The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

Author:Jack Kerouac
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: classics
ISBN: 9780140042528
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1971-05-01T10:00:00+00:00

15

I put on my new flannel shirt and new socks and underwear and my jeans and packed the rucksack tight and slung it on and went to San Francisco that night just to get the feel of walking around the city night with it on my back. I walked down Mission Street singing merrily. I went to Skid Row Third Street to enjoy my favorite fresh doughnuts and coffee and the bums in there were all fascinated and wanted to know if I was going uranium hunting. I didn’t want to start making speeches about what I was going to hunt for was infinitely more valuable to mankind in the long run than ore, but let them tell me: “Boy, all you gotta do is go to that Colorady country and take off with your pack there and a nice little Geiger counter and you’ll be a millionaire.” Everybody in Skid Row wants to be a millionaire.

“Okay boys,” I said, “mebbe I’ll do that.”

“Lotsa uranium up in the Yukon country too.”

“And down in Chihuahua,” said an old man. “Bet any dough thar’s uranium in Chihuahua.”

I went out of there and walked around San Francisco with my huge pack, happy. I went over to Rosie’s place to see Cody and Rosie. I was amazed to see her, she’d changed so suddenly, she was suddenly skinny and a skeleton and her eyes were huge with terror and popping out of her face. “What’s the matter?”

Cody drew me into the other room and didn’t want me to talk to her. “She’s got like this in the last forty-eight hours,” he whispered.

“What’s the matter with her?”

“She says she wrote out a list of all our names and all our sins, she says, and then tried to flush them down the toilet where she works, and the long list of paper stuck in the toilet and they had to send for some sanitation character to clean up the mess and she claims he wore a uniform and was a cop and took it with him to the police station and we’re all going to be arrested. She’s just nuts, that’s all.” Cody was my old buddy who’d let me live in his attic in San Francisco years ago, an old trusted friend. “And did you see the marks on her arms?”

“Yes.” I had seen her arms, which were all cut up.

“She tried to slash her wrists with some old knife that doesn’t cut right. I’m worried about her. Will you watch her while I go to work tonight?”

“Oh man—”

“Oh you, oh man, don’t be like that. You know what it says in the Bible, ‘even unto the least of these…’”

“All right but I was planning on having fun tonight.”

“Fun isn’t everything. You’ve got some responsibilities sometimes, you know.”

I didn’t have a chance to show off my new pack in The Place. He drove me to the cafeteria on Van Ness where I got Rosie a bunch of sandwiches with his money and I went back alone and tried to make her eat.

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