bathroom. The fag became extremely sullen and I think suspicious of Dean’s final motives, turned
over no money, and made vague promises for Denver. He kept counting his money and checking on
his wallet. Dean threw up his hands and gave up. .You see, man, it’s better not to bother. Offer
them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken.. But he had
sufficiently conquered the owner of the Plymouth to take over the wheel without remonstrance, and
now we really traveled.
We left Sacramento at dawn and were crossing the Nevada desert by noon, after a hurling
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passage of the Sierras that made the fag and the tourists cling to each other in the back seat. We
were in front, we took over. Dean was happy again. All he needed was a wheel in his hand and four
on the road. He talked about how bad a driver Old Bull Lee was and to demonstrate - .Whenever a
huge big truck like that one coming loomed into sight it would take Bull infinite time to spot it, ’cause
he couldn’t see, man, he can’t see.. He rubbed his eyes furiously to show. .And I’d say, ‘Whoop,
look out, Bull, a truck,’ and he’d say, ‘Eh? what’s that you say, Dean?’ ’Truck! truck!’ and at the
very last moment he would go right up to the truck like this - . And Dean hurled the Plymouth
head-on at the truck roaring our way, wobbled and hovered in front of it a moment, the truckdriver’s
face growing gray before our eyes, the people in the back seat subsiding in gasps of horror, and
swung away at the last moment. .Like that, you see, exactly like that, how bad he was.. I wasn’t
scared at all; I knew Dean. The people in the back seat were speechless. In fact they were afraid to
complain: God knew what Dean would do, they thought, if they should ever complain. He balled
right across the desert in this manner, demonstrating various ways of how not to drive, how his father
used to drive jalopies, how great drivers made curves, how bad drivers hove over too far in the
beginning and had to scramble at the curve’s end, and so on. It was a hot, sunny afternoon. Reno,
Battle Mountain, Elko, all the towns along the Nevada road shot by one after another, and at dusk
we were in the Salt Lake flats with the lights of Salt Lake City infinitesimally glimmering almost a
hundred miles across the mirage of the flats, twice showing, above and below the curve of the earth,
one clear, one dim. I told Dean that the thing that bound us all together in this world was invisible,
and to prove it pointed to long lines of telephone poles that curved off out of sight over the bend of a
hundred miles of salt. His floppy bandage, all dirty now, shuddered in the air, his face was a light.
.Oh yes, man, dear God, yes, yes!. Suddenly he stopped the car and collapsed. I turned and saw
him huddled in the corner of the seat, sleeping. His face was down on his good hand, and the
bandaged hand automatically and dutifully remained in the air.
The people in the back seat sighed with relief. I heard them -whispering mutiny. .We can’t let him
drive any more, he’s absolutely crazy, they must have let him out of an asylum or something..
I rose to Dean’s defense and leaned back to talk to them. .He’s not crazy, he’ll be all right, and
don’t worry about his driving, he’s the best in the world..
.I just can’t stand it,. said the girl in a suppressed, hysterical whisper. I sat back and enjoyed
nightfall on the desert and waited for poor child Angel Dean to wake up again. We were on a hill
overlooking Salt Lake City’s neat patterns of light and he opened his eyes to the place in this spectral
world where he was born, unnamed and bedraggled, years ago.
.Sal, Sal, look, this is where I was born, think of it! People change, they eat meals year after year
and change with every meal. EE! Look!. He was so excited it made me cry. Where would it all
lead? The tourists insisted on driving the car the rest of the way to Denver. Okay, we didn’t care.
We sat in the back and talked. But they got too tired in the morning and Dean took the wheel in the
eastern Colorado desert at Craig. We had spent almost the entire night crawling cautiously over
Strawberry Pass in Utah and lost a lot of time. They went to sleep. Dean headed pellmell for the
mighty wall of Berthoud Pass that stood a hundred miles ahead on the roof of the world, a
tremendous Gibraltarian door shrouded in clouds. He took Berthoud Pass like a June bug - same as
at Tehachapi, cutting off the motor and floating it, passing everybody and never halting the rhythmic
advance that the mountains themselves intended, till we overlooked the great hot plain of Denver
again - and Dean was home.
