On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [82]
I never saw so many snarls in all my born days. But on Saturday night, smiling graciously at one another, they took off like a pair of successful Hollywood characters and went on the town. Henri wanted to get Diane into the movies; he wanted to make a Hollywood writer out of me; he was nothing but plans. He woke up and saw me come in the window. His great laugh, one of the greatest laughs in the world, dinned in my ear. “Aaaaah Kerouac, he comes in through the window, he follows instructions to a T. Where have you been, you’re two weeks late!” He slapped me on the back, he punched Diane in the ribs, he leaned on the wall and laughed and cried, he pounded the table so you could hear it everywhere in Marin city and that great long “Aaaaah” laugh resounding around Marin city. “Kerouac!” he screamed. “The one and only indispensable Kerouac.” I had just come through the little fishing village of Sausalito and the first thing I said was “There must be a lot of Italians in Sausalito.” “There must be a lot of Italians in Sausalito!” he shouted at the top of his lungs.. “Aaaaah!” he pounded himself, he fell on the bed, he almost rolled on the floor. “Did you hear what Kerouac said? There must be a lot of Italians in Sausalito? Aaaaah-haaa! Hoo! Wow! Whee!” He got red like a beet laughing. “Oh you slay me, Kerouac, you’re the funniest man in the world, and here you are, you finally got here, he came in through the window, you saw him Diane, he followed instructions and came in through the window…Aaah! Hooo!” The strange thing was that next door to Henri lived a Negro man called Mr. Snow whose laugh, I swear here on the Bible, was positively and finally the one greatest laugh in all this world. I can’t describe it now…I will in a moment when the time comes. But this Mr. Snow began his laugh from the supper table when his old wife said something casual; he apparently got up choking, leaned on the wall, looked up to heaven, and started; he ended staggering thru the door, leaning on neighbors’ walls, he was drunk with it, he staggered thruout marin city in the shadows raising his whooping triumphant call to the demon god that must have prodded his ass to do it…I don’t know if he ever finished supper. There’s a possibility that Henri without knowing it was picking up from this amazing man Mr. Snow.. And I say tho Henri was having worklife problems and bad lovelife with a sharp-tongued woman he at least had learned to laugh almost better than anyone in the world and I saw all the fun we were going to have in Frisco. The pitch was this: Henri slept with Diane in the bed across the room, and I slept in the cot by the window. I was not to touch Diane. Henri at once made a speech concerning this. “I don’t want to find you two playing around when you think I’m not looking. You can’t teach the old maestro a new tune. This is an original saying of mine.” I looked at Diane. She was a fetching hunk- -a honey-colored creature, but there was hate in her eyes for both of us. Her ambition was to marry a rich man. She came from a smalltown in Kansas. She rued the day she ever took up with Henri. On one of his big show off weekends he spent a hundred dollars on her and she thought she’d found an heir. Instead she was all hung up in this shack and for lack of anything else she had to stay there. She had a job in Frisco, she had to take the Greyhound bus at the crossroads and go in everyday. She never forgave Henri for it. He made the best of things. I was to stay in the shack and write a shining original story for a Hollywood studio. Henri was going to fly down in a Stratosphere liner with his harp under his arm and make us all rich; Diane was to go with him; he was going to introduce her to his buddy’s father who was a famous director and an intimate of WC Fields. So the first week I stayed in the shack in Marin City writing furiously at some gloomy tale about New York that I thought would satisfy a Hollywood director, and the trouble with it was that it was too sad. Henri couldn’t barely read and so he never even saw it, he just carried it down to Hollywood