strange sense of maternal satisfaction in the air, for the girls were really looking at Dean the way a
mother looks at the dearest and most errant child, and he with his sad thumb and all his revelations
knew it well, and that was why he was able, in tick-tocking silence, to walk out of the apartment
without a word, to wait for us downstairs as soon as we’d made up our minds about time. This was
what we sensed about the ghost on the sidewalk. I looked out the window. He was alone in the
doorway, digging the street. Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness - everything was
behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being.
.Come on, Galatea, Marie, let’s go hit the jazz joints and forget it. Dean will be dead someday.
Then what can you say to him?.
.The sooner he’s dead the better,. said Galatea, and she spoke officially for almost everyone in
the room.
.Very well, then,. I said, .but now he’s alive and I’ll bet you want to know what he does next
and that’s because he’s got the secret that we’re all busting to find and it’s splitting his head wide
open and if he goes mad don’t worry, it won’t be your fault but the fault of God..
They objected to this; they said I really didn’t know Dean; they said he was the worst scoundrel
that ever lived and I’d find out someday to my regret. I was amused to hear them protest so much.
Roy Johnson rose to the defense of the ladies and said he knew Dean better than anybody, and all
Dean was, was just a very interesting and even amusing con-man. I went out to find Dean and we
had a brief talk about it.
.Ah, man, don’t worry, everything is perfect and fine.. He was rubbing his belly and licking his
lips.
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4
The girls came down and we started out on our big night, once more pushing the car down the
street. .Wheeoo! let’s go!. cried Dean, and we jumped in the back seat and clanked to the little
Harlem on Folsom Street.
Out we jumped in the warm, mad night, hearing a wild tenorman bawling horn across the way,
going .EE-YAH! EE-YAH! EE-YAH!. and hands clapping to the beat and folks yelling, .Go, go,
go!. Dean was already racing across the street with his thumb in the air, yelling, .Blow, man, blow!.
A bunch of colored men in Saturday-night suits were whooping it up in front. It was a sawdust
saloon with a small bandstand on which the fellows huddled with their hats on, blowing over people’s
heads, a crazy place; crazy floppy sponren wandered around sometimes in their bathrobes, bottles
clanked in alleys. In back of the joint in a dark corridor beyond the splattered toilets scores of men
and women stood against the wall drinking wine-spodiodi and spitting at the stars - wine and whisky.
The behatted tenorman was blowing at the peak of a wonderfully satisfactory free idea, a rising and
falling riff that went from .EE-yah!. to a crazier .EE-de-lee-yah!. and blasted along to the rolling
crash of butt-scarred drums hammered by a big brutal Negro with a bullneck who didn’t give a
damn about anything but punishing his busted tubs, crash, rattle-ti-boom, crash. Uproars of music
and the tenorman had it and everybody knew he had it. Dean was clutching his head in the crowd,
and it was a mad crowd. They were all urging that tenorman to hold it and keep it with cries and wild
eyes, and he was raising himself from a crouch and going down again with his horn, looping it up in a
clear cry above the furor. A six-foot skinny Negro woman was rolling her bones at the man’s
hornbell, and he just jabbed it at her, .Ee! ee! ee!.
Everybody was rocking and roaring. Galatea and Marie with beer in their hands were standing on
their chairs, shaking and jumping. Groups of colored guys stumbled in from the street, falling over
one another to get there. .Stay with it, man!. roared a man with a foghorn voice, and let out a big
groan that must have been heard clear out in Sacramento, ah-haa! .Whoo!. said Dean. He was
rubbing his chest, his belly; the sweat splashed from his face. Boom, kick, that drummer was kicking
his drums down the cellar and rolling the beat upstairs with his murderous sticks, rattlety-boom! A
big fat man was jumping on the platform, making it sag and creak. .Yoo!. The pianist was only
pounding the keys with spread-eagled fingers, chords, at intervals when the great tenorman was
drawing breath for another blast - Chinese chords, shuddering the piano in every timber, chink, and
wire, boing! The tenorman jumped down from the platform and stood in the crowd, blowing around;
his hat was over his eyes; somebody pushed it back for him. He just hauled back and stamped his
foot and blew down a hoarse, laughing blast, and drew breath, and raised the horn and blew high,
wide, and screaming in the air. Dean was directly in front of him with his face lowered to the bell of
the horn, clapping his hands, pouring sweat on the man’s keys, and the man noticed and laughed in
his horn a long quivering crazy laugh, and everybody else laughed and they rocked and rocked; and
finally the tenorman decided to blow his top and crouched down and held a note in high C for a long
time as everything else crashed along and the cries increased and I thought the cops would come
swarming from the nearest precinct. Dean was in a trance. The tenorman’s eyes were fixed straight
on him; he had a madman who not only understood but cared and wanted to understand more and
much more than there was, and they began dueling for this; everything came out of the horn, no more
phrases, just cries, cries, .Baugh. and down to .Beep!. and up to .EEEEE!. and down to clinkers
and over to sideways-echoing horn-sounds. He tried everything, up, down, sideways, upside down,
horizontal, thirty degrees, forty degrees, and finally he fell back in somebody’s arms and gave up and
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everybody pushed around and yelled, .Yes! Yes! He blowed that one!. Dean wiped himself with his
handkerchief.
