

Starting point is 04:37:53 Because you can't have death without life. Hello, Dave. There you are. Know what I'm calling you about? Listen, pal. Take that big brunette Romana, that Romanian madwoman, and pack her and Willie, and come down to Billy's here and pick us up. We'll pack while you's en route.

Starting point is 04:38:12 Honey's on, and we'll all go spend two weeks of bliss in Monsanto's cabin. Does Monsanto agree? I'll call him right now and ask him. He'll say, sure. Well, I thought I'd be painting Romana's wall tomorrow, but maybe I'd have just got drunk doing that anyway. Sure, you want to do all this now? Yes, yeah, yeah, come on.

Starting point is 04:38:34 And I can bring Romana? Yes, but why not? And what's the purpose of all this? Ah, Daddy, maybe just to see you again, and we can talk about purposes anywhere. You want to go on a lecture tour to Utah University and Brown University and tell the well-scrubbed kids.

Starting point is 04:38:50 Scrubbed with what? Scrubbed with hopeless perfection, of pioneer Puritan hope that leaves nothing but dead pigeons to look at. Okay, I'll be right out. First I got to get Willie's tank filled up and an oil change, too. I'll pay you when you get here.

Starting point is 04:39:06 I heard you were eloping with Billy. Who told you that? It was in the paper today. Well, we'll start off by getting into Willie again and don't bring Ron Blake. We'll be just... Two couples, dig. Yeah, and listen, I'll bring my surf casting rod and catch some fish down there.

Starting point is 04:39:24 We'll have a ball. And listen, Dave, I'm grateful you're free and willing to drive us down there. I'm down in the mouth. I've been sitting here for a week drinking and the chair broke and the fish died and I'm all screwed up again. Well, you shouldn't ought to drink that sweet stuff all the time and you never eat. But that's not the real trouble. Well, we'll decide what the real trouble is. That's right.

Starting point is 04:39:46 but thinks the real trouble is those pigeons. Why? I don't know. Remember when we were in East St. Louis with George and Jack, you said you'd love those beautiful dancing girls if you knew they would live forever as beautiful as they are? But that's only a quote from Buddha. Yeah, but the girls didn't expect all that.

Starting point is 04:40:05 How are you feeling, Dave? What's Fagan doing tonight? Oh, he's sitting in his room writing something, calls it his goof book. That's big wild drawings in it. And Lex Pascal is drunk again and the music is playing and I'm real sad and I'm glad you called.

Starting point is 04:40:21 You like me, Dave? I ain't got nothing else to do, kid. But you really have something else to do? Really? Listen, never mind. I'll be up. You call Monsanto right away though. Because we also got to get the corralgate keys from him.

Starting point is 04:40:36 I'm glad I know you, Dave. Me too, Jack. Why? Maybe I want to stand on my head in the snow to prove it, but I do. I'm glad. We'll be. We'll be glad. After all, that's right. There's nothing else for us to do, but solve these damn problems, and I've got one right here in my pants for Romana. But that's so sick and tired to call life a problem that can be solved. Yes, but I'm just repeating what I read in the dead

Starting point is 04:41:02 pigeon textbooks. But Dave, I love you. Okay, I'll be right over. End of chapter 31. Section 32 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. The Sliverbox recording. in the public domain. Read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 32. We pack up little Elliot's pathetic warm clothes and put food together and get the hamper all set and wait for Dave to come sadly in the night. And we have a big talk.

Starting point is 04:41:38 Billy, but why did the fish die? But she knows already they probably died because I gave them Kellogg's cornflakes or something went wrong. One thing sure is that she didn't forget to feed them or anything. It's all me, all my fault. I'd as soon be rusted by autumn too much, think, than be dead fisher because of those poor little hunks of golden death floating on that scummy water. It reminds me in the otter, but I can't explain it to Billy, who's all abstract and talking about our abstract soul meetings in hell. And little Elliot is pulling at her, asking, where are we going? Where are we going? What for? What for? she's saying, and all because you think you don't deserve to be loved, because you think you

Starting point is 04:42:20 cause the death of the goldfish, though they probably just died on their own accord. Why would they do that? Why? What kind of logic is that for fish to have? Or because you think you drink too much, and therefore every time you're feeling good on a little booze, you give up and say your hands hang helpless. Like you said last night, when you were holding me with those hands, blessing my heart, and my boyfriend. body with your love. Oh Jack, it's time for you to wake up and come with me, or at least come with somebody and open your eyes to why God's put you here. Stop all that staring at the floor. You and Perry both. You're crazy. I'll draw you magic moon circles, change all your luck.

Starting point is 04:43:04 I look her dead in the eye and it is blue and I say, oh, Billy, forgive me. But you see, you go there talking guilty again. Well, I don't know. all those big theories about how everything should be, God damn it. All I know is that I'm a helpless hunk of helpful horse manure, looking in your eyes saying, help me. But when you make those big final statements, it doesn't help you. Of course I know that, but what do you want? I want us to get married and settle down to a sensible understanding about eternal things. And you may be right. I see it all raving before me the endless yacking kitchen mouthings of life. The longest, dark grave of Toomey Talks under midnight kitchen bulbs.

Starting point is 04:43:48 In fact, it fills me with love to realize that life so avid, misunderstood, nevertheless reaches out skinny skeleton hand to me and to Billy, too. But you know what I mean. And this is the way it begins. End of Chapter 32. Chapter 33 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This Libervox Recordings in the public domain. Read by Ben Tucker.

Starting point is 04:44:20 It sounds also sad, but it was actually such a gay night as Dave and Romana came over, and there's all the business of packing boxes and clothes down to the car, nipping out of bottles, getting ready, in fact, to sing all the way to Big Sir, Home on the Range, and I'm just a lonesome old turd by Dave Wayne. Me sitting up front next to Dave and Ramana for some reason, maybe because I wanted to identify with my old broken front rocking chair and lean there flapping and singing. But with Ramana between us, the seat is pinned down and no longer flaps. Meanwhile, Billy is on the back mattress with sleeping child, and off we go booming down Bay Shore to that other shore, whatever it will bring, the way people always feel whenever they essay some trip long or short, especially in the night.

Starting point is 04:45:15 The eyes of hope looking over the glare of the hood into the maw, with its white lion feeding in straight as an arrow, the lighting of fresh cigarettes, the buckling to lean forward to the next adventure, something that's been going on in America, ever since the covered wagons clocked the deserts in three months flat. Billy doesn't mind that I don't sit in back with her, because she knows I want to sing and have a good time. Ramana and I hit up fantastic medleys of popular and folk songs of all kinds, and Dave contributes his New York-Chicago Blue Light Nightclub Romantic Baritone specialties. My wavering Sinatra is barely heard, in fact. Beat on your knees and yell and sing Dixie and banjo on my knee. Get raucous and mown out Red River Valley. Where's my harmonica?

Starting point is 04:46:06 I've been meaning to buy me an $8 harmonica for eight years now. It always starts out good like that. The bad moments. Nothing has gained or lost also by the fact that I insist we stop at Cody's en route so I can pick up some clothes I left there. But secretly I want Evelyn to finally come face to face with Billy. It surprises me more, however, to see the look of an absolute fright on Cody's face as we pour into his living room at midnight, and I announce that Billy's in the Jeep sleeping.

Starting point is 04:46:37 Evelyn is not perturbed at all, and in fact says to me privately in the kitchen, I guess it was bound to happen. Sometimes she'd come here and see it, but I guess it was destined to be you who'd bring her. What's Cody so worried about? You're spoiling all this chance to be real secretive. He hasn't come and seen us for a whole week. That's, in a way, what happened?

Starting point is 04:47:01 He just left me stranded there. I've been feeling awful, too. Well, if you want, you can ask her to come in. Well, we're leaving in a minute anyway. You want to see her, at least? I don't care. Cody's sitting in the living room absolutely rigid, stiff, formal, with a big Irish stone in his eye.

Starting point is 04:47:22 I know he's really mad at me this time, though I don't really know why. I go out and there's Billy alone in the car over sleeping Elliot, biting her fingernail. You want to come in and meet Evelyn? I shouldn't. She won't like that. Is Cody there? Yeah. So Willemine climbs out.

Starting point is 04:47:42 I remember just then Evelyn telling me seriously that Cody always calls as women by their full first names. Rose Marie, Joanna, Evelyn, Willamine. He never gives them silly nicknames, nor uses them. The meeting is not eventful, of course. Both girls keep their silence and hardly look at each other. So it's all me and Dave Wayne carrying on with the usual baloney. And I see that Cody is really very sick and tired of me bringing gangs arbitrarily to his place,

Starting point is 04:48:12 running off with his mistress, getting drunk and thrown out of family plays. $100 or no $100, he probably feels I'm just a fool now anyway and hopelessly lost forever. But I don't realize that myself because I'm feeling good. I want us to resume down that road singing bawder and darker songs till we're negotiating narrow mountain roads at the pitch of the greatest songs. I try to ask Cody about Perry and all the other strange characters who visit Billy in the city, but he just looks at me out the corner of his eye and says, Ah, yeah, I don't know, and I never will know what he's up to anyway in the long run.

Starting point is 04:48:54 I realize I'm just a silly stranger goofing with other strangers for no reason, far away from anything that ever mattered to me, whatever that was. always an ephemeral visitor to the coast never really involved with anyone's lives there because i'm always ready to fly back across the country but not to any life of my own on the other end either just a traveling stranger like old bull balloon an exemplar of the loneliness of dorin khoit actually waiting for the only real trip to venus to the mountain of mean moh though when i look out of cody's living-room window just then I do see my star still shining for me as it's done all these 38 years over crib, outship windows, jail windows, over sleeping bags. Only now it's dummier and dimmer and getting blur it or damn it as though even my own star be now fading away from concern for me as I from concern for it.

Starting point is 04:49:55 In fact, we're all strangers with strange eyes sitting in a midnight living room for nothing. and small talk at that, like Billy's saying, I always wanted a nice fireplace. And I'm yelling, Don't worry, we got one at the cabin. Hey, Dave, and all the woods chopped. And Evelyn. What does Monsanto think of you using his cabin all summer?

