On the Road in San Francisco

Short Story to Jack Kerouac

It was on the late side of early and I needed to go go go but was there and I told the stop stop stop of the streetlights all turning red. It was that all over the country whichever country you wanted to call it. This was because it was bifurcated and coming apart at the seams stitched with precision and occlusion like the bursting of a plaque-hardened artery in the keys of hearts and spades without a pulse even in fibrillation. It was dead Jim. And still I called out hope even in this basement apartment will that some hypnotic resurrection in a brutal bullneck bathrobe in the Avant gardrobe fashion would burst out from the never beyond and rattle our skulls with a veneer exposition of sealy wit. But it was still dead Jim and was not coming back. Throw out the Subterraneans by the Lonesome Traveler and make whoopie on the Dharma bums reading down Elvis Presley reading Alfred Lloyd Tennyson. This was California the city by the bay. Would that Miles were here.

But as I said the cold night air ran down the yellow streets far beyond an empty vision could surmise. But the rolling hills with rails up and down declared a new kind of city for a left kind of coast. This wasn’t New York anymore. And so I started to walk down the empty street with parking lanes crisscross through with emptiness and desire on the limousine obnoxiousness parading in parked car esplanade down to the utter bay with an esplanade very different from Boston. I ran into Powell and descended my way into onto and beside Market Street though how anyone could buy a market over all that street is beyond my comprehension.

Of all of the present there was a window to a shop that sold egg salad salami with French toast on the side. I checked my jeans for money that was hidden in plain sight and my pocket and found that I had more than enough to slake my stomach for at least a few hours. Wedging in two the crowd bar build with gluconate specials and pattern and Eve are a rat with two dots and a dash on the crash side. I took a seat on the Bunsen burner with the heat lamp overhead to keep me cool.

A large man next to me looked over and saw that I was covered in the tools of a forgotten trade forgotten by many and known to each and every Joe.

“What you doing ya doing my seat.” He was trying to imply that he needed two seats just to take up the space from his enterprise.

I went over at him with the bleary eyes of a man who had not seen the insides of his eyelids for at least a day. I picked up some axle grease and smeared it down my chin. That shut him up because he did not know what I was capable of doing, and he did not want to find out.

Then I gave him a recitation of my troubles just to be sure that he did not know what he was dealing with. It was like I was helicoptered into a community whose sole occupation was hitchhiking east and west to find the great behind and beyond. I had to wait to give my order but that don’t mean nothing at the time. It was at least two hours before the sunrise so I had oodles of clocks to spare. I almost passed out because the diner glowed red before my waxed-out eyes. 20 could hear one buzzing in the hands of the inmates and saw all of the wonderful technical visions where everything I had ever known or done or her of or conjectured came back to me and rearranged in my mind a brand new logical way of remembering the things that I thought were forgotten in my hallucinating gaze.

Finally the man started to talk because if you can’t get it or walk away you might as well get to know it. “So where are you from exactly precisely on the spot.”

 I told him I was from Columbia in New York as opposed to Columbia in South America but I did not know which was better the same.

“Now that is relatively rare that someone thinks that a place in America would even dare to any place else.”

I replied that I had been to Columbia in both places and could see the attraction of either. Because Columbia in South America would never flunk you for missing a test.

“So you have been around?”

And around and around and around. If I hadn’t I wouldn’t be here. All the while stuffing my face with the over-hard egg with black and white peppering the outsides.

Then he tried to pitch some sport to me asking what I thought this year of Giants. And I replied that I hadn’t had any contact with the sports page and quite some time and wouldn’t know anything that would confide his approach because he knew so much more than I did at any given time. This man called him to silence yet again. And he then chewed his food with a fork and some hemorrhage on the plate.

And so I finished my breakfast and crashed out on the slide for the drum crash and loved out towards the east wondering when the lights would go on for the day.

I saw pigeons clocking towards the sidewalk and there was a hope that they could get something for free but I motioned that I was in the same place they were in that I was looking for a drag not giving out any.

 They took the hint. And they ran.

Then I walked up into Chinatown and said my course to the tower that I did not know the name of and looked into the utter East and finally saw the coming up of the dirty filthy sun.