Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac Page A

I have controverted some wish of Cody’s wife Evelyn concerning their daughter, on some sunny barge house in sunny Frisco, and she gives me the dirtiest look in the history of hate and sends me an electrical bolt that sends a wave of shock into my gut but I’m determined not to be afraid of her and stick by my ideas and go on calmly talking from my chair—It’s the same barge where my mother’d entertained the Admirals in an old dream—Poor Evelyn, she hears me agree with Cody that it was silly of her to give the only floor lamp to the Bishop, over her dishes her heart pounds—Poor human hearts pounding everywhere.
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    That rainy afternoon, according to a promise I made myself owing to the memory of a wonderful Chinese rice dish Jarry’d cooked up for us in the Mill Valley shack in April, I make a crazy Chinese sweet and sour sauce on the hot stove, compounded of turnip greens, sauerkraut, honey, molasses, red wine vinegar, pickled beet juice, sauce concentrate (very dark and bitter) and as it boils on the stove and the little rice pot makes the lid dance I pace in the yard and say “Chinee dinner alway velly good!” and remember in a rush my father and Chin Lee in Lowell, I see the redbrick wall outside the windows of the booths of the restaurant, scent rain, rain of redbrick and Chinese dinners unto San Francisco across the lonesome rains of the plains and mountains, I remember raincoats and smiling teeth, it’s a vast inevitable vision with poor misguided hand of—of fog—sidewalks, or cities, of cigar smoke and paying at the counter, of the way Chinese Chefs always scoop up a round ladleful of rice from the big pot and bring the little China bowl up to the inverted ladle and dump in leaving a round globe of steaming rice that is brought to you in your booth along with those insanely fragrant sauces—“Chinee dinner alway velly good”—and I see generations of rain, generations of white rice, generations of redbrick walls with the old-fashioned red neon flashing on it like warm compost of brick-dust fire, ah the sweet indescribable verdurous paradise of pale cockatoos and yocking mongrels and old Zen Nuts with staffs, and flamingos of Cathay, that you see on their marvelous Ming Vases and those of other duller dynasties—Rice, steaming, the smell of it so rich and woody, the look of it as pure as driven lakevalley clouds on a day like this one of the Chinee dinner when wind pusheth them rilling and milkying over stands of young fir, towards raw wet rock—
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    I dream of women, women in slips and in slipshod garments, one sitting next to me coyly moving my limp hand from her spot in the soft roll of flesh but even tho I make no effort one way or the other the hand stays there, other women and even aunts are watching—At one point that awful haughty bitch who was my wife is walking away from me to the toilet, sniffy, saying something nasty, I look at her slim ass—I’m a regular fool in pale houses enslaved to lust for women who hate me, they lay their bartering flesh all over the divans, it’s one fleshpot—insanity all of it, I should forswear and chew em all out and go hit the clean rail—I wake up glad to find myself saved in the wilderness mountains—For that lumpy roll flesh with the juicy hole I’d sit through eternities of horror in gray rooms illuminated by a gray sun, with cops and alimoners, at the door and the jail beyond?—It’s a bleeding comedy—The Great Wise Stages of pathetic understanding that characterize the Greater Religion elude me when it comes to harems—Harem-scarem, it’s all in heaven now—bless their all their bleating hearts—Some lambs are female, some angels have woman-wings, it’s all mothers in the end and forgive me for my sardony—excuse me for my rut.
    (Hor hor hor)
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    August 22 is such a funny date in my life, it was (for several years) the