Starting point is 04:50:16 Weren't you supposed to go there alone in secret? It's too late now. I sing, swigging from the bottle without which I'd only drop with shameface flat on the floor on the gravel driveway. And Dave and Ramana look a little uneasy, finally, so we all get up to go, Zoom. And that's the last time I see Cody or Evelyn

Starting point is 04:50:37 anyway. And as I say, our songs grow mightier, as the row grows darker and wilder. Finally, here we are on the canyon road, the headlights just reaching out there around bleak sand shoulders. Down to the creek where I

Starting point is 04:50:54 unlock the corral gate. across the meadow and back to the haunted cabin. Where on the strength of that night's booze and getaway gladness, Billy and I actually have a good time, lighting fires, and making coffee and gong to be together in one sleeping bag, easy as pie after we've bundled up little Elliot. And Dave and Romano have retired in his double nylon bag by the creek in the moonlight. No, it's the next day and night that concerned me.

Starting point is 04:51:25 End of Chapter 33. Chapter 34 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This, Librevox's Recordings in the Public Domain, read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 34 The whole day begins simply enough with me getting up feeling fair, and going down to the creek to slurp up water in my palms and wash up, seeing the languid waving of one large brown thigh over the mass of Dave's nylons indicative of an early morning love scene. In fact, Ramana telling us later at breakfast,

Starting point is 04:52:09 When I woke up this morning and saw all those trees and water and clouds, I told Dave, it's a beautiful universe we created. A real Adam and Eve waking up. In fact, this being one of Dave's gladdest days because he had really wanted to get away from the city again anyway, in this time with a pretty doll, and brought his surf casting gear planning a big day. We brought a lot of good food.

Starting point is 04:52:35 The only trouble is there's no more wine, so Dave and Romana go off and Willie to get some more anyway at a store 13 miles south down the highway. Billy and I are alone talking by the fire. I began to feel extremely low as soon as last night's alcohol wears off. Everything is trembling again, the trembling hand. I can't for a fact even light the fire, and Billy has to do it. I can't lie to fire anymore, I yell.

Starting point is 04:53:02 Well, I can, she says in a rare instance when she lets me have it for being such a nut. Little Elliot is constantly pulling at her asking this and that, What does that stick for? To put in the fire? Why? How does it burn? Why does it burn? Where are we?

Starting point is 04:53:20 When are we leaving? And the pattern develops where she begins to talk to him instead of me anyway, because I'm just sitting there staring at the floor, sighing. Later, when he takes his nap, we go down the path to the beach. beach, about noon, both of us sad and silent. What's the matter, I wonder? I say out loud. She, everything was all right last night when we slept in the back together. Now you won't even hold my hand.

Starting point is 04:53:48 God damn it, I'm going to kill myself. Because I've begun to realize in my soberness that this thing has come too far. That I don't love, Billy, that I'm leading her on, that I made a mistake dragging everyone here. that I simply want to go home now. I'm just plumb sick and tired, just like Cody, I guess, of the whole nerve-wracking scene bad enough as it is, always pivoting back to this poor haunted canyon, which again gives me the willies as we walk under the bridge

Starting point is 04:54:19 and come to those heartless breakers busting in on sand higher than earth and looking like the heartlessness of wisdom. Besides, I suddenly noticed as if for the first time the awful way the leaves of the canyon that have managed to be blown to the surf are all hesitantly advancing in gusts of wind, then finally plunging into the surf to be dispersed and belted and melted and taken off to sea. I turn around and notice how the wind is just harrying them off trees and into the sea, just hurrying them as it were to death. In my condition

Starting point is 04:54:56 they look human trembling to that brink, hastening, hastening, hastening. and that awful huge roar blast of autumn, sir, wind. Boom, clap. The waves are still talking, but now I'm sick and tired of whatever they ever said or ever will say. Billy wants me to stroll with her down towards the caves, but I don't want to get up from the sand where I'm sitting back to Boulder. She goes alone.

Starting point is 04:55:22 I suddenly remember James Joyce and stare at the waves, realizing, all summer you were sitting here, riding the so-called, Sound of the waves, not realizing how deadly serious our life and doom is. You fool, you happy kid with a pencil. Don't you realize you've been using words as a happy game? All those marvelous, skeptical things you wrote about graves and sea death, it's all true, you fool. Joyce is dead. The sea took him.

Starting point is 04:55:51 It will take you. And I look down the beach and there's Billy waiting in the treacherous undertow. She's already grown several times earlier. seeing my indifference and also, of course, the hopelessness at Cody's and the hopelessness of her wrecked apartment and wretched life. Someday I'm going to commit suicide. I suddenly wonder if she's going to horrify the heavens and me too with a sudden suicide walk into those awful under-toes.

Starting point is 04:56:17 I see her sad, blonde hair flying, the sad thin figure, alone by the sea, the leaf-hastening sea. She suddenly reminds me of something. I remember her musical sighs of death. and I see the words clearly imprinted in my mind over her figure in the sand, St. Carolyn by the sea. You were my last chance, she said, but don't all women say that? But can't it be by last chance? She doesn't mean mere marriage, but some profoundly sad realization of something in me.

Starting point is 04:56:52 She really needs to go on living. At least that impression coming across anyway on the force of all the gloom we've shared. Can it be I'm withholding from her something sacred, just like she says? Or am I just a fool who will never learn to have a decent eternally minded deep-down relation with a woman? And keep throwing that away for a song at a bottle. In which case my own life is over anyway.

Starting point is 04:57:21 And there are the Joyceian waves with their blank mouths saying, Yes, that's so. And there are the leaves hurrying one by one down. the sand and dumping in. In fact, the creek is freighting hundreds more of them a minute, right direct from the back hills. That big wind blasts and roars. It's all yellow, sunny, and blue fury everywhere. I see the rocks wobble, as it seems God is really getting mad for such a world and is about to destroy it.

Starting point is 04:57:54 Big cliffs wobbling in my dumb eyes, God says. It's gone too far. all destroying everything one way or the other wobble boom the end is now the second coming tic-tok i think shuddering st caroline by the sea is going in further i could run and go see her but she's so far away i realize if that nut is going to try this i'll have to make an awful run and swim to get her i get up an edge over but just then she turns around and starts back and if i call her that nut and my secret thoughts wonder what she calls me. Oh, hell, I'm sick of life.

Starting point is 04:58:33 If I had any guts, I'd drown myself in that tiresome water, but that wouldn't be getting it over at all. I can just see the big transformations and plans jellying down there to curse us up and some other wretched suffering for maternities of it. I guess that's what the kid feels. She looks so sad down there, wandering Ophelia-like and bare feet among thunders.

Starting point is 04:58:57 On top of that now, here come the tourists, people from other cabins in the canyon. It's the sunny season and they're out two, three times a week. What a dirty look I get from the elderly lady who's apparently heard about the author who was secretly invited to Mr. Monsanto's cabin, but instead brought gangs and bottles and today, worst of all, trollops. Because, in fact, earlier that morning, Dave and Romana have already made love on the sand and broad daylight, visible not only to others down the beach but from that high new cabin

Starting point is 04:59:29 on the shoulder of the cliff though hidden from sight from the bridge by the cliff wall so it's all well-known news now there's a ball going on in Mr. Montanto's cabin and him not even here this elderly lady being accompanied by children of all kinds so that when Billy returns from the far end of the beach and starts back with me down the path

Starting point is 04:59:49 and I'm silly with a big footlong wizard pipe in my mouth trying to light it and the wind to cover up. The lady gives her the once-over real close, but Billy only smiles lightly like a little girl and chirps hello. I feel like the most disgraceful and nay, disreputable wretch on earth. In fact, my hair was blowing in beastly streaks across my stupid and moronic face. The hangover has now worked paranoia into me down to the last pitiable detail.

Starting point is 05:00:25 Back at the cabin, I can't chop wood for fear I'll cut a foot off. I can't sleep. I can't sit. I can't pace. I keep going down to the creek to drink water till finally I'm going down there a thousand times, making Dave Wayne wonder as he's coming back with more wine. We sit there slugging out of our separate bottles. In my paranoia, I begin to wonder why I get to drink just the one bottle, and he the other.

Starting point is 05:00:49 But he's gay. I'm now going out surf-casting and catch us a grab bag of fish for a mark. marvelous supper. Romana, you get the salad ready, and anything else you can think of. We'll leave you alone now. He adds to gloomy me and belly thinking he's in our way, and say, why don't we go to Nepentham Private our grief tonight, and enjoy the moonlight on the terrace with Manhattan's, or go see Henry Miller? No, I almost yell. I mean, I'm so exhausted, I don't want to do anything or see anybody. Already feeling awful guilt about Henry Miller anyway. We've made an appointment with him about a week ago, and instead of showing up at his friend's house and Santa Cruz at seven,

Starting point is 05:01:29 we're all drunk at ten, calling long distance, and poor Henry just said, Well, I'm sorry I don't get to meet you, Jack, but I'm an old man, and at ten o'clock it's time for me to go to bed. You'd never make it here till after midnight now. His voice on the phone, just like on his records, nasal, Brooklyn, good guy voice, and him disappointed in a way because he's gone to the trouble of writing the preface to one of my books. though I suddenly now think in my remorseful paranoias Ah, the hell with it, he was only getting in the act like all these guys write prefaces So you don't even get to read the author first

Starting point is 05:02:02 As an example of how really psychotically suspicious and loco I was getting Alone with Billy is even worse I can't see anything to do now She said by the fire like an ancient Salem housewife Or Salem witch I'm leering I could have Elliot taken care of in a private home or an orphanage and just go to a nunnery myself. There's a lot of them around. Or I could kill myself and Elliot both.

Starting point is 05:02:36 Don't talk like that. There's no other way to talk when there's no more directions to take. You got me all wrong. I wouldn't be any good for you. I know that now. You want to be a hermit, you say, but you don't do it much, I noticed. You're just tired of life. and want to sleep.

Starting point is 05:02:53 In a way, that's how I feel, too, only I've got Elliot to worry about. I could take both their lives and solve that. You creepy talk. You told me the first night you loved me, that I was most interesting, that you hadn't met anyone you liked so much. Then you just went on drinking. I really can see now what they say about you is true, and all the others like you.

