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PART ONE
I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I
won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and
my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you
could call my life on the road. Before that I’d often dreamed of going West to see the country,
always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he
actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a
jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles. First reports of him came to me through Chad King, who’d
shown me a few letters from him written in a New Mexico reform school. I was tremendously
interested in the letters because they so naively and sweetly asked Chad to teach him all about
Nietzsche and all the wonderful intellectual things that Chad knew. At one point Carlo and I talked
about the letters and wondered if we would ever meet the strange Dean Moriarty. This is all far
back, when Dean was not the way he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery.
Then news came that Dean was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first
time; also there was talk that he had just married a girl called Marylou.
One day I was hanging around the campus and Chad and Tim Gray told me Dean was staying in
a cold-water pad in East Harlem, the Spanish Harlem. Dean had arrived the night before, the first
time in New York, with his beautiful little sharp chick Marylou; they got off the Greyhound bus at
50th Street and cut around the corner looking for a place to eat and went right in Hector’s, and since
then Hector’s cafeteria has always been a big symbol of New York for Dean. They spent money on
beautiful big glazed cakes and creampuffs.
All this time Dean was telling Marylou things like this: .Now, darling, here we are in New York
and although I haven’t quite told you everything that I was thinking about when we crossed Missouri
and especially at the point when we passed the Booneville reformatory which reminded me of my jail
problem, it is absolutely necessary now to postpone all those leftover things concerning our personal
lovethings and at once begin thinking of specific worklife plans . . .. and so on in the way that he had
in those early days.
I went to the cold-water flat with the boys, and Dean came to the door in his shorts. Marylou was
jumping off the couch; Dean had dispatched the occupant of the apartment to the kitchen, probably
to make coffee, while he proceeded with his loveproblems, for to him sex was the one and only holy
and important thing in life, although he had to sweat and curse to make a living and so on. You saw
that in the way he stood bobbing his head, always looking down, nodding, like a young boxer to
instructions, to make you think he was listening to every word, throwing in a thousand .Yeses. and
.That’s rights.. My first impression of Dean was of a young Gene Autry -trim, thin-hipped, blue-
eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent - a sideburned hero of the snowy West. In fact he’d just been
working on a ranch, Ed Wall’s in Colorado, before marrying Marylou and coming East. Marylou
was a pretty blonde with immense ringlets of hair like a sea of golden tresses; she sat there on the
edge of the couch with her hands hanging in her lap and her smoky blue country eyes fixed in a wide
stare because she was in an evil gray New York pad that she’d heard about back West, and waiting
like a longbodied emaciated Modigliani surrealist woman in a serious room. But, outside of being a
sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things. That night we all drank
beer and pulled wrists and talked till dawn, and in the morning, while we sat around dumbly smoking
butts from ashtrays in the gray light of a gloomy day, Dean got up nervously, paced around, thinking,
and decided the thing to do was to have Marylou make breakfast and sweep the floor. .In other

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words we’ve got to get on the ball, darling, what I’m saying, otherwise it’ll be fluctuating and lack of
true knowledge or crystallization of our plans.. Then I went away.
During the following week he confided in Chad King that he absolutely had to learn how to write
from him; Chad said I was a writer and he should come to me for advice. Meanwhile Dean had
gotten a job in a parking lot, had a fight with Marylou in their Hoboken apartment - God knows why
they went there - and she was so mad and so down deep vindictive that she reported to the police
some false trumped-up hysterical crazy charge, and Dean had to lam from Hoboken. So he had no
place to live. He came right out to Paterson, New Jersey, where I was living with my aunt, and one
night while I was studying there was a knock on the door, and there was Dean, bowing, shuffling
obsequiously in the dark of the hall, and saying, .Hello, you remember me - Dean Moriarty? I’ve
come to ask you to show me how to write..
.And where’s Marylou?. I asked, and Dean said she’d apparently whored a few dollars together
and gone back to Denver - .the whore!. So we went out to have a few beers because we couldn’t
talk like we wanted to talk in front of my aunt, who sat in the living room reading her paper. She
took one look at Dean and decided that he was a madman.
