gas-fare to Frisco and zoomed over the land.
Two fellows were driving this car; they said they were pimps. Two other fellows were passengers
with me. We sat tight and bent our minds to the goal. We went over Berthoud Pass, down to the
great plateau, Tabernash, Troublesome, Kremmling; down Rabbit Ears Pass to Steamboat Springs,
and j out; fifty miles of dusty detour; then Craig and the Great) American Desert. As we crossed the
Colorado-Utah border 11 saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the
desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, .Pass here and go on, you’re on the road to
heaven.. 1 Ah well, alackaday, I was more interested in some old rotted! covered wagons and pool
tables sitting in the Nevada desert] near a Coca-Cola stand and where there were huts with the!
weatherbeaten signs still napping in the haunted shrouded 1 desert wind, saying, .Rattlesnake Bill
lived here. or .Broken-j mouth Annie holed up here for years.. Yes, zoom! In Salt! Lake City the
pimps checked on their girls and we drove on. I Before I knew it, once again I was seeing the fabled
city of San Francisco stretched on the bay in the middle of the night. I ran immediately to Dean. He
had a little house now. I was! burning to know what was on his mind and what would happen now,
for there was nothing behind me any more, all my I bridges were gone and I didn’t give a damn
about anything at ] all. I knocked on his door at two o’clock in the morning.
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2
He came to the door stark naked and it might have been the President knocking for all he cared.
He received the world in the raw. .Sal!. he said with genuine awe. .I didn’t think you’d actually do
it. You’ve finally come to me..
.Yep,. I said. .Everything fell apart in me. How are things with you?.
.Not so good, not so good. But we’ve got a million things to talk about. Sal, the time has fi-nally
come for us to talk and get with it.. We agreed it was about time and went in. My arrival was
somewhat like the coming of the strange most evil angel in the home of the snow-white fleece, as
Dean and I began talking excitedly in the kitchen downstairs, which brought forth sobs from upstairs.
Everything I said to Dean was answered with a wild, whispering, shuddering .Yes!. Camille knew
what was going to happen. Apparently Dean had been quiet for a few months; now the angel had
arrived and he was going mad again. .What’s the matter with her?. I whispered.
He said, .She’s getting worse and worse, man, she cries and makes tantrums, won’t let me out to
see Slim Gaillard, gets mad every time I’m late, then when I stay home she won’t talk to me and says
I’m an utter beast.. He ran upstairs to soothe her. I heard Camille yell, .You’re a liar, you’re a liar,
you’re a liar!. I took the opportunity to examine the very wonderful house they had. It was a two-
story crooked, rickety wooden cottage in the middle of tenements, right on top of Russian Hill with a
view of the bay; it had four rooms, three upstairs and one immense sort of basement kitchen
downstairs. The kitchen door opened onto a grassy court where washlines were. In back of the
kitchen was a storage room where Dean’s old shoes still were caked an inch thick with Texas mud
from the night the Hudson got stuck on the Brazos River. Of course the Hudson was gone; Dean
hadn’t been able to make further payments on it. He had no car at all now. Their second baby was
accidentally coming. It was horrible to hear Camille sobbing so. We couldn’t stand it and went out to
buy beer and brought it back to the kitchen. Camille finally went to sleep or spent the night staring
blankly at the dark. I had no idea-what was really wrong, except perhaps Dean had driven her mad
after all.
After my last leaving of Frisco he had gone crazy over Marylou again and spent months haunting
her apartment on Divisadero, where every night she had a different sailor in and he peeked down
through her mail-slot and could see her bed. There he saw Marylou sprawled in the mornings with a-
boy. He trailed her around town. He wanted absolute proof that she was a whore. He loved her, he
sweated over her. Finally he got hold of some bad green, as it’s called in the trade - green, uncured
marijuana - quite by mistake, and smoked too much of it.
