A man named Raven wakes up blearily to his alarm clock ringing 2:15 in the afternoon. Jazz piano and sunlight fill his rented room shambles. He picks up some typewritten words to read . . . Bridge Street . . . San Francisco . . . he dresses and feeds the black and white cat on the windowsill.
Watching the opening of This Gun For Hire aware of Jack Kerouac watching up there, "seated in the first row of the balcony in shirtsleeves" 1 reveals more and more about his own life visions. From the first frame, it is filled with the poetry Kerouac would surely pick up on. Stars surrounding the Hozomeen-like signature cold mountain logo
of Paramount Pictures will recall his lookout window in The Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels: "Mist before the peak/--the dream/Goes on." 2
This image is followed by a book with titles superimposed, names of actors and everyone involved, as though everything to be seen is part of a legend contained in pages. "The final scope of the Legend will be simply a completely written lifetime with all its hundreds of characters and events and levels interswirling and reappearing and becoming complete . . . a continuous tale." 3
Then, when Raven drifts from the room, when the beat looking maid enters and attacks the cat, Raven explodes back at her. "Beat it, I said!" he sends her gone. She has committed the same crime described in Kerouac's "film of the angel child" 4 Visions of Gerard, mirrored in the holy rage of his saintly brother, "Bad girl! Don't you understand what you've done? When will you understand? We don't disturb little animals and little things! We leave them alone! . . . wake up, foolish girl!--realize what you've done! . . . There won't always be time!--Bad girl! Go on!" 5 From childhood on to his last days in Florida, Kerouac's remembering books took this commandment to heart, paging his works--cats walk all through the Book of Haikus--it was also the message Jack took down from the mountain in Desolation Angels.
In Vanity of Duluoz, Kerouac recalls his friendship with William S. Burroughs "Will Hubbard" ("Burroughs is Poe," 6 Kerouac revealed) and sets up his entanglement with "Franz Mueller," a role made for Laird Cregar, the heavy of This Gun For Hire. Kerouac nearly becomes the
Poe-named Raven when, "Mueller took my little cat, wrapped Hubbard's tie around its neck, and tried to hang it from the lamp: a little kitty. Will Hubbard immediately took it down, undamaged and just slightly hurt I guess in the neck, I don't know, I wasn't there, I would have thrown that man out the window." 7
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before*"The Raven"--Edgar Allan Poe
Even though Kerouac admired Raven, "I wore great big felt hats all level to imitate Alan Ladd in This Gun For Hire," 8 he admits, "it wasn't so much the killing in those stories that we used to feed upon, it was rather the dark and mysterious labyrinthal movement of our heroes, the sibilant hiss of their secret sanctumed laugh, the fall of rain on Fifth Avenue mansion at night, the slow creeping menace of masked justice along Manhattan depths, and above all, our hero unmasked and posing before the dull eye of the world . . ." 9 In fact, Kerouac rejected the violence, equating it with a nightmare, "it must be an educational movie from another Buddhaland showing Bodhisattvas why to reject violence and how horrible ignorance which not only projects an outside world but grasps at it, fights in it . . ." 10
Nevertheless, Jack Kerouac's life became a film noir in 1944. In the early morning a friend "like Alan Ladd" 11 came through his apartment window to confess Mueller's murder. "I've still got the knife and his glasses covered with blood." 12 Kerouac suggests their escape, "Let's take a subway downtown go see a movie" 13 which they do (as if they could walk into the screen, disappear into a dream). It all occurs in Book Eleven and Book Twelve, Vanity of Duluoz, shadows, murder, police, prison, all the elements. At the D.A.'s office, his wife visited him, "like in Jimmy Cagney movies when time's up they tell us it's time, she cries, hugs me, holds me, she waits to be dragged away like in the movies?" 14 and "Ma came to see me . . . in the jail, sat at the long table and talked to me in front of a guard just like in the John Garfield movies." 15
Next page: Life as a dream-movie
