Tristessa (Annotated) by Jack Kerouac

Author:Jack Kerouac [Kerouac, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, classics
ISBN: 9780988232228
Google: Z4dVDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2012-12-14T16:11:32+00:00

PART TWO

A Year Later . . .

DIMINISH’D NEVER IS the drizzle that broke no calm—I didnt tell her I loved her but when I left Mexico I began to think on her and then I began to tell her I loved her in letters, and almost did, and she wrote too, pretty Spanish letters, saying I was sweet, and please hurry back—I hurried back too late, I should have come back in the Spring, almost did, had no money, just touched the border of Mexico and felt that vomity feeling of Mexico—went on to California and lived in a shack with young monk Buddhist type visitors every day and went north to Desolation Peak and spent a summer surfing in the Wilderness, eating and sleeping alone—said, “Soon I go back, to the warm arms of Tristessa”—but waited too long.

O Lord, why have you done this to your angel-selves, this blight life, this ugh raggedy crap scene full of puke and thieves and dying?—couldnt you have placed us in a dismal heaven where all was glad anyhow?—Art thou Masochist, Lord, art thou Indian Giver, art thou Hater?

Finally I was back in Bull’s room after a four thousand mile voyage from the mountain peak near Canada, a terrible enough trip in itself, not worth moot herein—and he went out and got her.

Already he’d warned me: “I dont know what’s the matter with her, she’s changed in the past two weeks, the past week even—”

“Is that because she knew I was coming?” I thought darkly—

“She throws fits and hits me over the head with coffee cups and loses my money and falls in the street—”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“Goofballs—I told her not to take too many—You know it takes an old junkey with many years of experience to know how to handle sleeping pills,—she wont listen, she dont know how to use em, three, four, sometimes five, once twelve, it’s not the same Tristessa—What I wanta do is marry her and get my citizenship, see, you think that’s a good idea?—After all, she’s my life, I’m her life—”

I could see Old Bull had fallen in love—with a woman not named Morphina.

“I never touch her—it’s just a marriage of convenience—you know what I mean—I cant be getting stuff on the black market myself, I dont know how, I need her and she needs my money.”

Bull got $150 a month from a trust fund established by his father before he died—his father had loved him, and I could know why, for Bull is a sweet and tender person, though just a little of the con man, for years in New York he supported his junk habit by stealing about $30 every day, twenty years—He’d been in jail a few times when they’d found him with wrong merchandise—In jail he was always the librarian, he is a great scholar, in many ways, with a marvelous interest in history and anthropology and of all things French Symbolist poetry, Mallarmé above all—I’m not talking of the other Bull

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