The Dharma Bums

Chapter 15

I put on my new flannel shirt and new socks and underwear and my jeans and packed the rucksack tight and slung it on and went to San Francisco that night just to get the feel of walking around the city night with it on my back. I walked down Mission Street singing merrily. I went to Skid Row Third Street to enjoy my favorite fresh doughnuts and coffee and the bums in there were all fascinated and wanted to know if I was going uranium hunting. I didn't want to start making speeches about what I was going to hunt for was infinitely more valuable to mankind in the long run than ore, but let them tell me: "Boy, all you gotta do is go to that Colorady country and take off with your pack there and a nice little Geiger counter and you'll be a millionaire." Everybody in Skid Row wants to be a millionaire. "Okay boys," I said, "mebbe I'll do that."

"Lotsa uranium up in the Yukon country too."

"And down in Chihuahua," said an old man. "Bet any dough thar's uranium in Chihuahua. ".

I went out of there and walked around San Francisco with my huge pack, happy. I went over to Rosie's place to see Cody and Rosie. I was amazed to see her, she'd changed so suddenly, she was suddenly skinny and a skeleton and her eyes were huge with terror and popping out of her face.

"What's the matter?"

Cody drew me into the other room and didn't want me to talk to her.

"She's got like this in the last forty-eight hours," he whispered.

"What's the matter with her?"

"She says she wrote out a list of all our names and all our sins, she says, and then tried to flush them down the toilet where she works, and the long list of paper stuck in the toilet and they had to send for some sanitation character to clean up the mess and she claims he wore a uniform and was a cop and took it with him to the police station and we're all going to be arrested. She's just nuts, that's all." Cody was my old buddy who'd let me live in his attic in San Francisco years ago, an old trusted friend. "And did you see the marks on her arms?"

"Yes." I had seen her arms, which were all cut up.

"She tried to slash her wrists with some old knife that doesn't cut right. I'm worried about her. Will you watch her while I go to work tonight?"

"Oh man-"

"Oh you, oh man, don't be like that. You know what it says in the Bible, 'even unto the least of these…'"

"All right but I was planning on having fun tonight."

"Fun isn't everything. You've got some responsibilities sometimes, you know."

I didn't have a chance to show off my new pack in The Place. He drove me to the cafeteria on Van Ness where I got Rosie a bunch of sandwiches with his money and I went back alone and tried to make her eat. She sat in the kitchen staring at me.

"But you don't realize what this means!" she kept saying. "Now they know /everything /about you."

"Who?"

"You."

"Me?"

"You, and Alvah, and Cody, and that Japhy Ryder, all of you, and me.

Everybody that hangs around The Place. We're all going to be arrested tomorrow if not sooner." She looked at the door in sheer terror.

"Why'd you try to cut your arms like that? Isn't that a mean thing to do to yourself?"

"Because I don't want to live. I'm telling you there's going to be a big new revolution of police now."

"No, there's going to be a rucksack revolution," I said laughing, not realizing how serious the situation was; in fact Cody and I had no sense, we should have known from her arms how far she wanted to go.

"Listen to me," I began, but she wouldn't listen.

"Don't you /realize/ what's happening?" she yelled staring at me with big wide sincere eyes trying by crazy telepathy to make me believe that what she was saying was absolutely /true. /She stood there in the kitchen of the little apartment with her skeletal hands held out in supplicatory explanation, her legs braced, her red hair all frizzly, trembling and shuddering and grabbing her face from time to time.

"It's nothing but bullshit!" I yelled and suddenly I had the feeling I always got when I tried to explain the Dharma to people, Alvah, my mother, my relatives, girl friends, everybody, they never listened, they always wanted me to listen to them, /they /knew, I didn't know anything, I was just a dumb young kid and impractical fool who didn't understand the serious significance of this very important, very real world.

"The police are going to swoop down and arrest us all and not only that but we're all going to be questioned for weeks and weeks and maybe even years till they find out /all /the crimes and sins that have been committed, it's a network, it runs in every direction, finally they'll arrest everybody in North Beach and even everybody in Greenwich Village and then Paris and then finally they'll have /everybody /in jail, you don't know, it's only the beginning." She kept jumping at sounds in the hall, thinking the cops were coming.

"Why don't you listen to me?" I kept pleading, but each time I said that, she hypnotized me with her staring eyes and almost had me for a while believing in what she believed from the sheer weight of her complete dedication to the discriminations her mind was making. "But you're getting these silly convictions and conceptions out of nowhere, don't you realize all this life is just a dream? Why don't you just relax and enjoy God? God is /you, /you fool!"

"Oh, they're going to destroy you, Ray, I can see it, they're going to fetch all the religious squares too and fix them good. It's only begun.

It's all tied in with Russia though they won't say it… and there's something I heard about the sun's rays and something about what happens while we're all asleep. Oh Ray the world will never be the same!"

"What world? What difference does it make? Please stop, you're scaring me. By God in fact you're not scaring me and I won't listen to another word." I went out, angry, bought some wine and ran into Cowboy and some other musicians and ran back with the gang to watch her. "Have some wine, put some wisdom in your head."

"No, I'm laying off the lush, all that wine you drink is rot-gut, it burns your stomach out, it makes your brain dull. I can tell there's something wrong with you, you're not sensitive, you don't /realize /what's going on!"

"Oh come on."

"This is my last night on earth," she added.

The musicians and I drank up all the wine and talked, till about midnight, and Rosie seemed to be all right now, lying on the couch, talking, even laughing a bit, eating her sandwiches and drinking some tea I'd brewed her. The musicians left and I slept on the kitchen floor in my new sleeping bag. But when Cody came home that night and I was gone she went up on the roof while he was asleep and broke the skylight to get jagged bits of glass to cut her wrists, and was sitting there bleeding at dawn when a neighbor saw her and sent for the cops and when the cops ran out on the roof to help her that was it: she saw the great cops who were going to arrest us all and made a run for the roof edge.

The young Irish cop made a flying tackle and just got a hold of her bathrobe but she fell out of it and fell naked to the sidewalk six flights below. The musicians, who lived downstairs in a basement pad, and had been up all night talking and playing records, heard the thud.

They looked out the basement window and saw that horrible sight. "Man it broke us up, we couldn't make the gig that night." They drew the shades and trembled. Cody was asleep… When I heard about it the next day, when I saw the picture in the paper showing an X on the sidewalk where she had landed, one of my thoughts was: "And if she had only listened to me… Was I talking so dumb after all? Are my ideas about what to do so silly and stupid and childlike?

Isn't this the time now to start following what I know to be true?"

And that had done it. The following week I packed up and decided to hit the road and get out of that city of ignorance which is the modern city.

I said goodbye to Japhy and the others and hopped my freight back down the Coast to L. A. Poor Rosie-she had been absolutely /certain /that the world was real and fear was real and now what was real? "At least," I thought, "she's in Heaven now, and she knows."