Kerouac,

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ON THE ROAD
By JACK KEROUAC
New York The Viking Press
COPYRIGHT (c) 1955, 1957 BY JACK KEROUAC SEVENTEENTH PRINTING DECEMBER 1972
VIKING COMPASS EDITION
ISSUED IN 1959 BY THE VIKING PRESS, INC. 625 MADISON AVENUE, NEW YORK, N.Y.
IOO22
DISTRIBUTED IN CANADA
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
OF CANADA LIMITED
Parts of Chapters 12 and 73, Book One, appeared in The Paris Review under the title "The Mexican
Girl"; parts of Chapters 10 and 14, Book Three, in New World Writing (Seven) entitled "Jazz of the Beat
Generation"; and an excerpt from Chapter ;, Book Four, in New Directions 16 entitled "A Billowy Trip
in the World."
SBN 670-52512-* (HARDBOUND) SEN 670-00047-7 (PAPERBOUND)
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER:
57-9425
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY THE COLONIAL PRESS INC.
Also by Jack Kerouac:
The Town and the City
The Book of Dreams
The Dharma Bums
Big Sur
The Subterraneans
Visions of Gerard
Doctor Sax: Faust
Desolation Angels
Mexico City Blues (poems)
Satori in Paris
PART ONE
1
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 about, except 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 was 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 shrouded 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.
One day I was hanging around the campus and Chad and Tim Gray told me Dean was staying in a
cold-water pad in East Harlem, the Spanish Harlem. Dean had arrived the night before, the first
time in New York, with his beautiful little sharp chick Marylou; they got off the Greyhound bus at
50th Street and cut around the corner looking for a place to eat and went right in Hector's, and since
then Hector's cafeteria has always been a big symbol of New York for Dean. They spent money on
beautiful big glazed cakes and creampuffs.
All this time Dean was telling Marylou things like this: "Now, darling, here we are in New York
and although I haven't quite told you everything that I was thinking about when we crossed
Missouri and especially at the point when we passed the Booneville reformatory which reminded
me of my jail problem, it is absolutely necessary now to postpone all those leftover things
concerning our personal lovethings and at once begin thinking of specific worklife plans . . ." and
so on in the way that he had in those early days.
I went to the cold-water flat with the boys, and Dean came to the door in his shorts. Marylou was
jumping off the couch; Dean had dispatched the occupant of the apartment to the kitchen, probably
to make coffee, while he proceeded with his loveproblems, for to him sex was the one and only
holy and important thing in life, although he had to sweat and curse to make a living and so on. You
saw that in the way he stood bobbing his head, always looking down, nodding, like a young boxer
to instructions, to make you think he was listening to every word, throwing in a thousand "Yeses"
and "That's rights." My first impression of Dean was of a young Gene Autry-trim, thin-hipped,
blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent-a sideburned hero of the snowy West. In fact he'd just been
working on a ranch, Ed Wall's in Colorado, before marrying Marylou and coming East. Marylou
was a pretty blonde with immense ringlets of hair like a sea of golden tresses; she sat there on the
edge of the couch with her hands hanging in her lap and her smoky blue country eyes fixed in a
wide stare because she was in an evil gray New York pad that she'd heard about back West, and
waiting like a longbodied emaciated Modigliani surrealist woman in a serious room. But, outside of
being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things. 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. "In other words we've got to get on the ball, darling, what I'm saying, otherwise it'll be
fluctuating and lack of true knowledge or crystallization of our plans." Then I went away.
During the following week he confided in Chad King that he absolutely had to learn how to write
from him; Chad said I was a writer and he should come to me for advice. Meanwhile Dean had
gotten a job in a parking lot, had a fight with Marylou in their Hoboken apartment-God knows why
they went there-and she was so mad and so down deep vindictive that she reported to the police
some false trumped-up hysterical crazy charge, and Dean had to lam from Hoboken. So he had no
place to live. He came right out to Paterson, New Jersey, where I was living with my aunt, and one
night while I was studying there was a knock on the door, and there was Dean, bowing, shuffling
obsequiously in the dark of the hall, and saying, "Hello, you remember me-Dean Moriarty? I've
come to ask you to show me how to write."
"And where's Marylou?" I asked, and Dean said she'd apparently whored a few dollars together and
gone back to Denver-"the whore!" So we went out to have a few beers because we couldn't talk like
we wanted to talk in front of my aunt, who sat in the living room reading her paper. She took one
look at Dean and decided that he was a madman.
In the bar I told Dean, "Hell, man, I know very well you didn't come to me only to want to become
a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except you've got to stick to it with the energy
of a benny addict." And he said, "Yes, of course, I know exactly what you mean and in fact all those
problems have occurred to me, but the thing that I want is the realization of those factors that
should one depend on Schopenhauer's dichotomy for any inwardly realized . . ." and so on in that
way, things I understood not a bit and he himself didn't. In those days he really didn't know what he
was talking about; that is to say, he was a young jailkid all hung-up on the wonderful possibilities
of becoming a real intellectual, and he liked to talk in the tone and using the words, but in a
jumbled way, that he had heard from "real intellectuals"-although, mind you, he wasn't so naive as
that in all other things, and it took him just a few months with Carlo Marx to become completely in
there with all the terms and jargon. Nonetheless we understood each other on other levels of
madness, and I agreed that he could stay at my house till he found a job and furthermore we agreed
to go out West sometime. That was the winter of 1947.
