Book of Sketches - Jack Kerouac [56]
like a vast slow unfolding of
its rainy tragedy where driving
rains smash futilely on the
blank waving void.
Hopeless blue
boxes intended for plants or
for the outdoor coolness of
Spreckels’ Homo Milk and
8¢ cubes of Holiday Oleo-
margarine, stick out from
windowsills in and around what
the City Managers call the “blighted
area” that must be torn down
within 5, or even 3, years. Dispossession
and complete loneliness
haunt the empty sidewalks in
front of old stores for rent.
In a tenement a little Negro
girl in dumb thought at her
mother’s sofa alone in the
afternoon room reads “Hardened
vegetable oils (soybean & cottonseed),
skim milk, salt, monoglyceride,
lecithin; isopropyl citrate (0-01%)
to protect flavor, and vitamin
A and artificial color added.
2 oz. supplies 47% of adults
and 62% of child’s minimum
daily Vitamin A requirements,”
from the cube of oleo paper
and stares for 90 seconds in a
Buddhist-like trance at the
little ®(apparently meaning
‘registered’ trademark) at the
side of the brand name
Holiday, wondering if the
little ® is meant to be a
secret of the recipe not mentioned
in the long paragraph, or a
sign of some authority hidden
behind the butter in a suit and
briefcase withon it and
® on his Cadillac and he
drives around with bulging eyes
and a Texas Truman hat in
the streets of the City.
“I, poor French Canadian Ti Jean become
a big sophisticated hipster esthete in
the homosexual arts, I, mutterer to
myself in childhood French, I, Indian-
head, I, Mogloo, I the wild one,
the “wild boy,” I, Claudius Brutus
McGonigle Mckarroquack, hopper
of freights, Skid Row habituee,
railroad Buddhist, New England Modernist,
20th Century Storywriter, Crum, Krap,
dope, divorcee, hype, type; sitter in windows
of life; idiot far from home; no
wood in my stove, no potatoes in my
field, no field; hepcat, howler, wailer,
waiter in the line of time; lazy
washed-out, workless; yearner after
Europe, poet manquée; pas tough!
stool gatherer, food destroyer, war
evader, nightmare dreamer, angel
be-er, wisdom seer, fool, bird, cocacola
bottle — I, am in need of advice
from God and will not get it, not
likely, nor soon, nor ever — sad saha
world, we were born for nothing from
nothing — Respects to our sensitive
Keeners up & down the crime.”
O Melville! thy Soul
Sustains me
More than all the Buddhas
That have passed
With the water
Under the Brooklyn Bridge
NY
Dont let your New York be modified &
shrunken by local transitory dislikes (such
as Tony Bennett-Laurels-bleak N.Y.) (in
all this Applish Apple) — but the Liberté
steaming in in brightgold afternoon, of
the Daily News, 4 AM bars, Birdland,
Jackie Gleason, Italian restaurants,
5th Avenue, Lucien, Wolfe, Charley
Vackner the race results, West St. water-
front, Friday night fights in the TV saloon,
the Columbia Campus in May, the Remo, hep-
cats on corners bent, Pastrami at the Gaiety,
an ice cream soda at midnight on Broadway,
beautiful gorgeous blondes, brunettes, —
But I hate the fumes of 34th St.
A strange aura of masochism
and even of homosexuality
in Christian Catholicism
— “He will give you a
taste of joys & delights that
transcend anything” — etc —
. . . That’s the homosexuality . . .
“praying to God to rid you of
your desires and abase you thus”
the masochism —
Why?
You cant beat the Tao —
the Buddha — the Guru of
the Far East — “and Jesus
will make it easy” — Really
my dear — Nothin’s easy.
The difference between Merton
and me, is, I didnt fall
for the columbia jester
TANGIERS 1957
Blowing in an afternoon wind,
on a white fence,
A cobweb
March wind from the sea — a lonely dobe house
with red tiled roof, on a highway boulevard,
by white garages and new apartment buildings
in ruined field — everything in place in the inscrutable
sunny air, no meaning in the sky and
a girl running by coughing! It is very strange how
the green hills are full of trees and white houses
without comment. I think Tangiers is some kind
of