In the bar I told Dean, .Hell, man, I know very well you didn’t come to me only to want to
become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except you’ve got to stick to it with the
energy of a benny addict.. And he said, .Yes, of course, I know exactly what you mean and in fact
all those problems have occurred to me, but the thing that I want is the realization of those factors
that should one depend on Schopenhauer’s dichotomy for any inwardly realized . . .. and so on in
that way, things I understood not a bit and he himself didn’t. In those days he really didn’t know
what he was talking about; that is to say, he was a young jailkid all hung-up on the wonderful
possibilities of becoming a real intellectual, and he liked to talk in the tone and using the words, but in
a jumbled way, that he had heard from .real intellectuals. - although, mind you, he wasn’t so naive
as that in all other things, and it took him just a few months with Carlo Marx to become completely
in there with all the terms and jargon. Nonetheless we understood each other on other levels of
madness, and I agreed that he could stay at my house till he found a job and furthermore we agreed
to go out West sometime. That was the winter of 1947.
One night when Dean ate supper at my house - he already had the parking-lot job in New York he
leaned over my shoulder as I typed rapidly away and said, .Come on man, those girls won’t wait,
make it fast..
I said, .Hold on just a minute, I’ll be right with you soon as I finish this chapter,. and it was one
of the best chapters in the book. Then I dressed and off we flew to New York to meet some girls.
As we rode in the bus in the weird phosphorescent void of the Lincoln Tunnel we leaned on each
other with fingers waving and yelled and talked excitedly, and I was beginning to get the bug like
Dean. He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was
only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would
otherwise pay no attention to him. He was conning me and I knew it (for room and board and .howto-
write,. etc.), and he knew I knew (this has been the basis of our relationship), but I didn’t care
and we got along fine - no pestering, no catering; we tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking
new friends. I began to learn from him as much as he probably learned from me. As far as my work
was concerned he said, .Go ahead, everything you do is great.. He watched over my shoulder as I
wrote stories, yelling, .Yes! That’s right! Wow! Man!. and .Phew!. and wiped his face with his
handkerchief. .Man, wow, there’s so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even
begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and
grammatical fears . . ..

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.That’s right, man, now you’re talking.. And a kind of holy lightning I saw flashing from his
excitement and his visions, which he described so torrentially that people in buses looked around to
see the .overexcited nut.. In the West he’d spent a third of his time in the poolhall, a third in jail, and
a third in the public library. They’d seen him rushing eagerly down the winter streets, bareheaded,
carrying books to the poolhall, or climbing trees to get into the attics of buddies where he spent days
reading or hiding from the law.
We went to New York - I forget what the situation was, two colored girls - there were no girls
there; they were supposed to meet him in a diner and didn’t show up. We went to his parking lot
where he had a few things to do - change his clothes in the shack in back and spruce up a bit in front
of a cracked mirror and so on, and then we took off. And that was the night Dean met Carlo Marx.
A tremendous thing happened when Dean met Carlo Marx. Two keen minds that they are, they took
to each other at the drop of a hat. Two piercing eyes glanced into two piercing eyes - the holy con-
man with the shining mind, and the sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind that is Carlo Marx.
From that moment on I saw very little of Dean, and I was a little sorry too. Their energies met head-
on, I was a lout compared, I couldn’t keep up with them.
The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then; it would mix up all my friends
and all I had left of my family in a big dust cloud over the American Night. Carlo told him of Old Bull
Lee, Elmer Hassel, Jane: Lee in Texas growing weed, Hassel on Riker’s Island, Jane wandering on
Times Square in a benzedrine hallucination, with her baby girl in her arms and ending up in Bellevue.
