On the Road Read online

  It was very cold in Testament; they’d had an unseasonable snow. He stood in the long bleak main street that runs along the railroad, clad in nothing but a T-shirt and low-hanging pants with the belt unbuckled, as though he was about to take them off. He came sticking his head in to talk to Marylou; he backed away, fluttering his hands before her. “Oh yes, I know! I know you, I know you, darling!” His laugh was maniacal; it started low and ended high, exactly like the laugh of a radio maniac, only faster and more like a titter. Then he kept reverting to businesslike tones. There was no purpose in our coming downtown, but he found purposes. He made us all hustle, Marylou for the lunch groceries, me for a paper to dig the weather report, Ed for cigars. Dean loved to smoke cigars. He smoked one over the paper and talked. “Ah, our holy American slopjaws in Washington are planning fur-ther inconveniences—ah-hem!—aw—hup! hup!” And he leaped off and rushed to see a colored girl that just then passed outside the station. “Dig her,” he said, standing with limp finger pointed, fingering himself with a goofy smile, “that little gone black lovely. Ah! Hmm!” We got in the car and flew back to my brother’s house.

  I had been spending a quiet Christmas in the country, as I realized when we got back into the house and I saw the Christmas tree, the presents, and smelled the roasting turkey and listened to the talk of the relatives, but now the bug was on me again, and the bug’s name was Dean Moriarty and I was off on another spurt around the road.

  2

  We packed my brother’s furniture in back of the car and took off at dark, promising to be back in thirty hours—thirty hours for a thousand miles north and south. But that’s the way Dean wanted it. It was a tough trip, and none of us noticed it; the heater was not working and consequently the windshield developed fog and ice; Dean kept reaching out while driving seventy to wipe it with a rag and make a hole to see the road. “Ah, holy hole! In the spacious Hudson we had plenty of room for all four of us to sit up front. A blanket covered our laps. The radio was not working. It was a brand-new car bought five days ago, and already it was broken. There was only one installment paid on it, too. Off we went, north to Washington, on 301, a straight two-lane highway, without much traffic. And Dean talked, no one else talked. He gestured furiously, he leaned as far as me sometimes to make a point, sometimes he had no hands on the wheel and yet the car went straight as an arrow, not for once deviating from the white line in the middle of the road that unwound, kissing our left front tire.

  It was a completely meaningless set of circumstances that made Dean come, and similarly I went off with him for no reason. In New York I had been attending school and romancing around with a girl called Lucille, a beautiful Italian honey-haired darling that I actually wanted to marry. All these years I was looking for the woman I wanted to marry. I couldn’t meet a girl without saying to myself, What kind of wife would she make? I told Dean and Marylou about Lucille. Marylou wanted to know all about Lucille, she wanted to meet her. We zoomed through Richmond, Washington, Baltimore, and up to Philadelphia on a winding country road and talked. “I want to marry a girl,” I told them, “so I can rest my soul with her till we both get old. This can’t go on all the time—all this franticness and jumping around. We’ve got to go someplace, find something.”

  “Ah now, man,” said Dean, “I’ve been digging you for years about the home and marriage and all those fine wonderful things about your soul.” It was a sad night; it was also a merry night. In Philadelphia we went into a lunchcart and ate hamburgers with our last food dollar. The counterman—it was three A.M.—heard us talk about money and offered to give us the hamburgers free, plus more coffee, if we all pitched in and washed dishes in the back because his regular man hadn’t shown up. We jumped to it. Ed Dunkel said he was an old pearldiver from way back and pitched his long arms into the dishes. Dean stood googing around with a towel, so did Marylou. Finally they started necking among the pots and pans; they withdrew to a dark corner in the pantry. The counterman was satisfied as long as Ed and I did the dishes. We finished them in fifteen minutes. When daybreak came we were zooming through New Jersey with the great cloud of Metropolitan New York rising before us in the snowy distance. Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York. We swished through the Lincoln Tunnel and cut over to Times Square; Marylou wanted to see it.

  “Oh damn, I wish I could find Hassel. Everybody look sharp, see if they can find him.” We all scoured the sidewalks. “Good old gone Hassel. Oh you should have seen him in Texas.”

  So now Dean had come about four thousand miles from Frisco, via Arizona and up to Denver, inside four days, with innumerable adventures sandwiched in, and it was only the beginning.

  3

  We went to my house in Paterson and slept. I was the first to wake up, late in the afternoon. Dean and Marylou were sleeping on my bed, Ed and I on my aunt’s bed. Dean’s battered unhinged trunk lay sprawled on the floor with socks sticking out. A phone call came for me in the drugstore downstairs. I ran down; it was from New Orleans. It was Old Bull Lee, who’d moved to New Orleans. Old Bull Lee in his high, whining voice was making a complaint. It seemed a girl called Galatea Dunkel had just arrived at his house for a guy Ed Dunkel; Bull had no idea who these people were. Galatea Dunkel was a tenacious loser. I told Bull to reassure her that Dunkel was with Dean and me and that most likely we’d be picking her up in New Orleans on the way to the Coast. Then the girl herself talked on the phone. She wanted to know how Ed was. She was all concerned about his happiness.

