happened to Bobby Thomson when we left him thirty seconds ago with a man on third. Yes!.
Later in the afternoon we went out and played baseball with the kids in the sooty field by the
Long Island railyard. We also played basketball so frantically the younger boys said, .Take it easy,
you don’t have to kill yourself.. They bounced smoothly all around us and beat us with ease. Dean
and I were sweating. At one point Dean fell flat on his face on the concrete court. We huffed and
puffed to get the ball away from the boys; they turned and flipped it away. Others darted in and
smoothly shot over our heads. We jumped at the basket like maniacs, and the younger boys just
reached up and grabbed the ball from our sweating hands and dribbled away. We were like hotrock
blackbelly tenorman Mad of American back-alley go-music trying to play basketball against Stan
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Getz and Cool Charlie. They thought we were crazy. Dean and I went back home playing catch
from each sidewalk of the street. We tried extra-special catches, diving over bushes and barely
missing posts. When a car came by I ran alongside and flipped the ball to Dean just barely behind
the vanishing bumper. He darted and caught it and rolled in the grass, and flipped it back for me to
catch on the other side of a parked bread truck. I just made it with my meat hand and threw it back
so Dean had to whirl and back up and fall on his back across the hedges. Back in the house Dean
took his wallet, har-rumphed, and handed my aunt the fifteen dollars he owed her from the time we
got a speeding ticket in Washington. She was completely surprised and pleased. We had a big
supper. .Well, Dean,. said my aunt, .I hope you’ll be able to take care of your new baby that’s
coming and stay married this time..
.Yes, yass, yes..
.You can’t go all over the country having babies like that’ Those poor little things’ll grow up
helpless. You’ve got to offer them a chance to live.. He looked at his feet and nodded. In the raw
red dusk we said good-by, on a bridge over a superhighway.
.I hope you’ll be in New York when I get back,. I told him.
.All I hope, Dean, is someday we’ll be able to live on the same street with our families and get to
be a couple of oldtimers together..
.That’s right, man - you know that I pray for it completely mindful of the troubles we both had
and the troubles coming, as your aunt knows and reminds me. I didn’t want the new baby, Inez
insisted, and we had a fight. Did you know Marylou got married to a used-car dealer in Frisco and
she’s having a baby?.
.Yes. We’re all getting in there now.. Ripples in the upside-down lake of the void, is what I
should have said. The bottom of the world is gold and the world is upside down. He took out a
snapshot of Camille in Frisco with the new baby girl. The shadow of a man crossed the child on the
sunny pavement, two long trouser legs in the sadness. .Who’s that?.
.That’s only Ed Dunkel. He came back to Galatea, they’re gone to Denver now. They spent a
day taking pictures..
Ed Dunkel, his compassion unnoticed like the compassion of saints. Dean took out other pictures.
I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder,
thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in
the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot
of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless
and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance. .Good-by, good-by.. Dean walked off in
the long red dusk. Locomotives smoked and reeled above him. His shadow followed him, it aped his
walk and thoughts and very being. He turned and waved coyly, bashfully. He gave me the boomer’s
highball, he jumped up and down, he yelled something I didn’t catch. He ran around in a circle. All
the time he came closer to the concrete corner of the railroad overpass. He made one last signal. I
waved back. Suddenly he bent to his life and walked quickly out of sight. I gaped into the bleakness
of my own days. I had an awful long way to go too.
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2
The following midnight, singing this little song,
Home in Missoula,
Home in Truckee,
Home in Opelousas,
Ain’t no home for me.
Home in old Medora,
Home in Wounded Knee,
Home in Ogallala,
Home I’ll never be,
I took the Washington bus; wasted some time there wandering around; went out of my way to
see the Blue Ridge, heard the bird of Shenandoah and visited Stonewall Jackson’s grave; at dusk
stood expectorating in the Kanawha River and walked the hillbilly night of Charleston, West Virginia;
at midnight Ashland, Kentucky, and a lonely girl under the marquee of a closed-up show. The dark
and mysterious Ohio, and Cincinnati at dawn. Then Indiana fields again, and St. Louis as ever in its
great valley clouds of afternoon. The muddy cobbles and the Montana logs, the broken steamboats,
the ancient signs, the grass and the ropes by the river. The endless poem. By night Missouri, Kansas
fields, Kansas night-cows in the secret wides, crackerbox towns with a sea for the end of every
street; dawn in Abilene. East Kansas grasses become West Kansas rangelands that climb up to the
hill of the Western night.