Starting point is 05:03:18 Oh, I realize you're a writer and suffered through too much. but you're really ratty sometimes. But even that, I know you can't help, and I know you're not really ratty, but awfully broken up like you explained to me, the reasons, but you're always groaning about how sick you are. You really don't think about others enough,

Starting point is 05:03:37 and I know you can't help it. It's a curious disease a lot of us have anyway, only better hidden sometimes. But what you said the first night, and even just now, about me being St. Carolyn in the sea, Why don't you follow through with that What your heart knows is good and best and true You give up so easy to discouragement

Starting point is 05:03:56 Then I guess too often you don't really want me And just want to go home and resume your own life maybe With Louise your girlfriend No I couldn't with her either I'm just bound up inside like constipation I can't move emotionally like you'd say Emotionally as though that was some big grand

Starting point is 05:04:17 Magic mystery everybody's sake and oh, how wonderful life is. How miraculous God made this and God made that? How do you know he doesn't hate what he did? He might even be drunk and not noticing what he went and done. Of course, that's not true. Maybe God is dead. No, God can't be dead because he's the unborn.

Starting point is 05:04:42 But you have all those philosophies and sutras you were talking about? But don't you see, they've all become empty words. I realize I've been playing like a happy child with words, words, words, and a big serious tragedy. Look around. You could make some effort, damn it. What's even ineffably worse is that the more she advises me and discuss the trouble, the worse and worse it gets. It's as though she didn't know what she was doing, like an unconscious witch. The more she tries to help, the more I tremble almost to realize.

Starting point is 05:05:19 She's doing it on purpose and knowing she's witching me, but it's all got to be formally understood as help being blasted She must be some kind of chemical counterpart to me I just can't stand her for a minute I'm racked with guilt because all the evidence there seems to say she's a Wonderful person sympathizing in her quiet sad musical voice With an obvious rogue nevertheless No these rational guilt stick All I feel is a little

Starting point is 05:05:49 as the invisible stab from her. She's hurting me. At some point in our conversation, I'm a veritable ham actor, jumping up to twitch my head. That's the effect she has. What's the matter? She asks softly,

Starting point is 05:06:04 which makes me almost scream, and I've never screamed in my life. It's the first time in my life I'm not confident. I can hold myself together, no matter what happens, and be inly calm enough to even smile with condescension at the screaming hysteria.

Starting point is 05:06:19 areas of women in mad words. I'm in the same mad word all of a sudden. And what's happened? What's caused it? Are you driving me mad on purpose? I finally blurt. But naturally, she protests. I'm talking out of my head. There's no such evident intention anywhere. We're just on a happy weekend in the country with friends. Then there's something wrong with me. I yell. That's obvious, but why don't you try to calm down and, for instance, like, make love to me. I've been begging you all day and all you do is groan and turn away as though I was an ugly old bat she comes and offers herself to me softly and gently but i just stare at my quivering wrists it's really very awful it's hard to explain besides then the little boy is constantly coming at billy when she

Starting point is 05:07:08 kneels at my lap or sits on it or tries to soothe my hair and comfort me he keeps saying in the same pitiful voice "'Don't do it, Billy, don't do it, Billy.' "'To finally she has to give up that sweet patience of hers, "'where she answers is every little pathetic question and yell, "'Shut up! Elliot, will you shut up? Do I have to beat you again?' "'And I groan, no!' "'But Elliot yells louder, "'Don't do it, Billy, don't do it, Billy, don't do it, Billy!'

Starting point is 05:07:38 So she sweeps him off and starts whacking him screamingly on the porch, and I'm about to throw in the towel and gasp up my last. It's horrible. Besides, when she beats Elliot, she herself cries, and then we'll be yelling madwoman things like, I'll kill both of us if you don't stop. You leave me no alternative. Oh, my child! Suddenly picking him up and embracing him, rocking tears and gnashing of hair and all under those old peaceful Blue Jay trees, where, in fact, the Jays are still waiting for their food and watching all this.

Starting point is 05:08:12 Even so, off the sacred burritos in the yard waiting for somebody to give him an apple. I look up at the sun going down golden throughout the insane, shivering canyon. That blasted rogue wind comes topping down the trees a mile away, with an advancing roar that, when it hits the broken cries of mother and sun and grief are blown away with all those crazy scattering leaves, the creek screeches. A door bangs horribly, a shutter follow suit, The house shakes. I'm beating my knees in the den and can't even hear that.

Starting point is 05:08:45 What's I got to do with you committing suicide anyway? I'm yelling. All right. It has nothing to do with you. So, okay, you have no husband. But at least you've got little Elliot. He'll grow up and be okay. You can always, meanwhile, go on with your job, get married, move away, do something. Maybe it's Cody. But more than that, I'd say it's all those mad characters making you insane and want to kill yourself like that Perry. Don't talk about Perry. He's wonderful and sweet and I love him, and he's much kinder to me than you'll ever be. At least he gives of himself.

Starting point is 05:09:20 But what's all this giving of ourselves? What's there to give that'll help anybody? You'll never know you're so wrapped up in yourself. We're now starting to insult each other, which would be a healthy sign, except she keeps breaking down and crying on my shoulder more or less again, insisting I'm her last chance, which isn't true. let's go to a monastery together she adds madly Evelyn I mean Billy you might go to a nunnery at that

Starting point is 05:09:47 By God get thee to a nunnery You look like you'd make a nun Maybe that's what you'd need all that talk about Cody about religion Maybe all this worldly horror is just holding you back from what you call your true realizing You could become a big Reverend mother someday with not a worry on your mind Though I met a Reverend mother once who cried That's also sad What does she cry about?

Starting point is 05:10:13 I don't know After talking to me, I remember I said some silly thing Like the universe is a woman because it's round But I think she cried because she was remembering her early days When she had a romance with some soldier who died At least that's what they say She was the greatest woman I ever saw Big blue eyes

Starting point is 05:10:31 Big smart woman You could do that, get out of this awful mess And leave it all behind but I love, love too much for that. And not because you're sensual either, you poor kid. In fact, we quiet down a little and do actually make love, in spite of Elliot pulling at her. Billy, don't do it. Don't do it, Billy, don't do it.

Starting point is 05:10:54 Till right in the middle I'm yelling, don't do what? What's he mean? Can it be he's right and Billy, you shouldn't do it? Can it be we're sinning after all said and done? Oh, this is insane, but he's the most insane of them all. In fact, the child is up on the bed with us tugging at her shoulder just like a grown-up jealous lover, trying to pull a woman off another man. She being on top indication of exactly how helpless and busted down I've become. And here it is only four in the afternoon.

Starting point is 05:11:22 A little drama going on in the cabin may be a little different than what cabins are intended for, or the local neighbors are imagining. End of Chapter 34. Chapter 35 of Big Sur by James. Carowack. This Libravox recordings in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 35. But there's an awful paranoiac element sometimes in orgasm that suddenly releases not sweet gin-teal sympathy, but some token venom that splits up in the body. I feel a great ghastly hatred of myself and everything. The empty feeling far from being the usual relief is now

Starting point is 05:12:11 as though I've been robbed of my spinal power, right down the middle unpurposed by a great witching force. I feel evil forces gathering down all around me, from her, the kid, the very walls of the cabin, the trees, even the sudden thought of Dave Wayne and Romana is evil. They're all coming now. I leave poor Billy face in hand and rush off to drink water in the creek, but every time I do something like that, I have to run back to be sorry and say so. But the moment I see her again, she's doing something else.

Starting point is 05:12:46 I leer and I don't feel sorry at all. She's mumbling, face and hands, and the little boys crying at her side. My God, she should get to a nunnery, I think, rushing back to the creek. Suddenly the water in the creek tastes different as though somebody's thrown gasoline or kerosene in an upstream. Maybe those neighbors want to get back at me, that's what? I taste the water carefully, and I'm positive that's what happened. Like an idiot, I'm sitting by the creek staring when Dave Wayne comes striding down with one fish on the line, and his big cheerful western twang as though nothing unusual has happened.

Starting point is 05:13:22 Well, boy, I spent a whole two hours, and look what I got. One measly but beautiful pathetic, as you'll see holy little rainbow sea trout that I'm now going to clean. Now the way to clean fish is as follows. He kneels innocently by the creek to show me how. I have nothing else to do but watch, smile. He says, Be prepared to be taken on tour of Farallone Island.

Starting point is 05:13:47 Within next two years, boy, with wild canaries actually lighting on your boat hundreds of miles out at sea. See, I'm trying to save money for a fish boat of my own. I think fishing's better than anything, and I intend to entirely reorganize my life for this,

Starting point is 05:14:02 though I see the stern image of Fagan shrieking with a roci stick. But you ought to see how fast you can paint up hundreds of hairy and clean salmon in one and a half minutes. It's a fact. You walk around in hickory shirts and woolenet caps. Man, I know all about it, and I'm writing a final definitive article on how clean, hard work is the savior of us all. When you're out there, it's a very primal light. Fishing is, you're a hunter. Birds find fish for you. Weather drives you. Foolish mind hangs, dissolve before utter

Starting point is 05:14:35 fatigue and everything comes in. As I squat there, I imagine maybe Billy is telling Romano what happened in the cabin. And Dave will know in a while, though he seems to know a lot that's going on. He's hinted several times, like now. You look like you're having the worst time

Starting point is 05:14:51 of your life. That kid Elliot's enough to drive anybody crazy. And Billy is sure a nervous little wench. Now here's the way you scale with the seared knife. In that marvel that I can't be so useful and humanly simple and good enough to make small talk, to make others feel better, like Dave. There he is, long and hollow of cheeks

Starting point is 05:15:13 from long drinking himself the past few weeks. But he's not complaining or moaning in the corner like me. At least he does something about it. He puts himself to the test. He gives me that feeling again, that I'm the only person in the world who is devoid of human beingness. Damn it, that's true. That's the way I feel anyway.

Starting point is 05:15:31 "'Aught Dave, "'someday you and me'll go fishing "'in your abandoned mining camp on the Rogue River, huh? "'We'll be feeling better by then somehow, God damn it. "'Well, we've got to cut down on the sauce a whole lot, Jack.' "'Saying Jack, sadly, a lot like Jerry Wagner used to do "'on our Dharma-bumbing mountain climbs "'where we'd confide Dollers.

Starting point is 05:15:56 "'Yes, and we drink too many sweet drinks "'in a way, you know, all that sugar and no food is bound up set your metabolism and fill your blood with sugar at a point where you ain't got the strength of a hen. You especially, you've been drinking nothing but sweet port and sweet Manhattan's now for weeks. I promise you the holy flesh of this little fish will heal you. Chuckle. I suddenly look at the fish and feel horrible all over again.

