The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [59]
“Oh come on.”
“This is my last night on earth,” she added.
The musicians and I drank up all the wine and talked, till about midnight, and Rosie seemed to be all right now, lying on the couch, talking, even laughing a bit, eating her sandwiches and drinking some tea I’d brewed her. The musicians left and I slept on the kitchen floor in my new sleeping bag. But when Cody came home that night and I was gone she went up on the roof while he was asleep and broke the skylight to get jagged bits of glass to cut her wrists, and was sitting there bleeding at dawn when a neighbor saw her and sent for the cops and when the cops ran out on the roof to help her that was it: she saw the great cops who were going to arrest us all and made a run for the roof edge. The young Irish cop made a flying tackle and just got a hold of her bathrobe but she fell out of it and fell naked to the sidewalk six flights below. The musicians, who lived downstairs in a basement pad, and had been up all night talking and playing records, heard the thud. They looked out the basement window and saw that horrible sight. “Man it broke us up, we couldn’t make the gig that night.” They drew the shades and trembled. Cody was asleep…. When I heard about it the next day, when I saw the picture in the paper showing an X on the sidewalk where she had landed, one of my thoughts was: “And if she had only listened to me…Was I talking so dumb after all? Are my ideas about what to do so silly and stupid and childlike? Isn’t this the time now to start following what I know to be true?”
And that had done it. The following week I packed up and decided to hit the road and get out of that city of ignorance which is the modern city. I said goodbye to Japhy and the others and hopped my freight back down the Coast to L.A. Poor Rosie—she had been absolutely certain that the world was real and fear was real and now what was real? “At least,” I thought, “she’s in Heaven now, and she knows.”
16
And that’s what I said to myself, “I am now on the road to Heaven.” Suddenly it became clear to me that there was a lot of teaching for me to do in my lifetime. As I say, I saw Japhy before I left, we wandered sadly to the Chinatown park, had a dinner in Nam Yuen’s, came out, sat in the Sunday morning grass and suddenly here was this group of Negro preachers standing in the grass preaching to desultory groups of uninterested Chinese families letting their kiddies romp in the grass and to bums who cared just a little bit more. A big fat woman like Ma Rainey was standing there with her legs outspread howling out a tremendous sermon in a booming voice that kept breaking from speech to blues-singing music, beautiful, and the reason why this woman, who was such a great preacher, was not preaching in a church was because every now and then she just simply had to go sploosh and spit as hard as she could off to the side in the grass, “And I’m tellin you, the Lawd will take care of you if you re-cognize that you have a new field…Yes!”—and sploosh, she turns and spits about ten feet away a great sploosh of spit. “See,” I told Japhy, “she couldn’t do that in a church, that’s her flaw as a preacher as far as the churches are concerned but boy have you ever heard a greater preacher?”
“Yeah,” says Japhy. “But I don’t like all that Jesus stuff she’s talking about.”
“What’s wrong with Jesus? Didn’t Jesus speak of Heaven? Isn’t Heaven Buddha’s nirvana?”
“According to your own interpretation, Smith.”
“Japhy, there were things I wanted to tell Rosie and I felt suppressed by this schism we have about separating Buddhism from Christianity, East from West, what the hell difference does it make? We’re all in Heaven now, ain’t we?”
“Who said so?”
“Is this nirvana we’re in now or ain’t it?”
“It’s both nirvana and samsara we’re in now.”
“Words, words, what’s in a word? Nirvana by any other name. Besides don’t you hear that big old gal calling you and falling you you’ve got a new field, a new Buddha-field boy?” Japhy was so pleased he wrinkled his eyes and smiled. “Whole Buddha-fields