Jack Kerouac - The Subterraneans

DEAR BABY,

Isn’t it good to know winter is coming—

as we’d been complaining so much about heat and now the heat was ended, a coolness came into the air, you could feel it in the draining gray airshaft of Heavenly Lane and in the look of the sky and nights with a greater wavy glitter in streetlights—

—and that life will be a little more quiet—and you will be home writing and eating well and we will be spending pleasant nights wrapped round one another—and you are home now, rested and eating well because you should not become too sad—

written after, one night, in the Mask with her and newly arrived and future enemy Yuri erstwhile close lil brother I’d suddenly said “I feel impossibly sad and like I’ll die, what can we do?” and Yuri’d suggested “Call Sam,” which, in my sadness, I did, and so earnestly, as otherwise he’d pay no attention being a newspaper man and new father and no time to goof, but so earnestly he accepted us, the three, to come at once, from the Mask, to his apartment on Russian Hill, where we went, I getting drunker than ever, Sam as ever punching me and saying “The trouble with you, Percepied,” and, “You’ve got rotten bags in the bottom of your store,” and, “You Canucks are really all alike and I don’t even believe you’ll admit it when you die”—Mardou watching amused, drinking a little, Sam finally, as always falling over drunk, but not really, drunk-desiring, over a little lowtable covered a foot high with ashtrays piled three inches high and drinks and doodads, crash, his wife, with baby just from crib, sighing—Yuri, who didn’t drink but only watched bead-eyed, after having said to me the first day of his arrival, “You know Percepied I really like you now, I really feel like communicating with you now,” which I should have suspected, in him, as constituting a new kind of sinister interest in the innocence of my activities, that being by the name of, Mardou—

—because you should not become too sad

was only sweet comment heartbreakable Mardou made about that disastrous awful night—similar to example 2, one following the one with Lavalina, the night of the beautiful faun boy who’d been in bed with Micky two years before at a great depraved wildparty I’d myself arranged in days when living with Micky the great doll of the roaring legend night, seeing him in the Mask, and being with Frank Carmody and everybody, tugging at his shirt, insisting he follow us to other bars, follow us around, Mardou finally in the blur and roar of the night yelling at me “It’s him or me goddamit,” but not really serious (herself usually not a drinker because a subterranean but in her affair with Percepied a big drinker now)—she left, I heard her say “We’re through” but never for a moment believed it and it was not so, she came back later, I saw her again, we swayed together, once more I’d been a bad boy and again ludicrously like a fag, this distressing me again in waking in gray Heavenly Lane in the morning beer roared.—This is the confession of a man who can’t drink.—And so her letter saying:

because you should not become too sad—and I feel better when you are well—

forgiving, forgetting all this sad folly when all she wants to do, “I don’t want to go out drinking and getting drunk with all your friends and keep going to Dante’s and see all those Juliens and everybody again, I want us to stay quiet at home, listen to KPFA and read or something, or go to a show, baby I like shows, movies on Market Street, I really do.”—“But I hate movies, life’s more interesting!” (another putdown)—her sweet letter continuing:

I am full of strange feelings, reliving and refashioning many old things

—when she was 14 or 13 maybe she’d play hookey from school in Oakland and take the ferry to Market Street and spend all day in one movie, wandering around having hallucinated phantasies, looking at all the eyes, a little Negro girl roaming the shuffle restless street of winos, hoodlums, sams, cops, paper peddlers, the mad mixup there the crowd eying looking everywhere the sexfiend crowd and all of it in the gray rain of hookey days—poor Mardou—“I’d get sexual phantasies the strangest kind, not with like sex acts with people but strange situations that I’d spend all day working out as I walked, and my orgasms the few I had only came, because I never masturbated or even knew how, when I dreamed that my father or somebody was leaving me, running away from me, I’d wake up with a funny convulsion and wetness in myself, in my thighs, and on Market Street the same way but different and anxiety dreams woven out of the movies I saw.”—Me thinking O grayscreen gangster cocktail rainyday roaring gunshot spectral immortality B movie tire pile black-in-the-mist Wildamerica but it’s a crazy world!— “Honey” (out loud) “wished I could have seen you walking around Market like that—I bet I DID see you—I bet I did—you were thirteen and I was twenty-two—1944, yeah I bet I saw you, I was a seaman, I was always there, I knew the gangs around the bars—” So in her letter saying:

reliving and refashioning many old things

probably reliving those days and phantasies, and earlier cruder horrors of home in Oakland where her aunt hysterically beat her or hysterically tried and her sisters (tho occasional little-sister tenderness like dutiful kisses before bed and writing on one another’s backs) giving her a bad time, and she roaming the street late, deep in broodthoughts and men trying to make her, the dark men of dark colored-district doors—so going on,

and feeling the cold and the quietude even in the midst of my forebodings and fears—which clear nights soothe and make more sharp and real—tangible and easier to cope with

—said indeed with a nice rhythm, too, so I remember admiring her intelligence even then—but at the same time darkening at home there at my desk of well-being and thinking, “But cope that old psychoanalytic cope, she talks like all of em, the city decadent intellectual dead-ended in cause-and-effect analysis and solution of so-called problems instead of the great JOY of being and will and fearlessness—rupture’s their rapture—that’s her trouble, she’s just like Adam, like Julien, the lot, afraid of madness, the fear of madness haunts her—not Me Not Me by God”—

But why am I writing to say these things to you. But all feelings are real and you probably discern or feel too what I am saying and why I need to write it—

—a sentiment of mystery and charm—but, as I told her often, not enough detail, the details are the life of it, I insist, say everything on your mind, don’t hold it back, don’t analyze or anything as you go along, say it out, “That’s” (I now say in reading letter) “a typical example—but no mind, she’s just a girl—humph”—

My image of you now is strange

—I see the bough of that statement, it waves on the tree—

I feel a distance from you which you might feel too which gives me a picture of you that is warm and friendly

and then inserts, in smaller writing,

(and loving)

to obviate my feeling depressed probably over seeing in a letter from lover only word “friendly”—but that whole complicated phrase further complicated by the fact it is presented in originally written form under the marks and additions of a rewrite, which is not as interesting to me, naturally—the rewrite being

I feel a distance from you which you might feel too with pictures of you that are warm and friendly (and loving) —and because of the anxieties we are experiencing but never speak of really, and are similar too—

a piece of communication making me suddenly by some majesty of her pen feel sorry for myself, seeing myself like her lost in the suffering ignorant sea of human life feeling distant from she who should be closest and not knowing (no not under the sun) why the distance instead is the feeling, the both of us entwined and lost in that, as under the sea—