The Dharma Bums

by Jack Kerouac

wandering the world (usually the immense triangular arc of New York to Mexico City to San Francisco)

and I go to sleep and dream that while sleeping I use up three slices of bread breathing

urging them to glug a slug from the jug,

They spend all day washing their hands with creamy soaps they secretly wanta eat in the bathroom.’ He had a million ideas, he had ’em all.

Now when I went around that ledge that had scared me it was just fun and a lark, I just skipped and jumped and danced along and I had really learned that you can’t fall off a mountain. Whether you can fall off a mountain or not I don’t know, but I had learned that you can’t.

In fact I realized I had no guts anyway, which I’ve long known. But I have joy.

We’d eaten a slight lunch outside Yuma and now he said he was hungry for a good steak. ‘Only thing is these truck stops ain’t got big enough steaks to suit me.’ ‘Well you just park your truck up one of these Tucson supermarkets on the highway and I’ll buy a two-inch thick T-bone and we’ll stop in the desert and I’ll light a fire and broil you the greatest steak of your life.’ He didn’t really believe it but I did it. Outside the lights of Tucson in a flaming red dusk over the desert, he stopped and I lit a fire with mesquite branches, adding bigger branches and logs later, as it got dark, and when the coals were hot I tried to hold the steak over them with a spit but the spit burned so I just fried the huge steaks in their own fat in my lovely new potpan cover and handed him my jackknife and he went to it and said ‘Hm, om, wow, that is the best steak I ever et.’ I’d also bought milk and we just had steak and milk, a great protein feast, squatting there in the sand as highway cars zipped by our little red fire.

salesman gave me a ride. He said ‘Three hundred and sixty days out of the year we get bright sunshine here in El Paso and my wife just bought a clothes dryer!’ He took me to Las Cruces New Mexico and there I walked through the little town, following the highway, and came out on the other end and saw a big beautiful old tree and decided to just lay my pack down and rest anyhow.

the logs that had been bucked had more or less of a crack in them, where you more or less inserted the heavy iron wedge, and then, raising a five-pound sledgehammer over your head, standing way back so’s not to hit your own ankle, you brought it down konko on the wedge and split the log clean in half.

On this trip Japhy had brought along a delicious combination for hiking energy: Ry-Krisp crackers, good sharp Cheddar cheese a wedge of that, and a roll of salami. We had this for breakfast with hot fresh tea and felt great. Two grown men could live two days on that concentrated bread and that salami (concentrated meat) and cheese and the whole thing only weighed about a pound and a half. Japhy was full of great ideas like that.