Starting point is 05:16:26 That old death scheme is back, only now I'm going to put my big healthy angrily. low sax and teeth into it, and wrench away at the mournful flesh of a little living being that only an hour ago was swimming happily in the sea. In fact, even Dave thinking this and saying, Ah, yes, that little muslin mouth was blindly sucking away in the glad waters of life, and now look at it. Here's where the fitten heads chopped off. You don't have to look. Us big drunken sinners are now going to use it for our sacrificial supper. So in fact, when we cook it, I'm going to say an Indian prayer for it, hoping it's the same prayer the local Indians used. Jack, in a way, we might even start having fun here, and make a great week out of it.

Starting point is 05:17:13 Week? I thought we was coming here for a week. Oh, I said that, didn't I? I feel awful about everything, and I don't think I can make it. I'm going crazy with Billy and Elliot and me too. Maybe I'll have to. Maybe we'll have to, leave or something. I think I'll die here. And Dave is disappointed naturally. And here I've already rooted him up out of his own affairs to drive down here anyway. Another matter to make me feel like a rat. End of Chapter 35. Section 36 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This libid box recordings in the public domain read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 36.

Starting point is 05:18:05 But Dave's making the best of clomping up and down the cabin, preparing the bag of cornmeal and starting the corn oil in the frying pan. Ramana, too, she's making an exquisite big salad with lots of mayonnaise, and in fact poor Billy is mutely helping her, setting the table, and the little boy is crooning by the stove. It's almost like a happy domestic scene suddenly. Only I watch it from the porch with horrified eyes. Also because their shadows and the lamplight gone casting on the walls look huge and monster-like and witch-like and warlock-like. I'm alone in the woods with happy ghosts. The wind is howling as the sun goes down, so I go in. But I go out at once again, madly to my creek,

Starting point is 05:18:53 always thinking the creek itself will give me water that will clear away everything and reassure me forever. Also remembering my distress Edgar Case's advice, drink a lot of water. But there's kerosene in the water, I yell in the wind, nobody hearing. I feel like kicking the creek and screaming. I turn around and there's the cabin with its warm interiors. The silent people inside all noticeably glum

Starting point is 05:19:19 because they can't understand anyway what's with the nut wandering in and out from cabin to creek. Silent, wan-faced, stupefacted, trembling and sweating like midsummer was on the roof, and instead it's even cold now. I sit in the chair with my back to the door and watch Dave as he lectures on bravely. What we're having is a sacrificial banquet with all kinds of goodies you see laid in a regal spread around one little delicious fish so that we all have to pray to the fish and take tiny little bites.

Starting point is 05:19:53 We only have about four bites apiece, and there's all kinds of parts of the fish where the bites are more significant. But beyond that, the way to properly fry a fresh-caught fish is to be sure the oil is burning, and furiously, so when you lay the fish in it, not burning but real hot oil, well, yeah, even burning, hand me the spat, you then gently lay the fish into the oil and create a tremendous crackling racket. Which he does as Ramana cheers, and I glance at Billy and she's thinking of something else like a nun in the corner. But Dave keeps on making jokes till he actually has us all smiling While the fish is cooking

Starting point is 05:20:34 Though Romana As she's been doing all day is constantly handing me a bite to eat Some hors d'oeuvres or a piece of tomato or other Apparently trying to help me feel better You've got to eat She and Dave keeps saying But I don't want to eat And yet they're always holding out bites to my mouth

Starting point is 05:20:54 Until finally now I began to frown Thinking what's all these bites they keep throwing? going at me poison? And what's wrong with my eyes? They're all dilated black like I've had drugs. All I've had is wine. Did Dave put drugs in my wine or something, thinking it will help me or something?

Starting point is 05:21:13 Or are they members of a secret society that dopes people secretly, the idea being to enlighten them or something? Even as Ramana is handing me a bite and I take it from her big brown hands and chew. She's wearing purple panties and wearing purple panties and purple bronze, nothing else, just for fun. Dave's slapping her on the can joyfully as he cooks a supper. It's some big, erotic, natural thing to do for Romana. She believes in showing her beautiful big body anyway. In fact, at one point when Billy's up leaning over a chair, Dave goes behind Billy and playfully touches her and winks at me. But I'm not of all this like a moron, and we could all be

Starting point is 05:21:55 having fun such as soldiers dream the day away imagining, damn it. But the venom's in the blood are asexual, as well as as a-social, and a-everything. Billy's so nice and thin, like I'm used to Ramana, maybe I should switch around here for a variety, says Dave at the sizzling frying pan. I look over my shoulder and see it first with a leap of joy, but then with ominous fear, an enormous full moon at full fat, standing there between, Mean Moe Mountain and the North Canyon Wall, like saying to me as I look over my trembling shoulder, Who do you?

Starting point is 05:22:35 But I say, Dave, look, as if all this wasn't enough, and I point out the moon to him. There's dead silence in the trees and also among us inside. There she is. Vast, lugubrious full moon that frightens madmen and makes waters wave. She's got one or two treetops silhouetted, and has got that whole, side of the canyon lit up in silver. Dave just looks at the moon with his tired, madness eyes. Over-excited eyes my mother had said, and says nothing. I go out to the creek and drink water and come back and wonder about the moon, and suddenly the

Starting point is 05:23:15 foreshadows in the cabin are all dead silent as though they had conspired with the moon. Time to eat, Jack, says Dave, coming out on the porch suddenly. No one's saying, anything. I go in and sheepishly sit at the table like the useless pioneer who doesn't do anything to help the men or please the women. The idiot in the wagon train who nevertheless has to be fed. Dave stands there saying, Oh, full moon, here is our little fish, which we are now going to partake of, to feed us, so that we shall be stronger. Thank you fish people. Thank you fish God. Thank you, Moon, for making our light tonight. This is the night of the full moon fish, which we now consecrate with the first delicious bite.

Starting point is 05:24:03 He takes his fork and opens the little fish carefully, beautifully breaded and fried and centered in a dazzle of salads and vegetables and cornmeal Johnny cakes. He opens a funny gill, goes under, removes a strange bite, and projects it to my mouth, saying, Take the first bite, Jack, just a little bite. and be sure to chew very slowly. I do so, oily, delicious bite, but nothing delicious any more in my tongue. Then the others take their little holy bites,

Starting point is 05:24:34 little Elliot's eyes shining with delight at this wonderful game that, however, has started to frighten me, for obvious reasons by now. As we eat, Dave announces that he and I are sick from too much of drinking, and by God we're going to reform and see to it that we shape up. Then he launches into it. stories as usual, ending in a talkative ordinary supper that I think will sort of straighten me out at first, but after supper I feel even worse. That fish has all the death of otters and

Starting point is 05:25:02 mouses and snakes ride in it or something, I'm thinking. Billy is quietly washing the dishes without complaint. Dave is gladly smoking after dinner cigarettes on the porch. But here I am again mooning by the creek, hiding from all of them each five minutes, though I can't understand what makes me do it. I have to get out of there, but I have no right to stay away. So I keep coming back, but it's all an insane, revolving, automatic directionless circle of anxiety, back and forth, around and around, till they're really by now so perturbed by my increasing silent departures and creepy returns. They're all sitting without a word by the stove, but now their heads are together, and they're whispering.

Starting point is 05:25:47 From the woods I see those three shadowy heads whispering me by the stove. What's Dave saying? And why do they look like they're plotting something further? Can it be? It was all arranged by Dave Wayne via Cody that I would meet Billy and be driven mad and now they've got me alone in the woods and are going to give me final poisons tonight that will utterly remove all my control so that in the morning I'll have to go to a hospital forever and never write another line?

Starting point is 05:26:14 Dave Wayne is jealous because I wrote ten novels. Billy has been assigned by Cody to get me to marry her, so he'll get all my money. Romana is a member of the expert poisoning society. I've heard her mention tree spirits already earlier in the car, and she sung some strange songs the night before. The three of them, Dave Wayne, in fact the chief conspirator, because I know he does have amphetamine on his person and the needles in a little box. Just one injection of a tomato Or of a portion of fish Or drops into a bottle of wine

Starting point is 05:26:48 And my eyes become mad, wide, and black like they are now My nerves, ooh, ouch! This is what I'm thinking. Still, they sit there by the fire and dead silence. When I tromp into the cabin, in fact, they all start talking up again. Sure sign. I walk out again. I'm going down the roadways. Okay!

Starting point is 05:27:10 But the moment I'm alone on the path of million waving moon arms or thrashing around me and every hole in the cliffs and burnt out trees I'd calmly passed a hundred times all summer and dead of fog now has something moving in it quickly I hurry back even on the porch I'm scared to see the familiar bushes near the outhouse or down by the broken tree trunk and now a babble in the creek has somehow entered my head and with all the rhythm of the sea waves going get old Lump, you're up, you're up, you're up and top, liquor, lager, lager. I grab my heat, but it keeps babbling.

Starting point is 05:27:50 Masks explode before my eyes when I close them. When I look at the moon, it waves, moves, when I look at my hands and feet that creep. Everything is moving. The porch is moving like ooze and mud. The chair trembles under me. Sure, you don't want to go to Nipth for a Manhattan, Jack? No.

Starting point is 05:28:11 And you dump poison in it. I think darkly but seriously hurt I could ever allow myself to think that about poor Dave And I realized the unbearable anguish of insanity How uninformed people can be thinking insane people are happy Oh God In fact it was Irwin Garden once warned me Not to think the madhouses are full of happy nuts

Starting point is 05:28:35 There's a tightening around the head that hurts There's a terror of the mind that hurts even more They're so unhappy and especially because they can't explain it to anybody or reach out and be helped through all the hysterical paranoia they are really suffering more than anyone in the world and i think in the universe in fact and erwin knew this from observing his mother naomi who finally had to have a lobotomy which sets me thinking how nice to cut away therefore all that agony in my forehead and stop it stop that babbling because now the babbling's not only in the creek as i say it's left the creek and come in my head

Starting point is 05:29:13 It would be all right for coherent babbling meaning something, but it's all brilliantly enlightened babble that does more than mean something. It's telling me to die, because everything is over. Everything is swarming all over me. Dave and Rwana retire again by the creek for a night's sweet sleep under the moon, while Billy and I sit there gloomy by the fire. Her voice is crying. It might make you feel better to just come in my arms.

