KEROUAC
BDAY
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Jack Kerouac
So we go out, and she has on this little heartbreaking never-seen-by-me before red raincoat over the black velvet slacks and cuts along, with black short hair making her look so strange, like a - like someone in Paris - I have on just my old ex-brakeman railroad Cant Bust Ems and a workshirt without undershirt and suddenly it's cold October out there, and with gusts of rain, so I shiver at her side as we hurry up Price Street - towards Market.
"Baby I'm going to tell you something and if I tell it to you I want you to promise nevertheless you'll come to the movie with me."
"Okay." And naturally I add, after pause, "What is it?" I think it has something to do with "Let's break up" - so I wait confidently for this kind of talk, tho feel bleak, tragic, grim, and the air cold."
"You know the other night? Well I went to Dante's and didn't want to stay, and tried to leave -- and Yuri was trying to hang around and he called somebody -- and I was at the phone -- and told Yuri he was wanted" (as incoherent as that) "and while he is in the booth I cut on home, because I was tired -- baby at two o'clock in the morning he came and knocked on the door."
"Why?"
"For a place to sleep, he was drunk, he rushed in - and - well…"
"Huh?"
"Well baby we made it together," that hip word -- at the sound of which even as I walked and my legs propelled under me and my feet felt firm, the lower part of my stomach sagged into my pants or loins and the body experienced a sensation of deep melting down-going into some soft somewhere, nowhere -- suddenly the streets were so bleak, the people passing so beastly, the lights so unnecessary just to illuminate this…this cutting world -- it was going across the cobbles when she said it, "made it together," I had (locomotive wise) to concentrate on getting up on the curb again and I didn't look at her. I looked down Columbus and thought of walking away, rapidly, as I'd done at Larry's -- I didn't -- I said, "I don't want to live in this beastly world" -- but so low she barely if at all heard me and if so never commented.
Oh what'll we do? I think -- now I go home, and it's all over for sure, not only now is she bored and has had enough but has pierced me with an adultery of a kind, has been inconstant, as prophesied in a dream, the dream the bloody dream -- I see myself grabbing Yuri by the shirt and throwing him on the floor, he pulls out a Yugoslavian knife, I pick up a chair to bash him with, everybody's watching…but I continue the daydream and I look into his eyes and I see suddenly the glare of a jester angel who made his presence on earth all a joke and I realize that this too with Mardou was a joke and I think, "Funny Angel, elevated amongst the subterraneans."
"Baby it's up to you," is what she's actually saying, "about how many times you wanta see me and all that -- but I want to be independent like I say."
And I go home having lost her love.
And write this book.