Atop an Underwood (15 page)

American language. Smarten up, or hang up your spikes. One word for it: Beautiful.

How to smarten up? That's the point of poets and poetry. They keep dawdling about, trying to find the way. They never do, but they improve. Sometimes they come damned close to it. Some have hit it on the head.

Be a proud man-creature. Dignity and pride and kindness. That's why Jack Kerouac is a poet. He figures it's the most man-like thing to do. If Kerouac were a pigeon, he would do the most pigeon-like thing. He is a man, so he does the most man-like thing and writes for his fellow men. He assumes from the beginning that most of them can read.

This has been a hell of a novel.

What is sex? Sex is rigid bone, covered with velvet skin, pounding and ripping into fleshy cavity with heart-pounding passion and blood-red lust. Sex is bang! Bang! That's sex, brother, and don't kid yourself. Bang! Pound! Bang! And them comes a rush of luscious fever, an ocean of pin-prick sensation, and a shuddering climax of gushing hot blood. Pow! And then to hell with sex. That's sex, kid.

A novel is a story of man's development, I think. Development is the soul of Fate. My first novel will be a novel. Everything develops, and then dies. That's a novel. This novel is now ended.

If you're on a porch in the middle of Summer, under a night-sky rich in stars and vague nebulae, and you have your head thrown back for a good view of everything up there, you are bound to remember a lot of things. There is all about you the sound of a Saturday night in a mill city of New England, and if you are on my street, you can hear the river whispering over to the left. You can hear music coming from open windows, and up the street there is the exciting light and music of a traffic intersection. People are wearing their best, men with straw hats and white shoes, women with light summer dresses, and wide-brimmed hats, young men on the store corner wearing new suits and smoking out of full cigarette packs and impatiently leaning against the wall as they try to decide what everything is all about.

And oftentimes some little children go by underneath your piazza, and they are so innocently absorbed within their little ego-universes that you realize that they are safe for a while at least. And the sky! On the particular night that I remember, the sky was thick with huge chunkfuls of nodding light, and they were all packed together to form a beautiful spectacle of light and darkness. Right off at the start, if you have your chair tipped back against the railing of the porch and look in upwelling awe at the night-sky you will become a poet for a night at least. The stars seem to be close, just above you and watching you with intense patience. But, on that night when they seemed so, I wasn't fooled one bit. I knew they were indifferent.

And as I sat there, the mystery of the universe began to augment before me until after a while I had to tear my gaze away from the sky lest I should go mad with the eternal of it all. Instead, I fixed my eyes upon the Men's Club across the street from my house, and inside I could see them shooting pool. Through the screened windows I could hear them talk and laugh, some of them rubbing blue chalk on the tip of their pool cues, some of them leaning over the tables intent on their play. I knew there were spittoons somewhere on the floor, because one man spat every half-minute. The roof of this club sagged, and the fire escape which led up to the screened door hung in its skeleton grating by the light of the moon.

And then I began to remember.

I remembered one day out of all the myriad thousands of my life, one day back in my childhood during the seemingly dull, dark, and dismal ‘20's. I suppose the fact that I was a morbid child must account for my saying that the 1920–1930 era was a dismal one, but at least, to me the tone of that era will forever remain colorless and tasteless, for it was not until the '30's that I began to grow up and learn to appreciate the world about me.

I remember myself seated in the parlor, on That Day. Outside there is one grand vision of Gray Time—a vast tedium that seemed to envelop and encompass every pore of the world. The sky is exceedingly tasteless, its pallid solemnity hanging over the roofs of the city with a heavy gloom. The parlor is dark and dull, and in the corner and behind the chairs and sofas broods a sombre black color. I am seated on the sofa, listening to the clock ticking in the kitchen, equally gray and listless, and to the sink with its song of the dripping faucet. I am all alone in the house (I suppose my mother had gone out to the store) and I stare languidly at the roofs of the city, disconsolately feeding upon the overwhelming drabness of the cloudy sky like vultures at lean fare.

I am about six years old, and am dying a thousand prosaic deaths. What is there to life, little boy seated in the parlor? Whatever the future holds in store for you, will it not be rendered gray and barren and stupid by this enormous Gray Time? Does not life, at this moment, narrow down to one little gray ball of Time, stuffed down your throat and choking you? Is there nothing but death to assuage this?

Here, then, is something that I cannot overcome: A cloudy day. Perhaps if I were to be distracted from these idle thoughts by some calamity, I wouldn't give a cloudy day, the Great Gray Time a second thought. But yet I can still remember vividly myself at the age of six, sitting in a parlor, listening to the eternal sigh of the Gray Time, and wondering whether it wouldn't have been better not [to] be born.

Back in the days of my boyhood, there was a youngster in the neighborhood who used to be the laziest child imaginable. The women talked about him all the time, at the supper table. He was the casual talk of the town. He couldn't be the main talk of the town, because he himself was too insignificant and inconspicuous.

“That boy is no good. He will never be any good. He is too lazy.”

Yes, he was too lazy. Every day, he would sit down on the top of the sandbank and gaze at the hills.

“One day,” he told me on a cloudy morning, “I shall go into those forests and explore them.”

“You're nuts,” I told him. “They have already been explored. They are full of houses and roads and barking dogs and rubbish.”

“They are not,” he said, biting a twig. “They are wilderness. I shall explore them some day.”

And so he would sit there all day, gazing. From down on the street, we could see him up there, a speck straddling a cliff. The sandbanks were dusty in those sunny summer days. We could see him up there; sitting quietly, looking into the distance, the eddies of dust swirling about him.