Starting point is 05:29:43 I've got to try something, Billy. After all, I've told you I can't make you see what's happening to me. You don't understand. Come into our sleeping bag again, like last night. Just sleep. We get in naked, but now I'm not drunk. I'm aware of the real tight squeeze in there. And besides in my fever, I'm perspiring so much it's unbearable.

Starting point is 05:30:05 Her own skin is soaking wet from mine, yet our arms are outside in the cold. This won't do. What all you do? Let's try the cot inside. But mechanically, I arranged the cot all screwy with a board on top of it, forgetting to put sleeping bag pads underneath like I'd done all summer. I simply forgot all that, Billy. Poor Billy lies down with me on this absurd board,

Starting point is 05:30:32 thinking I'm trying to drive my madness away by self-torturing ordeals. It's ridiculous. We lie there stiff as boards on a board. I roll off and saying, We'll try something else. I try laying out on the sleeping bag on the floor of the porch. But the moment she's in my arms, a mosquito comes at me, where I burst out sweating,

Starting point is 05:30:54 where I see a flash of lightning, where I hear a big roaring hymn in my head, or imagine a thousand people are coming down the creek talking, where the roar of the wind is bringing flying tree trunks that will crush us. Wait a minute! I yell, and get up to pace a while and run down, to drink water by the creek where Dave and Ramana are peacefully entangled. I start cursing Dave.

Starting point is 05:31:18 Bastards got the only decent spot there is to sleep in anyway, right there in that sand by the creek. If he wasn't here, I could sleep there, and the creek would cover the noise in my head, and I could sleep there with Billy even all night. Bastards got my spot. And I kicked back to the porch. Poor Billy's arms are outstretched to me. Please, Jack. Come on.

Starting point is 05:31:40 Love me. Love me. I can't. But why can't you, if even, we'll never see each other again? Let us our last night be beautiful and something to remember forever. Like a big ideal memory for both of us, can't you give me just that? I would if I could. I'm muttering around like a fussy old nut inside the cabin looking for a match. I can't even light my cigarette.

Starting point is 05:32:09 something sinister blows it out. When it's lit, it mortifies my hot mouth anyway, like a mouthful of death. I grab up another batch of bags and blankets and start piling myself up on the other side of the porch, saying to Billy, who's sighing now, realizing it's hopeless. First, I'll try to take a nap by myself here. Then when I wake up, I'll feel better and come over to you. So I try that, turning over rigidly my eyes wide open, staring full fright into the dark like the time in movie Humphrey Bogart, who's just killed his partner trying to sleep by the fire, and you see his

Starting point is 05:32:44 eyes staring into the fire, rigid and insane. That's just the way I'm staring. If I try to close my eyes, some elastic pulls them open again. If I try to turn over, the whole universe turns over with me, but it's no better on the other side of the universe. I realize I may never come out of this, and my mother is waiting for me at home praying for me because she must know what's happening tonight. I cry out to her to pray and help me. I remember my cat for the first time in three hours and let out a yell that scares Billy. All right, Jack? Give me a little time.

Starting point is 05:33:28 But now she's started to sleep. Poor girl is exhausted. I realize she's going to abandon me to my fate anyway, and I can't help thinking she and Dave and Romana are all. all secretly awake waiting for me to die. For what reason I'm thinking? The secret poisoning society. I know it's because I'm a Catholic.

Starting point is 05:33:48 It's a big anti-Catholic scheme. It's communists destroying everybody. Systemic individuals are poisoned till finally they'll have everybody. This madness changes you completely. And in the morning you no longer have the same mind. The drug is invented by Erapatians. It's the brainwash drug. I always thought that Romano was a communist, being a Romanian.

Starting point is 05:34:12 And as for Billy, that gang of hers is as strange, and Cody don't care, and Dave's all evil, just like I always figured maybe. I'd assume my thoughts aren't even as rational as that anymore, but become hours of raving. There are forces whispering in my ear and rapid long speeches, advising and mourning. Suddenly other voices are shouting. The trouble is all the voices are long-winded and talking. Very fast like Cody at his fastest, and like the creek,

Starting point is 05:34:41 so that I have to keep up with the meaning of I want to bat it out of my ears. I keep waving at my ears. I'm afraid to close my eyes for all the turmoiled universes. I see tilting and expanding, suddenly exploding, suddenly clawing into my center, faces, yelling mouths, long-haired yellers, sudden evil confidences, sudden rat-tat tats of cerebral committees arguing about Jack and talking about him as if he wasn't there. Aimless moments when I'm waiting for more voices and suddenly the wind explodes, huge groans, and the million tree-top leaves that sound like the moon gone mad.

Starting point is 05:35:24 And the moon rising higher, brighter, shining down in my eyes now like a street lamp. The huddled, shadowy sleeping figures over there, so. coy. So human and safe. I'm crying. I'm not human anymore. And I'll never be safe anymore. Oh, what I wouldn't give to be home on Sunday afternoon yawning because I'm bored. Oh, for that again, it'll never come back again. Ma was right. It was all bound to drive me mad. Now it's done. What'll I say to her? She'll be terrified and go mad herself. Oh, T. Taiki. Ed Muay. me who's just eaten fish have no right to ask for brother tyke again an argot of sudden screamed reports rattles through my head in a language i never heard but understand immediately for a moment i see blue heaven and the virgin's white veil but suddenly a great evil blur like an ink spot spreads over it the devil the devil's come after me to-night tonight is the night that's what but angels are laughing and having a big barn dance in the rocks of the sea Nobody cares anymore.

Starting point is 05:36:33 Suddenly, as clear as anything I ever saw in my life. I see the cross. End of Chapter 36. Chapter 37 Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This Librevox recordings in the public domain. Read by Ben Tucker. Chapter 37. I see the cross.

Starting point is 05:37:03 It's silent. It stays a long time. My heart goes. out to it my whole body fades away to it I hold out my arms to be taken away to it by God I am being taken away my body starts dying and swooning out to the cross standing in a luminous area of the darkness I start to scream because I know I'm dying but I don't want to scare Billy or anybody with my death scream so I swallow the scream and just let myself go into death and the cross

Starting point is 05:37:36 As soon as that happens, I slowly sink back to life. Therefore, the devils are back. Commissioners are sending out orders in my ear to think anew. Babbling secrets are hissed. Suddenly I see the cross again, this time smaller and far away, but just as clear. And I say through all the noise of the voices, I'm with you, Jesus, for always, thank you. I lie there in cold sweat wondering what's come over me

Starting point is 05:38:06 for years. My Buddhist studies and pipe-smoking assured meditations on emptiness, and all of a sudden the cross has manifested to me. My eyes filled with tears. We'll all be saved. I won't even tell Dave Wayne about it.

Starting point is 05:38:22 I won't go wake him up down there and scare him. He'll know soon enough. Now I can sleep. I turn over, but it's only begun. It's only 1 o'clock in the morning. and the night wears on to the wheeling moon worse and worse till dawn by which time I've seen the cross again and again. But there's a battle somewhere and the devils keep coming back.

Starting point is 05:38:49 I know if I could only sleep for an hour, the whole complex of noisy brains would settle down. Some control would come back somewhere inside there. Some blessing would soothe the whole issue. But the bat comes, silently flapping around me again. I see him clearly in the moonlight. Now his little head of darkness and wings that zigzag maddeningly So you can't even get a look at them. Suddenly I hear a hum.

Starting point is 05:39:16 A definite flying saucer is hovering right over those trees where the hum must be. There are orders in there. They're coming to get me. Oh my God! I jump up and glare at the tree. I'm going to defend myself. The bat flaps in front of my face. The bat is there represent.

Starting point is 05:39:34 Intative in the Canyon, his radar message they got, why don't they leave? Doesn't Dave hear that awful hum? Billy is dead asleep, but little Elliot suddenly thumps his foot once. I realize he's not even asleep and knows everything that's going on. I lie down again and peek at him across the porch floor. I suddenly, realizing he's staring at the moon and there he goes again, thumping his foot, he's sending messages. He's a warlock disguised as a little boy. He's also destroying Billy. I get up to look at him feeling guilty too, realizing this is all nonsense probably, but he is not properly covered. His little bare arms are outside the blankets and the cold night. He hasn't even got a nightshirt. I curse it, Billy. I cover him up and he whimpers. I go back and lie down with mad eyes looking deep inside me.

Starting point is 05:40:26 Suddenly a bliss comes over me as the sleep mechanism takes sinking hold. And there, I am dreaming me and two kids are hired to work in the mountains on the same ridge as desolation peak, i.e. Meadow Mountain again. And start with a cliffside river crew, who tell us two workers have apparently sunk in the cliffside snow, and we must lean over sheer drops and see if we can dump them out or haul them in. All we do is lie there on crumbly snow, a thousand-foot fall to the river, crumbling the snow off in slabs, so big. big you wouldn't know if men were trapped in them or not. Not only that, the bosses have special shoes on sliders that are holding them to the safe shore,

Starting point is 05:41:10 like ski clamps, so I begin to realize they're only fooling us poor kids, and we could have fallen too. I almost do. Did. Almost? As observer of the story, I see it's just an annual ritualistic joke to fool the new kids on the job who are then dispatched to the other side of the river, to slump off more snow from sheer banks in hopes of finding the lost workmen.

Starting point is 05:41:37 So we start there on a big trip, downriver first, but en route all the peasants tell us stories of the god monster machine on the other shore, who makes sounds like certain birds and owls, and has a million infernal contraptions, enough to make you sick with all the slipshod windmill rickety details. As observer of the story again, I see it's just a trick to make us scared when we get there at night, and hear actual natural sounds of birds, owls, etc.

