The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [58]
“She tried to slash her wrists with some old knife that doesn’t cut right. I’m worried about her. Will you watch her while I go to work tonight?”
“Oh man—”
“Oh you, oh man, don’t be like that. You know what it says in the Bible, ‘even unto the least of these…’”
“All right but I was planning on having fun tonight.”
“Fun isn’t everything. You’ve got some responsibilities sometimes, you know.”
I didn’t have a chance to show off my new pack in The Place. He drove me to the cafeteria on Van Ness where I got Rosie a bunch of sandwiches with his money and I went back alone and tried to make her eat. She sat in the kitchen staring at me.
“But you don’t realize what this means!” she kept saying. “Now they know everything about you.”
“Who?”
“You.”
“Me?”
“You, and Alvah, and Cody, and that Japhy Ryder, all of you, and me. Everybody that hangs around The Place. We’re all going to be arrested tomorrow if not sooner.” She looked at the door in sheer terror.
“Why’d you try to cut your arms like that? Isn’t that a mean thing to do to yourself?”
“Because I don’t want to live. I’m telling you there’s going to be a big new revolution of police now.”
“No, there’s going to be a rucksack revolution,” I said laughing, not realizing how serious the situation was; in fact Cody and I had no sense, we should have known from her arms how far she wanted to go. “Listen to me,” I began, but she wouldn’t listen.
“Don’t you realize what’s happening?” she yelled staring at me with big wide sincere eyes trying by crazy telepathy to make me believe that what she was saying was absolutely true. She stood there in the kitchen of the little apartment with her skeletal hands held out in supplicatory explanation, her legs braced, her red hair all frizzly, trembling and shuddering and grabbing her face from time to time.
“It’s nothing but bullshit!” I yelled and suddenly I had the feeling I always got when I tried to explain the Dharma to people, Alvah, my mother, my relatives, girl friends, everybody, they never listened, they always wanted me to listen to them, they knew, I didn’t know anything, I was just a dumb young kid and impractical fool who didn’t understand the serious significance of this very important, very real world.
“The police are going to swoop down and arrest us all and not only that but we’re all going to be questioned for weeks and weeks and maybe even years till they find out all the crimes and sins that have been committed, it’s a network, it runs in every direction, finally they’ll arrest everybody in North Beach and even everybody in Greenwich Village and then Paris and then finally they’ll have everybody in jail, you don’t know, it’s only the beginning.” She kept jumping at sounds in the hall, thinking the cops were coming.
“Why don’t you listen to me?” I kept pleading, but each time I said that, she hypnotized me with her staring eyes and almost had me for a while believing in what she believed from the sheer weight of her complete dedication to the discriminations her mind was making. “But you’re getting these silly convictions and conceptions out of nowhere, don’t you realize all this life is just a dream? Why don’t you just relax and enjoy God? God is you, you fool!”
“Oh, they’re going to destroy you, Ray, I can see it, they’re going to fetch all the religious squares too and fix them good. It’s only begun. It’s all tied in with Russia though they won’t say it…and there’s something I heard about the sun’s rays and something about what happens while we’re all asleep. Oh Ray the world will never be the same!”
“What world? What difference does it make? Please stop, you’re scaring me. By God in fact you’re not scaring me and I won’t listen to another word.” I went out, angry, bought some wine and ran into Cowboy and some other musicians and ran back with the gang to watch her. “Have some wine, put some wisdom in your head.”
“No, I’m laying off the lush, all that wine you drink is rotgut, it burns your stomach out, it makes your brain dull. I can tell there’s something wrong with you, you’re not sensitive, you don’t