It was with a great deal of silly relief that these people let us off the car at the corner of Ayth and
Federal. Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no
matter, the road is life.
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6
Now we had a number of circumstances to deal with in Denver, and they were of an entirely
different order from those of 1947. We could either get another travel-bureau car at once or stay a
few days for kicks and look for his father.
We were both exhausted and dirty. In the John of a restaurant I was at a urinal blocking Dean’s
way to the sink and I stepped, out before I was finished and resumed at another urinal, and said to
Dean, .Dig this trick..
.Yes, man,. he said, washing his hands at the sink, .it’s a very good trick but awful on your
kidneys and because you’re getting a little older now every time you do this eventually years of
misery in your old age, awful kidney miseries for the days when you sit in parks..
It made me mad. .Who’s old? I’m not much older than you are!.
.I wasn’t saying that, man!.
.Ah,. I said, .you’re always making cracks about my age. I’m no old fag like that fag, you don’t
have to warn me about! my kidneys.. We went back to the booth and just as the waitress set down
the hot-roast-beef sandwiches - and ordinarily Dean would have leaped to wolf the food at once - I
said to cap my anger, .And I don’t want to hear any more of it.. And suddenly Dean’s eyes grew
tearful and he got up and left his food steaming there and walked out of the restaurant. I wondered if
he was just wandering off forever. I didn’t care, = I was so mad - I had nipped momentarily and
turned it down on Dean. But the sight of his uneaten food made me sadder than anything in years. I
shouldn’t have said that ... he likes to eat so much . . . He’s never left his food like this . . . What the
hell. That’s showing him, anyway.
Dean stood outside the restaurant for exactly five minutes and then came back and sat down.
.Well,. I said, .what were you doing out there, knotting up your fists? Cursing me, thinking up new
gags about my kidneys?.
Dean mutely shook his head. .No, man, no, man, you’re all completely wrong. If you want to
know, well - .
.Go ahead, tell me.. I said all this and never looked up from my food. I felt like a beast.
.I was crying,. said Dean.
.Ah hell, you never cry..
.You say that? Why do you think I don’t cry?.
.You don’t die enough to cry.. Every one of these things I said was a knife at myself. Everything
I had ever secretly held against my brother was coming out: how ugly I was and what filth I was
discovering in the depths of my own impure psychologies.
Dean was shaking his head. .No, man, I was crying..
.Go on, I bet you were so mad you had to leave..
.Believe me, Sal, really do believe me if you’ve ever believed anything about me.. I knew he was
telling the truth and yet I didn’t want to bother with the truth and when I looked up at him I think I
was cockeyed from cracked intestinal twistings in my awful belly. Then I knew I was wrong.
.Ah, man, Dean, I’m sorry, I never acted this way before with you. Well, now you know me.
You know I don’t have close relationships with anybody any more - I don’t know what to do with
these things. I hold things in my hand like pieces of crap and don’t know where to put it down. Let’s
forget it.. The holy con-man began to eat. .It’s not my fault! it’s not my fault!. I told him. .Nothing
in this lousy world is my fault, don’t you see that? I don’t want it to be and it can’t be and it won’t
be..
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.Yes, man, yes, man. But please harken back and believe me..