Then up stepped the tenorman on the bandstand and asked for a slow beat and looked sadly out
the open door over people’s heads and began singing .Close Your Eyes.. Things quieted down a
minute. The tenorman wore a tattered suede jacket, a purple shirt, cracked shoes, and zoot pants
without press; he didn’t care. He looked like a Negro Hassel. His big brown eyes were concerned
with sadness, and the singing of songs slowly and with long, thoughtful pauses. But in the second
chorus he got excited and grabbed the mike and jumped down from the bandstand and bent to it. To
sing a note he had to touch his shoetops and pull it all up to blow, and he blew so much he staggered
from the effect, and only recovered himself in time for the next long slow note. .Mu-u-u-usic pla-aa-
a-a-a-ay!. He leaned back with his face to the ceiling, mike held below. He shook, he swayed.
Then he leaned in, almost falling with his face against the mike. .Ma-a-a-ake it dream-y for dancing
. - and he looked at the street outside with his lips curled in scorn, Billie Holiday’s hip sneer
.while we go ro-man-n-n-cing. - he staggered sideways - .Lo-o-o-ove’s holi-da-a-ay. - he shook
his head with disgust and weariness at the whole world - .Will make it seem. - what would it make
it seem? everybody waited; he mourned - .O-kay.. The piano hit a chord. .So baby come on just
clo-o-o-ose your pretty little ey-y-y-y-yes. - his mouth quivered, he looked at us, Dean and me,
with an expression that seemed to say, Hey now, what’s this thing we’re all doing in this sad brown
world? -and then he came to the end of his song, and for this there had to be elaborate
preparations, during which time you could send all the messages to Garcia around the world twelve
times and what difference did it make to anybody? because here we were dealing with the pit and
prunejuice of poor beat life itself in the god-awful streets of man, so he said it and sang it, .Close your
- . and blew it way up to the ceiling and through to the stars and on out - .Ey-y-y-y-y-y-es. and
staggered off the platform to brood. He sat in the corner with a bunch of boys and paid no
attention to them. He looked down and wept. He was the greatest.
Dean and I went over to talk to him. We invited him out to the car. In the car he suddenly yelled,
.Yes! ain’t nothin I like better than good kicks! Where do we go?. Dean jumped up and down in
the seat, giggling maniacally. .Later! later!. said the tenorman. .I’ll get my boy to drive us down to
Jamson’s Nook, I got to sing. Man, I live to sing. Been singin ’Close Your Eyes’ for two weeks - I
don’t want to sing nothin else. What are you boys up to?. We told him we were going to New York
in two days. .Lord, I ain’t never been there and they tell me it’s a real jumpin town but I ain’t got no
cause complainin where I am. I’m married, you know..
.Oh yes?. said Dean, lighting up. .And where is the darling tonight?.
.What do you mean?. said the tenorman, looking at him out of the corner of his eye. .I tole you
I was married to her, didn’t I?.
.Oh yes, oh yes,. said Dean. .I was just asking. Maybe she has friends? or sisters? A ball, you
know, I’m just looking for a ball..
.Yah, what good’s a ball, life’s too sad to be ballin all the time,. said the tenorman, lowering his
eye to the street. .Shh-eee-it!. he said. .I ain’t got no money and I don’t care tonight..
