Feel, We're In a Hurry
From “The Mexican Girl,” by Jack Kerouac:
Terry had a new idea. We would hitch to Sabinal, her hometown up the San Joaquin Valley, and live in her brother’s garage. Anything was all right to me, especially a nice garage. On the road I made Terry sit down on my bag to make her look like a woman in distress and right off a truck stopped and we ran for it all gleegiggles. The man was a good man, his truck was poor. He roared and crawled on up the Valley. We got to Sabinal in the wee hours of the morning not until after that tired sleepy beau’ pushed his old rattle right from Indian Ponce de Leon Springs of down-valley up the screaming cricket fields of grape and lemon four hours, to let us off, with a cheerful “So long pard,” and here we were with the wine finished (I, while she slept in the truck).
I have a favorite sentence of this excerpt from “The Mexican Girl”: The man was a good man, his truck was poor.
Strict grammar rules of English say this is a no-no. I’m sure Kerouac doesn’t care about that. Throughout “The Mexican Girl,” he writes like he’s in a hurry, and it makes his characters feel like they are in a hurry.
More than that, it makes his scenery feel like it’s in a hurry. So what you see in this passage where the truck picks up Sal and Terry fits nicely with the truck happening by, stopping in an instant it feels like, and roaring and crawling away in the spirit of the “gleegiggles” of its passengers.
Kerouac loses the introductions of its passengers to the driver. In place of that, he lets the sound and imagery of the hitchhiking fill the moments you as the reader are meant to imagine.
It’s the “wee hours of the morning” through “screaming cricket fields” and the sight and smell of “grape and lemon” saturated with minds happy and drunken. A late night with good spirits.
This good man and his poor truck. Kerouac could have phrased his introduction of those characters in any way. What he created was worthy of a pause that only a comma can provide, and the encounter is so strange and light that a strict grammatical interpretation of the moment feels wrong somehow. Instead, let the phrase break some rules and pass the reader along quickly.
It would be too harsh and stunted to say The man was a good man; his truck was poor. I also can’t imagine the man willing to pick up two hitchhikers in his busted truck as anyone who would use a period to punctuate his sentences, like The man was a good man. His truck was poor.
Those are too much. Too formal. Too paused.
I prefer that we can notice and appreciate the quick comma pause and continue on our journey alongside Sal and Terry. Soon we’re in the wee hours of the night. We have long forgotten about the quality of the ride, we have made it to the cheerful “So long.”