Free Lonesome Traveler by Jack Kerouac

I can catch it. Standing on the back platform are the rear brakemanand an old deadheading conductor ole Charley W. Jones, why he had seven wives and six kids and one time out at Lick no I guess it was Coyote he couldnt see on account of the steam and out he come and found his lantern in the igloo regular anglecock of my herald and they gave him fifteen benefits so now there he is in the Sunday har har owlala morning and he and young rear man watch incredulously his student brakeman running like a crazy trackman after their departing train. I feel like yelling “Make your airtest now make your airtest now!” knowing that when a passenger pulls out just about at the first crossing east of the station they pull the air a little bit to test the brakes, on signal from the engine, and this momentarily slows up the train and I could manage it, and could catch it, but they’re not making no airtest the bastards, and I hek knowing I’m going to have to run like a sonofabitch. But suddenly I get embarrassed thinking what are all the people of the world gonna say to see a man running so devilishly fast with all his might sprinting thru life like Jesse Owens just to catch a goddam train and all of them with their hysteria wondering if I’ll get killed when I catch the back platform and blam, I fall down and go boom and lay supine across the crossing, so the old flagman when the train has flowed by will see that everything lies on the earth in the same stew, all of us angels will die and we dont ever know how or our own diamond, O heaven will enlighten us and open you eyes—open our eyes, open our eyes.— I know I wont get hurt, I trust my shoes, hand grip, feet, solidity of yipe and cripe of gripe and grip and strength and need no mystic strength to measure the musculature in my rib rack—but damn it all it’s a social embarrassment to be caught sprinting like a maniac after a train especially with two men gaping at me from rear of train and shaking their heads and yelling I cant makeit even as I halfheartedly sprint after them with open eyes trying to communicate that I can and not for them to get hysterical or laugh, but I realize it’s all too much for me, not the run, not the speed of the train which anyway two seconds after I gave up the complicated chase did indeed slow down at the crossing in the air-test before chugging up again for good and Bayshore. So I was late for work, and old Sherman hated me and was about to hate me more.
    THE GROUND I WOULD HAVE EATEN in solitude, cronch—the railroad earth, the flat stretches of long Bayshore that I have to negotiate to get to Sherman’s bloody caboose on track 17 ready to go with pot pointed to Redwood and the morning’s 3-hour work.— I get off the bus at Bayshore Highway and rush down the little street and turn in—boys riding the pot of a switcheroo in the yardgoat day come yelling by at me from the headboards and footboards “Come on down ride with us” otherwise I would have been about 3 minutes even later to my work but now I hop on the
littlt
engine that momentarily slows up to pick me up and it’s alone not pulling anything but tender, the guys have been up to the other end of the yard to get back on some track of necessity.— That boy will have to learn to flag himself without nobody helping him as many’s the time I’ve seen some of these young goats think they have everything but the plan is late, the word will have to wait, the massive arboreal thief with the crime of the kind, and air and all kinds of ghouls—ZONKed! made tremendous by the flare of the whole crime and encrudalatures of all kinds—San Franciscos and shroudband Bayshores the last and the last furbelow of the eek plot pall prime tit top work oil twicks and wouldn’t you?—the railroad earth Iwould have eaten alone, cronch, on foot head bent to get to Sherman who ticking watch observes with finicky eyes the time