Atop an Underwood by Jack Kerouac

place. You leave the street and enter New York’s night life—a sudden rush of festivity, not the wild dark festivity of Spain, but a cultured, toned festivity borne along by the nostalgic improvisations of a guitar, or the rich round moans of a Billie Holiday. There is the eternal smoke of cigarettes, the fine smell of bars ranged with colorful displays of bottles, gowned women, tuxedoed men, and those who reminisce, wrangle, and cry at the bar. You look down the bar—it is not like an ordinary bar, for there is something about the New York bars that no other bar can capture—and you see a gallery of faces, each as interesting as the other. Millions of dancing illusions cloud your eyes as you search into the eyes of these barflies—that one there looks a lot like a bookie, and the other much like an actor, and there is a high-priced harlot. Books and novels could be written about the lives of these rangy faces, these pouting velvet faces, these red lips, these dark mysterious faces, these jovial open-faced faces, these drunken dull-eyed faces. The bartender, looking a lot like a performer with the light of his brilliantly arrayed bar shining up to his face and softening it like footlights do, is mixing drinks. There is the hardness of the city in him—hardness, a certain look of hectic suspicion, a tinge of awed dismay, and an obviously false certainty that is helped along by the most mundane manipulation of a cigarette.
    I remember once when I was quite childishly eating a hot fudge sundae at a fountain back home. It was raining, and I was as virile and masculine as anyone else in the place. But I was perched up on a stool and drooling in my fudge and cream like a child. I was self-conscious. Then in walked a fellow attired in soda pop clothes, a driver of the Coca-Cola trucks. He walked up to the cigarette counter with a preoccupied stride. The soda jerk recognized him:
    â€œHowdy Joe. Just pull in?”
    (Just pull in, I think. A truck driver, just pull in. Just pull in, the rain was slashing at his windshield. Just pull in, the hero. Wearing drivers’ clothes, just pull in, and the rain.)
    The truck driver looked carefully at his questioner, pulling out some money from his pocket and smoking knowingly on his cigarette. He answered, very curtly and with much competent authority, almost a scowl:
    â€œYeah.”
    (Oh boy, I sneer to myself. The great man, just pull in.)
    I looked at him. He bought the pack of cigarettes, letting his last cigarette butt hang from his twisted mouth and spiral smoke up to his scowling eyes. He walked out, still preoccupied. A sort of false preoccupation designed to befuddle everyone with whom he communicated. Preoccupied with his paltry little truck universe, as if it were the only universe in the place. The big man, cigarette butt hanging from snarling mouth, Yeah, curtly scowling at the world, women and drink and trucks and the hell with anything and everything else.
    Where is the naked unquestioning sincerity in this world today?
    You buy yourself a Coke and take a table in an obscure corner. You light your cigarette and look around you. The music will soon begin—the little negro trumpeter is almost ready, but never quite begins. He holds the horn in his chubby black hands, with white fingernails, and he talks to friends and musicians around and below him. He smiles, and blows through his trumpet to emit a small round tone. Then he talks some more, jokes, maddeningly producing his horn to his mouth only to let it drop again in order to say something to the inevitable someone who is always around him. The music will never start, you say. And suddenly he starts playing on his trumpet.

Part Two
    An Original Kicker 1941

from Background
    [...] In the Spring, I was back on the field working with the varsity backfield (Governali, Will, Wood, and I). There were glowing reports in the papers about me, but when the Fall of 1941 came, I did not return to