Greenwich Village Bohemia: A Winter Wonderland Turns Into An American Renaissance(Part II).
in perfect beatnick fashion. He captures the downtrodden sense of a lost soul entering the city, beaten down from the trials of an uncertain life, but determined to travel against the odds of a future incomprehensible to see on a horizon drifting onwards towards the hazy lost mists of dawn.
"It happened like this; we arrived in Manhatten on a freezing November morning. Norman said goodbye and there we were on the sidewalk, the four of us, coughing like tuberculars from lack of sleep and too much resultant concomitative smoking. In fact I was sure I had T.B. And I was thinner than ever in my life, about 155 pounds(to my present 195), with hollowed cheeks and really sunken eyes in a cavernous eye bone. And it was cold in New York. It s suddenly occurred to me we were all probably going to die, no money, coughing, on the sidewalk with bags, looking in all four directions of regular old sour Manhatten hurrying to work for pizza night comforts." (2)
Joyce Johnson would remember years later her recollections of Jack Kerouac as he rolled into New York City with his friend Neal Cassidy.
"I walked into the Howard Johnson's on Eighth Street in Greenwich Village and there at the counter was Jack Kerouac in a red-and- black checked lumberjack shirt. Through his eyes were a startling light blue, he too seemed all red and black, with his ruddy, sunburned complexion and his gleaming dark hair." (3)
They would meet on those dark streets of dawn and continue over to Joyce's apartment. Kerouac describes the scene beautifully in all the splendor of a writer in the top form of his craft.
"It's like a big surrealistic drawing by Picasso with this and that reaching for this and that--even Picasso doesnt want to be too accurate. It's the Garden of Eden and anything goes. I cant think of anything more beautiful in my life (& aesthetic) than to hold a naked girl in my arms, sideways on a bed, in the first preliminary kiss. The velvet back. The hair, in which Obis, Paranas & Euphrates run. The nape of the neck the original person now turned into a serpentine Eve by the Fall of the Garden where you feel the actual animal soul personal muscles and there's no sex--but O the rest so soft and unlikely--If men were so soft I'd love them as
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