.I do believe you, I do.. This was the sad story of that afternoon. All kinds of tremendous
complications arose that night when Dean and I went to stay with the Okie family. These had been
neighbors of mine in my Denver solitude of two weeks before. The mother was a wonderful woman
in jeans who drove coal trucks in winter mountains to support her kids, four in all, her husband
having left her years before when they were traveling around the country in a trailer. They had rolled
all the way from Indiana to LA in that trailer. After many a good time and a big Sunday-afternoon
drunk in crossroads bars and laughter and guitar-playing in the night, the big lout had suddenly
walked off across the dark field and never returned. Her children were wonderful. The eldest was a
boy, who wasn’t around that summer but in a camp in the mountains; next was a lovely thirteen-
year-old daughter who wrote poetry and picked flowers in the fields and wanted to grow up and be
an actress in Hollywood, Janet by name; then came the little ones, little Jimmy who sat around the
campfire at night and cried for his .pee-tater. before it was half roasted, and little Lucy who made
pets of worms, horny toads, beetles, and anything that crawled, and gave them names and places to
live. They had four dogs. They lived their ragged and joyous lives on the little new-settlement street
and were the butt of the neighbors’ semi-respectable sense of propriety only because the poor
woman’s husband had left her and because they littered up the yard. At night all the lights of Denver
lay like a great wheel on the plain below, for the house was in that part of the West where the
mountains roll down foothilling to the plain and where in primeval times soft waves must have washed
from sea-like Mississippi to make such round and perfect stools for the island-peaks like Evans and
Pike and Longs. Dean went there and of course he was all sweats and joy at the sight of them,
especially Janet, but I warned him not to touch her, and probably didn’t have to. The woman was a
great man’s woman and took to Dean right away but she was bashful and he was bashful. She said
Dean reminded her of the husband gone. .Just like him - oh, he was a crazy one, I tell ya!.
The result was uproarious beer-drinking in the littered living room, shouting suppers, and booming
Lone Ranger radio.
The complications rose like clouds of butterflies: the woman - Frankie, everyone called her - was
finally about to buy a jalopy as she had been threatening to do for years, and had recently come into
a few bucks toward one. Dean immediately took over the responsibility of selecting and naming the
price of the car, because of course he wanted to use it himself so as of yore he could pick up girls
coming out of high school in the afternoons and drive them up to the mountains. Poor innocent
Frankie was always agreeable to anything. But she was afraid to part with her money when they got
to the car lot and stood before the salesman. Dean sat right down in the dust of Alameda Boulevard
and beat his fists on his head. .For a hunnerd you can’t get anything better!. He swore he’d never
talk to her again, he cursed till his face was purple, he was about to jump in the car and drive k away
anyway. .Oh these dumb dumb dumb Okies, they’ll never change, how completely and how
unbelievably dumb, the moment it comes time to act, this paralysis, scared, hysterical, nothing
frightens em more than what they want - it’s my father my father my father all over again!.
Dean was very excited that night because his cousin Sam Brady was meeting us at a bar. He was
wearing a clean T-shirt and beaming all over. .Now listen, Sal, I must tell you about Sam - he’s my
cousin..
.By the way, have you looked for your father?.
.This afternoon, man, I went down to Jiggs’ Buffet where he used to pour draft beer in tender
befuddlement and get hell from the boss and go staggering out - no - and I went to the old
barbershop next to the Windsor - no, not there -old fella told me he thought he was - imagine! working
in a railroad gandy-dancing cookshack or sumpin for the Boston and Maine in New
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England! But I don’t believe him, they make up fractious stories for a dime. Now listen to hear. In
my childhood Sam Brady my close cousin was my absolute hero. He used to bootleg whisky from
the mountains and one time he had a tremendous fist fight with his brother that lasted two hours in the
yard and had the women screaming and terrified. We used to sleep together. The one man in the
family who took tender concern for me. And tonight I’m I going to see him again for the first time in
seven years, he just got back from Missouri..
.And what’s the pitch?.