Starting point is 05:42:09 Thinking as green rookies in the country, it's that monster. Meanwhile, we sign on to go to the main mountain, but I promise myself if I don't like to work there, I'll come back, get my old job and desolation. Already our employers have shown a murderous sense of humor. I arrive at Mean Moe Mountain, which is like Rotton. canyon again, but as a large though dry rot river running in the wide hole and down there on many rocks or huge brooding vultures. Old bums row out to them and pull them clumsily off the rocks

Starting point is 05:42:44 and start feeding them like pets, bites of red meat or red mite, though at first I thought the eccentric old town bums wanted them to eat or to sell. Still, maybe so. Because before I study this, I look and see hundreds of slowly fornicating vulture couples on the town dump. These are now humanly formed vultures with human-shaped arms, legs, heads, torsos, but they have rainbow-colored feathers, and the men are all quietly sitting behind vulture women, slowly somehow fornicating at them in all the same slow, obscene movement. Both men and woman sit facing the same direction,

Starting point is 05:43:28 And somehow there's contact because you can see all their feathery rainbow behinds, slowly, dully, monotonously fornicating on the dump slopes. As I pass, I even see the expression on the face of a youngish-blond vulture man, eternally displeased because his vulture mistress is an old yacker who's been arguing with him all the time. His face is completely human, but inhumanly pasty, like uncooked pale pie dough, with dull, seemed buggy horror, that he's doomed to all this enough to make me shudder in sympathy. I even see her awful expression of middle-aged pie-dough tormentism.

Starting point is 05:44:12 They're so human. But suddenly me and the two kid workers are taken to the vulture people respectable quarter of town, to our apartment where a vulture woman and her daughter show us our rooms. Their faces are leprous thick, with softy yeast. painted with makeup to make them like thick Christmas dolls and dull and fuzzy, but human expressions, like with thick lips of rubber muze. Fat expressions all crumbly like cracker meal, yellow pizza puke faces, disgusting us, though we say nothing.

Starting point is 05:44:48 The apartment has dirty beatnik beds and mattresses everywhere, but I walk through the back looking for a sink. It's huge. An endless walk-through long, greasy pants, and vast washrooms a block long with single filthy little sink all dark and slimy like underground Lowell High School crumbling basements. Finally I come to the kitchen where we new workers are supposed to cook little meals all summer. It's vast stone fireplaces and stone stoves, all rancid and greasy from a month-old vulture people banquet orgy. With still dozens of uncooked

Starting point is 05:45:25 chickens lying around on the floor among garbage and bottles. Rancid, stale grease everywhere. Nobody's ever cleaned it up, or knew how, and the place as big as a garage. I pushed my way out of there, pushing a huge, greasy, stink food-stained tray of some sort, hurrying away from the big stinky emptiness and horror. The fat golden chickens lie rotten upside down on littered stone slabs. I hurry out never having seen such a dirty sight in my life. Meanwhile, I learned the two boys are studying a hamper full of vulture food for us, and one of them wisely says, blisters in our sugar, meaning the vultures put their blisters in our sugar so we'll die. But instead of being really dead, we'll be taken to the underground slimes to walk neck-deep in steaming mucks, pulling huge

Starting point is 05:46:20 groaning wheels among small-forked snakes. So the devil, with the long e-yed, ears can mine his purple magenta square stone that is the secret of all this kingdom. You end up down there groaning and pulling through dead bodies of other people, even your own family floating in the ooze. If you succeed, you can become a pasty vulture person, obscenely fornicating slowly on the dump above. I think either that or the devil just "'invince the vulture people with what's left over out of the underground hell. "'Beans anyone?' "'I hear myself saying as thump. I'm awake again.'

Starting point is 05:46:59 "'Elliot has thumped his foot just at that moment on the porch. "'I look over there. "'He's doing it on purpose. "'He knows everything that's going on. "'What on earth have I brought these people for, "'and why, just this particular night of that moon, that moon, that moon? "'I'm up again, pacing up and down, and drinking water at the creek.

Starting point is 05:47:23 Dave and Ramana's lump figures and the moonlight don't move like hypocrites. Bastard has my only sleeping spot. I clutch my head. I'm so alone in all this. I go fearfully casting about for control back inside the cabin by the lighted lamp. A smoke.

Starting point is 05:47:40 Trying to squeeze the last red drop out of the rancid port bottle. No go. Now that Billy's asleep and so still and peaceful, I wonder if I can sleep just by lying beside her and holding her. I do just this, crawling in with all my clothes which I've put on because I'm afraid of going mad, naked,

Starting point is 05:47:57 or of not being able to suddenly run away from everything in my shoes. She moans a little in her sleep and resumes sleeping as I hold her with those rigid staring eyes. Her blonde flesh in the moonlight, the poor blonde hair so carefully washed and combed. The lady-like little body, also a burden to carry around like my own, but so frail, thinish. I'd just stare at her shoulders with tears I'd wake her up and confess everything But I'll only scare her I've done irreparable harm

Starting point is 05:48:30 Got her adorable narm yells the creek All my self-sayings Suddenly blurting babbles So the meaning can't even stay a minute I mean a moment To satisfy my rational endeavors to hold control Every thought I have is smashed to a million pieces

Starting point is 05:48:48 my million-piece mental explosions that I remember I thought were so wonderful when I'd first seen them on the peatol and masculine. I'd said then, when still innocently playing with words, ah, the manifestation of multiplicity you can actually see it. It ain't just words. But now it's, ah, the Kessala Maro Yacht, you rot. Though when dawn finally comes my mind as just a series of explosions that get loud, and more. Multiply broken in pieces, some of them big orchestral, and then rainbow explosions of sound and sight mixed. At dawn also I've almost dimmed into sleep three times, but I swear, and this is something I remember that makes me realize I don't understand what happened to Big Sur even now.

Starting point is 05:49:39 The little boy somehow thumped his foot just at the moment of drows. To instantly wake me up, wide awake, back to my horror. Which when all is said and done is the horror of all the worlds, the showing of it to me being damn well what I deserve anyway with my previous blithe yakkings about the sufferings of others and books. Books, schmucks. The sickness has got me wishing if I can ever get out of this. I'll gladly become a mill worker and shut my big mouth. End of Chapter 37. Chapter 38 of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac.

Starting point is 05:50:24 This liverfox recordings in the public domain. Read by Ben Tucker, Chapter 38. Dawn is most horrible of all, with the owls suddenly calling back and forth in the misty moon haunt. And even worse than dawn is morning, the bright sun only glaring in on my pain, making it all brighter, hotter, more maddening, more nerve-wracking. I even go roaming up and down the valley in the bright Sunday morning, sunshine with bag on her arm looking hopelessly for some spot to sleep in. As soon as I find a spot of grass by the path, I realize I can't lie down there, because the

Starting point is 05:51:05 tourists might walk by and see me. As soon as I find a glade near the creek, I realize it's too sinister there, like Hemingway's darker part of the swamp, where the fishing would be more tragic somehow. All the haunts and glades having certain special evil forces concentrated there and driving me away. So haunted I go wandering up and down the canyon, crying with that bag under my arm, what on earth's happened to me? And how can earth be like that?

Starting point is 05:51:38 Am I not a human being and have done my best as well as anybody else? Never really trying to hurt anybody or half-hearded cursing heaven. The words I'd studied all my life have suddenly gotten to me in all their serious and definite deathliness. never more i be a happy poet singing about death and allied romantic matters go thou crumb of dust you with your silt of a billion years here's a billion pieces of silk for you shake that out of your shaker

Starting point is 05:52:09 and all the green nature of the canyon now waving in the morning sun looking like a cruel idiot convocation coming back to the sleepers and staring at them wild-eyed like my brother had once stared at me in the dark over my crib staring at the them not only enviously, but lonely and human isolation from their simple sleeping minds. But they all look dead. I'm carking in my canyon. Sleep is death. Everything is death. The horrible climax coming when the others finally get up and pook about, making a troubled breakfast. And I told Dave I can't possibly stay here another minute. He must drive us all back to town. Okay, but I sure wish we could stay a week like Romano. wants to do. Well, you drive me and come back.

Starting point is 05:52:58 Well, I don't know if Monsanto would like that. We've already dirtied up the place of plenty. In fact, we've got to dig a garbage pit and get rid of the junk. Billy offers to dig the garbage pit but does so by digging a neat tiny coffin-shaped grave instead of just a garbage hole. Even Dave Wayne blinks to see it. It's exactly the size fit for putting a little dead Elliot in it. Dave is thinking the same thing I am.

Starting point is 05:53:23 can tell by a glance he gives me. We've all read Freud sufficiently to understand something there. Besides, little Elliot's been crying all morning and has had two beatings, both of them ending up crying and Billy saying she can't stand it anymore and she's going to kill herself. And Ramana, too, notices it,

Starting point is 05:53:42 the perfect four-foot-by-three-foot, neatly-sided grave like you're ready to sink a little box in it. Horrifying me so much, I take the shovel and go down to dump junk into it mess up the neat pattern somehow. But little Elliot starts screaming and grabs the shovel and refuses. I go near the hole. So Billy herself goes and starts filling the garbage in,

Starting point is 05:54:02 but then looks at me significantly. I'm sure sometimes she really did aspire to make me crazy. Do you want to finish the job yourself? What do you mean? Cover the earth on? Do the honors? What do you mean do the honors? Well, I said I dig the garbage pit.

Starting point is 05:54:22 and I've done that. Ain't you supposed to do the rest? Dave Wayne is watching fascinated. There's something screwy he sees there, too. Something cold and frightening. Well, okay, I say. I'll dump the earth over it and tamp it down. But I go down to do this.

Starting point is 05:54:41 Elliot is screaming. No, no, no, no, no! My God, the fish's bones are in that grave, I realize, too. What's the matter? He won't let me go near that hole. Why did you make it look like a grave? I finally yell. But Billy's only smiling quietly and steadily at me over the grave, shovel in hand.

Starting point is 05:55:00 The kid, weeping, tugging the shovel, rushing up to block my way, trying to shove me back with his little hands. I can't understand any of it. He's screaming as I grab the shovel as though I'm about to bury Billy in there, or something, or himself maybe. What's the matter with this kid? Is he a cretan? I yell. For the same quiet, steady sense. smile, Billy says, oh, you're so fucking neurotic.

Starting point is 05:55:27 I simply get mad and dump earth over the garbage and tromp it down and say, The hell with all this madness! I get mad and stomp up on the porch and throw myself in the canvas chair and close my eyes. Dave Wayne says he's going down the road to investigate the canyon a bit, and when he comes back, the girls will have finished packing and we'll all leave. Dave goes off, the girls clean up and sweep. The little kid is sleeping and. suddenly, hopelessly, and completely finished, I sit there in the hot sun and close my eyes.