We went back in for more. The girls were so disgusted with Dean and me for gunning off and
jumping around that they had left and gone to Jamson’s Nook on foot; the car wouldn’t run anyway.
We saw a horrible sight in the bar: a white hipster fairy had come in wearing a Hawaiian shirt and
was asking the big drummer if he could sit in. The musicians looked at him suspiciously. .Do you
blow?. He said he did, mincing. They looked at one another and said, .Yeah, yeah, that’s what the
man does, shhh-ee-it!. So the fairy sat down at the tubs and they started the beat of a jump number
and he began stroking the snares with soft goofy bop brushes, swaying his neck with that complacent
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Reich-analyzed ecstasy that doesn’t mean anything except too much tea and soft foods and goofy
kicks on the cool order. But he didn’t care. He smiled joyously into space and kept the beat, though
softly, with bop subtleties, a giggling, rippling background for big solid foghorn blues the boys were
blowing, unaware of him. The big Negro bullneck drummer sat waiting for his turn. .What that man
doing?. he said. .Play the music!. he said. .What in hell!. he said. .Shh-ee-eet!. and looked away,
disgusted.
The tenorman’s boy showed up; he was a little taut Negro with a great big Cadillac. We all
jumped in. He hunched over the wheel and blew the car clear across Frisco without stopping once,
seventy miles an hour, right through traffic and nobody even noticed him, he was so good. Dean was
in ecstasies. .Dig this guy, man! dig the way he sits there and don’t move a bone and just balls that
jack and can talk all night while he’s doing it, only thing is he doesn’t bother with talking, ah, man, the
things, the things I could - I wish - oh, yes. Let’s go, let’s not stop - go now! Yes!. And the boy
wound around a corner and bowled us right in front of Jamson’s Nook and was parked. A cab
pulled up; out of it jumped a skinny, withered little Negro preacherman who threw a dollar at the
cabby and yelled, .Blow!. and ran into the club and dashed right through the downstairs bar, yelling,
.Blowblowblow!. and stumbled upstairs, almost falling on his face, and blew the door open and fell
into the jazz-session room with his hands out to support him against anything he might fall on, and he
fell right on Lampshade, who was working as a waiter in Jamson’s Nook that season, and the music
was there blasting and blasting and he stood transfixed in the open door, screaming, .Blow for me,
man, blow!. And the man was a little short Negro with an alto horn that Dean said obviously lived
with his grandmother just like Tom Snark, slept all day and blew all night, and blew a hundred
choruses before he was ready to jump for fair, and that’s what he was doing.
.It’s Carlo Marx!. screamed Dean above the fury.
And it was. This little grandmother’s boy with the taped-up alto had beady, glittering eyes; small,
crooked feet; spindly legs; and he hopped and flopped with his horn and threw his feet around and
kept his eyes fixed on the audience (which was just people laughing at a dozen tables, the room thirty
by thirty feet and low ceiling), and he never stopped. He was very simple in his ideas. What he liked
was the surprise of a new simple variation of a chorus. He’d go from .ta-tup-tader-rara . . . ta-tuptader-
rara,. repeating and hopping to it and kissing and smiling into his horn, to .ta-tup-EE-da-dedera-
RUP! ta-tup-EE-da-de-dera-RUP!. and it was all great moments of laughter and
understanding for him and everyone else who heard. His tone was clear as a bell, high, pure, and
blew straight in our faces from two feet away. Dean stood in front of him, oblivious to everything else
in the world, with his head bowed, his hands socking in together, his whole body jumping on his
heels and the sweat, always the sweat, pouring and splashing down his tormented collar to lie
actually in a pool at his feet. Galatea and Marie were there, and it took us five minutes to realize it.
Whoo, Frisco nights, the end of the continent and the end of doubt, all dull doubt and tomfoolery,
good-by. Lampshade was roaring around with his trays of beer; everything he did was in rhythm; he
yelled at the waitress with the beat; .Hey now, baby baby, make a way, make a way, it’s
Lampshade comin your way,. and he hurled by her with the beers in the air and roared through the
swinging doors into the kitchen and danced with the cooks and came sweating back. The hornman
sat absolutely motionless at a corner table with an untouched drink in front of him, staring gook-eyed
into space, his hands hanging at his sides till they almost touched the floor, his feet outspread like
lolling tongue his body shriveled into absolute weariness and entranced sorrow and what-all was on
his mind: a man who knocked self out every evening and let the others put the quietus him in the
night. Everything swirled around him like a cloud. And that little grandmother’s alto, that little Carlo
Marx hopped and monkeydanced with his magic horn and blew two hundred choruses of blues,
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each one more frantic than the! other, and no signs of failing energy or willingness to call any-| thing a
day. The whole room shivered.
