On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [128]
with the Mayan Codices on his lap and although he went on talking the book lay open all the time. I was young and I said once “What’s going to happen to us when we die?” and he said “When you die you’re just dead, that’s all.” He had a set of chains in his room that he said he used with his psychoanalyst; they were experimenting with narco-analysis and found that Bill had seven separate personalities each growing worse and worse on the way down till finally he was a raving idiot and had to be restrained with chains. The top personality was an English Lord, the bottom the idiot. Halfway he was an old Negro who stood in line waiting with everyone else and said “Some’s bastards, some’s ain’t, that’s the score.” Bill had a sentimental streak about the old days in America, especially 1910 when you could get morphine in a drugstore without prescription and Chinamen smoked opium in their evening windows and the country was wild and brawling and free with abundance and any kind of freedom for everyone. His chief hate was Washington bureaucracy; second to that, Liberals; also cops. He spent all his time talking and teaching others. Joan sat at his feet, so did I, so did Neal; and so had Allen Ginsberg. We’d all learned from him. He was a gray, nondescript looking fellow you wouldn’t notice on the street, unless you looked closer and saw his mad bony skull with its strange youthfulness and fire---a Kansas minister with exotic phenomenal fires and mysteries. He had studied medicine in Vienna, known Freud too; had studied anthropology, read everything; and now he was settling to his life’s work, which was the study of things themselves in the streets of life and the night. He sat in his chair; Joan brought drinks, martinis. The shades by his chair were always drawn, day and night; it was his corner of the house. On his lap were the Mayan codices and an air gun which he occasionally raised to pop benzedrine tubes across the room. I kept rushing around putting up new ones. We all took shots. Meanwhile we talked. Bill was curious to know the reason for this trip. He peered at us and snuffed down his nose. “Now Neal, I want you to sit quiet a minute and tell me what you’re doing crossing the country like this.” Neal could only blush and say “Ah well, you know how it is.” “Jack, what are you going to the Coast for?” “Only for a few days, I’m coming back to school.” “What’s the score with this Al Hinkle, what kind of character is he?” At that moment Al was making up to Helen in the bedroom; it didn’t take him long. We didn’t know what to tell Bill about Al Hinkle. Seeing that we didn’t know anything about ourselves he whipped out three sticks of tea and said to go ahead, supper’d be ready soon. “Ain’t nothing better in the world to give you an appetite. I once ate a horrible lunchcart hamburg on tea and it seemed like the most delicious thing in the world. I just got back from Houston last week, went to see Kells about our cotton. I was sleeping in a motel one morning when all of a sudden I was blasted out of bed. This damned guy had just shot his wife in the room next to mine. Everybody stood around confused and the guy just got in his car and drove off, left the shotgun on the floor for the sheriff. They finally caught him in Houma drunk as a Lord. Man ain’t safe going around this country any more without a gun.” He pulled back his coat and showed us his revolver. Then he opened the drawer and showed us the rest of his arsenal. In New York he once had a machinegun under his bed. “I got something better than that now…a german sheintoth gas gun, look at this beauty, only got one shell. I could knock out a hundred men with this gun and have plenty of time to make a getaway. Only thing wrong I only got one shell.” “I hope I’m not around when you try it” said Joan from the kitchen. “How do YOU know it’s a gas shell.” Bill snuffed; he never paid any attention to her sallies but he heard them. His relation with his wife was one of the strangest: they talked till late at night: Bill liked to hold the floor, he went right on in his dreary monotonous