Jack Kerouac - The Subterraneans

And who’s in our bed in Heavenly Lane but Yuri—cheerful—“Hey I been workin’ all day, so tired I had to come back and get some more rest.”—I decide to tell him everything, try to form the words in my mouth, Yuri sees my eyes, senses the tenseness, Mardou senses the tenseness, a knock on the door brings in John Golz (always romantically interested in Mardou in a naiver way), he senses the tenseness, “I’ve come to borrow a book”—grim expression on his face and remembering how I’d put him down about selectivity—so leaves at once, with book, and Yuri in getting up from bed (while Mardou hides behind screen to change from party dress to home jeans)—“Leo hand me my pants.”—“Get up and get ‘em yourself, they’re right there on the chair, she can’t see you”—a funny statement, and my mind feels funny and I look at Mardou who is silent and inward.

The moment she goes to the bathroom I say to Yuri “I’m very jealous about you and Mardou in the backseat last night man, I really am.”—“It’s not my fault, it was her started it.”—“Lissen, you’re such—like don’t let her, keep away—you’re such a lady-killer they all fall for you”—saying this just as Mardou returns, looking up sharply not hearing the words but seeing them in the air, and Yuri at once grabs the still open door and says “Well anyway I’m going to Adam’s I’ll see you there later.”

“What did you tell Yuri—?”—I tell her word for word—“God the tenseness in here was unbearable”—(sheepishly I review the fact that instead of being stern and Moses-like in my jealousy and position I’d instead chatted with nervous “poet” talk with Yuri, as always, giving him the tension but not the positiveness of my feelings in words—sheepishly I review my sheepishness—I get sad to see old Carmody somehow—

“Baby I’m gonna—you think they got chickens on Columbus?—I’ve seen some—And cook it, see, we’ll have a nice chicken supper.”—“And,” I say to myself, “what good is a nice domestic chicken supper when you love Yuri so much he has to leave the moment you walk in because of the pressure of my jealousy and your possibility as prophesied in a dream?” “I want” (out loud) “to see Carmody, I’m sad—you stay here, cook the chicken, eat—alone—I’ll come back later and get you.”—“But it always starts off like this, we always go away, we never stay alone.”—“I know but tonight I’m sad I gotta see Carmody, for some reason don’t ask me I have a tremendous sad desire and reason just to—after all I drew his picture the other day” (I had drawn my first pencil sketches of human figures reclining and they were greeted with amazement by Carmody and Adam and so I was proud) “and after all in drawing those shots of Frank the other day I saw such great sadness in the lines under his eyes that I know he—” (to myself: I know he’ll understand how sad I am now, I know he has suffered on four continents this way).—Pondering Mardou does not know which way to turn but suddenly I tell her of my quick talk with Yuri the part I’d forgotten in the first report (and here too) “He said to me ‘Leo I don’t want to make your girl Mardou, after all I have no eyes—’.” “Oh, so he has no eyes! A hell of a thing to say!” (the same teeth of glee now the portals where pass angry winds, and her eyes glitter) and I hear that junkey-like emphasis on the ings where she presses down on her ings like many junkies I know, from some inside heavy somnolent reason, which in Mardou I’d attributed to her amazing modernness culled (as I once asked her) “From where? where did you learn all you know and that amazing way you speak?” but now to hear that interesting ing only makes me mad as it’s coming in a transparent speech about Yuri where she shows she’s not really against seeing Yuri again at party or otherwise, “if he’s gonna talk like that about no eyes,” she’s gonna tell him.—“O,” I say, “now you WANT to come to the party at Adam’s, because there you can get even with Yuri and tell him off—you’re so transparent.”

“Jesus,” as we’re walking along the benches of the church park sad park of the whole summer season, “now you’re calling me names, transparent.”

“Well that’s what it is, you think I can’t see through that, at first you didn’t want to go to Adam’s at all and now that you hear—well the hell with that if it ain’t transparent I don’t know what is.”—“Calling me names, Jesus” (shnuffling to laugh) and both of us actually hysterically smiling and as tho nothing had happened at all and in fact like happy unconcerned people you see in newsreels busy going down the street to their chores and where-go’s and we’re in the same rainy newsreel mystery sad but inside of us (as must then be so inside the puppet filmdolls of screen) the great tumescent turbulent turmoil alliterative as a hammer on the brain bone bag and balls, bang I’m sorry I was ever born….