.The first day,. he said, .I lay rigid as a board in bed and couldn’t move or say a word; I just
looked straight up with my eyes open wide. I could hear buzzing in my head and saw all kinds of
wonderful technicolor visions and felt wonderful. The second day everything came to me,
EVERYTHING I’d ever done or known or read or heard of or conjectured came to me and
rearranged itself in my mind in a brand-new logical way and because I could think of nothing else in
the interior concerns of holding and catering to the amazement and gratitude I felt, I kept saying,
’Yes, yes, yes, yes.’ Not loud. Yes,’ real quiet, and these green tea visions lasted until the third day.
I had understood everything by then, my life was decided, I knew I loved Marylou, I knew I had to
fir my father wherever he is and save him, I knew you were buddy et cetera, I knew how great Carlo
is. I knew a thousand things about everybody everywhere. Then the third day began having a terrible
series of waking nightmares, and the were so absolutely horrible and grisly and green that I lay there
doubled up with my hands around my knees, saying, ’Oh, oh, oh, ah, oh . . .’ The neighbors heard
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me and sent for a doctor. Camille was away with the baby, visiting hot folks. The whole
neighborhood was concerned. They came in and found me lying on the bed with my arms stretched
out forever. Sal, I ran to Marylou with some of that tea. And do you know that the same thing
happened to that dumb little box? - the same visions, the same logic, the same final decision about
everything, the view of all truths in one painful In leading to nightmares and pain - ack! Then I knew I
loved her so much I wanted to kill her. I ran home and beat my head on the wall. I ran to Ed Dunkel;
he’s back in Frisco with Galatea; I asked him about a guy we know has a gun, I went the guy, I got
the gun, I ran to Marylou, I looked down mail-slot, she was sleeping with a guy, had to retreat and
he hesitate, came back in an hour, I barged in, she was alone - and gave her the gun and told her to
kill me. She held the gun in her hand the longest time. I asked her for a sweet dead pact. She didn’t
want. I said one of us had to die. She said no. I beat my head on the wall. Man, I was out of my
mind. She’ll tell you, she talked me out of it..
.Then what happened?.
.That was months ago - after you left. She finally married a used-car dealer, dumb bastit has
promised to kill me if he finds me, if necessary I shall have to defend myself and kill him and I’ll go to
San Quentin, ‘cause, Sal, one more rap of any kind and I go to San Quentin for life - that’s the end
of me. Bad hand and all.. He showed me his hand. I hadn’t noticed in the excitement that he had
suffered a terrible accident to his hand. .I Ht Marylou on the brow on February twenty-sixth at six
o’clock in the evening - in fact six-ten, because I remember I had to make my hotshot freight in an
hour and twenty minutes - the last time we met and the last time we decided everything, and now
listen to this: my thumb only deflected off her brow and she didn’t even have a bruise and in fact
laughed, but my thumb broke above the wrist and a horrible doctor made a setting of the bones that
was difficult and took three separate castings, twenty-three combined hours of sitting on hard
benches waiting, et cetera, and the final cast had a traction pin stuck through the tip of my thumb, so
in April when they took off the cast the pin infected my bone and I developed osteomyelitis which
has become chronic, and after an operation which failed and a month in a cast the result was the
amputation of a wee bare piece off the tip-ass end..
He unwrapped the bandages and showed me. The flesh, about half an inch, was missing under the
nail.
