“What do my eyeballs see? Ah—the blue sky. Long-fellow!” He swayed and blinked. He rubbed his eyes. “Together with windows—have you ever dug windows? Now let’s talk about windows. I have seen some really crazy windows that made faces at me, and some of them had shades drawn and so they winked.” Out of his seabag he fished a copy of Eugene Sue’s Mysteries of Paris and, adjusting the front of his T-shirt, began reading on the street corner with a pedantic air. “Now really, Sal, let’s dig everything as we go along …” He forgot about that in an instant and looked around blankly. I was glad I had come, he needed me now.
“Why did Camille throw you out? What are you going to do?”
“Eh?” he said. “Eh? Eh?” We racked our brains for where to go and what to do. I realized it was up to me. Poor, poor Dean—the devil himself had never fallen further; in idiocy, with infected thumb, surrounded by battered suitcases of his motherless feverish life across America and back numberless times, an undone bird. “Let’s walk to New York,” he said, “and as we do so let’s take stock of everything along the way—yass.” I took out my money and counted it; I showed it to him.
“I have here,” I said, “the sum of eighty-three dollars and change, and if you come with me let’s go to New York—and after that let’s go to Italy.”
Excerpted from On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Published by Penguin Books, New York, 2003.