"Джек Керуак. Big Sur (engl)" - читать интересную книгу автора

and then the Plains, the mountains, the desert, the final mountains of
California, all so easy and dreamlike compared to my old harsh hitch hikings
before I made enough money to take transcontinental trains (all over America
high school and college kids thinking "Jack Duluoz is 26 years old and on
the road all the time hitch hiking" while there I am almost 40 years old,
bored and jaded in a roomette bunk crashin across that Salt Flat) - But in
any case a wonderful start towards my retreat so generously offered by sweet
old Monsanto and instead of going thru smooth and easy I wake up drunk,
sick, disgusted, frightened, in fact terrified by that sad song across the
roofs mingling with the lachrymose cries of a Salvation Army meeting on the
corner below "Satan is the cause of your alcoholism, Satan is the cause of
your immorality, Satan is everywhere workin to destroy you unless you repent
now" and worse than that the sound of old drunks throwing up in rooms next
to mine, the creak of hall steps, the moans everywhere Including the moan
that had awakened me, my own moan in the lumpy bed, a moan caused by a big
roaring Whoo Whoo in my head that had shot me out of my pillow like a ghost.

2

And I look around the dismal cell, there's my hopeful rucksack all
neatly packed with everything necessary to live in the woods, even unto the
minutest first aid kit and diet details and even a neat little sewing kit
cleverly reinforced by my good mother (like extra safety pins, buttons,
special sewing needles, little aluminum scissors)... The hopeful medal of St
Christopher even which she'd sewn on the flap... The survival kit all in
there down to the last little survival sweater and handkerchief and tennis
sneakers (for hiking) - But the rucksack sits hopefully in a strewn mess of
bottles all empty, empty poor boys of white port, butts, junk, horror...
"One fast move or I'm gone, " I realize, gone the way of the last three
years of drunken hopelessness which is a physical and spiritual and
metaphysical hopelessness you cant learn in school no matter how many books
on existentialism or pessimism you read, or how many jugs of vision
producing Ayahuasca you drink, or Mescaline take, or Peyote goop up with -
That feeling when you wake up with the delirium tremens with the fear of
eerie death dripping from your ears like those special heavy cobwebs spiders
weave in the hot countries, the feeling of being a bent back mudman monster
groaning underground in hot steaming mud pulling a long hot burden nowhere,
the feeling of standing ankledeep in hot boiled pork blood, ugh, of being up
to your waist in a giant pan of greasy brown dishwater not a trace of suds
left in it... The face of yourself you see in the mirror with its expression
of unbearable anguish so haggard and awful with sorrow you cant even cry for
a thing so ugly, so lost, no connection whatever with early perfection and
therefore nothing to connect with tears or anything: it's like William
Seward Burroughs" "Stranger" suddenly appearing in your place in the mirror
- Enough! "One fast move or I'm gone" so I jump up, do my headstand first
to pump blood back into the hairy brain, take a shower in the hall, new
T-shirt and socks and underwear, pack vigorously, hoist the rucksack and run
out throwing the key on the desk and hit the cold street and walk fast to
the nearest little grocery store to buy two days of food, stick it in the
rucksack, hike thru lost alleys of Russian sorrow where bums sit head on