.It got from worse to worse. I had to support Camille and Amy and had to work as fast as I
could at Firestone as mold man, curing recapped tires and later hauling big hunnerd-fifty-pound tires
from the floor to the top of the cars - could only use my good hand and kept banging the bad broke
it again, had it reset again, and it’s getting all infected and swoled again. So now I take care of
baby while Camille works. You see? Heeby-jeebies, I’m classification three-A, jazz-hounded
Moriarty has a sore butt, his wife gives him daily injections of penicillin for his thumb, which produces
hives, for he’s allergic. He must take sixty thousand units of Fleming’s juice within a month. He must
take one tablet every four hours for this month to combat allergy produced from his juice. He must
take codeine aspirin to relieve the pain in his thumb. He must have surgery on his leg for an inflamed
cyst. He must rise next Monday at six A.M. to get his teeth cleaned. He must see a foot doctor twice
a week for treatment. He must take cough syrup each night. He must blow and snort constantly to
clear his nose, which has collapsed just under the bridge where an operation some years ago
weakened it. He lost his thumb on his throwing arm. Greatest seventy-yard passer in the history of
New Mexico State Reformatory. And yet - and yet, I’ve never felt better and finer and happier with
the world and to see little lovely children playing in the sun and I am so glad to see you, my fine gone
wonderful Sal, and I know, I know everything will be all right. You’ll see her tomorrow, my terrific
darling beautiful daughter can now stand alone for thirty seconds at a time, she weighs twenty-two
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pounds, is twenty-nine inches long. I’ve just figured out she is thirty-one-and-a-quarter-per-cent
English, twenty-seven-and-a-half-per-cent Irish, twenty-five-per-cent German, eight-and-threequarters-
per-cent Dutch, seven-and-a-half-per-cent Scotch, one-hun-dred-per-cent wonderful.. He
fondly congratulated me for the book I had finished, which was now accepted by the publishers.
.We know life, Sal, we’re growing older, each of us, little by little, and are coming to know things.
What you tell me about your life I understand well, I’ve always dug your feelings, and now in fact
you’re ready to hook up with a real great girl if you can only find her and cultivate her and make her
mind your soul as I have tried so hard with these damned women of mine. Shit! shit! shit!. he yelled.
And in the morning Camille threw both of us out, baggage and all. It began when we called Roy
Johnson, old Denver Roy, and had him come over for beer, while Dean minded the baby and did the
dishes and the wash in the backyard but did a sloppy job of it in his excitement. Johnson agreed to
drive us to Mill City to look for Remi Boncoeur. Camille came in from work at the doctor’s office
and gave us all the sad look of a harassed woman’s life. I tried to show this haunted woman that I
had no mean intentions concerning her home life by saying hello to her and talking as warmly as I
could, but she knew it was a con and maybe one I’d learned from Dean, and only gave a brief smile.
In the morning there was a terrible scene: she lay on the bed sobbing, and in the midst of this I
suddenly had the need to go to the bathroom, and the only way I could get there was through her
room. .Dean, Dean,. I cried, .where’s the nearest bar?.
.Bar?. he said, surprised; he was washing his hands in the kitchen sink downstairs. He thought I
wanted to get drunk. I told him my dilemma and he said, .Go right ahead, she does that all the time..
No, I couldn’t do that. I rushed out to look for a bar; I walked uphill and downhill in a vicinity of four
blocks on Russian Hill and found nothing but laundromats, cleaners, soda fountains, beauty parlors. I
came back to the crooked little house. They were yelling at each other as I slipped through with a
feeble smile and locked myself in the bathroom. A few moments later Camille was throwing Dean’s
things on the living-room floor and telling him to pack. To my amazement I saw a full-length oil
painting of Galatea Dunkel over the sofa. I suddenly realized that all these women were spending
months of loneliness and womanliness together, chatting about the madness of the men. I heard
Dean’s maniacal giggle across the house, together with the wails of his baby. The next thing I knew
he was gliding around the house like Groucho Marx, with his broken thumb wrapped in a huge white
bandage sticking up like a beacon that stands motionless above the frenzy of the waves. Once again
I saw his pitiful huge battered trunk with socks and dirty underwear sticking out; he bent over it,
throwing in everything he could find. Then he got his suitcase, the beatest suitcase in the USA. It was
made of paper with designs on it to make it look like leather, and hinges of some kind pasted on. A
great rip ran down the top; Dean lashed on a rope. Then he grabbed his seabag and threw things into
that. I got my bag, stuffed it, and as Camille lay in bed saying, .Liar! Liar! Liar!. we leaped out of
the house and struggled down the street to the nearest cable car - a mass of men and suitcases with
that enormous bandaged thumb sticking up in the air.
That thumb became the symbol of Dean’s final development. He no longer cared about anything
(as before) but now he also cared about everything in principle; that is to say, it was all the same
to him and he belonged to the world and there was nothing he could do about it. He stopped me in
the middle of the street.
