Visions of Raven: Jack Kerouac and Film Noir 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

"I feel like Jimmy Cagney, I can feel the air with my fingers."
Visions of Cody ⁴⁰

It did become harder and harder for Kerouac to function in the outside world, by 1963 it was "all a mad mixed up mess whenever I leave the house so I stay home." ⁴¹ Though he had proved perfectly capable on the road alone, in the woods, desert and mountain top, as time passed he seemed to do better with a companion and guide, as was Cassady, Ginsberg, Burroughs in Mexico, and Gary Snyder provided for The Dharma Bums. Alone could lead to the circling of Satori in Paris or awash on Big Sur. Memere provided that calm for him, offered him a place to go after journeys to reflect and build his legend. "I've always been 'settled with my mother' who supported me by working in shoe factories while I wrote most of my books years ago. She's my friend as well as my mother. When I go on the road I always have a quiet, clean home to come back to, and to work in, which probably accounts for the fact that I've published twelve books in the last six years." ⁴² Her influence can be felt throughout his books, he even took her on his travels, moving homes and hide-outs, Kerouac remained writing in her house until the end.

When Cody Jarrett uses the veil of teargas to escape from the chemical plant office, it mirrors Raven eluding the police into the shroud of the foggy rail yard morning. He leads his pursuers on a chase across a bridge that Kerouac recalled for Visions of Cody: "Last night at home I talked with Ma . . . woke up at four restlessly, hurried to Jersey City in a long foolish ride . . . got off at Erie Station, followed signs through the waiting room halls to the footbridge that's just like the one in This Gun For Hire with Alan Ladd (a pix incidentally that I saw the afternoon I signed on for Arctic Greenland in 1942, when I lay in the grass of Boston Common thinking of death . . ." ⁴³

Raven is lucky to escape the police bullets shot after him but--like the scene of doom in Doctor Sax Book Four, The Night the Man With the Watermelon Died: "I saw he was really dead and taken--his eyes had turned glassy on the milky waters of the night . . . that part which yet I see in dreams of Lowell and the bridge. I shuddered and saw white flowers and grew cold" ⁴⁴--Raven also knows death is only a matter of time. He has committed his own worst crime--only hours before, he killed a cat.

"One morning, in cold blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree;--hung it with tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart;--hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence;--hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin."
--"The Black Cat" Edgar Allan Poe

Trains, rail yard sounds of engines pulling screeching wheels, spotlights over tracks, hiding out the night before in the ruined train car, a gray cat visited them, coming in through the open window. Raven smiles, "Cats bring you luck," he admits. But when the animal is heard by two men outside, Raven is forced to smother it. "I killed my luck," he tells her and the camera shows it in his eyes. "I'd like to crawl down there with you and sleep," he tells the cat, but, "It's no good, I'd only dream." Kerouac could sympathize, "It occurred to me, remembering last night's dream of me in a movie holding a kitty high over my head as a ravening hound leaped to eat it, that I was that hound, I wanted to eat and dissect the kitty of knowledge with my ravening mind." ⁴⁵

As the fog lifts morning, Raven promises her he's done with gun violence, he heads for the bridge Kerouac recalled in Visions of Cody. Up a dirt hill, he gets caught, gets out with a shot and runs again. Onto that wooden bridge, Raven passes a woman carrying a baby swaddled like a watermelon in her arms. He runs. Halfway across he stops and crawls through the slats and jumps down to the train passing below, just like Cody in White Heat. James Cagney isn't done yet. His biography, Cagney By Cagney, reveals the story behind his only time directing, "when my old friend A.C. Lyles came to me in 1957 and asked me if I would direct his Paramount production of Short Cut to Hell, I was moved to do so out of friendship only. I said I would do it if he wanted me to, and he asked me how much I'd charge. "How about nothing? Is that too much?" I asked him. We shot this updated version of Graham Greene's This Gun for Hire in just twenty days, and that was long enough for me." ⁴⁶ A movie shot with the speed of Kerouac typing the holy roll of On the Road.

As Raven rushes off to the end, the air raid sirens sound in the street. Raven, in a mask and uniform, gains entrance to Nitro Chemical. Caught, Gates blubbers to him, "I'm not to blame. You wouldn't--You wouldn't kill an innocent man, would you? It's all his fault. I was acting as his agent." Raven forces Gates to take him up the elevator, through four pairs of double doors to the president's office. In there he rounds up all the doublecrossers before his gun. There's a last doublecross as the old man's longtime nurse rips the alarm button from him, "For fifteen years dressing you, nursing you, cleaning you, listening to your dirty deals. Go ahead!" he shrieks at Raven, "Wipe him out!" Even Gates turns on the president, informing Raven, "I'll tell you. That new gas formula--he sold it to the highest bidder." The nurse agrees, "To the Japanese."

Next page: The doublecross