On the corner of Fourth and Folsom an hour later I stood 1 with Ed Fournier, a San Francisco
alto man who waited with! me while Dean made a phone call in a saloon to have Roy I Johnson pick
us up. It wasn’t anything much, we were just I talking, except that suddenly we saw a very strange
and insane sight. It was Dean. He wanted to give Roy Johnson the I address of the bar, so he told
him to hold the phone a minute ] and ran out to see, and to do this he had to rush pellmell through a
long bar of brawling drinkers in white shirtsleeves, go to the middle of the street, and look at the post
signs. He did this, crouched low to the ground like Groucho Marx, his feet carrying him with amazing
swiftness out of the bar, like an apparition, with his balloon thumb stuck up in the night, and came to
a whirling stop in the middle of the road, looking everywhere above him for the signs. They were
hard to see in the dark, and he spun a dozen times in the road, thumb upheld, in a wild, anxious
silence, a wild-haired person with a ballooning thumb held up like a great goose of the sky, spinning
and spinning in the dark, the other hand distractedly inside his pants. Ed Fournier was saying, .I
blow a sweet tone wherever I go and if people don’t like it ain’t nothin I can do about it. Say, man,
that buddy of yours is a crazy cat, looka him over there. - and we looked. There was a big silence
everywhere as Dean saw the signs and rushed back in the bar, practically going under someone’s
legs as they came out and gliding so fast through the bar that everybody had to do a double take to
see him. A moment later Roy Johnson showed up, and with the same amazing swiftness. Dean glided
across the street and into the car, without a sound. We were off again.
.Now, Roy, I know you’re all hung-up with your wife about this thing but we absolutely must
make Forty-sixth and Geary in the incredible time of three minutes or everything is lost. Ahem! Yes!
(Cough-cough.) In the morning Sal and I are leaving for New York and this is absolutely our last
night of kicks and I know you won’t mind..
No, Roy Johnson didn’t mind; he only drove through every red light he could find and hurried us
along in our foolishness. At dawn he went home to bed. Dean and I had ended up with a colored
guy called Walter who ordered drinks at the bar and had them lined up and said, .Wine-spodiodi!.
which was a shot of port wine, a shot of whisky, and a shot of port wine. .Nice sweet jacket for all
that bad whisky!. he yelled.
He invited us to his home for a bottle of beer. He lived in the tenements in back of Howard. His
wife was asleep when we came in. The only light in the apartment was the bulb over her bed. We
had to get up on a chair and unscrew the bulb as she lay smiling there; Dean did it, fluttering his
lashes. She was about fifteen years older than Walter and the sweetest woman in the world. Then we
had to plug in the extension over her bed, and she smiled and smiled. She never asked Walter where
he’d been, what time it was, nothing. Finally we were set in the kitchen with the extension and sat
down around the humble table to drink the beer and tell the stories. Dawn. It was time to leave and
move the extension back to the bedroom and screw back the bulb. Walter’s wife smiled and smiled
as we repeated the insane thing all over again. She never said a word.
Out on the dawn street Dean said, .Now you see, man, there’s real woman for you. Never a
harsh word, never a complaint, or modified; her old man can come in any hour of the night with
anybody and have talks in the kitchen and drink the beer and leave any old time. This is a man, and
that’s his castle.. He pointed up at the tenement. We stumbled off. The big night was over, A
cruising car followed us suspiciously for a few blocks. We bought fresh doughnuts in a bakery on
Third Street and ate them in the gray, ragged street. A tall, bespectacled, well-dressed fellow came
stumbling down the street with a Negro in a truck-driving cap. They were a strange pair. A big truck
rolled by and the Negro pointed at it excitedly and tried to express his feeling. The tall white man
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furtively looked over his shoulder and counted his money. .It’s Old Bull Lee!. giggled Dean.
.Counting his money and worried about everything, and all that other boy wants to do is talk about
trucks and things he knows.. We followed them awhile.
Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America.
