Tristessa by Jack Kerouac Read Free Book Online Page A

I’m talking about—Junk is the only thing I want—You’ve never been junksick, you don’t know what it’s like—Boy when you wake up in the morning sick and take a good bang, boy, that feels good.” I can picture myself and Tristessa waking up in our nuptial madbed of blankets and dogs and cats and canaries and dots of whoreplant in the coverlet and naked shoulder to shoulder (under the gentle eyes of the Dove) she shoots me in or I shoot myself in a big bang of waterycolored poison straight into the flesh of your arm and into your system which it instantly proclaims its —you feel the weak fall of your body to the disease in the solution—but never having been junksick, I don’t know the horror of the disease—A story Old Bull could tell much better than I—
    HE LETS ME out, but not until he’s muttered and sputtered out of bed—holding his pajamas and bathrobe, pushing in his belly where it hurts, where some kind of hernia cave-in annoys him,—poor sick fella, almost 60 years old and hanging on to his diseases without bothering anybody—Born in Cincinnati, brought up in the Red River Steamboats. (redlegged? his legs as white as snow)—
    I see that it’s stopped raining and I’m thirsty and have drunk Old Bull’s two cups of water (boiled, and kept in a jar)—I go across the street in my damp sopping shoes and buy an ice-cold Spur Cola and gobble it down on my way to my room—The skies are opening up, there might be sunshine in afternoon, the day is almost wild and Atlantican, like a day at sea off the coast of the Firth of Scotland—I yell imperial flags in my thoughts and rush up the two flights to my room, the final flight a ricket of iron tin-spans creaking and cracking on nails and full of sand, I get on the hard adobe floor of the roof, the Tejado, and walk on slippery little puddles around the air of the courtyard rail only two foot high so you can just easily fall down three flights and crack your skull on tile Espaniala floors where Americans gnash and fight sometimes in raucous parties early in the twilight of the morning,—I could fall, Old Bull almost fell over when he lived on the roof a month, the children sit on the soft stone of the 2 foot rail and goof and talk, all day running around the thing and skidding and I never like to watch—I come to my room around two curves of the Hole and unlock my padlock which is hooked to decaying halfout nails (one time left the room open and unattended all day)—I go in and jam the door in the rain damp wood and rain has swollen the wood and the door barely tightens at the top—I get in my dry hobo pants and two big hobo shirts and go to bed with thick socks on and finish the Spur and lay it on the table and say “Ah” and wipe the back of my mouth and look awhile at holes in my door showing the outside Sunday morning sky and I hear churchbells down Orizaba lane and people are going to church and I’m going to sleep and I’ll make up for it later, goodnight.
    â€œBLESSED LORD, THOU lovedest all sentient life.” Why do I have to sin and do the sign of the Cross? “Not one of the vast accumulation of conceptions from beginningless time, through the present and into the never ending future, not one of them is graspable.”
    It’s the old question of “Yes life’s not real” but you see a beautiful woman or something you can’t get away from wanting because it is there in front of you—This beautiful woman of 28 standing in front of me with her fragile body (“I put thees in my neck [a dicky] so nobody look and see my beautiful body,” she thinks she jokes, not regarding herself as beautiful) and that face so expressive of the pain and loveliness that went no doubt into the making of this fatal world,—a beautiful sunrise, that makes you stop on the sands and gaze out to sea hearing Wagner’s Magic