Read Online Lonesome Traveler by Jack Kerouac - Free Book Online

till the time I have to stick my railroad watch in my jean watchpocket and cut out allowing myself exactly 8 minutes to the station and the 7:15 train No. 112 I have to catch for the ride five miles to Bayshore through four tunnels, emerging from the sad Rath scene of Frisco gloom gleak in the rainymouth fogmorning to a sudden valley with grim hills rising to the sea, bay on left, the fog rolling in like demented in the draws that have little white cottages disposed real-eastatically for come-Christmas blue sad lights—my whole soul and concomitant eyes looking out on this reality of living and working in San Francisco with that pleased semiloin-located shudder, energy for sex changing to pain at the portals of work and culture and natural foggy fear.-—There I am in my little room wondering how I’ll really manage to fool myself into feeling that these next 2% hours will be well filled, fed, with work and pleasure thoughts.— It’s so thrilling to feel the coldness of the morning wrap around my thickquilt blankets as I lay there, watch facing and ticking me, legs spread in comfy skidrow soft sheets with soft tears or sew lines in ‘em, huddled in my own skin and rich and not spending a cent on—I look at my littlebook—and I stare at the words of the Bible.— On the floor I find last red afternoon Saturday’s
Chronicle
sports page with news of football games in Great America the end of which I bleakly see in the gray light entering.— The fact that Frisco is built of wood satisfies me in my peace, I know nobody’ll disturb me for 2½ hours and all bums are asleep in their own bed of eternity awake or not, bottle or not—it’s the joy I feel that counts for me.—On the floor’s my shoes, big lumberboot flopjack workshoes to colomp over rockbed with and not turn the ankle—solidity shoes that when you put them on, yokewise, you know you’re working now and so for same reason shoes not be worn for any reason like joys of restaurant and shows.— Night-before shoes are on the floor beside the clunkershoes a pair of blue canvasshoes à la 1952 style, in them I’d trod soft as ghost the indented hill sidewalks of Ah Me Frisco all in the glitter night, from the top of Russian Hill I’d looked down at one point on all roofs of North Beach and the Mexican nightclub neons, I’d descended to them on the old steps of Broadway under which they were newly laboring a mountain tunnel—shoes fit for watersides, embarcaderos, hill and plot lawns of park and tiptop vista. Workshoes covered with dust and some oil of engines—the crumpled jeans nearby, belt, blue railroad hank, knife, comb, keys, switch keys and caboose coach key, the knees white from Pajaro Riverbottom finedusts, the ass black from slick sandboxes in yardgoat after yardgoat—the gray workshorts, the dirty undershirt, sad shorts, tortured socks of my life.— And the Bible on my desk next to the peanut butter, the lettuce, the raisin bread, the crack in the plaster, the stiff-with-old-dust lace drape now no longer laceable but hard as—after all those years of hard dust eternity in that Cameo skid inn with red eyes of rheumy oldmen dying there staring without hope out on the dead wall you can hardly see thru windowdusts and all you heard lately in the shaft of the rooftop middle way was the cries of a Chinese child whose father and mother were always telling him to shush and then screaming at him, he was a pest and his tears from China were most persistent and worldwide and represented all our feelings in brokendown Cameo tho this was not admitted by bum one except for an occasional harsh clearing of throat in the halls or moan of nightmarer—by things like this and neglect of a hard-eyed alcoholic oldtime chorusgirl maid the curtains had now absorbed all the iron they could take and hung stiff and even the dust in them was iron, if you shook them they’d crack