And Dean told Carlo of unknown people in the West like Tommy Snark, the clubfooted poolhall
rotation shark and cardplayer and queer saint. He told him of Roy Johnson, Big Ed Dunkel, his
boyhood buddies, his street buddies, his innumerable girls and sex-parties and pornographic
pictures, his heroes, heroines, adventures. They rushed down the street together, digging everything
in the early way they had, which later became so much sadder and perceptive and blank. But then
they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life
after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are
mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who
never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles
exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and
everybody goes .Awww!. What did they call such young people in Goethe’s Germany? Wanting
dearly to learn how to write like Carlo, the first thing you know, Dean was attacking him with a great
amorous soul such as only a con-man can have. .Now, Carlo, let me speak - here’s what I’m
saying .... I didn’t see them for about two weeks, during which time they cemented their relationship
to fiendish allday-allnight-talk proportions.
Then came spring, the great time of traveling, and everybody in the scattered gang was getting
ready to take one trip or another. I was busily at work on my novel and when I carne to the halfway
mark, after a trip down South with my aunt to visit my brother Rocco, I got ready to travel West for
the very first time.
Dean had already left. Carlo and I saw him off at the 34th Street Greyhound station. Upstairs
they had a place where you could make pictures for a quarter. Carlo took off his glasses and looked
sinister. Dean made a profile shot and looked coyly around. I took a straight picture that made me
look like a thirty-year-old Italian who’d kill anybody who said anything against his mother. This
picture Carlo and Dean neatly cut down the middle with a razor and saved a half each in their
wallets. Dean was wearing a real Western business suit for his big trip back to Denver; he’d finished
his first fling in New York. I say fling, but he only worked like a dog in parking lots. The most
fantastic parking-lot attendant in the world, he can back a car forty miles an hour into a tight squeeze

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and stop at the wall, jump out, race among fenders, leap into another car, circle it fifty miles an hour
in a narrow space, back swiftly into tight spot, hump, snap the car with the emergency so that you
see it bounce as he flies out; then clear to the ticket shack, sprinting like a track star, hand a ticket,
leap into a newly arrived car before the owner’s half out, leap literally under him as he steps out, start
the car with the door flapping, and roar off to the next available spot, arc, pop in, brake, out, run;
working like that without pause eight hours a night, evening rush hours and after-theater rush hours,
in greasy wino pants with a frayed fur-lined jacket and beat shoes that flap. Now he’d bought a new
suit to go back in; blue with pencil stripes, vest and all - eleven dollars on Third Avenue, with a
watch and watch chain, and a portable typewriter with which he was going to start writing in a
Denver rooming house as soon as he got a job there. We had a farewell meal of franks and beans in
a Seventh Avenue Riker’s, and then Dean got on the bus that said Chicago and roared off into the
night. There went our wrangler. I promised myself to go the same way when spring really bloomed
and opened up the land.
And this was really the way that my whole road experience began, and the things that were to
come are too fantastic not to tell.
Yes, and it wasn’t only because I was a writer and needed new experiences that I wanted to
know Dean more, and because my life hanging around the campus had reached the completion of its
cycle and was stultified, but because, somehow, in spite of our difference in character, he reminded
me of some long-lost brother; the sight of his suffering bony face with the long sideburns and his
straining muscular sweating neck made me remember my boyhood in those dye-dumps and swim-
holes and riversides of Paterson and the Passaic. His dirty workclothes clung to him so gracefully, as
though you couldn’t buy a better fit from a custom tailor but only earn it from the Natural Tailor of
Natural Joy, as Dean had, in his stresses. And in his excited way of speaking I heard again the voices
of old companions and brothers under the bridge, among the motorcycles, along the wash-lined
neighborhood and drowsy doorsteps of afternoon where boys played guitars while their older
brothers worked in the mills. All my other current friends were .intellectuals. - Chad the Nietzschean
anthropologist, Carlo Marx and his nutty surrealist low-voiced serious staring talk, Old Bull Lee and
his critical anti-every-thing drawl - or else they were slinking criminals like Elmer Hassel, with that hip
sneer; Jane Lee the same, sprawled on the Oriental cover of her couch, sniffing at the New Yorker.
