The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [61]
But I was bound to get out of there fast. The smog was heavy, my eyes were weeping from it, the sun was hot, the air stank, a regular hell is L.A. And I had caught a cold from Cody’s kids and had that old California virus and felt miserable now. With the water dripping out of reefer refrigerators I gathered up palmfuls and splashed it in my face and washed and washed my teeth and combed my hair and walked into L.A. to wait until seven-thirty in the evening when I planned to catch the Zipper firstclass freight to Yuma Arizona. It was a horrible day waiting. I drank coffee in Skid Row coffee houses, South Main Street, coffee-and, seventeen cents.
At nightfall I was lurking around waiting for my train. A bum was sitting in a doorway watching me with peculiar interest. I went over to talk to him. He said he was an ex-Marine from Paterson New Jersey and after a while he whipped out a little slip of paper he read sometimes on freight trains. I looked at it. It was a quotation from the Digha Nikaya, the words of Buddha. I smiled; I didn’t say anything. He was a great voluble bum, and a bum who didn’t drink, he was an idealistic hobo and said “That’s all there is to it, that’s what I like to do, I’d rather hop freights around the country and cook my food out of tin cans over wood fires, than be rich and have a home or work. I’m satisfied. I used to have arthritis, you know, I was in the hospital for years. I found out a way to cure it and then I hit the road and I been on it ever since.”
“How’d you cure your arthritis? I got thrombophlebitis myself.”
“You do? Well this’ll work for you too. Just stand on your head three minutes a day, or mebbe five minutes. Every morning when I get up whether it’s in a riverbottom or right on a train that’s rollin along, I put a little mat on the floor and I stand on my head and count to five hundred, that’s about three minutes isn’t it?” He was very concerned about whether counting up to five hundred made it three minutes. That was strange. I figured he was worried about his arithmetic record in school.
“Yeah, about that.”
“Just do that every day and your phlebitis will go away like my arthritis did. I’m forty, you know. Also, before you go to bed at night, have hot milk and honey, I always have a little jar of honey” (he fished one out from his pack) “and I put the milk in a can and the honey, and heat it over the fire, and drink it. Just those two things.”
“Okay.” I vowed to take his advice because he was Buddha. The result was that in about three months my phlebitis disappeared completely, and didn’t show up ever again, which is amazing. In fact since that time I’ve tried to tell doctors about this but they seem to think I’m crazy. Dharma Bum, Dharma Bum. I’ll never forget that intelligent Jewish ex-Marine bum from Paterson New Jersey, whoever he was, with his little slip of paper to read in the raw gon night by dripping reefer platforms in the nowhere industrial formations of an America that is still magic America.
At seven-thirty my Zipper came in and was being made up by the switchmen and I hid in the weeds to catch it, hiding partly behind a telephone pole. It pulled out, surprisingly fast I thought, and with my heavy fifty-pound rucksack I ran out and trotted along till I saw an agreeable drawbar and took a hold of it and hauled on and climbed straight to the top of the box to have a good look at the whole train and see where my flatcar’d be. Holy smokes goddamn and all ye falling candles of heaven smash, but as the train picked up tremendous momentum and tore out of that yard I saw it was a bloody no-good eighteen-car sealed sonofabitch and at almost twenty miles an hour it was do or die, get off or hang on to my life at eighty miles per (impossible on a boxcar top) so I had to scramble down the rungs again but first I had