Free Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg by Jack Kerouac Page B

bar, filled with visions. Your Cezanne paper swirled in my head, that is, the understanding of sight. I saw—and especially as New York was bright like a bonnet that day due to low humidity—I saw everything in its true contour and light. But this is not my point (the spiritual esthetic.) Not now. When he came back—it was now eleven in the morning—I called Lucien. Tom and I wanted to go on drinking, and I knew it was Lou’s day off. Lucien told us to come down and wake him up. We had Tristano 25 records with us. We played them, and Lucien lay in bed trying to wake up, listening intently, after awhile, to Tristano; after which he got up. He had had a big hangover. I kept wondering how I should act to impress Lucien. But suddenly I just took sick, nauseous from no sleep and no eat, and just lay on the couch with my eyes closed. Lucien came over and yanked at my leg and grinned. He talked to Tom. Finally he gave me milk and I felt better. “I have a splendid idea,” he says, “we’ll go sit in Washington Square.” Barbara [Hale] was out of town, by the way, or of course? . . . We started down Sixth Avenue in that Cezanne light of the day. I pointed it out to Lucien, and he agreed. We went into a Parisian bar (the Rochambeau) and had three pernods. The bartender carefully iced the glasses, took the ice out, poured pernod, and water, and handed us the smoky green drink. Like the light of the day, and the light of Lucien’s intelligence, the pernod brought in another light. It warmed us, all three, in the pit of our stomachs. We sat radiantly together at the bar and drank slowly. Then again we wandered down the beautiful streets of the day. We went to visit some St. Louis friends of Lucien and had a hiball there and talked with them. They were very condescending young socialites, but Lucien was delighted to point out afterwards that their condescension nowhere approached that of Tom Livornese, who is after all richer than they. At this time Tom delighted Lucien forever by going into a certain nightclub . . . We were out of money and wanted to drink all day and night . . . by going into the nightclub and saying, “Does the name Livornese mean anything to you?” and they said certainly, and they cashed a $20 check for him, or that is, they gave him $20 on trust . . . I don’t know exactly, I was waiting outside the club looking at people go by, with new eyes. Lucien rushed out and told me that people were always going to get money by some ruse, some daring ruse like Tom’s, but never succeeded, but he had. We stood on the corner eating hotdogs then, and Lucien mentioned this to me with delight, as Tom was talking to him, and Tom turned to me and said: “Tell me later what he said.” Can you just see the rapport of all this? Then Tom left us $5 and went to dinner with his girl, saying he would meet us at another bar. Lucien and I drank and talked. He told me about you and him, just as you told me. And then he regretted that I had to be a “disreputable writer” and could not get into the economic system as he had done. But I knew he was saying that because he had once believed in “artistic communicative this-and-that” art that you and he used to talk about at Columbia, remember? I mean, for the first time, I am able to hear what people are saying from the other world. We don’t know what we’re saying: it appears that only God must know. We communicate to each other depthlessly, without the words we use. And it is the same in “bad” writing. And we continually worry about how we feel towards each other, whereas if we were God we would know that we always feel love for each other, without deviation, only with variations of complicated obtrusion and inversion of intent . . . well, confusion among other things. But more, more . . . Lucien and I then walked out of the bar because we wanted to see the light of the day before it sank in