.No pitch, man, I only want to know what’s been happening in the family - I have a family,
remember - and most; particularly, Sal, I want him to tell me things that I’ve forgot- -, ten in my
childhood. I want to remember, remember, I do!. I never saw Dean so glad and excited. While we
waited for: his cousin in the bar he talked to a lot of younger downtown < hipsters and hustlers and
checked on new gangs and goings-on. Then he made inquiries after Marylou, since she’d been in
Denver recently. .Sal, in my young days when I used to come to this corner to steal change off the
newsstand for bowery beef stew, that rough-looking cat you see out there standing had nothing but
murder in his heart, got into one horrible fight after another, I remember his scars even, till now years
and y-e-a-r-s of standing on the corner have finally softened him and chastened him ragely, here
completely he’s become sweet and willing and patient with everybody, he’s become a fixture on the
corner, you see how things happen?.
Then Sam arrived, a wiry, curly-haired man of thirty-five with work-gnarled hands. Dean stood in
awe before him.’ .No,. said Sam Brady, .I don’t drink any more..
.See? See?. whispered Dean in my ear. .He doesn’t drink any more and he used to be the
biggest whiskyleg in town, he’s got religion now, he told me over the phone, dig him,-dig the change
in a man - my hero has become so strange.. Sam Brady was suspicious of his young cousin. He
took us out for a spin in his old rattly coupe and immediately he made his position clear in regard to
Dean.
.Now look, Dean, I don’t believe you any more or anything you’re going to try to tell me. I came
to see you tonight because there’s a paper I want you to sign for the family. Your father is no longer
mentioned among us and we want absolutely nothing to do with him, and, I’m sorry to say, with you
either, any more.. I looked at Dean. His face dropped and darkened.
.Yass, yass,. he said. The cousin continued to drive us around and even bought us ice-cream
pops. Nevertheless Dean plied him with innumerable questions about the past and the cousin
supplied the answers and for a moment Dean almost began to sweat again with excitement. Oh,
where was his raggedy father that night? The cousin dropped us off at the sad lights of a carnival on
Alameda Boulevard at Federal. He made an appointment with Dean for the paper-signing next
afternoon and left. I told Dean I was sorry he had nobody in the world to believe in him.
.Remember that I believe in you. I’m infinitely sorry for the foolish grievance I held against you
yesterday afternoon..
.All right, man, it’s agreed,. said Dean. We dug the carnival together. There were merry-gorounds,
Ferris wheels, popcorn, roulette wheels, sawdust, and hundreds of young Denver kids in
jeans wandering around. Dust rose to the stars together with every sad music on earth. Dean was
wearing washed-out tight Levis and a T-shirt and looked suddenly like a real Denver character
again. There were motorcycle kids with visors and mustaches and beaded jackets hanging around
the shrouds in back of the tents with pretty girls in Levis and rose shirts. There were a lot of Mexican
girls too, and one amazing little girl about three feet high, a midget, with the most beautiful and tender
face in the world, who turned to her companion and said, .Man, let’s call up Gomez and cut out..
Dean stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of her. A great knife stabbed him from the darkness of
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the night. .Man, I love her, oh, love her . . .. We had to follow her around for a long time. She
finally went across the highway to make a phone call in a motel booth and Dean pretended to be
looking through the pages of the directory but was really all wound tight watching her. I tried to open
up a conversation with the lovey-doll’s friends but they paid no attention to us. Gomez arrived in a
rattly truck and took the girls off. Dean stood in the road, clutching his breast. .Oh, man, I almost
died. . . ..
.Why the hell didn’t you talk to her?.
.I can’t, I couldn’t . . .. We decided to buy some beer and go up to Okie Frankie’s and play
records. We hitched on the road with a bag of beer cans. Little Janet, Frankie’s thirteen- year-old
daughter, was the prettiest girl in the world and was about to grow up into a gone woman. Best of all
were he long, tapering, sensitive fingers that she used to talk wit like a Cleopatra Nile dance. Dean
sat in the farthest corner of the room, watching her with slitted eyes and saying, .Ye yes, yes.. Janet
was already aware of him; she turned to for protection. Previous months of that summer I had a lot
of time with her, talking about books and little thing she was interested in.