One night when Dean ate supper at my house-he already had the parking-lot job in New York-he
leaned over my shoulder as I typed rapidly away and said, "Come on man, those girls won't wait,
make it fast."
I said, "Hold on just a minute, I'll be right with you soon as I finish this chapter," and it was one of
the best chapters in the book. Then I dressed and off we flew to New York to meet some girls. As
we rode in the bus in the weird phosphorescent void of the Lincoln Tunnel we leaned on each other
with fingers waving and yelled and talked excitedly, and I was beginning to get the bug like Dean.
He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only
conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise
pay no attention to him. He was conning me and I knew it (for room and board and "how-to-write,"
etc.), and he knew I knew (this has been the basis of our relationship), but I didn't care and we got
along fine-no pestering, no catering; we tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends. I
began to learn from him as much as he probably learned from me. As far as my work was
concerned he said, "Go ahead, everything you do is great." He watched over my shoulder as I wrote
stories, yelling, "Yes! That's right! Wow! Man!" and "Phew!" and wiped his face with his
handkerchief. "Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even
begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions
and grammatical fears . . ."
"That's right, man, now you're talking." And a kind of holy lightning I saw flashing from his
excitement and his visions, which he described so torrentially that people in buses looked around to
see the "overexcited nut." In the West he'd spent a third of his time in the poolhall, a third in jail,
and a third in the public library. They'd seen him rushing eagerly down the winter streets,
bareheaded, carrying books to the poolhall, or climbing trees to get into the attics of buddies where
he spent days reading or hiding from the law.
We went to New York-I forget what the situation was, two colored girls-there were no girls there;
they were supposed to meet him in a diner and didn't show up. We went to his parking lot where he
had a few things to do-change his clothes in the shack in back and spruce up a bit in front of a
cracked mirror and so on, and then we took off. And that was the night Dean met Carlo Marx. A
tremendous thing happened when Dean met Carlo Marx. Two keen minds that they are, they took
to each other at the drop of a hat. Two piercing eyes glanced into two piercing eyes-the holy
con-man with the shining mind, and the sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind that is Carlo
Marx. From that moment on I saw very little of Dean, and I was a little sorry too. Their energies
met head-on, I was a lout compared, I couldn't keep up with them.
The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then; it would mix up all my friends
and all I had left of my family in a big dust cloud over the American Night. Carlo told him of Old
Bull Lee, Elmer Hassel, Jane: Lee in Texas growing weed, Hassel on Riker's Island, Jane
wandering on Times Square in a benzedrine hallucination, with her baby girl in her arms and
ending up in Bellevue. And Dean told Carlo of unknown people in the West like Tommy Snark, the
clubfooted poolhall rotation shark and cardplayer and queer saint. He told him of Roy Johnson, Big
Ed Dunkel, his boyhood buddies, his street buddies, his innumerable girls and sex-parties and
pornographic pictures, his heroes, heroines, adventures. They rushed down the street together,
digging everything in the early way they had, which later became so much sadder and perceptive
and blank. But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've
been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad
ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same
time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous
yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue
centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!" What did they call such young people in Goethe's
Germany? Wanting dearly to learn how to write like Carlo, the first thing you know, Dean was
attacking him with a great amorous soul such as only a con-man can have. "Now, Carlo, let me
speak-here's what Fm saying ..." I didn't see them for about two weeks, during which time they
cemented their relationship to fiendish allday-allnight-talk proportions.
Then came spring, the great time of traveling, and everybody in the scattered gang was getting
ready to take one trip or another. I was busily at work on my novel and when I carne to the halfway
mark, after a trip down South with my aunt to visit my brother Rocco, I got ready to travel West for
the very first time.
Dean had already left. Carlo and I saw him off at the 34th Street Greyhound station. Upstairs they
had a place where you could make pictures for a quarter. Carlo took off his glasses and looked
sinister. Dean made a profile shot and looked coyly around. I took a straight picture that made me
look like a thirty-year-old Italian who'd kill anybody who said anything against his mother. This
picture Carlo and Dean neatly cut down the middle with a razor and saved a half each in their
wallets. Dean was wearing a real Western business suit for his big trip back to Denver; he'd finished
his first fling in New York. I say fling, but he only worked like a dog in parking lots. The most
fantastic parking-lot attendant in the world, he can back a car forty miles an hour into a tight
squeeze and stop at the wall, jump out, race among fenders, leap into another car, circle it fifty
miles an hour in a narrow space, back swiftly into tight spot, hump, snap the car with the
emergency so that you see it bounce as he flies out; then clear to the ticket shack, sprinting like a
track star, hand a ticket, leap into a newly arrived car before the owner's half out, leap literally
under him as he steps out, start the car with the door flapping, and roar off to the next available spot,
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