We had to sleep; Galatea Dunkel’s was out of the question. Dean knew a railroad brakeman
called Ernest Burke who lived with his father in a hotel room on Third Street. Originally he’d been on
good terms with them, but lately not so, and the idea was for me to try persuading them to let us
sleep on their floor. It was horrible. I had to call from a morning diner. The old man answered the
phone suspiciously. He remembered me from what his son had told him. To our surprise he came
down to the lobby and let us in. It was just a sad old brown Frisco hotel. We went upstairs and the
old man was kind enough to give us the entire bed. .I have to get up anyway,. he said and retired to
the little kitchenette to brew coffee. He began telling stories about his railroading days. He reminded
me of my father. I stayed up and listened to the stories. Dean, not listening, was washing his teeth
and bustling around and saying, .Yes, that’s right,. to everything he said. Finally we slept; and in the
morning Ernest came back from a Western Division run and took the bed as Dean and I got up.
Now old Mr. Burke dolled himself up for a date with his middle-aged sweetheart. He put on a green
tweed suit, a cloth cap, also green tweed, and stuck a flower in his lapel.
.These romantic old broken-down Frisco brakemen live sad but eager lives of their own,. I told
Dean in the toilet. .It was very kind of him to let us sleep here..
.Yass, yass,. said Dean, not listening. He rushed out to get a travel-bureau car. My job was to
hurry to Galatea Dunkel’s for our bags. She was sitting on the floor with her fortune-telling cards.
.Well, good-by, Galatea, and I hope everything works out fine..
.When Ed gets back I’m going to take him to Jamson’s Nook every night and let him get his fill
of madness. Do you think that’ll work, Sal? I don’t know what to do..
.What do the cards say?.
.The ace of spades is far away from him. The heart cards always surround him - the queen of
hearts is never far. See this jack of spades? That’s Dean, he’s always around..
.Well, we’re leaving for New York in an hour..
.Someday Dean’s going to go on one of these trips and never come back..
She let me take a shower and shave, and then I said good-by and took the bags downstairs and
hailed a Frisco taxi-jitney, which was an ordinary taxi that ran a regular route and you could hail it
from any corner and ride to any corner you want for about fifteen cents, cramped in with other
passengers like on a bus, but talking and telling jokes like in a private car. Mission Street that last
day in Frisco was a great riot of construction work, children playing, whooping Negroes coming
home from work, dust, excitement, the great buzzing and vibrating hum of what is really America’s
most excited city -and overhead the pure blue sky and the joy of the foggy sea that always rolls in
at night to make everybody hungry for food and further excitement. I hated to leave; my stay had
lasted sixty-odd hours. With frantic Dean I was rushing through the world without a chance to see it.
In the afternoon we were buzzing toward Sacramento and eastward again.
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5
The car belonged to a tall, thin fag who was on his way home to Kansas and wore dark glasses
and drove with extreme care; the car was what Dean called a .fag Plymouth.; it had no pickup and
no real power. .Effeminate car!. whispered Dean in my ear. There were two other passengers, a
couple, typical halfway tourist who wanted to stop and sleep everywhere. The first stop would have
to be Sacramento, which wasn’t even the faintest beginning of the trip to Denver. Dean and I sat
alone in the back seat and left it up to them and talked. .Now, man, that alto man last night had IT he
held it once he found it; I’ve never seen a guy who could hold so long.. I wanted to know what
.IT. meant. .Ah well. -Dean laughed - .now you’re asking me impon-de-rables - ahem! Here’s a
guy and everybody’s there, right? Up to him to put down what’s on everybody’s mind. He starts the
first chorus, then lines up his ideas, people, yeah, yeah, but get it, and then he rises to his fate and has
to blow equal to it. All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he gets it -everybody
looks up and knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries. Time stops. He’s filling empty space with
the substance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes of
old blowing. He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling soul-
exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it’s not the tune that counts but IT - .
Dean could go no further; he was sweating telling about it.