.Now, man, I know you’re probably real bugged; you just got to town and we get thrown out the
first day and you’re wondering what I’ve done to deserve this and so on - together with all horrible
appurtenances - hee-hee-hee! - but look at me. Please, Sal, look at me..
I looked at him. He was wearing a T-shirt, torn pants hanging down his belly, tattered shoes; he
had not shaved, his hair was wild and bushy, his eyes bloodshot, and that tremendous bandaged
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thumb stood supported in midair at heart-level (he had to hold it up that way), and on his face was
the goofiest grin I ever saw. He stumbled around in a circle and looked everywhere.
.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 farther; in idiocy, with infected thumb,
surrounded by the 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..
.Italy?. he said. His eyes lit up. .Italy, yass - how shall we get there, dear Sal?.
I pondered this. .I’ll make some money, I’ll get a thousand dollars from the publishers. We’ll go
dig all the crazy women in Rome, Paris, all those places; we’ll sit at sidewalk cafes; we’ll live in
whorehouses. Why not go to Italy?.
.Why yass,. said Dean, and then realized I was serious and looked at me out of the corner of his
eye for the first time, for I’d never committed myself before with regard to his burdensome existence,
and that look was the look of a man weighing his chances at the last moment before the bet. There
were triumph and insolence in his eyes, a devilish look, and he never took his eyes off mine for a long
time. I looked back at him and blushed.
I said, .What’s the matter?. I felt wretched when I asked it. He made no answer but continued
looking at me with the same wary insolent side-eye.
I tried to remember everything he’d done in his life and if there wasn’t something back there to
make him suspicious of something now. Resolutely and firmly I repeated what I said
-.Come to New York with me; I’ve got the money.. I looked at him; my eyes were watering
with embarrassment and tears. Still he stared at me. Now his eyes were blank and looking through
me. It was probably the pivotal point of our friendship when he realized I had actually spent some
hours thinking about him and his troubles, and he was trying to place that in his tremendously
involved and tormented mental categories. Something clicked in both of us. In me it was suddenly
concern for a man who was years younger than I, five years, and whose fate was wound with mine
across the passage of the recent years; in him it was a matter that I can ascertain only from what he
did afterward. He became extremely joyful and said everything was settled. .What was that look?. I
asked. He was pained to hear me say that. He frowned. It was rarely that Dean frowned. We both
felt perplexed and uncertain of something. We were standing on top of a hill on a beautiful sunny day
in San Francisco; our shadows fell across the sidewalk. Out of the tenement next to Camille’s house
filed eleven Greek men and women who instantly lined themselves up on the sunny pavement while
another backed up across the narrow street and smiled at them over a camera. We gaped at these
ancient people who were having a wedding party for one of their daughters, probably the thousandth
in an unbroken dark generation of smiling in the sun. They were well dressed, and they were strange.
Dean and I might have been in Cyprus for all of that. Gulls flew overhead in the sparkling air.
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.Well,. said Dean in a very shy and sweet voice, .shall we go?.
.Yes,. I said, .let’s go to Italy.. And so we picked up our bags, he the trunk with his one good
arm and I the rest, and staggered to the cable-car stop; in a moment rolled down the hill with our
legs dangling to the sidewalk from the jiggling shelf, two broken-down heroes of the Western night.
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3
First thing, we went to a bar down on Market Street and decided everything - that we would
stick together and be buddies till we died. Dean was very quiet and preoccupied, looking at the old
bums in the saloon that reminded him of his father. .I think he’s in Denver - this time we must
absolutely find him, he may be in County Jail, he may be around Larimer Street again, but he’s to be
found. Agreed?.
Yes, it was agreed; we were going to do everything we’d never done and had been too silly to do
in the past. Then we promised ourselves two days of kicks in San Francisco before starting off, and
of course the agreement was to go by travel bureau in share-the-gas cars and save as much money
as possible. Dean claimed he no longer needed Marylou though he still loved her. We both agreed
he would make out in New York.