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7
Nothing happened that night; we went to sleep. Everything happened the next day. In the
afternoon De and I went to downtown Denver for our various chores and see the travel bureau for a
car to New York. On the way home in the late afternoon we started out for Okie Frankie’s up
Broadway, where Dean suddenly sauntered into a sports goods store, calmly picked up a softball on
the counter, came out, popping it up and down in his palm. Nobody (iced; nobody ever notices such
things. It was a drowsy, afternoon. We played catch as we went along. .We’ll get a travel-bureau
car for sure tomorrow..
A woman friend had given me a big quart of Old Grandad bourbon. We started drinking it at
Frankie’s hoi Across the cornfield in back lived a beautiful young chick that Dean had been trying to
make ever since he arrived. Trouble was brewing. He threw too many pebbles in window and
frightened her. As we drank the bourbon the littered living room with all its dogs and scattered toys
and sad talk, Dean kept running out the back kitchen door and crossing the cornfield to throw
pebbles and whistle. Once in a while Janet went out to peek. Suddenly Dean came back pale.
.Trouble, m’boy. That gal’s mother is after me with a shotgun and she got a gang of high-school kids
to beat me up from down the road..
.What’s this? Where are they?.
.Across the cornfield, m’boy.. Dean was drunk and didn’t care. We went out together and
crossed the cornfield in the moonlight. I saw groups of people on the dark dirt road.
.Here they come!. I heard.
.Wait a minute,. I said. .What’s the matter, please?.
The mother lurked in the background with a big shotgun across her arm. .That damn friend of
yours been annoying us long enough. I’m not the kind to call the law. If he comes back here once
more I’m gonna shoot and shoot to kill.. The high-school boys were clustered with their fists
knotted. I was so drunk I didn’t care either, but I soothed everybody some.
I said, .He won’t do it again. I’ll watch him; he’s my brother and listens to me. Please put your
gun away and don’t bother about anything..
.Just one more time!. she said firmly and grimly across the dark. .When my husband gets home
I’m sending him after you..
.You don’t have to do that; he won’t bother you any more, understand. Now be calm and it’s
okay.. Behind me Dean was cursing under his breath. The girl was peeking from her bedroom
window. I knew these people from before and they trusted me enough to quiet down a bit. I took
Dean by the arm and back we went over the moony cornrows.
.Woo-hee!. he yelled. .I’m gonna git drunk tonight.. We went back to Frankie and the kids.
Suddenly Dean got mad at a record little Janet was playing and broke it over his knee: it was a
hillbilly record. There was an early Dizzy Gillespie there that he valued - .Congo Blues,. with Max
West on drums. I’d given it to Janet before, and I told her as she wept to take it and break it over
Dean’s head. She went over and did so. Dean gaped dumbly, sensing everything. We all laughed.
Everything was all right. Then Frankie-Maw wanted to go out and drink beer in the roadhouse
saloons. .Lessgo!. yelled Dean. .Now dammit, if you’d bought that car I showed you Tuesday we
wouldn’t have to walk..
.I didn’t like that damn car!. yelled Frankie. Yang, yang, the kids started to cry. Dense, mothlike
eternity brooded in the crazy brown parlor with the sad wallpaper, the pink lamp, the excited faces.
Little Jimmy was frightened; I put him to sleep on the couch and trussed the dog on him. Frankie
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drunkenly called a cab and suddenly while we were waiting for it a phone call came for me from my
woman friend. She had a middle-aged cousin who hated my guts, and that earlier afternoon I had
written a letter to Old Bull Lee, who was now in Mexico City, relating the adventures of Dean and
myself and under what circumstances we were staying in Denver. I wrote: .I have a woman friend
who gives me whisky and money and big suppers..
I foolishly gave this letter to her middle-aged cousin to mail, right after a fried-chicken supper. He
opened it, read it, and took it at once to her to prove to her that I was a con-man. Now she was
calling me tearfully and saying she never wanted to see me again. Then the triumphant cousin got on
the phone and began calling me a bastard. As the cab honked outside and the kids cried and the
dogs barked and Dean danced with Frankie I yelled every conceivable curse I could think over that
phone and added all kinds of new ones, and in my drunken frenzy I told everybody over the phone
to go to hell and slammed it down and went out to get drunk.
