THAT GORGEOUS BLONDE DANCING BARE-BREASTED on a golden stage before the sullen Charlotte N.C. audience, that Zaza-like Gabor beauty--at one point she began pulling up her panties, you could see the brown hairs of her Venus hump starting to show berween her sensuous thighs so sexy-tossed---Old ladies began leaving the theater in civic excitement, finally even young men rose and held local caucuses among their seats and I even heard some of them calling for a committee, a rope, a lynching---uproars gathered---the blonde danced on, her huge bulbous soft white breasts with pale pink nipple bouncing in the golden footlight glow---

I began to cry out "Stop this furor, this is a beautiful woman---enjoy and watch her---never mind your lynchings and laws---Is that all you're interested in? There's life and love staring you in the face, sip it while you can---besides you dont want to harm a nice woman like that---" No one hears me; angry Southerners are shouting with Southern accents and it seems I never knew they were so mysteriously vicious and organized in that---

there are rushes out of the theater---I run to the stage door, I run after the blonde who's now put on her blue slacks and is hustling to her bus with her traveling bag---across a field in back of the barracks theater---shaking her head and saying to me "'Well I guess it didnt go over in Charlotte---Elmira's my next engagement---I've been on the road with this act for a month---grossed pretty well in Kewark---" and so on with showbusiness gravity and "innocence"---of issues in the real, political world---and she's short, God so tall and statuesque on the stage and so buxom, and here a short businesslike little showbusiness blonde cuttin along in slacks---fast, fast walker, I can hardly keep up---

--Jack Kerouac

EDITOR'S NOTES

I posted this dream for its interesting shift from a simple sex fantasy to politics--freedom of expression versus censorship and even a threat of lynching. It's typical of Kerouac that his dream shifts again. He gets a backstage interview with his sex goddess who he's just defended as an incarnation of life and love... and she's a dharma bum like him, traveling the country working. His train work, her stripping. Work is work.

Source: page 31 of Book of Dreams by Jack Kerouac, expanded (2001) edition, City Lights Books.
Date: estimated from sequence.
Title: Kerouac always capitalized a dream's first phrase as a working title.
Paragraph breaks: I added when text got hard to follow on screen. The web is not the printed page. I apologize to purists.

--Chris Wayan

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