The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [52]
“Where’s everybody?” says she.
“How long can you stay?”
“I’ve got to go right away, unless I call my mother.”
“Let’s call.”
“Okay.”
We went down to the corner gas station pay phone, and she said she’d be home in two hours, and as we walked back along the sidewalk I put my arm around her waist but way around with my fingers digging into her belly and she said “Oooh, I can’t stand that!” and almost fell down on the sidewalk and bit my shirt just as an old woman was coming our way ogling us angrily and after she passed us we clinched in a big mad passionate kiss under the trees of evening. We rushed to the cottage where she spent an hour literally spinning in my arms and Alvah walked in right in the middle of our final ministrations of the Bodhisattva. We took our usual bath together. It was great sitting in the hot tub chatting and soaping each other’s backs. Poor Princess, she meant every word she said. I really felt good about her, and compassionate, and even warned her: “Now don’t go wild and get into orgies with fifteen guys on a mountaintop.”
Japhy came after she left, and then Coughlin came and suddenly (we had wine) a mad party began in the cottage. It started off with Coughlin and me, drunk now, walking arm in arm down the main drag of town carrying huge, almost impossibly huge flowers of some kind we’d found in a garden, and a new jug of wine, shouting haikus and hoos and satoris at everybody we saw in the street and everybody was smiling at us. “Walked five miles carrying huge flower,” yelled Coughlin, and I liked him now, he was deceptively scholarly looking or fatty-boomboom looking but he was a real man. We went to visit some professor of the English Department at U. of Cal. we knew and Coughlin left his shoes on the lawn and danced right into the astonished professor’s house, in fact frightened him somewhat, though Coughlin was a fairly well known poet by now. Then barefooted with our huge flowers and jugs we went back to the cottage it was now about ten. I had just gotten some money in the mail that day, a fellowship of three hundred bucks, so I said to Japhy “Well I’ve learned everything now, I’m ready. How about driving me to Oakland tomorrow and helping me buy all my rucksack and gear and stuff so I can take off for the desert?”
“Good, I’ll get Morley’s car and be over to get you first thing in the morning, but right now how about some of that wine?” I turned on the little red bandana dimbulb and we poured wine and all sat around talking. It was a great night of talk. First Japhy started telling his later life story, like when he was a merchant seaman in New York port and went around with a dagger on his hip, 1948, which surprised Alvah and me, and then about the girl he was in love with who lived in California: “I had a hardon for her three thousand miles long, goodness!”
Then Coughlin said “Tell ’em about Great Plum, Japh.”
Instantly Japhy said “Great Plum Zen Master was asked what the great meaning of Buddhism was, and he said rush flowers, willow catkins, bamboo needles, linen thread, in other words hang on boy, the ecstasy’s general, ’s what he means, ecstasy of the mind, the world is nothing but mind and what is the mind? The mind is nothing but the world, goddammit. Then Horse Ancestor said ‘This mind is Buddha.’ He also said ‘No mind is Buddha.’ Then finally talking about Great Plum his boy, ‘The plum is ripe.’”
“Well that’s pretty interesting,” said Alvah, “but Où sont les neiges d’antan?”
“Well I sort of agree with you because the trouble is these people saw the flowers like they were in a dream but dammit-all the world is real Smith and Goldbook and everybody carries on like it was a dream, shit, like they were themselves dreams or dots. Pain or love or danger makes you real again, ain’t that right Ray like when you were scared on that ledge?”
“Everything was real, okay.”
“That’s why frontiersmen are always heroes and were always my real heroes and will always be. They’re constantly on the alert in the realness which might