Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings

  “I hope you have a nice trip on the way over, John,” your old pal said to you at the station. “And be sure to study hard, now, and get some good marks at College. And write to me!”

  “Sure, Fouch,” you told your old chum. “I’ll write some tremendous documents and tell you all about College in detail.”

  And then you remember with poignant inklings of a new regret the mist in your mother’s eyes as she fluttered her kindly hands all over your coat, brushing off specks of dust and infinitesimal strands of hair with a meticulous nervousness and a taut hopelessness that kindled a hot fire within your inner entrails. You don’t know just what to call this hot fire which had burned your very eyes and caused them to unleash molten love in searing rivulets. Probably, you think, it is because you are leaving your Mother for the first time!

  As a matter of fact, when you left your loved ones at the station, you didn’t know much—all you knew was one thing: that you were leaving home, and going to College, and that a new and glittering existence awaited you, far-off and shimmering and towering into clear, lucid skies, shrieking out into space with an exultant triumph!

  “Ah!” you say now, seated in the roaring train, the last remnants of your old home-town suburbs scattering by in sparse bits, as if completely blown to non-existence by the fact that you are leaving it. “Ah!” you repeat to yourself, “Now I am heading toward my goal—and I am hurtling through the land to my destination. I am no longer immovable. I am now alive!” You dream of these fond sayings with a puerile, knowing smile.

  Ah, my poor little madman, still a child, why don’t you open your eyes and look about you in the train. Look carefully at your fellow passengers. See those seamy, lined expressions; those tallow grimaces of mobile resignation, weariness, and impassiveness. These fellow-passengers of yours, little madman, why don’t you study them carefully. Why don’t you remove the mist of youth from your unassailed, unpummeled young eyes! Why don’t you do this! Why must you wait for Life to beat it into you with its blunt hammer, its vulpine leer glutting above you with a fresh new triumph!!!!! But wait.....

  Now, it is four months later, and there is a blinding blanket of snow covering the earth. A train is wailing its mournful whistle across the alabaster wastes, and our little madman is seated in the train, going back home for Christmas, four months of College under his belt.

  He is thinking of the City Hall clock, as it has winked in the night for eighteen years. He is thinking of the smell of his cellar at home; of the murmurous hush of the river at night; of the wail of the winds through the backyard trees . . . . . and then he jumps with a delighted start! For the train has begun to slow down, and he sees the familiar old Mills, stolid and bowed in the blanket ebony of the night sky, silhouetted against the whiteness of the snow. To him, they look as though they have been patiently waiting his arrival. He feasts his eyes upon them, but leaves his thirst only partially satiated. Now the train is really slowing down, and our little madman takes up his grips and rushes down the aisle. There is more to come, more miracles to be beheld, and more wonders to stun him!

  “Homeville!” croaks the conductor in his wooden weariness, going to the door of the train and spitting out into the night air. Our little madman stands behind the conductor, eyes riveted upon the broad blueness of his back, the maddening bulk of this man thrust between himself and the glorious happiness which awaits him at the station.

  Now! The train is easing to a crawling stop, and you wait while the torturous engineer blasts all the atoms of your existence with his damned preciseness! Slow, slowly—please get out of my way, Mr. Conductor, I want to see my old Home Town, I want to consume the sight of it, to masticate it, to slurp up its blood . . . .

  At last, the blue-uniformed conductor swings down to the platform, and everything is unfolded to your clouded gaze. You see a group of old familiar faces, and you think of God as you watch the radiance and warmth sing up to your very soul. You see all that God-like essence come up to you from the dark night, and your Faith is redeemed. You see God before you, emblazoned in all those loved faces like a starry tarpaulin. The all-encompassing, all-loving God!

  With all the nonchalance that you can muster, in an effort to betray your College experience, you step down from the train, your hands trembling wildly. You kiss the lovely cheek of your mother and sister, and you shake hands warmly with your father, a stout stone of integrity; and you clasp the wiry hand of your best pal.

