I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk baout, excpet that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that I'd often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles. First reports of him came to me through Chad King, who'd shown me a few letters from him written in a New Mexico reform school, I ws tremendously interested in the letters because they so naively and sweetly asked Chad to teach him all about Nietzsche and all the wonderful intellectual things that Chad knew. At one point Carlo and I talked about the letters and wondered if we would ever meet the strange Dean Moriarty. This is all far back, when Dean was not the way he is today, when he was a young jailkid shourded in mystery. Then news came that Dean was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first time; also there was talk that he had just married a girl called Marylou.引自 Part One
That night we all drank beer and pulled wrists and talked till dawn, and in the morning, while we sat around dumbly smoking butts from ashtrays in the gray light of a gloomy day, Dean got up nervously, paced around, thinking, and decided the thing to do was to have Marylou make breakfast and sweep the floor.引自 Part One
- *p81* but most of the time we were alone and mixing up our souls ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by.
- *p92* As I labored at this absurd task, great Kleig lights of a Hollywood premiere stabbed in the sky, that humming West Coast sky. All around me were the noises of the crazy gold-coast city.
- *p96* Suddenly I found myself on Time Square. I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream - grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City. The high tower of the land - the other end of the land, the place where Paper America is born. I stood in a subway doorway, trying to get enough nerve to pick up a beautiful long butt, and every time I stooped great crowds rushed by and obliterated it from my sight, and finally it was crushed. I had no money to go home in the bus. Paterson is quite a few miles from Time Square.
- *p112*Something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven. Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will overtake us before heaven. The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that means us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die? In the rush of events I kept thinking about this in the back of my mind.
- *p113*That is the night, what is does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.
- *p115*He didn’t give a damn about anything. He is a great scholar who goes reeling down the New York waterfront with original seventeenth-century musical manuscripts under his arm, shouting. He crawls like a big spider through the streets. His excitement blew out of his eyes in stabs of fiendish light. He rolled his neck in spastic ecstasy. He lapsed, he writhed, he flopped, he moaned, he howled, he fell back in despair. He could hardly get a word out, he was so excited with life. Dean stood before him with head bowed, repeating over and over again, ‘Yes...Yes...Yes.’ He took me into a corner. ‘That Rollo Greb is the greatest, most wonderful of all. That’s what I was trying to tell you-that’s what I want to be. I want to be like him. He’s never hung-up, he goes every direction, he lets it all out, he knows time, he has nothing to do but rock back and forth. Man, he’s the end! You see, if you go like him all the time you’ll finally get it.’
- *p121*We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and no sense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, *move*. And we moved! We flashed past the mysterious white signs in the night somewhere in New Jersey that say SOUTH (with an arrow) and WEST (with an arrow) and took the south one. New Orland! It burned in our brains. From the dirty snows of ‘frosty fat town New York,’ as Dean called it, all the way to the greeneries and river smells of old New Orleans at the washed-out bottom of America; then west.
- The purity of the road. The white line in the middle of the highway unrolled and hugged our left front tire as if glued to our groove. Dean hunched his muscular neck, T-shirted in the winter night, and blasted the car along. ... It was crazy; the radio was on full blast. Dean beat drums on the dashboard till a great sag developed in it; I did too. The poor Hudson-the slow boat to China-was receiving her beating.
- *p156* And for just a moment I had reached the point of estacy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, which a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angles dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiance shinning in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn’t in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn’t remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realized that it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it.
- *p189* At one point the driver said, ‘For God’s sakes, you’re rocking the boat back there.’ Actually we were; the car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all over our lives.
- *p192* Our battered suitcase were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.
- *p189* ’Oh man! man!’ moaned Dean. ‘And it’s not even the beginning of it - and now here we are at least going east together, we’ve never gone east together, Sal, think of it, we’ll dig Denver together and see what everybody’s doing although that matters little to us, the point being that we know IT is and we know TIME and know that everything is really FINE.’ The he whispered, clutching my sleeve, sweating, ‘Now you just dig them in front. They have worries, they are counting miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there - and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won’t be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that *too* worries them no end. Listen! Listen! ‘We now,’ he mimicked, ‘“...” Man, you dig all this.’ He was poking me furiously in the ribs to understand. I tried my wildest best. Bing, bing, it was all Yes! Yes! Yes! In the back seat and the people up front were mopping their brows with fright and wishing they’d never picked us up at the travel bureau. It was only the beginning.
- *p202* As the cabby drove us up the infinitely dark Alameda Boulevard along which I had walked many and many a lost night the previous months of the summer, singing and moaning and eating the stars and dropping the juices of my heart drop by drop on the hot tar, Dean suddenly hive up behind us in the stolen convertible and began tooting and tooting and crowding us over and screaming.
