ball. It seems that we played ball for years. Then the dream ended. What a silly dream!
Sometimes the diabolist regrets his sins against nature and dreams of gods or reality. But reality persists in being boring.
Who can understand my odd nature. My passion for the absurd or the prank. I live for these things. I have traveled and travel is a flop so far as I am concerned. Wherever you go you are a tourist, that is to say some sucker to the odd denizens of the place. Give me my home, my imagination and my dreams.
It is almost as though the “real” world were an asylum and the unreal world is a super-asylum . . . for those who have gone insane in the outer madhouse and been placed in this outer void. It is a place where those who don’t know they are insane are placed. Those who know they are ill are outside consulting psychiatrists. Pilgrim is the sort of place you leave by asserting that the correct date is actually the date and the correct man is actually the president. There is a definite letdown in being released . . . you feel upon leaving the Insane Asylum as though you are entering the Sane Asylum.
This all is a task too difficult to describe once you have attained this dimension. It is like hearing the inaudible . . . seeing the invisible.
Mishaps, Perhaps , 1966
Neal Cassady
(1926–1968)
A juvenile car thief and reform-school graduate, a con man, and bigamist, Neal Cassady inhabited the road that Kerouac celebrated. He served time, lived with Ginsberg, and drove Ken Kesey’s magic Merry Pranksters bus through Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and into legend. Cassady was Dean Moriarty in On the Road, and Cody Pomeray in other Kerouac novels. His hundreds of letters to Kerouac inspired and fed the fire of what Ginsberg called “spontaneous bop prosody.” Cassady died at forty-two under mysterious circumstances and his own autobiographical novel The First Third was published posthumously.
Letter to Jack Kerouac, March 7, 1947 (Kansas City, Mo.)
D EAR JACK :
I am sitting in a bar on Market St. I’m drunk, well, not quite, but I soon will be. I am here for 2 reasons; I must wait 5 hours for the bus to Denver & lastly but, most importantly, I’m here (drinking) because, of course, because of a woman & what a woman! To be chronological about it:
I was sitting on the bus when it took on more passengers at Indianapolis, Indiana—a perfectly proportioned beautiful, intellectual, passionate, personification of Venus De Milo asked me if the seat beside me was taken!!! I gulped, (I’m drunk) gargled & stammered NO! (Paradox of expression, after all, how can one stammer No!!?) She sat—I sweated—She started to speak, I knew it would be generalities, so to tempt her I remained silent.
She (her name Patricia) got on the bus at 8 pm (Dark!) I didn’tspeak until 10 pm—in the intervening 2 hours I not only of course, determined to make her, but, how to DO IT.
I naturally can’t quote the conversation verbally, however, I shall attempt to give you the gist of it from 10 pm to 2 am.
Without the slightest preliminaries of objective remarks (what’s your name? where are you going? etc.) I plunged into a completely knowing, completely subjective, personal & so to speak “penetrating her core” way of speech; to be shorter, (since I’m getting unable to write) by 2 am I had her swearing eternal love, complete subjectivity to me & immediate satisfaction. I, anticipating even more pleasure, wouldn’t allow her to blow me on the bus, instead we played, as they say, with each other.
Knowing her supremely perfect being was completely mine (when I’m more coherent, I’ll tell you her complete history & psychological reason for loving me) I could conceive of no obstacle to my satisfaction, well, “the best laid plans of mice & men go astray” and my nemesis was her sister, the bitch.
Pat had told me her reason for going to St. Louis was to see her sister; she had wired her to
Sometimes the diabolist regrets his sins against nature and dreams of gods or reality. But reality persists in being boring.
Who can understand my odd nature. My passion for the absurd or the prank. I live for these things. I have traveled and travel is a flop so far as I am concerned. Wherever you go you are a tourist, that is to say some sucker to the odd denizens of the place. Give me my home, my imagination and my dreams.
It is almost as though the “real” world were an asylum and the unreal world is a super-asylum . . . for those who have gone insane in the outer madhouse and been placed in this outer void. It is a place where those who don’t know they are insane are placed. Those who know they are ill are outside consulting psychiatrists. Pilgrim is the sort of place you leave by asserting that the correct date is actually the date and the correct man is actually the president. There is a definite letdown in being released . . . you feel upon leaving the Insane Asylum as though you are entering the Sane Asylum.
This all is a task too difficult to describe once you have attained this dimension. It is like hearing the inaudible . . . seeing the invisible.
Mishaps, Perhaps , 1966
Neal Cassady
(1926–1968)
A juvenile car thief and reform-school graduate, a con man, and bigamist, Neal Cassady inhabited the road that Kerouac celebrated. He served time, lived with Ginsberg, and drove Ken Kesey’s magic Merry Pranksters bus through Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and into legend. Cassady was Dean Moriarty in On the Road, and Cody Pomeray in other Kerouac novels. His hundreds of letters to Kerouac inspired and fed the fire of what Ginsberg called “spontaneous bop prosody.” Cassady died at forty-two under mysterious circumstances and his own autobiographical novel The First Third was published posthumously.
Letter to Jack Kerouac, March 7, 1947 (Kansas City, Mo.)
D EAR JACK :
I am sitting in a bar on Market St. I’m drunk, well, not quite, but I soon will be. I am here for 2 reasons; I must wait 5 hours for the bus to Denver & lastly but, most importantly, I’m here (drinking) because, of course, because of a woman & what a woman! To be chronological about it:
I was sitting on the bus when it took on more passengers at Indianapolis, Indiana—a perfectly proportioned beautiful, intellectual, passionate, personification of Venus De Milo asked me if the seat beside me was taken!!! I gulped, (I’m drunk) gargled & stammered NO! (Paradox of expression, after all, how can one stammer No!!?) She sat—I sweated—She started to speak, I knew it would be generalities, so to tempt her I remained silent.
She (her name Patricia) got on the bus at 8 pm (Dark!) I didn’tspeak until 10 pm—in the intervening 2 hours I not only of course, determined to make her, but, how to DO IT.
I naturally can’t quote the conversation verbally, however, I shall attempt to give you the gist of it from 10 pm to 2 am.
Without the slightest preliminaries of objective remarks (what’s your name? where are you going? etc.) I plunged into a completely knowing, completely subjective, personal & so to speak “penetrating her core” way of speech; to be shorter, (since I’m getting unable to write) by 2 am I had her swearing eternal love, complete subjectivity to me & immediate satisfaction. I, anticipating even more pleasure, wouldn’t allow her to blow me on the bus, instead we played, as they say, with each other.
Knowing her supremely perfect being was completely mine (when I’m more coherent, I’ll tell you her complete history & psychological reason for loving me) I could conceive of no obstacle to my satisfaction, well, “the best laid plans of mice & men go astray” and my nemesis was her sister, the bitch.
Pat had told me her reason for going to St. Louis was to see her sister; she had wired her to
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