Read Online Atop an Underwood by Jack Kerouac - Free Book Online Page A

streets, dripping eaves, gurgling gutters; a resolute water-shedding that made you feel like reading a book in the parlor, snugly content inside the heart-warming ramifications of man.
    But, no, there was no rain. The heavens were swept by large gray clouds, with an even grayer background. The streets did not glisten, but were damp and steaming. Everything was damp and steaming.
    Richard walked past the city library and looked at its moist granite-blocked structure, a looming castle of books, as dreary and joyless as the day. But inside, Richard could picture the reading room, strewn with tables and chairs and busts. And in one particular corner, where the bookshelves seemed thickest and most forbidding, Richard’s own nook.
    All the way up the street, he could see the familiar shamble and lean of objects which you have been looking at all your life: storefronts, telephone poles, filling station pumps, bakeries, trees rising from cement sidewalks, extinct trolley tracks, fences plastered with posters, barber shop poles whose limitless energies had fascinated his stare since childhood. And above all this hovered a gloomy, tasteless sky.
    A man may be walking up the street like this, completely wrapped up within himself, and satisfied in his solitary observations. And in such a state of mind was Richard as he strode up the street, his wet soles making an irritating crunch as they ground into the sand on the cement. A man may be doing just this, and in such a case, be truthful and completely himself, with no quarter to ask and no desire to tyrannize anyone. He is just walking on a street in America. But suddenly he is accosted by an acquaintance, and immediately this man is no longer truthful and philosophic and meditative; he has to apply himself to the other individual in such a way that he becomes partly submerged within the other’s ego-universe, and in so doing, loses his own private dignity.
    â€œHello Richard,” is the greeting.
    Richard whirls, looks at the accoster, recognizes the features, thinks for a brief second, and then finally says: “Oh hello Walt!”
    â€œHow you doin’?” asks Walt, not really wanting to know.
    â€œSwell.”
    â€œStill goin’ to school?” asks Walt, the accoster.
    â€œYeah. I’m a Post Graduate in High this year.”
    â€œWhat are you studyin’?” is the next query.
    â€œAccounting and shorthand. I’m going to Galloway Commercial College next year.” Richard answers these questions politely and in a friendly manner, although he has no real desire to be friendly. But way down deep within him, he feels the necessity of making the other fellow feel good.
    â€œGood!” ejaculates the other. “Good goin’.”
    â€œWhat are you doing, working?” asks Richard, knowing that the half-way mark of the conversation has arrived, and knowing that this question is as inevitable and necessary in social contact for him as death, taxes, and war seem to be inevitable and necessary for mankind.
    â€œYeah. I’m workin’ in the Nostrand,” is the answer.
    The Nostrand is a by-word in Galloway; it is a large cotton mill.
    â€œDay-shift?” asks Richard kindly, showing by his expression that he hopes it so.
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œGood!” says Richard. “Good thing you’re not on the night shift.”
    â€œYou said it, Dick,” agrees the accoster.
    And now comes the pause. Both sides have given short accounts of their contemporary progress. Life, at this very moment, is hinging on jobs, day-shifts and night-shifts, school, how one is doing, and studies. Life, that rich adventure, is narrowed down to a few terse sentences and obliging smiles; it has lost its grand luster, it has become nothing but a sidewalk conversation, looking into a mill-hand’s fretful eyes, smelling the smoke of his cigarette, noticing his oil-stained overalls, and being open for the outpouring of the