Dean put on his pin-stripe suit with a sports shirt, we stashed our gear in a Greyhound bus locker
for ten cents, and we took off to meet Roy Johnson who was going to be our chauffeur for two-day
Frisco kicks. Roy agreed over the phone to do so. He arrived at the corner of Market and Third
shortly thereafter and picked us up. Roy was now living in Frisco, working as a clerk and married to
a pretty little blonde called Dorothy. Dean confided that her nose was too long - this was his big
point of contention about her, for some strange reason - but her nose wasn’t too long at all. Roy
Johnson is a thin, dark, handsome kid with a pin-sharp face and combed hair that he keeps shoving
back from the sides of his head. He had an extremely earnest approach and a big smile. Evidently his
wife, Dorothy, had wrangled with him over the chauffeuring idea - and, determined to make a stand
as the man of the house (they lived in a little room), he nevertheless stuck by his promise to us, but
with consequences; his mental dilemma resolved itself in a bitter silence. He drove Dean and me all
over Frisco at all hours of day and night and never said a word; all he did was go through red lights
and make sharp turns on two wheels, and this was telling us the shifts to which we’d put him. He was
midway between the challenge of his new wife and the challenge of his old Denver poolhall gang
leader. Dean was pleased, and of course unperturbed by the driving. We paid absolutely no attention
to Roy and sat in the back and yakked.
The next thing was to go to Mill City to see if we could find Remi Boncoeur. I noticed with some
wonder that the old ship Admiral Freebee was no longer in the bay; and then of course Remi was
no longer in the second-to-last compartment of the shack in the canyon. A beautiful colored girl
opened the door instead; Dean and I talked to her a great deal. Roy Johnson waited in the car,
reading Eugene Sue’s Mysteries of Paris. I took one last look at Mill City and knew there was no
sense trying to dig up the involved past; instead we decided to go see Galatea Dunkel about sleeping
accommodations. Ed had left her again, was in Denver, and damned if she still didn’t plot to get him
back. We found her sitting crosslegged on the Oriental-type rug of her four-room tenement flat on
upper Mission with a deck of fortune cards. Good girl. I saw sad signs that Ed Dunkel had lived here
awhile and then left out of stupors and disinclinations only.
.He’ll come back,. said Galatea. .That guy can’t take care of himself without me.. She gave a
furious look at Dean and Roy Johnson. .It was Tommy Snark who did it this time. All the time
before he came Ed was perfectly happy and worked and we went out and had wonderful times.
Dean, you know that. Then they’d sit in the bathroom for hours, Ed in the bathtub and Snarky on the
seat, and talk and talk and talk -such silly things..
Dean laughed. For years he had been chief prophet of that gang and now they were learning his
technique. Tommy Snark had grown a beard and his big sorrowful blue eyes had come looking for
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Ed Dunkel in Frisco; what happened (actually and no lie), Tommy had his small ringer amputated in a
Denver mishap and collected a good sum of money. For no reason under the sun they decided to
give Galatea the slip and go to Portland, Maine, where apparently Snark had an aunt. So they were
now either in Denver, going through, or already in Portland.
.When Tom’s money runs out Ed’ll be back,. said Galatea, looking at her cards. .Damn fool he
doesn’t know anything and never did. All he has to do is know that I love him..
Galatea looked like the daughter of the Greeks with the sunny camera as she sat there on the rug,
her long hair streaming to the floor, plying the fortune-telling cards. I got to like her. We even
decided to go out that night and hear jazz, and Dean would take a six-foot blonde who lived down
the street, Marie.
That night Galatea, Dean, and I went to get Marie. This girl had a basement apartment, a little
daughter, and an old car that barely ran and which Dean and I had to push down the street as the
girls jammed at the starter. We went to Galatea’s, and there everybody sat around - Marie, her
daughter, Galatea, Roy Johnson, Dorothy his wife - all sullen in the overstaffed furniture as I stood in
a corner, neutral in Frisco problems, and Dean stood in the middle of the room with his balloon-
thumb in the air breast-high, giggling. .Gawd damn,. he said, .we’re all losing our fingers - hawrhawr-
hawr..