But Dean’s intelligence was every bit as formal and shining and complete, without the tedious
intellectualness. And his .criminality. was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-
saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something
new, long prophesied, long a-coming (he only stole cars for joy rides). Besides, all my New York
friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish
or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love; he
didn’t care one way or the other, .so long’s I can get that lil ole gal with that lil sumpin down there
tween her legs, boy,. and .so long’s we can eat, son, y’ear me? I’m hungry, I’m starving, let’s eat
right now!. - and off we’d rush to eat, whereof, as saith Ecclesiastes, .It is your portion under the
sun..
A western kinsman of the sun, Dean. Although my aunt warned me that he would get me in
trouble, I could hear a new call and see a new horizon, and believe it at my young age; and a little bit
of trouble or even Dean’s eventual rejection of me as a buddy, putting me down, as he would later,
on starving sidewalks and sickbeds - what did it matter? I was a young writer and I wanted to take
off.
Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line

the pearl would be handed to me.

9
2
In the month of July 1947, having saved about fifty dollars from old veteran benefits, I was ready
to go to the West Coast. My friend Remi Boncoeur had written me a letter from San Francisco,
saying I should come and ship out with him on an around-the-world liner. He swore he could get me
into the engine room. I wrote back and said I’d be satisfied with any old freighter so long as I could
take a few long Pacific trips and come back with enough money to support myself in my aunt’s
house while I finished my book. He said he had a shack in Mill City and I would have all the time in
the world to write there while we went through the rigmarole of getting the ship. He was living with a
girl called Lee Ann; he said she was a marvelous cook and everything would jump. Remi was an old
prep-school friend, a Frenchman brought up in Paris and a really mad guy - I didn’t know how mad
at this time. So he expected me to arrive in ten days. My aunt was all in accord with my trip to the
West; she said it would do me good, I’d been working so hard all winter and staying in too much;
she even didn’t complain when I told her I’d have to hitchhike some. All she wanted was for me to
come back in one piece. So, leaving my big half-manuscript sitting on top of my desk, and folding
back my comfortable home sheets for the last time one morning, I left with my canvas bag in which a
few fundamental things were packed and took off for the Pacific Ocean with the fifty dollars in my
pocket.
I’d been poring over maps of the United States in Paterson for months, even reading books about
the pioneers and savoring names like Platte and Cimarron and so on, and on the road-map was one
long red line called Route 6 that led from the tip of Cape Cod clear to Ely, Nevada, and there
dipped down to Los Angeles. I’ll just stay on 6 all the way to Ely, I said to myself and confidently
started. To get to 6 I had to go up to Bear Mountain. Filled with dreams of what I’d do in Chicago,
in Denver, and then finally in San Fran, I took the Seventh Avenue subway to the end of the line at
242nd Street, and there took a trolley into Yonkers; in downtown Yonkers I transferred to an
outgoing trolley and went to the city limits on the east bank of the Hudson River. If you drop a rose
in the Hudson River at its mysterious source in the Adirondacks, think of all the places it journeys by
as it goes out to sea forever - think of that wonderful Hudson Valley. I started hitching up the thing.
Five scattered rides took me to the desired Bear Mountain Fridge, where Route 6 arched in from
New England. It began to rain in torrents when I was let off there. It was mountainous. Route 6
came over the river, wound around a traffic circle, and disappeared into the wilderness. Not only
was there no traffic but the rain came down in buckets and I had no shelter. I had to run under some
pines to take cover; this did no good; I began crying and swearing and socking myself on the head
for being such a damn fool. I was forty miles north of New York; all the way up I’d been worried
about the fact that on this, my big opening day, I was only moving north instead of the so-longed-for
west. Now I was stuck on my northernmost hangup. I ran a quarter-mile to an abandoned cute
English-style filling station and stood under the dripping eaves. High up over my head the great hairy
Bear Mountain sent down thunderclaps that put the fear of God in me. All I could see were smoky
trees and dismal wilderness rising to the skies. .What the hell am I doing up here?.
