Tristessa by Jack Kerouac Page B

visitors every day and went north to Desolation Peak and spent a summer surfing in the Wilderness, eating and sleeping alone—said, “Soon I go back, to the warm arms of Tristessa”—but waited too long.
    O Lord, why have you done this to your angel-selves, this blight life, this ugh raggedy crap scene full of puke and thieves and dying?—couldnt you have placed us in a dismal heaven where all was glad anyhow?—Art thou Masochist, Lord, art thou Indian Giver, art thou Hater?
    Finally I was back in Bull’s room after a four thousand mile voyage from the mountain peak near Canada, a terrible enough trip in itself, not worth moot herein—and he went out and got her.
    Already he’d warned me: “I dont know what’s the matter with her, she’s changed in the past two weeks, the past week even—”
    â€œIs that because she knew I was coming?” I thought darkly—
    â€œShe throws fits and hits me over the head with coffee cups and loses my money and falls in the street—”
    â€œWhat’s the matter with her?”
    â€œGoofballs—I told her not to take too many—You know it takes an old junkey with many years of experience to know how to handle sleeping pills,—she wont listen, she dont know how to use em, three, four, sometimes five, once twelve, it’s not the same Tristessa—What I wanta do is marry her and get my citizenship, see, you think that’s a good idea?—After all, she’s my life, I’m her life—”
    I could see Old Bull had fallen in love—with a woman not named Morphina.
    â€œI never touch her—it’s just a marriage of convenience—you know what I mean—I cant be getting stuff on the black market myself, I dont know how, I need her and she needs my money.”
    Bull got $150 a month from a trust fund established by his father before he died—his father had loved him, and I could know why, for Bull is a sweet and tender person, though just a little of the con man, for years in New York he supported his junk habit by stealing about $30 every day, twenty years—He’d been in jail a few times when they’d found him with wrong merchandise—In jail he was always the librarian, he is a great scholar, in many ways, with a marvelous interest in history and anthropology and of all things French Symbolist poetry, Mallarmé above all—I’m not talking of the other Bull who is the great writer who wrote “Junkey”—This is another Bull, older, almost 60, I wrote poems in his room all last summer when Tristessa was mine, mine , and I wouldnt take her—I had some silly ascetic or celibacious notion that I must not touch a woman—My touch might have saved her—
    Now too late—
    He brings her home and right away I see something is wrong—She comes tottering in on his arm and gives a weak (thank God for that) smile and holds out her arm rigidly, I dont know what to do but hold her arm up, “What’s the matter with Tristessa is she sick?”
    â€œAll last month she was paralyzed down one whole leg and her arms were covered with cysts, O she was an awful sick girl last month”
    â€œWhat’s the matter with her now?”
    â€œShh—let her sit down—”
    Tristessa is holding me and slowly levels her sweet brown cheek against mine, with a rare smile, and I’m playing the befuddled American almost consciously—
    Look, I’ll save her yet—
    TROUBLE IS, WHAT would I do with her once I’d won her?—it’s like winning an angel in hell and you are then entitled to go down with her to where it’s worse or maybe there’ll be light, some, down there, maybe it’s me’s crazy—
    â€œShe’s going crazy,” says Bull, “those goofballs’ll do it to everybody, to you, anybody I dont care who.”
    In fact Bull himself took too many two nights later and