  [Y]ou realize that a man can take a train and never reach his destination, that a man has no destination at the end of the road, but that he merely has a starting point on the road—which is Home. You see it all, this epic of mankind, before your eyes; it is a limpid and awful truth, it has a naked and beautiful reality. You are now a man, little madman. When you left, four months ago, you were but a child—you with your high ideals and mad dreams. Now, I hope that you see everything, that you will from now on read it in the faces of the passengers of the world, the faces that comet across the surface of the Earth, forever searching for the destination. I hope, little madman, that you realize that the destination is really not a tape at the end of a straight-away racing course, but that it is a tape on an oval that you must break over and over again as you race madly around. And whether you give up the race after circumventing the swarming oval once, or whether you continue through the marathon alleys of life—whichever you do, little madman, you shall always return to the place where the road began.

  For the place where the road began is composted of infantine hallucinations and youthful ambition, and these are deathless elements that remain within you forever.

  This Home that I speak of, madmen, may be anywhere on earth. It is the soul of Man, I think, and it is a component, a mixture, a swarming vat-like concoction of all the ideals of Man, embodied upon one portion of the Earth’s crusty integument, and thrust upwards in a gesture of terrible finality and beauty that shall forever beckon.

  New York Nite Club—

  Outside, in the street, the sudden music which comes from the nitespot fills you with yearning for some intangible joy—and you feel that it can only be found within the smoky confines of the place. You leave the street and enter New York’s night life—a sudden rush of festivity, not the wild dark festivity of Spain, but a cultured, toned festivity borne along by the nostalgic improvisations of a guitar, or the rich round moans of a Billie Holiday. There is the eternal smoke of cigarettes, the fine smell of bars ranged with colorful displays of bottles, gowned women, tuxedoed men, and those who reminisce, wrangle, and cry at the bar. You look down the bar—it is not like an ordinary bar, for there is something about the New York bars that no other bar can capture—and you see a gallery of faces, each as interesting as the other. Millions of dancing illusions cloud your eyes as you search into the eyes of these barflies—that one there looks a lot like a bookie, and the other much like an actor, and there is a high-priced harlot. Books and novels could be written about the lives of these rangy faces, these pouting velvet faces, these red lips, these dark mysterious faces, these jovial open-faced faces, these drunken dull-eyed faces. The bartender, looking a lot like a performer with the light of his brilliantly arrayed bar shining up to his face and softening it like footlights do, is mixing drinks. There is the hardness of the city in him—hardness, a certain look of hectic suspicion, a tinge of awed dismay, and an obviously false certainty that is helped along by the most mundane manipulation of a cigarette.

  I remember once when I was quite childishly eating a hot fudge sundae at a fountain back home. It was raining, and I was as virile and masculine as anyone else in the place. But I was perched up on a stool and drooling in my fudge and cream like a child. I was self-conscious. Then in walked a fellow attired in soda pop clothes, a driver of the Coca-Cola trucks. He walked up to the cigarette counter with a preoccupied stride. The soda jerk recognized him:

  “Howdy Joe. Just pull in?”

  (Just pull in, I think. A truck driver, just pull in. Just pull in,
the rain was slashing at his windshield. Just pull in, the hero. Wearing drivers’ clothes, just pull in, and the rain.)

  The truck driver looked carefully at his questioner, pulling out some money from his pocket and smoking knowingly on his cigarette. He answered, very curtly and with much competent authority, almost a scowl:

  “Yeah.”

  (Oh boy, I sneer to myself. The great man, just pull in.)

  I looked at him. He bought the pack of cigarettes, letting his last cigarette butt hang from his twisted mouth and spiral smoke up to his scowling eyes. He walked out, still preoccupied. A sort of false preoccupation designed to befuddle everyone with whom he communicated. Preoccupied with his paltry little truck universe, as if it were the only universe in the place. The big man, cigarette butt hanging from snarling mouth, Yeah, curtly scowling at the world, women and drink and trucks and the hell with anything and everything else.

  Where is the naked unquestioning sincerity in this world today?

