Maggie Cassidy by Jack Kerouac

England he’d rather have right now than Emil Duluoz and with the rush season on) “—last Saturday night I worked for the Tele , they called me up ‘bout six o’clock, their regular man was sick and layin off so I said ‘Okay’ and I went up and boy I melted lead and turned out more galleys a ten-ton truck and it was about six o’clock in the morning when I finished and the back of my neck, and my feet numb from sitting all night—”
    â€œI know Jim—Only last week it was old fartface come up to me and wanted me to go to a show with him then a game over to Bill Wilson’s room in the hotel down there see this is all in Lawrence he’d drive me from Andover we had—Oh we saw a lot of nice gals dancing there ya know, hoopsidoo, that Gem Club, on Hollis Street, we had a few beers, I said to Bill ‘I gotta finish this copy if you dont mind Bill looks to me like it’ll take me to well nigh near midnight’—”
    Meanwhile a kid is waiting with papers in his hand for the two old bucks the boss and the big fat man to stop talking but they wont—
    Emil, a half-hour later, steps out into the snow, coughs hugely, cigar-a-mouth, and minces off like Babe Ruth or W. C. Fields with the same pout and little short steps but also with a leering pathetical grin looking at everybody and digging all the streets of Lowell with his eyes.
    â€œOh for krissakes, there goes that old Charley McConnell he’s had that damn Model-T Ford ever since I got mine in 1929 and that was at Lakeview for the picnic there and even then he’d have that same look of pitiful defeat in his face, still and all he’s made out all right from what I hear—That job in City Hall pays him fairly well and certainly hasnt killed him and he’s got a house in the Highlands— I never had anything against McConnell”—(scoffing with himself, coughing)—“Well it’s all in the way the rain barrel rolls over I guess, they’ll spill em out one by one to the hole in the ground out by Edson’s Cemetery and we’ll take no more trips to Boston that way . . . The years, the years, that I’ve seen . . . eat . . . the faces . . . of respectable . . . and . . . disrespectable people . . . in this town . . . they cant . . . tell me . . . I don’t know who’s heir to Heaven, hell, riches, gold and all the immense uncounted cash registers and poorpot pissplots of every grave from here to the Roman diosee and back by golly I’ve seen and heard it all. When they put me away they better not spend too much money, I wont appreciate it from my bed of clay— They’d better learn that now. Ha ha ha ha! What a town when you come to think of it— Lowell —” He heaved a sigh. “Well it’s where my little woman hung her curtains, I guess. The sucker was in the kitchen sittin by the radio, name of Emil. I guess the old lady had it coming to her, to inherit a beast and at the same time I guess she didnt do too bad with the pieces of—grass—I was able to lay around her picnic. My wife Angry—Okay. God , tell me if anything goes wrong and you dont want me to go on that way. I’m just tryna please. If I cant please You, and the world, and Ti Jean too, then I cant please the lion and the angel and the lamb all at the same time neither. Thank you God, and get those Democrats outa there before this country goes to hell!”
    By now he’d be talking out loud to himself and cutting through the snow head bent, teeth gricked to the sleet, hatbrim down, coat whitening, in the wonderful mysterious hours of an ordinary day in ordinary life in ordinary cold blue life.
    Rushing from the Club de Paisan at one o’clock, the day’s school over, with G.J. and the gang striding, I’d run into my father rounding the corner of the