Visions of Gerard by Jack Kerouac Page A

the dream. “Ten dont do you no good, Emilio, lessn you got another underneath,” dealing Emil a ten of clubs. Deals Charley a seven, making a pair of 7’s on the top. “You better have a queen underneath,” which Charley doesnt have, stripped bare and queenless, turning up a 10 apologetically. “Another pair of Sevens!” dealing Sagely a 7 of hearts. “If he has another 7 underneath,” opines the rednosed dealer from Butte Montana, “he’s got his own deck a cards hidden in back of his ear inside that curly hair, yass. Which, would a left me with the Ace of Jokers,” dealing himself, for the hell of it, the final fifth card tho he’s out, the Ace of Spades, Death. “Gentlemen,” seeing he’s inadvertently emptied his flask without realizing it in the heat of what he was doing, “is there any beer in the house? No beer?”
    â€œWe got some left, yeh Bull, in the box there.”
    And Emil rakes in the pot, cigar in teeth, big body tensed forward in chair to affairs of the night, as goldpots strew the blue beginnings with incense of aurora and dawn creaks up to crack and boom over the black sad earth now irrevocably Gerard was, enfleshed, sacrificed and given over to, O moanin shame.
    â€œI’m the one shoulda got that spade,” comments Emil in the alley, as they urinate.
    Bull, pointing up the dawn sky: “More ill fated than in all your dreams you’d a bitterly hoped her to be.”
    Then they get drunk—It happens all of a sudden, on the spur of nothing but a cry—“Slup a slug, son!”—The high white mists of Spring morn over the redbrick roofs of downtown Lowell make them dizzily glad, they go (Manuel in the middle bawling) staggering down the alley—In two cars and the ridiculous motorcycle they go careering thru the mists and over the bridge.
    â€œWhere’s that Irish club?—Where’s that dog with the pipe in his mouth and the blue eyes who sits by the stove in the—”
    â€œYou mean Bob Donnelly, if he aint asleep now with his arms around his milky wife I’d bet and be damned and be called Tarzan if he wasnt still up and jawin his Jew’s harp somewhere the other side a town—”
    â€œAnd Murphy! Where are the river boys?”
    â€œNever mind! It’s a mystery!”
    â€œBe Jesus Christ it makes me feel good, they lit the furnace in my damp cellar.”
    â€œAll the blowers of hell’ll send it thru the vents and veins and you’ll come out with a true face at last.”
    They rave and scream as the wind ventilates them across the bridge, they’re looking for the Polish Club that’s supposed to open 24 hours a day, down on Lakeview—“That place with the chairs in front.”
    â€œAh who needs a ga dam club—come down by the carnival grounds and piss in the bushes.”
    â€œSuits me fine, termagant.”
    â€œManuel, what you doin, you almost got us to the end of our holes.”
    â€œThey been swallowin a long time!”
    â€œThen why not swallow more, lover.”
    â€œWith my wife in hell everything suits me.”
    â€œYou got eyes like a dead potatobug—wake up and watch the road!”
    â€œEat the damn road!” says Manuel who’d as soon the road ate him so they’d be where they were going sooner.
    Irrelevent conversations meanwhile rage in the cars, driven respectively by Sagely and O’Brien, Old Bull Baloon in his red-eye cups now reconstructing adventures of six decades with the invention of sixty—They all spill out on the field at Lakeview Avenue, across from the mills, on the river, just as the blazing red sun kisses and peeps over the window roofs of all Centerville—
    My father reels about from snort to snort, the earth morning under him—
    My father with straw hat in big gnarled veiny hands, collar bursting out soft and unstylish over his coat lapels from folds of