Then I began talking; I never talked so much in all my life. I told Dean that when I was a kid and
rode in cars I used to imagine I held a big scythe in my hand and cut down all the trees and posts and
even sliced every hill that zoomed past the window. .Yes! Yes!. yelled Dean. .I used to do it too
only different scythe - tell you why. Driving across the West with the long stretches my scythe had to
be immeasurably longer and it had to curve over distant mountains, slicing off their tops, and reach
another level to get at further mountains and at the same time clip off every post along the road,
regular throbbing poles. For this reason - O man, I have to tell you, NOW, I have IT - I have to tell
you the time my father and I and a pisspoor bum from Larimer Street took a trip to Nebraska in the
middle of the depression to sell flyswatters. And how we made them, we bought pieces of ordinary
regular old screen and pieces of wire that we twisted double and little pieces of blue and red cloth to
sew around the edges and all of it for a matter of cents in a five-and-ten and made thousands of
flyswatters and got in the old bum’s jalopy and went clear around Nebraska to every farmhouse and
sold them for a nickel apiece - mostly for charity the nickels were given us, two bums and a boy,
apple pies in the sky, and my old man in those days was always singing ’Hallelujah, I’m a bum, bum
again.’ And man, now listen to this, after two whole weeks of incredible hardship and bouncing
around and hustling in the heat to sell these awful makeshift flyswatters they started to argue about
the division of the proceeds and had a big fight on the side of the road and then made up and bought
wine and began drinking wine and didn’t stop for five days and five nights while I huddled and cried
in the background, and when they were finished every last cent was spent and we were right back
where we started from, Larimer Street. And my old man was arrested and I had to plead at court to
the judge to let him go cause he was my pa and I had no mother. Sal, I made great mature speeches
at the age of eight in front of interested lawyers . . .. We were hot; we were going east; we were
excited.
.Let me tell you more,. I said, .and only as a parenthesis within what you’re saying and to
conclude my last thought. As a child lying back in my father’s car in the back seat I also had a vision
of myself on a white horse riding alongside over every possible obstacle that presented itself: this
included dodging posts, hurling around houses, sometimes jumping over when I looked too late,
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running over hills, across sudden squares with traffic that I had to dodge through incredibly - . .Yes!
Yes! Yes!. breathed Dean ecstatically. .Only difference with me was, I myself ran, I had no horse.
You were a Eastern kid and dreamed of horses; of course we won’t assume such things as we both
know they are really dross and literary ideas, but merely that I in my perhaps wilder schizophrenia
actually ran on foot along the car and at incredible speeds sometimes ninety, making it over every
bush and fence and farmhouse and sometimes taking quick dashes to the hills and back without
losing a moment’s ground . . ..
We were telling these things and both sweating. We had completely forgotten the people up front
who had begun to wonder what was going on in the back seat. At one point the driver said, .For
God’s sakes, you’re rocking the boat back there.. Actually we were; the car was swaying as Dean
and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank
tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our
lives.
.Oh, man! man! man!. moaned Dean. .And it’s not even the beginning of it - and now here we
are at last going east together, we’ve never gone east together, Sal, think of it, we’ll dig Denver
together and see what everybody’s doing although that matters little to us, the point being that we
know what IT is and we know TIME and we know that everything is really FINE.. Then he
whispered, clutching my sleeve, sweating, .Now you just dig them in front. They have worries,
they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas,
the weather, how they’ll get there - and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see. But they need
to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls
really won’t be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having
once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and
all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end. Listen! Listen! Well
now,’ he mimicked, .I don’t know - maybe we shouldn’t get gas in that station. I read recently in
National Petroffious Petroleum News that this kind of gas has a great deal of O-Octane gook in it
and someone once told me it even had semi-official high-frequency cock in it, and I don’t know, well
I just don’t feel like it anyway . . .’ Man, you dig all this.. He was poking me furiously in the ribs to
understand. I tried my wildest best. Bing, bang, it was all Yes! Yes! Yes! in the back seat and the
people up front were mopping their brows with fright and wishing they’d never picked us up at the
travel bureau. It was only the beginning, too.
In Sacramento the fag slyly bought a room in a hotel and invited Dean and me to come up for a
drink, while the couple went to sleep at relatives’, and in the hotel room Dean tried everything in the
book to get money from the fag. It was insane. The fag began by saying he was very glad we had
come along because he liked young men like us, and would we believe it, but he really didn’t like
girls and had recently concluded an affair with a man in Frisco in which he had taken the male role
and the man the female role. Dean plied him with businesslike questions and nodded eagerly. The fag
said he would like nothing better than to know what Dean thought about all this. Warning him first
that he had once been a hustler in his youth, Dean asked him how much money he had. I was in the
