Free Visions of Gerard by Jack Kerouac Page A

horror in the night, floods into his being as he sees his delighted mother come hurrying over bearing the steaming tray to place on his lap—Ahead of him is a long day of interested drawing and erector set—The sun hasnt shown, it’s a cold cloudy day, the windows are gray and portentous with the news of the excitement of life and the healthy and the living—
    He eats daintily and formally the simple food, reverencing each bite as tho it was holy, to enjoy it more, and because it is so momentous. “The corner of the toast—good—the middle of the toast—there—” A faint twinge in his legs recalls the pain of the night before, and setting the tray aside with a weary sigh he nevertheless sees it fit to realize, “Ah well, it goes up and down and then it goes no more. It’s best not to frighten anyone, nor harm anyone—dont let them know.”
    I’m up in my crib, in long johns, jealous because Gerard got his breakfast before me. I’m thinking “Because he’s sick he’s always waited on before me—Me, me!” I cry. “Me too I’m hungry!” “They always make such a fuss over him,” I pout—I remember that morning, distinctly, standing in the crib like that— Sticks and stones may break my bones but words’ll hurt me never ?
    In fact, Gerard is a little impatient with me for rattling the crib and throws me an exasperated look—“ Eh twé , Oh you!”
    And there’s no doubt in my heart that my mother loves Gerard more than she loves me.
    After awhile Pa’s up and grumbling in the kitchen over his breakfast, with puffed disinterested eyes, not, as Edgar Cayce explicitly reminds us, “mindful of the present vision before our eyes.”
    The long night of life is terribly long and deceptively short.
    Caribou the man who was drunkest and gayest the night before, having undergone indescribably ghastly feelings under the bridge where he wobbled and woggled and spit, is now lofting a new morning drink to his lips which will soon plunge him back into—what?
    â€œWhat else you want me to do?—We all die? We’re all piles of you-know-what? Liars? Poor? Invalids? Well then! I drink! Open the door, belly, gimme another chance.” He gets his other chance, dances jigs till ten, and sleeps at noon. What he does at 4 o’clock in the afternoon is in its poor selfsame essence no different than what the mournful ladies with their beads and moving-lips, in the shadows of the church, are doing—For, the truth that is realizable in dead men’s bones ought to be a good enough truth for everybody, laughers, cryers, cynics, and hopers included, all—The truth that is realizable in dead men’s bones, all great gloomy unwilling life aside, and setting aside my knighthood to thus say so, exhilirates yea exterminates all symbols and bosses and crosses and leaves that quiet blank—For my part, the news about the truth came from the silence of my predecessor diers’ graves.
    Sicken if you will, this gloomy book’s foretold.
    Comes the cankerous rush of spring, when earth will fecundate and get soft and produce forms that are but to die, multiply—And a thousand splendors sweep across the March sky, and moons with raving moons that you see through drunken pine boughs snapping—When the river with her loaden humus gets heavier at the bank, because of the melting of the caky stiffnesses that’d had the earth seal-locked in her vaunted tomb of Hard—And there’ll be laughter in the melting earth tonight—And there’ll be sawdust, trees, women’s thighs, river bends, starlight, backporches, more babies, young husbands, beer—There’ll be singing in the April tree tops—There’ll be visitations from the South from oft-returning species of visitors with feather tails and beady eyes, avaricious for the worm—And the worm himself will