To cap everything, as if it wasn’t enough, the whole world opens up as Adam opens the door bowing solemnly but with a glint and secret in his eye and some kind of unwelcomeness I bristle at the sight of—“What’s the matter?” Then I sense the presence of more people in there than Frank and Adam and Yuri.—“We have visitors.”—“Oh,” I say, “distinguished visitors?”—“I think so.”—“Who?”—“Mac Jones and Phyllis.”—“What?” (the great moment has come when I’m to come face to face, or leave, with my arch literary enemy Balliol Mac-Jones erstwhile so close to me we used to slop beer on each other’s knees in leaning-over talk excitement, we’d talked and exchanged and borrowed and read books and literarized so much the poor innocent had actually come under some kind of influence from me, that is, in the sense, only, that he learned the talk and style, mainly the history of the hip or beat generation or subterranean generation and I’d told him “Mac, write a great book about everything that happened when Leroy came to New York in 1949 and don’t leave a word out and blow, go!” which he did, and I read it, critically Adam and I in visits to his place both critical of the manuscript but when it came out they guarantee him 20,000 dollars an unheard of sum and all of us beat types wandering the Beach and Market Street and Times Square when in New York, tho Adam and I had solemnly admitted, quote, “Jones is not of us—but from another world—the midtown sillies world” (an Adamism). And so his great success coming at the moment when I was poorest and most neglected by publishers and worse than that hung-up on paranoiac drug habits I became incensed but I didn’t get too mad, but stayed black about it, changing my mind after father time’s few local scythes and various misfortunes and trips around, writing him apologetic letters on ships which I tore up, he too writing them meanwhile, and then, Adam acting a year later as some kind of saint and mediator reported favorable inclinations on both our parts, to both parties—the great moment when I would have to face old Mac and shake with him and call it quits, let go all the rancor—making as little impression on Mardou, who is so independent and unavailable in that new heartbreaking way. Anyway Macjones was there, immediately I said out loud “Good, great, I been wantin’ to see him,” and I rushed into the living-room and over someone’s head who was getting up (Yuri it was) I shook hands firmly with Balliol, sat brooding awhile, didn’t even notice how poor Mardou had managed to position herself (here as at Bromberg’s as everywhere poor dark angel)—finally going to the bedroom unable to bear the polite conversation under which not only Yuri but Jones (and also Phyllis his woman who kept staring at me to see if it was still crazy) rumbled, I ran to the bedroom and lay in the dark and at the first opportunity tried to get Mardou to lie down with me but she said “Leo I don’t want to lay around in here in the dark.”—Yuri then coming over, putting on one of Adam’s ties, saying, “I’m going out and find me a girl,” and we have a kind of whispering rapport now away from them in the parlor—all’s forgiven.—But I feel that because Jones does not move from his couch he really doesn’t want to talk to me and probably wishes secretly I’d leave, when Mardou roams back again to my bed of shame and sorrow and hidingplace, I say, “What are you talking about in there, bop? Don’t tell him anything about music.”—(Let him find out for himself! I say to myself pettishly)— I’m the bop writer!—But as I’m commissioned to get the beer downstairs, when I come in again with beer in arms they’re all in the kitchen, Mac foremost, smiling, and saying, “Leo! let me see those drawings they told me you did, I want to see them.”—So we become friends again bending over drawings and Yuri has to be showing his too (he draws) and Mardou is in the other room, again forgotten—but it is a historic moment and as we also, with Carmody, study Carmody’s South American bleak pictures of high jungle villages and Andean towns where you can see the clouds pass, I notice Mac’s expensive good-looking clothes, wrist watch, I feel proud of him and now he has an attractive little mustache that makes his maturity—which I announce to everyone—the beer by now warming us all up, and then his wife Phyllis begins a supper and the conviviality flows back and forth—