On the Road - Jack Kerouac [101]
5
The oar belonged to a tall thin fag who was on his way home to Kansas and wore dark glasses and drove with extreme care; the car was what Dean called a “fag Plymouth”; it had no pickup and no real power. “Effeminate car!” whispered Dean in my ear. There were two other passengers, a couple, typical halfway tourist who wanted to stop and sleep everywhere. The first stop would have to be Sacramento, which wasn’t even the faintest beginning of the trip to Denver. Dean and I sat alone in the back seat and left it up to them and talked. “Now, man, that alto man last night had IT—he held it once he found it; I’ve never seen a guy who could hold so long.” I wanted to know what “IT” meant. “Ah well”—Dean laughed—“now you’re asking me impon-de-rables—ahem! Here’s a guy and everybody’s there, right? Up to him to put down what’s on everybody’s mind. He starts the first chorus, then lines up his ideas, people, yeah, yeah, but get it, and then he rises to his fate and has to blow equal to it. All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he gets it—everybodylooks up and knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries. Time stops. He’s filling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes of old blowing. He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it’s not the tune that counts but IT—” Dean could go no further; he was sweating telling about it.
Then I began talking; I never talked so much in all my life. I told Dean that when I was a kid and rode in cars I used to imagine I held a big scythe in my hand and cut down all the trees and posts and even sliced every hill that zoomed past the window. “Yes! Yes!” yelled Dean. “I used to do it too only different scythe—tell you why. Driving across the West with the long stretches my scythe had to be immeasurably longer and it had to curve over distant mountains, slicing off their tops, and reach another level to get at further mountains and at the same time clip off every post along the road, regular throbbing poles. For this reason—O man, I have to tell you, NOW, I have IT—I have to tell you the time my father and I and a pisspoor bum from Larimer Street took a trip to Nebraska in the middle of the depression to sell flyswatters. And how we made them, we bought pieces of ordinary regular old screen and pieces of wire that we twisted double and little pieces of blue and red cloth to sew around the edges and all of it for a matter of cents in a five-and-ten and made thousands of flyswatters and got in the old bum’s jalopy and went clear around Nebraska to every farmhouse and sold them for a nickel apiece—mostly for charity the nickels were given us, two bums and a boy, apple pies in the sky, and my old man in those days was always singing ‘Hallelujah, I’m a bum, bum again.’ And man, now listen to this, after two whole weeks of incredible hardship and bouncing around and hustling in the heat to sell these awful makeshift flyswatters they started to argue about the division of the proceeds and had a big fight on the side of the road and then made up and bought wine and began drinking wine and didn’t stop for five days and five nights while I huddled and cried in the background, and when they were finished every last cent was spent and we were right back where we started from, Larimer Street. And my old man was arrested and I had to plead at court to the judge to let him go cause he was my pa and I had no mother. Sal, I made great mature, speeches at the age of eight in front of interested lawyers ...” We were hot; we were going east; we were excited.
“Let me tell you more,” I said, “and only as a parenthesis within what you’re saying and to conclude my last thought. As a child lying back in my father’s car in the back seat I also had a vision of myself on a white horse riding alongside over every possible obstacle