- *p196* Sal, in my young days when I used to come to this corner to steal change off the newsstand for Bowery beef stew, that rough-looking cat you see out there standing had nothing but murder in his heart, got into one horrible fight after another, I remember his scars even, till now years and y-e-a-r-s of standing on the corner have finally softened him and chastened him ragely, here completely he’s become sweet and willing and patient with everybody, he’s become a *fixture* on the corner, you see how things happen?
- *p207* But we didn’t have to do that and only inches along through them, sometimes gently bumping as they miles and mooed like a sea around the car doors. Beyond we saw the light of Ed Wall’s ranch house. Around this lonely light stretched hundreds of miles of plains.
- *p209* It could hold the road like a boat holds on the water
- *p221* The magnificent car made the wind roar; it made the plains unfold like a roll of paper; it cast hot tar from itself with deference - an imperial boat. I opened my eyes to a fanning dawn; we were hurling up to it. Dean’s rocky dogged face as ever bent over the dash light with a bony purpose of its own.
- *p217* I don’t know but we gotta go.
- *p223* What difference does it make after all? - anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what’s heaven? what’s earth? All in the mind.
- *p224* Time Square was being torn up, for New York never rests.
- *p224* We were so used to traveling we had to walk all over Long Island, but there was no more land, just the Atlantic Ocean, and we could only go so far. We clapped hands and agreed to be friends forever.
- *p243* We got in the car at Babe’s and said good-bye to her. Tim was riding with us to his house outside town. Babe was beautiful that day; her hair was long and blond and Swedish, her freckles showed in the sun. She looked exactly like the little girl she had been. There was a mist in her eyes. She might join us later with Tim - but she didn’t. Good-bye, good-bye.
- *p229* ‘You mean we’ll end up old bums?’
‘Why not, man? Of course we will if we want to, and all that. There’s no harm ending that way. You spend a whole life of non-interference with the wishes of others, including politicians and the rich, and nobody bothers you and you cut along and make it your own way.’ I agreed with him. He was reaching his Tao decisions in the simplest direct way. ‘What’s your road, man? - holy boy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?’ We nodded in the rain. ... ‘I’ll tell you, Sal, straight, no matter where I live, my trunk’s always sticking out from under the bed, I’m ready to leave or get thrown out, I’ve decided to leave everything out of my hands. *You’ve* seen me try and break my ass to make it and *you* know that it doesn’t;t matter and we know time - how to slow it up and walk and dig and just old-fashioned spade kicks, what other kicks are there? *We* know.’ We sighed in the rain. It was falling all up and down the Hudson Valley that night. The great world piers of the sea-wide river were drenched in it, old steamboat landings at Poughkeepsie were drenched in it, old Split Rock Pond of sources was drenched in it, Vanderwhacker Mount was drenched in it.
- *p244* Now we pointed our rattle snout south and headed for Castle Rock, Colorado, as the sun turned red and the rock of the mountains to the west looked like a Brooklyn brewery in November dusks. Far up in the purple shades of the rock there was someone walking, walking, but we could not see; maybe that old man with the white hair I had sensed years ago up in the peaks. Zecatecan Jack. But he was coming closer to me, if only ever just behind. And Denver receded back of us like the city of salt, her smokes breaking up in the air and dissolving to our sight.
- *p244*We drove on. Across the immense plain of night lay the first Texas town, Dalhart, which I’d crossed in 1947. It lay glimmering on the dark floor of the earth, fifty miles away. The land by moonlight was all mesquite and wastes. On the horizon was the moon. She fattened, she grew huge and rusty. She mellowed and rolled, till the morning star contended and dews began to blow in our windows - and still we rolled.
- *p251* Instantly we were out in the desert and there wasn’t a light or a car for fifty miles across the flats. And just then dawn was coming over the Gulf of Mexico and we began to see the ghostly shapes of yucca cactus and organ pipe on all sides. ‘What a wild country!’ I yelped. Dean and I were completely awake. In Laredo we’d been half dead. Stan, who’d been to foreign countries before, just calmly slept in the back seat. Dean and I had the whole of Mexico before us.
‘Now, Sal, we’re leaving everything behind us and entering a new and unknown phase of things. All the years and troubles and kicks - and now *this*! So that we can safely think of nothing else and just go on ahead with our faces stuck out like this, you see, and *understand* the world as, really and genuinely speaking, other Americans haven’t done before us - they were here, weren’ t they? The Mexican war. Cutting across here with cannon.’
- ‘Ah,’ sighed Dean, ‘the end of Texas, the end of America, we don’t know no more.’ It was tremendously hot: we were all sweating buckets. There was no night dew, not a breath of air, nothing except billions of moths smashing at bulbs everywhere and the low, rank smell of a hot river in the night nearby - the Rio Grande, The begins in cool Rocky Mountain deals and ends up fashioning world - valleys to mingle its heats with the Mississippi muds in the great Gulf.
- *p254* I want to get on and on - this road drives *me*!!
- *p254* Besides he knew the road would get more interesting, especially ahead, always ahead.