.Dean, why do you act so foolish?. said Galatea. .Camille called and said you left her. Don’t you
realize you have a daughter?.
.He didn’t leave her, she kicked him out!. I said, breaking my neutrality. They all gave me dirty
looks; Dean grinned. .And with that thumb, what do you expect the poor guy to do?. I added. They
all looked at me; particularly Dorothy Johnson lowered a mean gaze on me. It wasn’t anything but a
sewing circle, and the center of it was the culprit, Dean -responsible, perhaps, for everything that
was wrong. I looked out the window at the buzzing night-street of Mission; I wanted to get going
and hear the great jazz of Frisco - and remember, this was only my second night in town.
.I think Marylou was very, very wise leaving you, Dean,. said Galatea. .For years now you
haven’t had any sense of responsibility for anyone. You’ve done so many awful things I don’t know
what to say to you..
And in fact that was the point, and they all sat around looking at Dean with lowered and hating
eyes, and he stood on the carpet in the middle of them and giggled - he just giggled. He made a little
dance. His bandage was getting dirtier all the time; it began to flop and unroll. I suddenly realized that
Dean, by virtue of his enormous series of sins, was becoming the Idiot, the Imbecile, the Saint of the
lot.
.You have absolutely no regard for anybody but yourself and your damned kicks. All you think
about is what’s hanging between your legs and how much money or fun you can get out of people
and then you just throw them aside. Not only that but you’re silly about it. It never occurs to you that
life is serious and there are people trying to make something decent out of it instead of just goofing all
the time..
That’s what Dean was, the HOLY GOOF.
.Camille is crying her heart out tonight, but don’t think for a minute she wants you back, she said
she never wanted to see you again and she said it was to be final this time. Yet you stand here and
make silly faces, and I don’t think there’s a care in your heart..
This was not true; I knew better and I could have told them all. I didn’t see any sense in trying it. I
longed to go and put my arm around Dean and say, Now look here, all of you, remember just one
thing: this guy has his troubles too, and another thing, he never complains and he’s given all of you a
damned good time just being himself, and if that isn’t enough for you then send him to the firing
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squad, that’s apparently what you’re itching to do anyway . . .
Nevertheless Galatea Dunkel was the only one in the gang who wasn’t afraid of Dean and could
sit there calmly, with her face hanging out, telling him off in front of everybody. There were earlier
days in Denver when Dean had everybody sit in the dark with the girls and just talked, and talked,
and talked, with a voice that was once hypnotic and strange and was said to make the girls come
across by sheer force of persuasion and the content of what he said. This was when he was fifteen,
sixteen. Now his disciples were married and the wives of his disciples had him on the carpet for the
sexuality and the life he had helped bring into being. I listened further.
.Now you’re going East with Sal,. Galatea said, .and what do you think you’re going to
accomplish by that? Camille has to stay home and mind the baby now you’re gone - how can she
keep her job? - and she never wants to see you again and I don’t blame her. If you see Ed along the
road you tell him to come back to me or I’ll kill him .
Just as flat as that. It was the saddest night. I felt as if I was with strange brothers and sisters in a
pitiful dream. Then a complete silence fell over everybody; where once Dean would have talked his
way out, he now fell silent himself, but standing in front of everybody, ragged and broken and idiotic,
right under the lightbulbs, his bony mad face covered with sweat and throbbing veins, saying, .Yes,
yes, yes,. as though tremendous revelations were pouring into him all the time now, and I am
convinced they were, and the others suspected as much and were frightened. He was BEAT - the
root, the soul of Beatific. What was he knowing? He tried all in his power to tell me what he was
knowing, and they envied that about me, my position at his side, defending him and drinking him in as
they once tried to do. Then they looked at me. What was I, a stranger, doing on the West Coast this
fair night? I recoiled from the thought.
.We’re going to Italy,. I said, I washed my hands of the whole matter. Then, too, there was a