Starting point is 05:55:59 And there's the golden, swarming piece of heaven in my eyelids. It comes with a sure hand, a soft blessing as big as it is beneficent, i.e. endless. I've fallen asleep. I've fallen asleep in a strange way, with my hands clasped behind my head, thinking I'm just going to sit there and think. But I'm sleeping like that. and when I wake up just one short minute later I realize the two girls are both sitting behind me in absolute silence. When I'd sat down, they were sweeping, but now they were squatting behind my back facing each other, not a word. I turn and see them there.

Starting point is 05:56:38 Blessed relief has come to me from just that minute. Everything has washed away. I'm perfectly normal again. Dave Wayne is down the road looking at fields and flowers. I'm sitting smiling in the sun. The birds sing again. All's well again. I still can't understand it.

Starting point is 05:56:59 Most of all, I can't understand the miraculousness of the silence of the girls and the sleeping boy in the silence of Dave Wayne in the fields. Just a golden wash of goodness is spread over all and over all my body and mind. All the dark torture is a memory. I know now I can get out of there. We'll drive back to the city. I'll take Billy home. I'll say goodbye to her properly.

Starting point is 05:57:21 She won't commit no suicide or do anything wrong. She'll forget me. Her life will go on. Ramana's life will go on. Old Dave will manage somehow. I'll forgive them and explain everything as I'm doing now. And Cody and George Bezo and Raven, McLeer and perfect starry Fagan, they'll all pass through one way or the other.

Starting point is 05:57:44 I'll stay with Monsanto at his home a few days and he'll smile and show me how to be happy a while. We'll drink dry wine and... instead of sweet, and have quiet evenings in his home. Arthur Ma will come to quietly draw pictures at my side. Monsanto will say, That's all there is to it. Take it easy. Everything's okay. Don't take things too serious.

Starting point is 05:58:07 It's bad enough as it is without you going the deep end over imaginary conceptions, just like you always said yourself. I'll get my ticket and say goodbye on a flowery day, and leave all San Francisco behind, and go back home across autumn America. and it'll all be like it was in the beginning. Simple golden eternity, blessing all. Nothing ever happened.

Starting point is 05:58:30 Not even this. St. Carolyn by the sea will go on being golden one way or the other. The little boy will grow up and be a great man. There will be farewells and smiles. My mother will be waiting for me, glad. The corner of the yard where Tyke is buried will be a new and fragrant shrine, making my home more home-like somehow. When soft spring nights I'll stand in the yard under the stars.

Starting point is 05:58:58 Something good will come out of all things yet. And it will be golden and eternal, just like that. There's no need to say another word. End of Chapter 38. Appendix to Big Sur by Jack Kerouac. This Libervox recording is in the public domain, read by Ben Tucker. C. Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur.

Starting point is 05:59:31 Churson, cherson. You ain't just whistling Dixie, see. Churson, cherson. We chalcine fathers here below. Kitchen lights on. See engines from Russia. See birding here below. When rocks outset froth, I'll know Hawaii, cracked up and scramble up my daub-legged cliff.

Starting point is 05:59:56 Cracked up and scramble, up my double-legged cliff, to the silt of a million years. Shush, shush. Go on, die, salt light, you billion-yeared rock knocker. Cavroom! Sea bird, cabro bird, sat as wife and hill, loved as mother in fog. Oh, oh, oh, see, oh! Where's your little neppy tune tonight? These gentle tree pulp pages, which have nothing to do with your crash, roar, liar, see,

Starting point is 06:00:33 Ah, we're made for rock, tumble, seabird dig down, footstep hollow weed, move, bedarveling, crash. Ah, again, wine is salt here, tidal wave kitchen, engines of Russia and your soft talk. The poissons de la Mer Parle Breton My name is libri The carroac Parle Poissants Lottie Parallinine

Starting point is 06:01:00 Ocean Sanding Crasch the Billion Rocks Curplotch Sure, Shue, God Brash The headland looks like a long-nosed Collie sleeping With his light on his nose As the Ocean

Starting point is 06:01:15 Obeying its accommodations of mind, crashes in rhythm, which could and will intrude in thy rhythm of sand, thought, big frigging shoulders on that, son of a bitch. Parle, oh, parle, mere, parle, see speak to me, speak to me, your silver, you light, where hole opened up in Alaska, gray, shh, wind in. The canyon, wind in, the rain. Wind in the rolling rash, moving and... Well, sea, sea, diving, see. Oh, bird, la vengeance de la roche, cocezeze!

Starting point is 06:02:01 Ah, rare. He rammed the gate, rare over by Cherson, Chersin, we calcify fathers here below, a watery cross with weeds entwined. This grins, restoredly, low sleep, wave. Oh no, shush, shirk, boom, plop! Neptune now his arms extends While one millions of souls Sit lit in caves of darkness What, oh, bark, the dog mountain

Starting point is 06:02:31 Down by the sea engines? God rush, shore, shaw, shoo! Oh, soft sigh, We wait, hair twined like larks, Bisset, rest not, Plot it, bisp, take. Who's whispering over there? The silly earthen creek!

Starting point is 06:02:57 The fog thunders, we put silver light on face. We took the heroes in. A billion years ain't nothing. Oh, the cities here below. The men with a thousand arms. The stanchions of their upward gaze. The coral of their poetry. The sea, dragons, tenderized meat for fleshy fish.

Starting point is 06:03:20 Navark, Navark! the fishes of the sea speak Breton. Wash as soft as people's dreams. We got peoples in and out the shore they call it shore, see call it. Pishreplosh! The five billion years since.

Starting point is 06:03:37 Earth we saw substantial Chan. Chinese are the waves. The woods are dreaming. No human words bespeak the token sorrow older than old this wave be crashing smarts. The sand with plosh of twirled, sandy thought.

Starting point is 06:03:55 Ah, change the world, ah set, the fee, Our rope, the angels in all the sea. Ah, ropy otter, barnacle bee, Ah, cave, ah, crush, a feathery sea. Too much short, where, Miss Knop Tonight? Rutan karach in the Labydallian Aristotelian Park. With slime a middle, and raunty foreigner, who pulled pearls by rope to throne, The king by the roll in the forest of the ever seas, Not ever seas, B, sees, creep, crash.

Starting point is 06:04:35 The woman with her body, in the sea, The frog who never moves and thunders, shush! The snake with his body under the sand, the dog with the light on his nose, supine with shoulders so, enormous they reach back to rain crack. The leaves hasten to the sea. We let them hasten to be wetted, and give them that old sought change. A neuter thinking will make you see they originate from the we see anyway.

Starting point is 06:05:07 No dooming booms on Sunday afternoons. We run through the core of cliffs. Blam up caves, disengaged, no, jelly or jelly pendant thinkers. Our armies, of anchored seaweed in the coves, give of the smell of jellied salt. Reach, reach, some leaves haven't hastened near enough. Roll, roll, pearl, the sand shark floor, a greeny, pally, Andarva.

Starting point is 06:05:37 Ah, back, ah forth, ah, shish, boom away! Doom, a day. Vain we, firm, the sea is wee. Pall, boll, boomed, earth, a re, e, ee, Shaw, shoo, shoo, fruit, Ravad, tapavada, pow, kuf, luf, roof. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yo, yeah. Shh.

Starting point is 06:06:04 Which one? The one, which one? The one, ploshed. The ploshed one? The same. Ah, boom. Who's that ant? That giant golden salt change ant,

Starting point is 06:06:15 magnifying my mountain of feet. Tis finder, finding the change and thought to draw. joined the boomer, hangers in the cave of light, and built a house above it. Never fear. Navei foie, lebrant quillin, la lingue de la mer, Saint-espaniot combe, lecule de Kurd, who did La Maha? Prana, pragna, parameda, du suet, ah, yes, cave-lum, gum-see, silent me. They ain't about to try Them ants who wear out tunnels

Starting point is 06:06:50 And a week The tunnel a million years One, no Down round the headland slabs for weed The chicken of the sea Go yak! They sleep A roar! Aroar! Arra! Arro! Otter me! Daughter me sea

Starting point is 06:07:05 Me last blue lagoon inside of Me the sea Divine is the substance all over the sea Of space we speak And hasten Let no mouth Swallow the sea, Gavril, Gavro, the Cherson Chinese and old fingernail C, is ringing your ear, dear, Dee, is virgin you trying to fathom me? Tiresome old sea, ain't you sick and tired of all this

Starting point is 06:07:32 Mard, this incessant boom-boom and sand walk, you people, hoary rockies here to Fuegy and never get sad, or despair like a German phony, just glue. Boom, boom, and green on foggy nights. The fog is part of us. I know, but tired, as I can be listening to all this silly majesty. Basho, Lao, pop! Who is this fish, sitting unsunk, run up? A Hawaii typhoon smash him against his rock.

Starting point is 06:08:05 We'll jelly you, jellied man, show you essential, jello of the sea, king of the sea. No monarch ever Irish be. Do you see the Irish sea? Green winds on Tamarack vines? Joyce, James, shish, sea, sea, brash, navash, lavash, ectur, the sea don't say much actually. Gosh, she, hussy, toe, let men, on, Ulysses, and all of them fair-headed, Mouin de plache and what difference make one little white spark of light. Hair woven hands, Penelopee seabote, Smeller, Cortier's and Telemachus, skies, dropadary, dropperdairie creep, or. Frank Gold rippled that undersea creek where fish, fish, fish, four, fishermen, saltine, brein the wets, owesters of old Portuguese prayers.

Starting point is 06:09:08 Sal tangled, changed, salt and dropped the sand and weed and water brains entangled. Rats of old Venetian yellers, Ariel Calaband, to Roma port, pow spell. Speak you, parley, in this my mother's parlor. Wash your under shoes when you come in. Say thanks to foggy moon. Go brash. Topata, al fat. Will gray ye rose.

Starting point is 06:09:35 Morning primord creeper sees the bird. of Perivision dying, tweet the yellow mouth roof, How sweet! The earth, yell sand, Except when tumble, boom! Oh, we wait too, for heaven, All in one, all is there, in fair and sight. I'm going to wash now, old pavia down,

Starting point is 06:09:57 And pack my salt to either town. Cliffs of antique ain't got no rose. The morning scene, the letter pose. Boom de boom day, the sea is me. We are the sea, it ain't all snow. We wash Fujiyama down, soon and sand, crook-bird back, we high-bash, rock. Long short, low and easy, wind and many freezing, bottoms on luck rock, rapaport, endymion thou tangled, dreamer, love my thigh, rose of Shelley, rose, oh urns, ogled urns in fish-eye. Sinko-C, the Chico Sea, the midgeti, the mage.