  You buy yourself a Coke and take a table in an obscure corner. You light your cigarette and look around you. The music will soon begin—the little negro trumpeter is almost ready, but never quite begins. He holds the horn in his chubby black hands, with white fingernails, and he talks to friends and musicians around and below him. He smiles, and blows through his trumpet to emit a small round tone. Then he talks some more, jokes, maddeningly producing his horn to his mouth only to let it drop again in order to say something to the inevitable someone who is always around him. The music will never start, you say. And suddenly he starts playing on his trumpet.

  Part Two

  An Original Kicker 1941

  from Background

  [...] In the Spring, I was back on the field working with the varsity backfield (Governali, Will, Wood, and I). There were glowing reports in the papers about me, but when the Fall of 1941 came, I did not return to Columbia. I had spent the entire summer writing and studying feverishly, and wanted to keep that up rather than return to a college education interrupted by dozens of immaterial activities, such as football, N.Y.A. jobs, meal jobs, typing agencies, ghost-writing and whatnot. I left Lowell and got a job in a gas station in Hartford, Conn., away from my disconsolate and reprimanding parents.

  Curiously enough, I enjoyed my new status in life: it was peaceful to contemplate not being a Golden Boy of football, and to devote all my energies to writing. I wrote like a fiend, sending one radio script to Orson Welles which was never returned to me, even to this day. In the space of two months, I wrote about two hundred short stories.

  There’s Something About a Cigar

  This is one of several plays that Kerouac wrote at Columbia in the spring of 1941. In a note to Sebastian Sampas on March 5, 1941, Kerouac told him that he was hitchhiking home for a long weekend: “So that we can get together and discuss over a banana split at Marion’s, I am bringing a one-act play I wrote this morning at 3 A.M.” Marion’s was a small store with ice cream and a pool table at 53 Martin Street in the Rosemont section of Pawtucketville.

  A little play in several acts and scenes.

  Date: March 23, 1941 Time: 1 A.M. (Date and time of writing. This is mentioned because I feel that it will be illuminating to people to know that this thing was written at one o’clock in the morning of March 23rd, 1941. Why, I don’t know. It doesn’t make any difference. As long as we get a little kick out of life, it’s all right. There’s no harm done.)

  Here in America last night, I saw an awful thing which people call a play. It was awful. If that is what the theatre has come to, then there is no hope for anyone except the cigar-smokers. Which brings me to the issue.

  Act One: Scene One: (Before the curtain is rung up, the audience should be supplied with good fat five-cent cigars. The women should at least light them and hold them in their hands; but the men must smoke them. It is essential.

  Because there’s something about a cigar. As you shall soon see.)

  Ages ago, I used to lay down in the warm sun and close my eyes. It was, of course wonderful. Like the time that I was naked, lying on my back in the grass, feeling the little insects run all over me and listening to the sound of the forest and the river. The forest and the river are just like a good cigar; they don’t make any noise to speak of. A turbulent river and a forest in the morning make a lot of noise; so does a loaded cigar. But I’m talking about normal conditions, if there is such a thing.

  The scene, then, is as of ages ago, where I used to be a fine poet. The sky is very blue, it is New England, there is a plowed field across the little stream, which slips by like beautiful blue-green oil. You can hear Time march on, not like in the movies, but like Time really does march on—a tremendous muffled roar. The doors in back of the stage should be open to let the sound of Time in on the customers. And it would be an outlet for the cigar smoke. Now we’re all set. There is a young fellow in a bathing suit sitting in the grass, smoking a cigar. His hair is wet, and he just got out of the water. He is smoking this cigar and the first thing he says in the play is this: Young Fellow: There’s something about a cigar . . . .

  (The sound of Time, the tremendous muffled roar of it all, is audible to all. If necessary, install a Time machine underneath the stage and let it reverberate in a restrained, powerful monotone. Also a few bird cheeps and lapping water. The sky is blue as hell. It is a New England sky. Blue as all hell. Now comes another young man in his swimming regalia. He is walking along the trail which follows the stream, and he approaches the cigar-smoking poet. He knows him. His name is Nick.

  Nick: Where the hell did you get that stogie?

  Young Fellow: At Joe’s. I bought a dollar’s worth—20 of them.

  Nick: You did? Well, whaddaya say?

