Tristessa by Jack Kerouac Read Free Book Online

room—“Till the street door is opened at 8 A M” I add, and suddenly decide to curl up on the floor with a flimsy coverlet, which, instantly as done, is like a bed of soft fleece and I lay there divine, legs all tired and clothes partly wet (am wrapped in Old Bull’s big towel robe like a ghost in a Turkish bath) and the whole journey in the rain done, all I have to do is lie dreaming on the floor. I curl up and start sleeping. In the middle of the night now, with the small yellowbulb on, and rain crashing outside, Old Bull Gaines has closed shutters tight, is smoking cigarette after cigarette and I can’t breathe in the room and he’s coughing “Ke-he!” the dry junkey cough, like a protest, like yelling Wake Up !—he lies there, thin, emaciated, long nosed, strangely handsome and gray haired and lean and mangy 22 in his derelict worldling (“student of souls and cities” he calls himself) decapitated and bombed out by morphine frame—Yet all the guts in the world. He starts munching on candy, I lay there waking up realizing that Old Bull is munching on candy noisily in the night—All the sides to this dream—Annoyed, I glance anxiously around and see him myorking and monching on condy after condy, what a preposterous thing to do at 4 A M in your bed—Then at 4:30 he’s up and boiling down a couple of capsules of morphine in a spoon,—you see him, after the shot has been sucked in and siphoned out, with big glad tongue licking so he can spit on the blackened bottom of the spoon and rub it clean and silver with a piece of paper, using, to really polish the spoon, a pinch of ashes—And he lays back, feeling it a little, it takes ten minutes, a muscle bang,—by about twenty minutes he might feel alright—if not, there he is rustling in his drawer waking me up again, he’s looking for his goof-balls—“So he can sleep.”
    So I can sleep. But no. Immediately he wants another jolt of some kind, he ups and opes his drawer and pulls out a tube of codeine pills and counts out ten and pops that in with a slug of cold coffee from his old cup that sits on the chair by the bed—and he endures in the night, with the light on, and lights further cigarettes—At some time or other, around dawn, he falls asleep—I get up after some reflections at 9 or 8, or 7, and quickly put my wet clothes on to rush upstairs to my warm bed and dry clothes—Old Bull is sleeping, he finally made it, Nirvana, he’s snoring and he’s out, I hate to wake him up but he’ll have to lock himself in, with his bolt and slider—It’s gray outside, rain has finally stopped after heaviest surge at dawn. 40,000 families were flooded out in the Northwestern part of Mexico City that storm. Old Bull, far from floods and storms with his needles and his powders beside the bed and cottons and eyedroppers and paraphernalias—“When you got morphine, you dont need anything else, me boy,” he says to me in the daytime all combed and high sitting in his easy chair with papers the picture of glad health—“Madame Poppy, I call her. When you’ve got Opium you’ve got all you need.—All that good O goes down in your veins and you feel like singing Hallelujah!” And he laughs. “Bring me Grace Kelly on this chair, Morphine on that chair, I’ll take Morphine.”
    â€œAva Gardner too ?”
    â€œAva GVavna and all the bazotzkas in all the countries so far—if I can have my M in the morning and my M in the afternoon and my M in the evening before going to bed, I dont even need to know what time it is on the City Hall Clock—” He tells me all this and more nodding vigorously and sincerely. His jaw quivers with emotion. “Why for krissakes if I had no junk I’d be bored to death, I’d die of boredom ” he complains, almost crying—“I read Rimbaud and Verlaine, I know what