Starting point is 06:10:38 Jelen, Headland, Sea, what hype side reel did he put down, bending beatniks sea-goatee, over old goat manuscripts to find the other side of flat, sea round, see the end of me, round and huge bedroom, op whole cave and shawl, sand and salt and hair eyes, strong enough to make coffee grow in your hair, whose plantation Neptune got, that of Atlas still down there. Hesperids, his feet, sir, his sleet, Irish sea, finger-tip, and corned, while I his soul, badoom. Shurning, shurning, plop, bedash.

Starting point is 06:11:14 This sigh old learnings high beside me. Rough old hands have played out, pedigree. We've sunk more boats than dreamer'll ever see. Burning, burning, the world is burning and needs water. I'll have a daughter, otter wait and sea. Churning, churning me. Panties, panties, these ancient fancies are so girling. You've not seen mermaids of,

Starting point is 06:11:38 my actual sea. You've not seen sexless babies with breasts of majesty. My wife. My wife. Her name is, Oh, so really, high life. The low-life kingdom where we part out tea is C. Side, me, Josh, Coup, Patra. I. E. Moe. Poush. S. Come here, read me. Dirty postcard. Urchin C. Karash, your name. Want to swim? Sink or swim. Ears ringing again. See vibrate rhythm. Crash sets off cave. Hanger blower's whistling, dog ear back to sea, Ari, grudge Napoleon Nada. Nada. Pluto eats the sea, room, hands folded by the sea. On e, too, cached, mange the silence.

Starting point is 06:12:24 Died le poissons de la mer. Ah, mar, gore, thalata, merd, mard, demur, mu mer, macavache. The ocean is the mother. I'm not a mauve quaint. I'm, I'm tranquil In the tempete I cry, Come a fool

Starting point is 06:12:42 I mose, I brach tute Clock, clack, milk Me, me, me, ma Says the wind blowing sand, Pluto eats the sea

Starting point is 06:12:53 Ami, go Da, Shepop, Go come kark, care Keter va foe Kata Kek Kek

Starting point is 06:13:03 Kek, Kek, Kukyotil Kik Some of these, rather, taratesters, trapped, here I chair, theft, the Anadongdak ramat lot, round my cruel to pat the lat, rat the Anakakal Ked, Ramon Tukak, Krahavoon, Frup, feet cold, weighed, mind sore, Sim, sin, horny, lay the sea, corny, try me, usins here, hang no more, here, havin'erata, plowsh, Sh, and more. Again, Kavluk, K'bloom! And here comes, big Mr. Trash. More waves coming, every syllable, windy.

Starting point is 06:13:46 Backwash palaver, paralleling parlippuceviour. A troublesome spirit hanging here can't make it in the void. The sea will only drown me. These words are affectations of sick mortality. We try to make our way in self-reliance aid. Not ever comes too quick from wherever, and whatever, heaven dear may have suggested to promise us. But these waves scare me.

Starting point is 06:14:11 I am going to die in full despair. Wake up where? On second breath in life, the atmosphere is dearer, maybe closer to heaven. Oh, paradise. Is the sea really so bad? Have you sent men here for this cold clown and monstrous eater at the world, whose sound I mock? God, I've got to believe in your living death.

Starting point is 06:14:34 Will you save us all? Soon or now? Send illumination to our drowning brains. We're pitiful Lord, we need your help. Save us, dear. Save yourself, Godman. If you were Godman, you'd command these waves to very well. Tennyson's, dear, now dead.

Starting point is 06:14:57 Leave it to the light. Concern yourself with supper and an eye. Somebody's eye, a wife. A girl, a friend, an animal, a blood let drop. He for his sea, he for his fire, thee for thy desire. This sea drove me away and yelled, go to your desire. As I hurried up the valley, it added one last yell, and laugh! Even the sea can't stop me from writing something to read in my old age.

Starting point is 06:15:26 This is the chart of brief forms. The sea, the briefest, shish yourself. After scared me like that, Mar, I'll exas. Zoriate your slum, your iodine weeds and slime hoops. Even your dried hollow seaweed stinks. You stink all over. Boom, try that creep. The little Monterey fishing boat glides downward home, 15 miles to go. Be home to fried fish and beer be five. It guides the sea, it's bird routes. Silver loss forever outward. From blue sky of human bridges to the massive mock cloud sea center. heap to the gray.

Starting point is 06:16:05 Some boys call it gunboat blue, or gray, but I call it the Civil War of rocks. Rocks come air. Rocks come water, and rocks, rocks. Kara, Tavira, Mnash, Grand Bash, Push, Labas, Croosh, La Hort, plash, opede, pee, Rolla, test, bull, mange,

Starting point is 06:16:29 The Hensombe, La Ranch. The handsome king prevails, over boom, sing birdhead. Crash de adie. Spit your ideas, says the sea to me quite appropriately. Pss, p, p, p, ps, girl inside. Red shoes, scum, eyes of old, sorcerers, toenails hanging down, in the barrel of old, furkin cheese, the Dutchman forgot to eat that tempest, 19-0-16.

Starting point is 06:16:58 When torpedoed by gunboat, Pedro in the valley of a million fees. When Magellan cross-eyed ate the Amazonian feet, And, ah, when Columbo crossed, When Drake surfranchised the waves, With beating of the Blue Jay, dark, Pounded his aleward tank before the boom. Housed up all thoughts of Eric, the Red, the Greenland caperer, And builder of rock dungs in new port, new,

Starting point is 06:17:27 yet. Oldport, Indian, fish head, old port tattoo, quakutal, headpost, Taboo, Putash, coyotal, potlatch. Old primitive Columbia, named for Columbus, named for Arugio,

Starting point is 06:17:44 Vesmarica. Ar, or da! What about Varanano? He sailed, he Varazano, zailed, and we staten his island in on deep, In on Dachin, Rotted the Wallower

Starting point is 06:17:59 Sinners, liars, good men all Sink water, swim, Drink Neptune's nectar, the Zal Sotat. Zal Sotate, name for Crota. Crota, Tachrot, you ain't, about to find. Jesus Christian, any dry turds here below? Wafo no, go crash yonder, rock of bleak With your fillet mignon teeth and see

Starting point is 06:18:22 For you, the hearth, the heart, The lock of hair, for me, for us, the sea, the murdering of time by eating, lusty cracks of lip-feed wave, At eons of sandy artistry till nothing's left but old age, New morning primordial pain of sinners by the unborn bird of roses yet undone. With weeds your roses, sand crabs your hummers, with buzzers in the sea, with runners in the deep. This septred osh, this white leg, spanning rock, US to rock. Japan, this unstable roller roaming all, this plusher at Jagori. Dry dung door, this mouth of silver-white, auring to hold thee, this perjure of conscience, aura for thee, no mouse in here but's got a little glee.

Starting point is 06:19:14 And aft or oft the osprey in his glee's aghly, oh purdy, hearty ocean, me. Sop, bring the sceptre down. Again you've accepted me. Breathe our iodine, filthy your drink, faint it, feet wet. Drop your profile, move it in the sea. Float, weeded, watery, adenai, longs for thee. And Shelley three, that's three.

Starting point is 06:19:39 Burn and salt, with slow most change. We've had no crack at eternity. In a billion years of trying, one grain of sand possesses, Three thousand worlds of glee, not to mention me. Ah, see. Ah, see, ah, so. Shoot, shiver, mix, ha, roll. Tara, Tata, curlerk, kayash, ki, pearls, pearls in the yellow west, yellow sky to China.

Starting point is 06:20:09 Pacific we named here. Water is always meeting. Water. Pacific, Pacific, Pacific, Tapfik, Karum, Gadaw, Gdaush, Gaka, Gaia, Taya, Tata. What sails used old Bikus, Dikus, Dikus, Dikus! What raft mailed mows to the hovind of post, What saved black swirl from kid plank, What go-bug here, seat, see,

Starting point is 06:20:34 Kara, ponder's out yar. Big sir, they call this sand, these rocks, this creek, Raton Canyon by name pours, Coyote leaves and old poma bones, And old dust of tomahawks into your angler maw, My salt maw shall salvage tailors, Sewing in the room below, Sewing weed, shrap for hikers,

Starting point is 06:20:55 In the milky silt, Sowing crosswords for certainty, Sarton are we of price victory. In this salt war with thee, And thine thee jelly'd yink, Look, O the sea here called Pacific Sea, Taki! My golden empty soul,

Starting point is 06:21:11 Outlast your salty sill, The windows of my jelly eye and fish-head muck Look out on thee, Slit with cigar a-mere, mouth some contempt. Yet I, high, me to see you, you, high thee to eat, me, fair in sight, and worn aright. Arra, Arou, Gerdava. Silly, silent cities in the sea have children playing cardboard mush with Enyard, old Englander, bee plates, slicker'd o'er with scum of histories below. No tempest as still and awful as the tempest within, sorcerer hip! Buddha lands and Buddha seas

Starting point is 06:21:48 What sails Magalya Yayana used, he only knows to tell but got killed by yellers, screaming down the cliff. Let's go home now! Leave Marge smashed Jamas. Madgal Yayana was murdered by the sea, but the sea don't tell, the sea don't murder. The sea draying scholars ought to know that or go back to school. Here over there, the ocean motor feel the splash of it. Six silly centipedes here.

Starting point is 06:22:16 Macri. Ah, ratat-da-da-tat-tat. The machine-gun see rhythmic balls of you pouring in with smooth glantini in your pedigreed milk-pup tenor. Tender marsh, aright-a-ru, a rack, arach, quack. Kamak monarch, karat, javak, tamada, kaval, va vuvla, via. Mia, mine, see, poo, farewell, sir. Did you ever tell him about the water, meeting water? Oh, go back to Otter.

Starting point is 06:22:50 Term, term, term, clerm, curn, cow, cow, cash, catch, cluck, clock. Go meet, sea need, B.D. I. by C.U. Enoch, soon an arf, in old Brittany. 21st, August, 1960. Pacific Ocean at Big Sur, California. End of C. End of Big Sur by Jack Kerouac.

Classic Audiobook Collection - Big Sur by Jack Kerouac ~ Full Audiobook [drama]

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