The Decadent Worker

“Why’d you try to cut your arms like that? Isn’t that a mean thing to do to yourself?”

“Because I don’t want to live. I’m telling you there’s going to be a big new revolution of police now.”

“No, there’s going to be a rucksack revolution,” I said laughing, not realizing how serious the situation was; in fact Cody and I had no sense, we should have known from her arms how far she wanted to go. “Listen to me,” I began, but she wouldn’t listen.

“Don’t you realize what’s happening?” she yelled staring at me with big wide sincere eyes trying by crazy telepathy to make me believe that what she was saying was absolutely true. She stood there in the kitchen of the little apartment with her skeletal hands held out in supplicatory explanation, her legs braced, her red hair all frizzly, trembling and shuddering and grabbing her face from time to time.

“It’s nothing but bullshit!” I yelled and suddenly I had the feeling I always got when I tried to explain the Dharma to people, Alvah, my mother, my relatives, girl friends, everybody, they never listened, they always wanted me to listen to them, they knew, I didn’t know anything, I was just a dumb young kid and impractical fool who didn’t understand the serious significance of this very important, very real world.

“The police are going to swoop down and arrest us all and not only that but we’re all going to be questioned for weeks and weeks and maybe even years till they find out all the crimes and sins that have been committed, it’s a network, it runs in every direction, finally they’ll arrest everybody in North Beach and even everybody in Greenwich Village and then Paris and then finally they’ll have everybody in jail, you don’t know, it’s only the beginning.” ‘She kept jumping at sounds in the hall, thinking the cops were coming.

“Why don’t you listen to me?” I kept pleading, but each time I said that, she hypnotized me with her staring eyes and almost had me for a while believing in what she believed from the sheer weight of her complete dedication to the discriminations her mind was making. “But you’re getting these silly convictions and conceptions out of nowhere, don’t you realize all this life is just a dream? Why don’t you just relax and enjoy God? God is you, you fool!”

“Oh, they’re going to destroy you, Ray, I can see it, they’re going to fetch all the religious squares too and fix them good. It’s only begun. It’s all tied in with Russia though they won’t say it… and there’s something I heard about the sun’s rays and something about what happens while we’re all asleep. Oh Ray the world will never be the same!” — Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, pp. 110-111

As a matter of fact, the so-called Woodpecker stations, created by the Russians, are said to reinforce the rhythms of low-freq. sound waves from storms on the sun, as they emerge on the North American side of the world, thus turning them into useful carrier waves for, among other things, nocturnal mind manipulation. Rosie, the paranoid in this scene, was, as is true of most of Kerouac’s characters, an actual person with another name — which is given in passing in one of the nonfiction books about Kerouac and the Beat Generation.

“Eventually — say by A.D. 2000 — perhaps all this depth manipulation of the psychological variety will seem amusingly old-fashioned. By then perhaps the biophysicists will take over with ‘bio-control,’ which is depth persuasion carried to its ultimate. Bio-control is the new science of controlling mental processes, emotional reactions, and sense perceptions by bioelectric signals.” — Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders, 1957, p. 206

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