I cursed, I cried for Chicago. .Even now they’re all having a big time, they’re doing this, I’m not
there, when will I get there!. - and so on. Finally a car stopped at the empty filling station; the man
and the two women in it wanted to study a map. I stepped right up and gestured in the rain; they
consulted; I looked like a maniac, of course, with my hair all wet, my shoes sopping. My shoes,
damn fool that I am, were Mexican huaraches, plantlike sieves not fit for the rainy night of America
and the raw road night. But the people let me in and rode me north to Newburgh, which I accepted

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as a better alternative than being trapped in the Bear Mountain wilderness all night. .Besides,. said
the man, .there’s no traffic passes through 6. If you want to go to Chicago you’d do better going
across the Holland Tunnel in New York and head for Pittsburgh,. and I knew he was right. It was
my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great
red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes.
In Newburgh it had stopped raining. I walked down to the river, and I had to ride back to New
York in a bus with a delegation of schoolteachers coming back from a weekend in the mountains chatter-
chatter blah-blah, and me swearing for all the time and the money I’d wasted, and telling
myself, I wanted to go west and here I’ve been all day and into the night going up and down, north
and south, like something that can’t get started. And I swore I’d be in Chicago tomorrow, and made
sure of that, taking a bus to Chicago, spending most of my money, and didn’t give a damn, just as
long as I’d be in Chicago tomorrow.

11
3
It was an ordinary bus trip with crying babies and hot sun, and countryfolk getting on at one Penn
town after another, till we got on the plain of Ohio and really rolled, up by Ashtabula and straight
across Indiana in the night. I arrived in Chi quite early in the morning, got a room in the Y, and went
to bed with a very few dollars in my pocket. I dug Chicago after a good day’s sleep.
The wind from Lake Michigan, bop at the Loop, long walks around South Halsted and North
Clark, and one long walk after midnight into the jungles, where a cruising car followed me as a
suspicious character. At this time, 1947, bop was going like mad all over America. The fellows at the
Loop blew, but with a tired air, because bop was somewhere between its Charlie Parker
Ornithology period and another period that began with Miles Davis. And as I sat there listening to
that sound of the .light which bop has come to represent for all of us, I thought of all my friends from
one end of the country to the other and how they were really all in the same vast backyard doing
something so frantic and rushing-about. And for the first time in my life, the following afternoon, I
went into the West. It was a warm and beautiful day for hitchhiking. To get out of the impossible
complexities of Chicago traffic I took a bus to Joliet, Illinois, went by the Joliet pen, stationed myself
just outside town after a walk through its leafy rickety streets behind, and pointed my way. All the
way from New York to Joliet by bus, and I had spent more than half my money.
My first ride was a dynamite truck with a red flag, about thirty miles into great green Illinois, the
truckdriver pointing out the place where Route 6, which we were on, intersects Route 66 before they
both shoot west for incredible distances. Along about three in the afternoon, after an apple pie and
ice cream in a roadside stand, a woman stopped for me in a little coupe. I had a twinge of hard joy
as I ran after the car. But she was a middle-aged woman, actually the mother of sons my age, and
wanted somebody to help her drive to Iowa. I was all for it. Iowa! Not so far from Denver, and
once I got to Denver I could relax. She drove the first few hours, at one point insisted on visiting an
old church somewhere, as if we were tourists, and then I took over the wheel and, though I’m not
much of a driver, drove clear through the rest of Illinois to Davenport, Iowa, via Rock Island. And
here for the first time in my life I saw my beloved Mississippi River, dry in the summer haze, low
water, with its big rank smell that smells like the raw body of America itself because it washes it up.
Rock Island - railroad tracks, shacks, small downtown section; and over the bridge to Davenport,
same kind of town, all smelling of sawdust in the warm midwest sun. Here the lady had to go on to
her Iowa hometown by another route, and I got out.
The sun was going down. I walked, after a few cold beers, to the edge of town, and it was a long
walk. All the men were driving home from work, wearing railroad hats, baseball hats, all kinds of
hats, just like after work in any town anywhere. One of them gave me a ride up the hill and left me at
a lonely crossroads on the edge of the prairie. It was beautiful there. The only cars that came by
were farmer-cars; they gave me suspicious looks, they clanked along, the cows were coming home.