One sunny day, I was climbing the sandbank with my staff, talking to the trees and telling them that the prophet had arrived. I the prophet, I was shouting. I, the new prophet. Look at me, trees, and weep. I have come to save you, branch by branch. Bend before the winds, but break before me.

He was up there, sitting on the jutting cliff, gazing quietly. I came to him.

“Alcide,” I roared in his ear. “I am the new prophet.”

“You,” he said. “Have been reading the Bible.”

“Hell, I have not. I saw a movie of the life of Christ. He got nailed to a cross by a bunch of cannibals. I dream of him every night. I wish my mother would let me wear a long robe. I would really look like a prophet.”

I stood beside him and looked at the New England hills. They were curved delicately on the horizon, veiled beneath a lovely pall. Pale, wan ghosts. A colossal cyclorama, circumventing the landscape.

“Prophet,” he said profoundly, “let me alone.”

I walked away.

A few weeks later I was a World War soldier. I came by, carrying my rifle, crawling in the dust, begrimed and alert.

“You Hun!” I shouted from behind a bush. “Yell Kamarade, or I'll shoot you.”

The boy shifted his position from the top of the hill, and turned his head to look at me.

“You bore me,” he said. “Go away.”

“I'll shoot you nevertheless,” I said. And I did.

The next day it rained in torrents. I had forgotten my sweater there, and when my mother found out, she commanded me to get it before it became completely destroyed. I found it, a crumpled mess of soggy clay and wool. Poor lost little thing, I roared to myself. Alone in the rain, glistening wet and limp and covered with pieces of sand. Little pieces of sand on a sweater in the rain, rivulets running through its valleys and mountains, carrying grains of sand. Little sodden mountain of forgotten mush. Musty mud.

The boy was on top of the sandbank standing and looking away. He wore a raincoat and a little Gloucester fishermen rain-cap. He stood and looked. I disarranged my little mountain of lead-heavy wool, and shouted through the rain:

“You're nuts.”

He said nothing.

The next day, it was warm and sunny. I was walking to the store, dragging my feet through the hot sand, the lost Foreign Legion hero.

“Water,” I muttered. “Water.”

He was on top of the bank, sitting down this time. It was not raining; he was sitting down, munching on a blade of grass, like Whitman. What is the grass? asked the man carrying it to the child with full hands.

“Hell,” he said, when I reached him. “Look at those hills. How long have they been?”

“Been where?”

“Just been,” he said.

“I guess since the beginning of the world,” I said.

“Of course.”

The sun beat down on both of us: shimmering radiations—the distant hills are dancing, Father. They are dancing the Rhumba, the Tango, and the Jive.

“Hell,” said the lazy child. “I'm going into those forests some day.”

“When,” I asked.

“When the time comes,” he said.

I went to the store. I walked into the grocery shop, sweating. I was uncomfortable, waiting. The fresh apples, smelling off cool waves. Flies buzzing about, annoying. Sticking paper, hanging down. China, I roared to myself. Hanging mandarins, hung by the neck for throwing knives. Knives flash in the dark Shanghai alleys. Hang, you mandarin, and love it. Flies love it.

“Twelve cents, Johnny,” said the grocer.

To hell with you, I roared to myself. I walked home, handed the package to my sister. I went back to the swirling sands of the bank. No longer a hero of the French desert forces.

“Alcide,” I said. “May I sit with you?”

He shifted his position on top of the sandbank to turn his neck.

“No!” he said. “Go away. You bore me!”

I went away, and in the yard, Tarzan came by on an elephant and I roared, To hell with you.

The next day, I went back to the sandbank. Alcide was not there. He is gone into the forest at last, I cried to myself. He has gone at last. All afternoon, I sat on his spot and gazed at the far-off woods, smiling.

Alcide's family moved away. They roared away from our street the next day, the truck tottering with beds and chairs. Alcide was sitting on the top of the pile, his legs folded like an Arab's, quietly riding along and swaying with the truck. His brothers were yelling with joy. Alcide was thunderously quiet. His brown little eyes stared down at me as the truck grunted sway, its chassis low slung and smoking and stumbling up the street like a giant frog that is hurt and cannot leap.

I have not seen Alcide for years. I don't know what happened to him. He went away from us, but not from himself, I assure you. Alas for him? Hell!

Hell! I roared as the truck teetered around the corner and disappeared.

Today, the sandbank is slowly swirling itself away. The distant hills are still there, with more houses.

I don't know; apparently, we're losing something. We must not let it go. Any more of this stuff, and we shall all die. If I was a millionaire, I would search for Alcide until I found him or his grave. Then I would carefully prop him up on the top of the sandbank, tear down the houses in the distant hills, grow some trees there, and then throw a cordon around the sandbank.

“Stand back, you pack of howling dogs. Let this boy muse. Find your own Goddamned sandbanks!”

In New Jersey today, while looking over the mass production in the Ford motor plant, I took a moment off to smoke a cigarette, and in so doing, I looked out of the window. Behind me roared Ford's Ford-makers; in front of me, through the turbid window pane, stood a cliff, on the other side of the street. On top of it sat a speck, looking over the whole blooming scene with the wisdom of altitude and perspective and silence.

Hell, I roared to myself in the plant. As long as the women of America keep turning out Alcides in mass production, we're all set. There's a new one up there now. Hell, I thundered, as five Ford-makers bumped into each other, trying to beat the assembly track to the deadline.

Alas, Hell!! I boomed to myself. Not for the little speck, at least. One at a time, Gents, one at a time. Let the prophet come by with his staff. Get out of the way. You'll get a staff on the head.