Read Online Visions of Gerard by Jack Kerouac - Free Book Online

women are 80 years old, they’ve been coming to that basement church at dusk every day for the last quarter of a century and they’ve had manifold and O manifold reasons to loft prayer from that cellar, little chance they mightnt—
    Amazing how the kids always scream with glee around the church at that sad hour of dusk.
    And by God, amazing the bar standers and beer eaters bubbling at elbow bangs in speakeasy clubs around the corner, enough to make a man believe in Rabelais and Khayyam and throw the Bible and the Sutras and the dry Precepts away—“ Encore un autre verre de bière mon Christ de vieux matou ! Another glass a beer ya Christing old he-cat!”
    â€œWell you’re swearing like a dog on Christmas Eve!”
    â€œChristmas Eve my—my you-know-what, if I dont have a glass a beer in my belly and two hundred others to boot it dont render me no merry in the Merry Christmas even if there was forty of your Christmases in the calendar the same bloody day I’m talkin to ya,” translation to that effect. “ Calvert, Caribou est sou , Caribou’s drunk!”
    â€œDrunk? Come to my house, I got some whiskey there that’ll make you fill your words with another kinda marde !”
    The cussingest people in the world the Canucks in their cups, all you have to do is go to their capital and range up and down the bars of Ste. Catherine Street in Montreal to see some guzzling and some profanity.
    â€œGayo, sonumbitch, go shit!”
    â€œAh the bastat.”
    A pretty Christmas they’re having, there’s a little tree in the corner with lights, and drunk under it—In comes the younger element, they’ll have to take out papers to catch up with the old good swigglers and cussmakers—
    My father, en route home, stops for a quick one himself in the company of his old friend Gaston MacDonald who has a spanking 1922 Stutz parked outside, with them is Manuel whose usual courtesy of driving Pa home tonight in the sidecar motorcycle has been set aside in favor of the Stutz and besides it’s too cold and besides they’re so high now the motorcycle trip would have been a fatality—
    â€œDrink, Emil, amuse yourself, dammit it’s Christmas!”
    â€œNot for me, Gaston—with my little Gerard in bed it’s not a hell of a pretty Christmas.”
    â€œAh, he was sick before.”
    â€œYes but it always tears my heart out.”
    â€œAh well, poor Emil, you might as well go throw yourself on the rocks in the river off the cliff in Little Canada . . . to crack . . . your spirit like that—look here, nothin you can do. Down the hatch!”
    â€œDown the hatch.”
    â€œYou dammit Manuel I thought you was s’posed to be a drunkard?”
    â€œDrunkards take their time,” says my father’s assistant with a sly grin—
    There are also silent drinkers with big chapped red fists around silent glasses, huddled over, figuring out ways to get their wives outa their thoughts and you can see their mouths lengthen down and draw sorrow almost as you look—
    â€œPoor dog there, look, Bolduc,—do you know that guy was the best basketball player at the YMCA in ‘18?—and ‘16, and ‘17 too!—They offered him a professional contract—No, his father didnt want it, old rocky Rocher Bolduc, ‘Stay in your store damn you or you’ll never have it again’—today he’s got the store, little candies for the children, licorice, pencils, a little stove near the corner, Bolduc spends his time in there with his sweater and his wife hates him and there was a time when he was the biggest athlete in Lowell—and a goodlooking happygolucky guy!”
    And chances are Bolduc’s wife is one of the black sorrowful ladies in the now-dark pews a few blocks up from the club—
    My father has his drink, two or three of them, and wipes his mouth, and heads home, on foot passing thru the