Not a truck. A few cars zipped by. A hotrod kid came by with his scarf flying. The sun went all the
way down and I was standing in the purple darkness. Now I was scared. There weren’t even any
lights in the Iowa countryside; in a minute nobody would be able to see me. Luckily a man going
back to Davenport gave me a lift downtown. But I was right where I started from.
I went to sit in the bus station and think this over. I ate another apple pie and ice cream; that’s
practically all I ate all the way across the country, I knew it was nutritious and it was delicious, of
course. I decided to gamble. I took a bus in downtown Davenport, after spending a half-hour
watching a waitress in the bus-station cafe, and rode to the city limits, but this time near the gas

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stations. Here the big trucks roared, wham, and inside two minutes one of them cranked to a stop
for me. I ran for it with my soul whoopeeing. And what a driver - a great big tough truckdriver with
popping eyes and a hoarse raspy voice who just slammed and kicked at everything and got his rig
under way and paid hardly any attention to me. So I could rest my tired soul a little, for one of the
biggest troubles hitchhiking is having to talk to innumerable people, make them feel that they didn’t
make a mistake picking you up, even entertain them almost, all of which is a great strain when you’re
going all the way and don’t plan to sleep in hotels. The guy just yelled above the roar, and all I had to
do was yell back, and we relaxed. And he balled that thing clear to Iowa City and yelled me the
funniest stories about how he got around the law in every town that had an unfair speed limit, saying
over and over again, .Them goddam cops can’t put no flies on my ass!. Just as we rolled into Iowa
Qty he saw another truck coming behind us, and because he had to turn off at Iowa City he blinked
his tail lights at the other guy and slowed down for me to jump out, which I did with my bag, and the
other truck, acknowledging this exchange, stopped for me, and once again, in the twink of nothing, I
was in another big high cab, all set to go hundreds of miles across the night, and was I happy! And
the new truckdriver was as crazy as the other and yelled just as much, and all I had to do was lean
back and roll on. Now I could see Denver looming ahead of me like the Promised Land, way out
there beneath the stars, across the prairie of Iowa and the plains of Nebraska, and I could see the
greater vision of San Francisco beyond, like jewels in the night. He balled the jack and told stories
for a couple of hours, then, at a town in Iowa where years later Dean and I were stopped on
suspicion in what looked like a stolen Cadillac, he slept a few hours in the seat. I slept too, and took
one little walk along the lonely brick walls illuminated by one lamp, with the prairie brooding at the
end of each little street and the smell of the corn like dew in the night.
He woke up with a start at dawn. Off we roared, and an hour later the smoke of Des Moines
appeared ahead over the green cornfields. He had to eat his breakfast now and wanted to take it
easy, so I went right on into Des Moines, about four miles, hitching a ride with two boys from the
University of Iowa; and it was strange sitting in their brand-new comfortable car and hearing them
talk of exams as we zoomed smoothly into town. Now I wanted to sleep a whole day. So I went to
the Y to get a room; they didn’t have any, and by instinct I wandered down to the railroad tracks and
there’re a lot of them in Des Moines - and wound up in a gloomy old Plains inn of a hotel by the
locomotive roundhouse, and spent a long day sleeping on a big clean hard white bed with dirty
remarks carved in the wall beside my pillow and the beat yellow windowshades pulled over the
smoky scene of the rail-yards. I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct
time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was - I was far away from
home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, hearing the hiss of steam
outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds,
and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange
seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted
life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my
youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange
red afternoon.
But I had to get going and stop moaning, so I picked up my bag, said so long to the old
hotelkeeper sitting by his spittoon, and went to eat. I ate apple pie and ice cream - it was getting
better as I got deeper into Iowa, the pie bigger, the ice cream richer. There were the most beautiful
bevies of girls everywhere I looked in Des Moines that afternoon - they were coming home from
high school - but I had no time now for thoughts like that and promised myself a ball in Denver.
Carlo Marx was already in Denver; Dean was there; Chad King and Tim Gray were there, it was

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their hometown; Marylou was there; and there was mention of a mighty gang including Ray Rawlins
and his beautiful blond sister Babe Rawlins; two waitresses Dean knew, the Bettencourt sisters; and

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