  “How did you get from Tucson to New Orleans?” I asked. She said she wired home for money and took a bus. She was determined to catch up with Ed because she loved him. I went upstairs and told Big Ed. He sat in the chair with a worried look, an angel of a man, actually.

  “All right, now,” said Dean, suddenly waking up and leaping out of bed, “what we must do is eat, at once. Marylou, rustle around the kitchen see what there is. Sal, you and I go downstairs and call Carlo. Ed, you see what you can do straightening out the house.” I followed Dean, bustling downstairs.

  The guy who ran the drugstore said, “You just got another call—this one from San Francisco—for a guy called Dean Moriarty. I said there wasn’t anybody by that name.” It was sweetest Camille, calling Dean. The drugstore man, Sam, a tall, calm friend of mine, looked at me and scratched his head. “Geez, what are you running, an international whorehouse?”

  Dean tittered maniacally. “I dig you, man!” He leaped into the phone booth and called San Francisco collect. Then we called Carlo at his home in Long Island and told him to come over. Carlo arrived two hours later. Meanwhile Dean and I got ready for our return trip alone to Virginia to pick up the rest of the furniture and bring my aunt back. Carlo Marx came, poetry under his arm, and sat in an easy chair, watching us with beady eyes. For the first half-hour he refused to say anything; at any rate, he refused to commit himself. He had quieted down since the Denver Doldrum days; the Dakar Doldrums had done it. In Dakar, wearing a beard, he had wandered the back streets with little children who led him to a witch-doctor who told him his fortune. He had snapshots of crazy streets with grass huts, the hip back-end of Dakar. He said he almost jumped off the ship like Hart Crane on the way back. Dean sat on the floor with a music box and listened with tremendous amazement at the little song it played, “A Fine Romance”—“Little tinkling whirling doodlebells. Ah! Listen! We’ll all bend down together and look into the center of the music box till we learn about the secrets—tinklydoodlebell, whee.” Ed Dunkel was also sitting on the floor; he had my drumsticks; he suddenly began beating a tiny beat to go with the music box, that we barely could hear. Everybody held his breath to listen. “Tick . . . tack . . . tick-tick . . . tack-tack.” Dean cupped a hand over his ear; his mouth hung open; he said, “Ah! Whee!”

  Carlo watched this silly madness with slitted eyes. Finally he slapped his knee and said, “I have an announcement to make.”

  “Yes? Yes?”<
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  “What is the meaning of this voyage to New York? What kind of sordid business are you on now? I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goes thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?”

  “Whither goest thou?” echoed Dean with his mouth open. We sat and didn’t know what to say; there was nothing to talk about any more. The only thing to do was go. Dean leaped up and said we were ready to go back to Virginia. He took a shower, I cooked up a big platter of rice with all that was left in the house, Marylou sewed his socks, and we were ready to go. Dean and Carlo and I zoomed into New York. We promised to see Carlo in thirty hours, in time for New Year’s Eve. It was night. We left him at Times Square and went back through the expensive tunnel and into New Jersey and on the road. Taking turns at the wheel, Dean and I made Virginia in ten hours.

  “Now this is the first time we’ve been alone and in a position to talk for years,” said Dean. And he talked all night. As in a dream, we were zooming back through sleeping Washington and back in the Virginia wilds, crossing the Appomattox River at daybreak, pulling up at my brother’s door at eight A.M. And all this time Dean was tremendously excited about everything he saw, everything he talked about, every detail of every moment that passed. He was out of his mind with real belief. “And of course now no one can tell us that there is no God. We’ve passed through all forms. You remember, Sal, when I first came to New York and I wanted Chad King to teach me about Nietzsche. You see how long ago? Everything is fine, God exists, we know time. Everything since the Greeks has been predicted wrong. You can’t make it with geometry and geometrical systems of thinking. It’s all this!” He wrapped his finger in his fist; the car hugged the line straight and true. “And not only that but we both understand that I couldn’t have time to explain why I know and you know God exists.” At one point I moaned about life’s troubles—how poor my family was, how much I wanted to help Lucille, who was also poor and had a daughter. “Troubles, you see, is the generalization-word for what God exists in. The thing is not to get hung-up. My head rings!” he cried, clasping his head. He rushed out of the car like Groucho Marx to get cigarettes—that furious, ground-hugging walk with the coattails flying, except that he had no coattails. “Since Denver, Sal, a lot of things—Oh, the things—I’ve thought and thought. I used to be in reform school all the time, I was a young punk, asserting myself—stealing cars a psychological expression of my position, hincty to show. All my jail-problems are pretty straight now. As far as I know I shall never be in jail again. The rest is not my fault.” We passed a little kid who was throwing stones at the cars in the road. “Think of it,” said Dean. “One day he’ll put a stone through a man’s windshield and the man will crash and die—all on account of that little kid. You see what I mean? God exists without qualms. As we roll along this way I am positive beyond doubt that everything will be taken care of for us—that even you, as you drive, fearful of the wheel” (I hated to drive and drove carefully)—“the thing will go along of itself and you won’t go off the road and I can sleep. Furthermore we know America, we’re at home; I can go anywhere in America and get what I want because it’s the same in every corner, I know the people, I know what they do. We give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every side.” There was nothing clear about the things he said, but what he meant to say was somehow made pure and clear. He used the word “pure” a great deal. I had never dreamed Dean would become a mystic. These were the first days of his mysticism, which would lead to the strange, ragged W. C. Fields saintliness of his later days.

