I said, “Jesus, it’s hot.”
And Janie said, “Get up and take a shower you bastard.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Don’t what’s the matter me. You smoked marijuana last night.”
“It wasn’t good stuff anyway,” I said, and I went into the bathroom. The June sun was all over the room and when I turned on the cold jet it was like diving into a shady pond back in Pennsylvania on a summer afternoon.
After, I sat in the front room with a towel and a glass of cold orangeade, and I asked Phillip where he had gone last night with Ramsay Allen. He told me that after they had left Dennison’s, they started out for the Empire State Building.
“Why the Empire State Building?” I asked.
“We were thinking of jumping off. I don’t clearly remember.”
“Jumping off, hey?” I said.
We talked along for a while about the New Vision, which Phillip was then in the process of trying to work out, and then when I had finished my orangeade I got up and went into the bedroom to put my pants on. I said I was hungry.
Janie and Phillip started dressing, and I went into the small alcove we called the library and thumbed through some things in the desk. In a slow sort of way I was getting ready to ship out again. I laid out a few things on top of the desk and then I went back into the front room and they were ready. We went down the stairs and out on the street.
“When are you shipping out again, Mike?” Phillip asked.
“Why,” I said, “in a couple of weeks, I guess.”
“The shit you are,” Janie said.
“Well,” Phillip said as we crossed the Square, “I’ve been thinking about shipping out myself. You know I have seaman’s papers, but I never have shipped out. What would I have to do to get a ship?”
I gave him all the details briefly.
Phillip nodded in a satisfied way. “I’m going to do it,” he said. “And is there any chance of our getting on the same boat?”
“Why yes,” I said. “You suddenly decided all this? And what would your uncle say?”
“He’ll be all for it. Glad to see me do a patriotic turn and all that. And glad to get rid of me for a while.”
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks © 2008 by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, and reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Press.