We stumbled over one another to get out of the cab at the roadhouse, a hillbilly roadhouse near
the hills, and went in and ordered beers. Everything was collapsing, and to make things inconceivably
more frantic there was an ecstatic spastic fellow in the bar who threw his arms around Dean and
moaned in his face, and Dean went mad again with sweats and insanity, and to add still more to the
unbearable confusion Dean rushed out the next moment and stole a car right from the driveway and
took a dash to downtown Denver and came back with a newer, better one. Suddenly in the bar I
looked up and saw cops and people were milling around the driveway in the headlights of cruisers,
talking about the stolen car. .Somebody’s been stealing cars left and right here!. the cop was saying.
Dean stood right in back of him, listening and saying, .Ah yass, ah yass.. The cops went off to
check. Dean came in the bar and rocked back and forth with the poor spastic kid who had just
gotten married that day and was having a tremendous drunk while his bride waited somewhere. .Oh,
man, this guy is the greatest in the world!. yelled Dean. .Sal, Frankie, I’m going out and get a real
good car this time and we’ll all go and with Tony too. (the spastic saint) .and have a big drive in the
mountains.. And he rushed out. Simultaneously a cop rushed in and said a car stolen from
downtown Denver was parked in the driveway. People discussed it in knots. From the window I
saw Dean jump into the nearest car and roar off, and not a soul noticed him. A few minutes later he
was back in an entirely different car, a brand-new convertible. .This one is a beaut!. he whispered in
my ear. .The other one coughed too much - I left it at the crossroads, saw that lovely parked in front
of a farmhouse. Took a spin in Denver. Come on, man, let’s all go riding.. All the bitterness and
madness of his entire Denver life was blasting out of his system like daggers. His face was red and
sweaty and mean.
.No, I ain’t gonna have nothing to do with stolen cars..
.Aw, come on, man! Tony’ll come with me, won’t you, amazing darling Tony?. And Tony - a
thin, dark-haired, holy-eyed moaning foaming lost soul - leaned on Dean and groaned and groaned,
for he was sick suddenly and then for some odd intuitive reason he became terrified of Dean and
threw up his hands and drew away with terror writhing in his face. Dean bowed his head and
sweated. He ran out and drove away. Frankie and I found a cab in the driveway and decided to go
home. As the cabby drove us up the infinitely dark Alameda Boulevard along which I had walked
many and many a lost night the previous months of the summer, singing and moaning and eating the
stars and dropping the juices of my heart drop by drop on the hot tar, Dean suddenly hove up
behind us in the stolen convertible and began tooting and tooting and crowding us over and
screaming. The cabby’s face grew white.
.Just a friend of mine,. I said. Dean got disgusted with us and suddenly shot ahead at ninety miles
an hour, throwing spectral dust across the exhaust. Then he turned in at Frankie’s road and pulled up
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in front of the house; just as suddenly he took off again, U-turned, and went back toward town as
we got out of the cab and paid the fare. A few moments later as we waited anxiously in the dark
yard, he returned with still another car, a battered coupe, stopped it in a cloud of dust in front of the
house, and just staggered out and went straight into the bedroom and flopped dead drunk on the
bed. And there we were with a stolen car right on our doorstep.
I had to wake him up; I couldn’t get the car started to dump it somewhere far off. He stumbled
out of bed, wearing just his jockey shorts, and we got in the car together, while the kids giggled from
the windows, and went bouncing and flying straight over the hard alfalfa-rows at the end of the road
whomp-ti-whomp till finally the car couldn’t take any more and stopped dead under an old
cottonwood near the old mill. .Can’t go any farther,. said Dean simply and got out and started
walking back over the cornfield, about half a mile, in his shorts in the moonlight. We got back to the
