Lonesome Traveler by Jack Kerouac

are old white bespectacled respectable old toppers and topers of time and everybody respects, but the dark Indian and the eastern Negro, with sledgehammers and dirtypants to them I waved and shortly thereafter I read a book and found out that the Porno Indian battle cry is Ya Ya Henna, which I thought once of yelling as the engine crashboomed by but what would I be starting but derailments of my own self and engineer.— All the railroad opening up and vaster and vaster until finally when I did quit it a year later I saw it again but now over the waves of the sea, the entire Coast Division winding down along the dun walls of bleak headland balboa amerikay, from a ship, and so the railroad opens up on the waves that are Chinese and on the orient shroud and sea.— It runs ragged to the plateau clouds and Pucalpas and lost Andean heights far below the world rim, it also bores a deep hole in the mind of man and freights a lot of interesting cargo in and out the holes precipitate and otherwise hidingplaces and imitative cauchemar of eternity, as you’ll see.
    SO ONE MORNING they called me at 3rd Street at about 4 A M and I took the early morning train to SanJose, arriving there 7:30 was told not to worry about anything till about 10 so I went out in my inconceivably bum’s existence went looking for pieces of wire that I could bend in such a way over my hotplate so they would support little raisin breads to make toast and also looking if possible for better than that a chickenwire arrangement on which I could sit pots to heat water and pans to fry eggs since the hotplate was so powerful it often burned and blackcaked the bottom of my eggs if by chance I’d overlook the possibility while busy peeling my potatoes or otherwise involved—I’d walk around, San Jose had a junk yard across the track, I went in there and lookt around, stuff in there so useless the proprietor never came out, I who was earning 600 a month made off with a piece of chicken wire for my hotplate.— Here it was 11 and still no train made up, gray, gloomy, wonderful day—I wandered down the little street of cottages to the big boulevard of Jose and had Carnation ice cream and coffee in the morning, whole bevies and classrooms of girls came in with tightfitting and sloosesucking sweaters and everything on earth on, it was some academy of dames suddenly come to gossip coffee and I was there in my baseball hat black slick oiled and rusted jacket weather jacket with fur collar that I had used to lean my head on in the sands of Watsonville riverbottoms and grits of Sunnyvale across from Westinghouse near Schukl’s student days ground where my first great moment of the railroad had taken place over by Del Monte’s when I kicked my first car and Whitey said “You’re the boss do it pull the pin with a will put your hand in there and pull ‘cause you’re the boss” and it was October night, dark, clean, clear, dry, piles of leaves by the track in the sweet scented dark and beyond them crates of the Del Monte fruit and workers going around in crate wagons with under reaching stuckers and—never will forgetWhitey saying that.— By same reminiscence of doubt, in spite and because of, wanted to save all me money for Mexico, I also refused to spend 75 cents or even 35 cents less for a pair of workgloves, instead, after initial losing of my first bought workglove while setting out that sweet San Mateo flower car on Sunday morning with the Sherman local I resolved to get all my other gloves from the ground and so went for weeks with my black hand clutching sticky cold iron of engines in the dewy cold night, till I finally found the first glove outside the San Jose yard office, a brown cloth glove with red Mephistophelean lining, picking it up limp and damp from the ground and smashed it on my knee and let it dry and wore it.— Final other glove found outside Watsonville yard office, a little leather