The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [77]
I walked anxiously over the border and through El Paso and out to the railroad station, got my bag out, heaved a big sigh, and went right on down those three miles to the arroyo, which was easy to re-recognize in the moonlight, and on up, my feet making that lonely thwap thwap of Japhy’s boots and I realized I had indeed learned from Japhy how to cast off the evils of the world and the city and find my true pure soul, just as long as I had a decent pack on my back. I got back to my camp and spread the sleeping bag and thanked the Lord for all He was giving me. Now the remembrance of the whole long evil afternoon smoking marijuana with slant-hatted Mexicans in a musty candlelit room was like a dream, a bad dream, like one of my dreams on the straw mat at Buddha Creek North Carolina. I meditated and prayed. There just isn’t any kind of night’s sleep in the world that can compare with the night’s sleep you get in the desert winter night, providing you’re good and warm in a duck-down bag. The silence is so intense that you can hear your own blood roar in your ears but louder than that by far is the mysterious roar which I always identify with the roaring of the diamond of wisdom, the mysterious roar of silence itself, which is a great Shhhh reminding you of something you’ve seemed to have forgotten in the stress of your days since birth. I wished I could explain it to those I loved, to my mother, to Japhy, but there just weren’t any words to describe the nothingness and purity of it. “Is there a certain and definite teaching to be given to all living creatures?” was the question probably asked to beetlebrowed snowy Dipankara, and his answer was the roaring silence of the diamond.
23
In the morning I had to get the show on the road or never get to my protective shack in California. I had about eight dollars left of the cash I’d brought with me. I went down to the highway and started to hitchhike, hoping for quick luck. A salesman gave me a ride. He said “Three hundred and sixty days out of the year we get bright sunshine here in El Paso and my wife just bought a clothes dryer!” He took me to Las Cruces New Mexico and there I walked through the little town, following the highway, and came out on the other end and saw a big beautiful old tree and decided to just lay my pack down and rest anyhow. “Since it’s a dream already ended, then I’m already in California, then I’ve already decided to rest under that tree at noon,” which I did, on my back, even napping awhile, pleasantly.
Then I got up and walked over the railroad bridge, and just then a man saw me and said “How would you like to earn two dollars an hour helping me move a piano?” I needed the money and said okay. We left my rucksack in his moving storage room and went off in his little truck, to a home in the outskirts of Las Cruces, where a lot of nice middleclass people were chatting on the porch, and the man and I got out of the truck with the handtruck and the pads and got the piano out, also a lot of other furniture, then transported it to their new house and got that in and that was that. Two hours, he gave me four dollars and I went into a truckstop diner and had a royal meal and was all set for that afternoon and night. Just then a car stopped, driven by a big Texan with a sombrero, with a poor Mexican couple, young, in the back seat, the girl carrying an infant, and he offered me a ride all the way to Los Angeles for ten dollars.
I said “I’ll give you all I can, which is only four.”
“Well goddammit come on anyway.” He talked and talked and drove all night straight through Arizona and the California desert and left me off in Los Angeles a stone’s throw from my railroad yards at nine o’clock in the morning, and the only disaster was the poor little Mexican wife had spilled some baby