  Even my aunt listened to him with a curious half-ear as we roared back north to New York that same night with the furniture in the back. Now that my aunt was in the car, Dean settled down to talking about his worklife in San Francisco. We went over every single detail of what a brakeman has to do, demonstrating every time we passed yards, and at one point he even jumped out of the car to show me how a brakeman gives a highball at a meet at a siding. My aunt retired to the back seat and went to sleep. In Washington at four A.M. Dean again called Camille collect in Frisco. Shortly after this, as we pulled out of Washington, a cruising car overtook us with siren going and we had a speeding ticket in spite of the fact that we were going about thirty. It was the California license plate that did it. “You guys think you can rush through here as fast as you want just because you come from California?” said the cop.

  I went with Dean to the sergeant’s desk and we tried to explain to the police that we had no money. They said Dean would have to spend the night in jail if we didn’t round up the money. Of course my aunt had it, fifteen dollars; she had twenty in all, and it was going to be just fine. And in fact while we were arguing with the cops one of them went out to peek at my aunt, who sat wrapped in the back of the car. She saw him.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not a gun moll. If you want to come and search the car, go right ahead. I’m going home with my nephew, and this furniture isn’t stolen; it’s my niece’s, she just had a baby and she’s moving to her new house.” This flabbergasted Sherlock and he went back in the station house. My aunt had to pay the fine for Dean or we’d be stuck in Washington; I had no license. He promised to pay it back, and he actually did, exactly a year and a half later and to my aunt’s pleased surprise. My aunt—a respectable woman hung-up in this sad world, and well she knew the world. She told us about the cop. “He was hiding behind the tree, trying to see what I looked like. I told him—I told him to search the car if he wanted. I’ve nothing to be ashamed of.” She knew Dean had something to be ashamed of, and me too, by virtue of my being with Dean, and Dean and I accepted this sadly.

  My aunt once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women’s feet and asked for forgiveness. But Dean knew this; he’d mentioned it many times. “I’ve pleaded and pleaded with Marylou for a peaceful sweet understanding of pure love between us forever with all hassles thrown out—she understands; her mind is bent on something else—she’s after me; she won’t understand how much I love her, she’s knitting my doom.”

  “The truth of the matter is we don’t understand our women; we blame on them and it’s all our fault,” I said.

  “But it isn’t as simple as that,” warned Dean. “Peace will come suddenly, we won’t understand when it does—see, man?” Doggedly, bleakly, he pushed the car through New Jersey; at dawn I drove into Paterson as he slept in the back. We arrived at the house at eight in the morning to find Marylou and Ed Dunkel sitting around smoking butts from the ashtrays; they hadn’t eaten since Dean and I left. My aunt bought groceries and cooked up a tremendous breakfast.

  4

  Now It was time for the Western threesome to find new living quarters in Manhattan proper. Carlo had a pad on York Avenue; they were moving in that evening. We slept all day, Dean and I, and woke up as a great snowstorm ushered in New Year’s Eve, 1948. Ed Dunkel was sitting in my easy chair, telling about the previous New Year’s. “I was in Chicago. I was broke. I was sitting at the window of my hotel room on North Clark Street and the most delicious smell rose to my nostrils from the bakery downstairs. I didn’t have a dime but I went down and talked to the girl. She gave me bread and coffee cakes free. I went back to my room and ate them. I stayed in my room all night. In Farmington, Utah, once, where I went to work with Ed Wall—you know Ed Wall, the rancher’s son in Denver—I was in my bed and all of a sudden I saw my dead mother standing in the corner with light all around her. I said, ‘Mother!’ She disappeared. I have visions all the time,” said Ed Dunkel, nodding his head.