On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [119]
rainy night. Neal was popeyed with awe. This madness would lead nowhere. I didn’t know what was happening to me, and I suddenly realized it was only the T that we were smoking, Neal had bought some in New York. It made me think that everything was about to arrive---the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever. I left everybody and went home to rest. My mother said I was wasting my time hanging around with Neal and his gang. I knew that was bull too. Life is life, and kind is kind. What I wanted was to take one more magnificent trip to the west coast and get back in time for the spring semester in school. And what a trip it turned out to be! I only went along for the ride, and to see what else Neal was going to do, and finally, also, knowing Neal would go back to Carolyn in Frisco, I wanted to have an affair with Louanne, and I did. We got ready to cross the groaning continent again. I drew my G.I. check and gave Neal $18 to mail to his wife; she was waiting for him to come home and she was broke. What was on Louanne’s mind I don’t know. Al Hinkle as ever just followed. There were long funny days spent in Allen’s apartment before we left. He went around in his bathrobe and made semi-ironical speeches as follows: “Now I’m not trying to take your hincty sweets from you but it seems to me the time has come to decide what you are and what you’re going to do.” Allen was working as copyboy for AP. “I want to know what all this sitting around the house all day is intended to mean. What all this talk is and what you propose to do. Neal, why did you leave Carolyn and pick up Louanne.” No answer---giggles. “Louanne, why are you travelling around the country like this and what are your womanly intentions concerning the shroud?” Same answer. “Al Hinkle, why did you abandon your new wife in Tucson and what are you doing here sitting on your big fat ass. Where’s your home? what’s your job?” Al Hinkle bowed his head in genuine befuddlement. “Jack---how comes it you’ve fallen on such sloppy days and what have you done with Pauline?” He adjusted his bathrobe and sat facing us all. “The days of wrath are yet to come. The baloon won’t sustain you much longer. And not only that but it’s an abstract baloon. You’ll all go flying to the west coast and come staggering back in search of your stone.” In these days Allen had developed a tone of voice which he hoped sounded like what he called The Voice of Rock; the whole idea was to stun people into the realization of the rock. “You pin a dragon to your hats,” he warned us, “you’re up in the attic with the bats.” His mad eyes glittered at us. Since the Dakar Doldrums he had finally gone through a terrible period which he called the Holy Doldrums, or Harlem Doldrums, when he lived in Harlem in midsummer and at night woke up in his lonely room and heard “the great machine” descending from the sky; and when he walked on 125th street “under water” with all the other fish. It was a riot of crazy ideas that had come to occupy his brain. He made Louanne sit on his lap and commanded her to subside. He told Neal “Why don’t you just sit down and relax. Why do you jump around so much?” Neal ran around putting sugar in his coffee and saying “Yes! yes! yes!” At night Al Hinkle slept on the floor on cushions, Neal and Louanne pushed Allen out of bed and went to it, and Allen sat up in the kitchen over his kidney stew mumbling the predictions of the rock. I came in days and watched everything. Al Hinkle said to me “Last night I walked clear down to Times Square and just as I arrived I suddenly realized I was a ghost---it was my ghost walking on the sidewalk.” He said these things to me without comment, nodding his head emphatically. Ten hours later in the midst of someone else’s conversation Al would suddenly say “Yep, it was my ghost walking on the sidewalk.” Suddenly Neal leaned to me earnestly and said “Jack I have something to ask of you---very important to me---I wonder how you’ll take it---we’re buddies aren’t we?” “Sure are, Neal.” He almost blushed. Finally he came out with it: he wanted