Free Tristessa by Jack Kerouac Page A

blue—
    â€œWhat we waiting for? Where we goin?” I’d kept asking—
    â€œI go get my shot,” she says—gets me another hot punch, which goes down shivering through me—One of the ladies is asleep, the dealer with ladle is beginning to get sore because apparently I’ve drank more than Tristessa paid or the two cats or something—
    Many people and carts pass—
    â€œVamonos,” says Tristessa getting up, and we wake up ragged Cruz and waver a minute standing, and go off in the streets—
    Now you can see to the ends of the streets, no more garbanzo darkness, it’s all pale blue churches and pale people and pink shawls—We move along and come to rubbly fields and cross and come to a settlement of adobe huts—
    It’s a village in the city by itself—
    We meet a woman and go into a room and I figure we’ll finally sleep in here but the two beds are loaded with sleepers and wakers, we just stand there talking, leave and go down the alley past waking-up doors—Everybody curious to see the two ragged girls and the raggedy man, stumbling like a slow team in the dawn—The sun comes up orange over piles of red brick and plaster dust somewhere, it’s the wee North America of my Indian Dreams but now I’m too gone to realize anything or understand, all I wanta do is sleep, next to Tristessa—She in her skimpy pink dress, her little breastless body, her thin shanks, her beautiful thighs, but I’m willing to just sleep but I’d like to hold her and stop shivering under some vast dark brown Mexican Blanket with Cruz too, on the other side, to chaperone, I just wanta stop this insane wandering in the streets—
    No soap, at the end of the village, in the final house, beyond which is fields of dumps and distant Church tops and the bleary city, we go in—
    What a scene! I jump to rejoice to see a huge bed—“We’re coming to sleep here!”
    But in the bed is a big fat woman with black hair, and beside her some guy with a ski cap, both awake, and simultaneously a brunette girl looking like some artist gal beatnik gal in Greenwich Village comes in—Then I see ten, maybe eight other people all milling around in the corners with spoons and matches—One of them is a typical junkey, that rugged tenderness, those rough and suffering features covered with a gray sick slick, the eyes certainly alert, the mouth alert, hat, suit, watch, spoon, heroin, working swiftly at shots—Everybody is shooting up—Tristessa is called by one of the men and she rolls up her coat sleeve—Cruz too—The ski cap has jumped out of bed and is doing the same—The Greenwich Village gal has somehow slipt into the bed, at the foot, got her big sensuous body under the sheets from the other end, and lies there, glad, on a pillow, watching—People come in and out from the village outdoors—I expect to get a shot too and I say to one of the cats “Poquito gote” which I imagine means little taste but really means “little leak”—Leak indeed, I get nothing, all my money’s gone—
    The activity is furious, interesting, human, I watch truly amazed, stoned as I am I can see this must be the biggest junk den in Latin America—What interesting types!—Tristessa is talking a mile a minute—The be-hatted junkey with rough and tender features, with little sandy mustache and faintly blue eyes and high cheekbones, is a Mexican but looks just like any junkey in New York—He wont give me a shot either—I just sit and wait—At my feet I have a half full bottle of beer Tristessa had bought me en route, which I’d cached in clothes, now I sip it in front of all these junkies and that finishes my chances—I keep a sharp eye on the bed expecting the fat lady to get up and leave, and the artist gal at her feet, but only the men hustle and dress and get out and finally we leave