Lonesome Traveler. Jack Kerouac
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out of school when you told the teacher you were sick and she told you you could go home, 2 o’clock in the afternoon.— You feel as though you just come home from Sunday morning church and you take off your suit and slip into your soft worn smooth cool overalls, to play—you look around and you see happy smiling faces, or the absorbed dark faces of worried lovers and fathers and policemen, you hear cantina music from across the little park of balloons and popsicles.— In the middle of the little park is a bandstand for concerts, actual concerts for the people, free—generations of marimba players maybe, or an Orozco jazzband playing Mexican anthems to El Presidente.— You walk thirsty through the swinging doors of a saloon and get a bar beer, and turn around and there’s fellas shooting pool, cooking tacos, wearing sombreros, some wearing guns on their rancher hips, and gangs of singing businessmen throwing pesos at the standing musicians who wander up and down the room.— It’s a great feeling of entering the Pure Land, especially because it’s so close to dry faced Arizona and Texas and all over the South-west—but you can find it, this feeling, this fellaheen feeling about life, that timeless gayety of people not involved in great cultural and civilization issues—you can find it almost anywhere else, in Morocco, in Latin America entire, in Dakar, in Kurd land.—
There is no “violence” in Mexico, that was all a lot of bull written up by Hollywood writers or writers who went to Mexico to “be violent”—I know of an American who went to Mexico for bar brawls because you dont usually get arrested there for disorderly conduct, my God I’ve seen men wrestle playfully in the middle of the road blocking traffic, screaming with laughter, as people walked by smiling—Mexico is generally gentle and fine, even when you travel among the dangerous characters as I did—“dangerous” in the sense we mean in America—in fact the further you go away from the border, and deeper down, the finer it is, as though the influence of civilizations hung over the border like a cloud.
THE EARTH IS AN INDIAN THING—I squatted on it, rolled thick sticks of marijuana on sod floors of stick huts not far from Mazatlan near the opium center of the world and we sprinkled opium in our masterjoints—we had black heels. We talked about Revolution. The host was of the opinion the Indians originally owned North America just as well as South America, about time to come out and say “La ti-erra esta la notre”—(the earth is ours)—which he did, clacking his tongue and with a hip sneer hunching up his mad shoulders for us to see his doubt and mistrust of anyone understanding what he meant but I was there and understood quite well.— In the corner an Indian woman, 18, sat, partly behind the table, her face in the shadows of the candle glow—she was watching us high either on “O” or herself as wife of a man who in the morning went out in the yard with a spear and split sticks on the ground idly languidly throwing it ground down half-turning to gesture and say something to his partner.— The drowsy hum of Fellaheen Village at noon—not far away was the sea, warm, the tropical Pacific of Cancer.— Spine-ribbed mountains all the way from Calexico and Shasta and Modoc and Columbia River Pasco-viewing sat rumped behind the plain upon which this coast was laid.— A one thousand mile dirt road led there—quiet buses 1931 thin high style goofy with oldfashioned clutch handles leading to floor holes, old side benches for seats, turned around, solid wood, bouncing in interminable dust down past the Navajoas, Margaritas and general pig desert dry huts of Doctor Pepper and pig’s eye on tortilla half burned—tortured road—led to this the capital of the world kingdom of opium—Ah Jesus—I looked at my host.— On the sod floor, in a corner, snored a soldier of the Mexican Army, it was a revolution. The Indian was mad. “La Tierra esta la notre—”
Enrique my guide and buddy who couldnt say “H” but had to say “K”—because his nativity was not buried in the Spanish name of Vera Cruz his hometown, in the Mixtecan Tongue instead.— On buses joggling in eternity he kept yelling at me “HK-o-t? HK-o-t? Is means caliente. Unnerstan?”
“Yeah yeah.”
“Is k-o-t… is k-o-t… is means caliente—HK-eat…. eat…”
“H-eat!”
“Is what letter—alphabay?”
“H”
“Is…HK…?”
“No… H…”
“Is Kard for me to pronouse. I can’ do it.”
When he said “K” his whole jaw leaped out, I saw the Indian in his face. He now squatted in the sod explaining eagerly to the host who by his tremendous demeanor I knew to be the King of some regal gang laid out in the desert, by his complete sneering speech concerning every subject brought up, as if by blood king by right, trying to persuade, or protect, or ask for something, I sat, said nothing, watched, like Gerardo in the corner.— Gerardo was listening with astonished air at his big brother make a mad speech in front of the King and under the circumstances of the strange Americano Gringo with his seabag. He nodded and leered like an old merchant the host to hear it and turned to his wife and showed his tongue and licked his lower teeth and then damped top teeth on lip, to make a quick sneer into the unknown Mexican dark overhead the candlelight hut under Pacific Coast Tropic of Cancer stars like in Acapulco fighting name.— The moon washed rocks from El Capitan on down—The swamps of Panama later on and soon enough.
Pointing, with huge arm, finger, the host:—“Is in the rib of mountains of the big plateau! the golds of war are buried deep! the caves bleed! we’ll take the snake out of the woods! we’ll tear the wings off the great bird! we shall live in the iron houses overturned in fields of rags!”
“Si!” said our quiet friend from the edge of the pallet cot. Estrando.— Goatee, hip eyes drooping brown sad and narcotic, opium, hands falling, strange witchdoctor sitter-next-to of this King—threw in occasional remarks that had the others listening but whenever he tried to follow through it was no go, he overdid something, he dulled them, they refused to listen to his elaborations and artistic touches in the brew.— Primeval carnal sacrifice is what they wanted. No anthropologist should forget the cannibals, or avoid the Auca. Get me a bow and arrow and I’ll go; I’m ready now; plane fare please; plain fare; vacuous is the list; knights grow bold growing old; young knights dream.
Soft.— Our Indian King wanted nothing to do with tentative ideas; he listened to Enrique’s real pleas, took note of Estrando’s hallucinated sayings, guttural remarks spicy thrown in pithy like madness inward and from which the King had learned all he knew of what reality would think of him—he eyed me with honest suspicion.
In Spanish I heard him ask if this Gringo was some cop following him from L.A., some F.B.I, man. I heard and said no. Enrique tried to tell him I was interessa pointing at his own head to mean I was interested in things—I was trying to learn Spanish, I was a head, cabeza, also chucharro—(potsmoker).— Chucharro didnt interest King. In L.A. he’d gone walking in from the Mexican darkness on bare feet palms out black face to the lights—somebody’s ripped a crucifix chain from his neck, some cop or hoodlum, he snarled remembering it, his revenge was either silent or someone was left dead and I was the F.B.I, man—the weird follower of Mexican suspects with records of having left feet prints on the sidewalks of Iron L.A. and chains in jailhouses and potential revolutionary heroes of late afternoon mustaches in the reddy soft light.—
He showed me a pellet of O.—I named it.— Partially satisfied. Enrique pleaded further in my defense. The witchdoctor smiled inwardly, he had no time to goof or do court dances or sing of drink in whore alleys looking for pimps—he was Goethe in the court of Fredericko Weimar.— Vibrations of television telepathy surrounded the room as silently the King decided to accept me—when he did I heard the sceptre drop in all their thoughts.
And O the holy sea of Mazatlan and the great red plain of eve with burros and aznos and red and brown horses and green cactus pulque.
The three muchachas two miles away in a little group talking in the exact concentric center of the circle of the red universe—the softness of their speech could never reach us, nor these waves of Mazatlan destroy it by their bark—soft sea winds to beautify the weed—three islands one mile out—rocks—the Fellaheen City’s muddy rooftops dusk in back …
TO EXPLAIN, I’D