  YF: Help yourself

  (He does. He lights the cigar and sits down in the grass

  beside YF. He sighs and doesn’t say a damned word.

  That’s the wonderful thing about Nick.)

  YF: That’s the wonderful thing about you

  Nick: What is?

  YF: Nothing(Now comes the third bather. He is Walter. His hair is all curled up in wet ringlets on his brow. He strides up to them with his cigarette. He has a white sweat shirt over his bathing suit. He sits down with a contented

  Walter: Aaaah ...

  (Offstage we hear the sound of shouting swimmers. They come nearer. Now they are here, two young fellows racing. They are both naked, because they forgot their bathing suits. Anyway, nobody ever goes to this place much—that is, girls. They end their race and flop on the grass beside the three smokers.)

  YF: Walter, throw that lousy butt away and have one of my cigars. There’s nothing can beat a cigar.

  Walter: Just as you say (The two racers are PAUL and SEBASTIAN)

  Sebastian: Zagg, you’re not very polite. Don’t you offer us a cigar?

  YF: Of course I do. Help yourself. I bought a dollar’s worth at Joe’s

  Paul: (Lights up his cigar; he is ringing wet.)

  Broush—broush, burp . . . ahem . . . egad ... kapf . . . kaff kaff . . . how does the stock stand today?

  Walter: (Also assuming a business man pose):Well, it’s like this JP. Amalgamated rose two points today, but I’m afraid that Consolidated will go down (Walter does this very well, and he raises his leg to indicate a typical business man fart as he speaks. He is bursting with opulence, power, prestige, and importance. He again raises his leg.)

  Nick spits calmly.

  YF watches Walter and bursts out laughing. Everyone laughs, in his own way. Sebastian smiles wanly, YF laughs out loud, Paul has a pleasant high-pitched giggle that is not at all silly, and Nick slaps his thigh approvingly.

  YF: You know, I used to smoke cigars and imitate burpers like Mouse just did. But now I’ve a new perspective. I smoke cigars because there’s something about them that gets me. For one thing, it’s such a silly goddamn thing to do, that I have to laugh at myself. From there on, the coast is clear.

  Sebastian: Laugh at yourself, and cry too.
(He is getting into one of his moods, as he was in my last play. Now he springs to his full six feet and starts shouting at the top of his lungs:Sunday in Moscow, gray gloomy Sunday in Moscow. Oh, ye bells of Moscow . . . ring . . . ring . . . I must see them. I am going there now. To Moscow . . . . (Sebastian runs off into the woods. In his youth, he read a lot about wood-nymphs and Pucks and stuff. So now he is going out to try it, naked. He is a wood-nymph too, because you can hear him all over the forest, reciting Poe’s “Bells” ... or should I say, shouting “Bells”)

  YF: Isn’t that marvelous? And to think that the poor bastard has to get up in the morning every day and go to his business, sleepy, grouchy, exhausted, hungry, cold, sick, empty, bleak, disgusted . . .

  Walter: It’s a wicked world

  YF: (Taking a luxurious drag from his cigar.)But, there’s something about cigars just the same. Like the time I walked out of a movie in New York and began to walk home along Broadway. I was cold, and shy of the world. Suddenly, I saw a cigar store. I said to myself, “Zagg, you’re going to go in there and buy yourself a cigar. What for? I don’t know. I’m glad I don’t know. I don’t want to know. I’ll just buy one and smoke it.” So I bought a cigar and lit it and walked out and went right along the street, a new man. I looked at every one with new interest, because the cigar gave me courage. It made me say: “Well, hello there. How the hell are you, you little pavement cipher, you little nameless, faceless cinder of Wolfe? I’m Zagg and I’ve got a cigar and I don’t give a damn for anything, nor do I reject anything. I think that you’ve an ugly puss, but I like you because you inhabit this earth with me and we’re both in the same boat.” And there I was, striding along the street, smoking my fucking stogie, laughing at the rich experience of it all. Nick farts, quietly and unassumingly. There is a tremendous burst of laughter, which drowns out the distant howls of Sebastian, the idealist.