The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac [89]
She said “Ah I don’t care, I wanta start living.” Her fiancé had a lot of money. Actually he was a nice guy and I felt sorry for him having to smile through all this.
After they left Japhy said “She won’t stay with him more than six months. Rhoda’s a real mad girl, she’d rather put on jeans and go hiking than sit around Chicago apartments.”
“You love her, don’t you?”
“You damn right, I oughta marry her myself.”
“But she’s your sister.”
“I don’t give a goddamn. She needs a real man like me. You don’t know how wild she is, you weren’t brought up with her in the woods.” Rhoda was real nice and I wished she hadn’t shown up with a fiancé. In all this welter of women I still hadn’t got one for myself, not that I was trying too hard, but sometimes I felt lonely to see everybody paired off and having a good time and all I did was curl up in my sleeping bag in the rosebushes and sigh and say bah. For me it was just red wine in my mouth and a pile of firewood.
But then I’d find something like a dead crow in the deer park and think “That’s a pretty sight for sensitive human eyes, and all of it comes out of sex.” So I put sex out of my mind again. As long as the sun shined then blinked and shined again, I was satisfied. I would be kind and remain in solitude, I wouldn’t pook about, I’d rest and be kind. “Compassion is the guide star,” said Buddha. “Don’t dispute with the authorities or with women. Beg. Be humble.” I wrote a pretty poem addressed to all the people coming to the party: “Are in your eyelids wars, and silk…but the saints are gone, all gone, safe to that other.” I really thought myself a kind of crazy saint. And it was based on telling myself “Ray, don’t run after liquor and excitement of women and talk, stay in your shack and enjoy natural relationship of things as they are” but it was hard to live up to this with all kinds of pretty broads coming up the hill every weekend and even on weeknights. One time a beautiful brunette finally consented to go up the hill with me and we were there in the dark on my mattress day-mat when suddenly the door burst open and Sean and Joe Mahoney danced in laughing, deliberately trying to make me mad…either that or they really believed in my effort at asceticism and were like angels coming in to drive away the devil woman. Which they did, all right. Sometimes when I was really drunk and high and sitting crosslegged in the midst of the mad parties I really did see visions of holy empty snow in my eyelids and when I opened them I’d see all these good friends sitting around waiting for me to explain; and nobody ever considered my behavior strange, quite natural among Buddhists; and whether I opened my eyes to explain something or not they were satisfied. During that whole season, in fact, I had an overwhelming urge to close my eyes in company. I think the girls were terrified of this. “What’s he always sitting with his eyes closed for?”
Little Prajna, Sean’s two-year-old daughter, would come and poke at my closed eyelids and say “Booba. Hack!” Sometimes I preferred taking her for little magic walks in the yard, holding her hand, to sitting yakking in the living room.
As for Japhy he was quite pleased with anything I did provided I didn’t pull any boners like making the kerosene lamp smoke from turning the wick too far up, or failing to sharpen the ax properly. He was very stern on those subjects. “You’ve got to learn!” he’d say. “Dammit, if there’s anything I can’t stand is when things ain’t done right.” It was amazing the suppers he’d roust up out of his own part of the food shelf, all kinds of weeds and dry roots bought in Chinatown and he’d boil up a mess of stuff, just a little, with soy sauce, and that went on top of freshly boiled rice and was delicious indeed, eaten with chopsticks. There we were sitting in the roar of trees at dusk with our windows