Henry Glass was riding the bus with me. He had got on at Terre Haute, Indiana, and now he said
to me, .I’ve told you why I hate this suit I’m wearing, it’s lousy - but ain’t all.. He showed me
papers. He had just been released from Terre Haute federal pen; the rap was for stealing and selling
cars in Cincinnati. A young, curly-haired kid of twenty. .Soon’s I get to Denver I’m selling this suit in
a pawnshop and getting me jeans. Do you know what they did to me in that prison? Solitary
confinement with a Bible; I used it to sit on the stone floor; when they seed I was doing that they
took the Bible away and brought back a leetle pocket-size one so big. Couldn’t sit on it so I read the
whole Bible and Testament. Hey-hey - . he poked me, munching his candy, he was always eating
candy because his stomach had been ruined in the pen and couldn’t stand anything else - .you know
they’s some real hot things in that Bible.. He told me what it was to .signify.. .Anybody that’s
leaving jail soon and starts talking about his release date is ‘signifying’ to the other fellas that have to
stay. We take him by the neck and say, ’Don’t signify with me!’ Bad thing, to signify - y’hear me?.
.I won’t signify, Henry..
.Anybody signify with me, my nose opens up, I get mad enough to kill. You know why I been in
jail all my life? Because I lost my temper when I was thirteen years old. I was in a movie with a boy
and he made a crack about my mother -you know that dirty word - and I took out my jackknife
and cut up his throat and woulda killed him if they hadn’t drug me off. Judge said, ‘Did you know
what you were doing when you attacked your friend?’ ‘Yessir, Your Honor, I did, I wanted to kill
the sonofabitch and still do.’ So I didn’t get no parole and went straight to reform school. I got piles
too from sitting in solitary. Don’t ever go to a federal pen, they’re worstest. Sheet, I could talk all
night it’s been so long since I talked to somebody. You don’t know how good I feel coming out.
You just sitting in that bus when I got on - riding through Terre Haute - what was you thinking?. , .I
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was just sitting there riding..
. .Me, I was singing. I sat down next to you ‘cause I was afraid to set down next to any gals for
fear I go crazy and reach under their dress. I gotta wait awhile..
.Another hitch in prison and you’ll be put away for life. You better take it easy from now..
.That’s what I intend to do, only trouble is m’nose opens up and I can’t tell what I’m doing..
He was on his way to live with his brother and sister-in-law; they had a job for him in Colorado.
His ticket was bought by the feds, his destination the parole. Here was a young kid like Dean had
been; his blood boiled too much for him to bear; his nose opened up; but no native strange saintliness
to save him from the iron fate.
.Be a buddy and watch m’nose don’t open up in Denver, will you, Sal? Mebbe I can get to my
brother’s safe..
When we arrived in Denver I took him by the arm to Larimer Street to pawn the penitentiary suit.
The old Jew immediately sensed what it was before it was half unwrapped. .I don’t want that damn
thing here; I get them every day from the Canyon City boys..
All of Larimer Street was overrun with ex-cons trying to sell their prison-spun suits. Henry ended
up with the thing under his arm in a paper bag and walked around in brand-new jeans and sports
shirt. We went to Dean’s old Glenarm bar -on the way Henry threw the suit in an ashcan - and
called up Tim Gray. It was evening now.
.You?. chuckled Tim Gray. .Be right over..
In ten minutes he came loping into the bar with Stan Shephard. They’d both had a trip to France
and were tremendously disappointed with their Denver lives. They loved Henry and bought him
beers. He began spending all his penitentiary money left and right. Again I was back in the soft, dark
Denver night with its holy alleys and crazy houses. We started hitting all the bars in town, roadhouses
out on West Colfax, Five Points Negro bars, the works.
Stan Shephard had been waiting to meet me for years and now for the first time we were
suspended together in front of a venture. .Sal, ever since I came back from France I ain’t had any
idea what to do with myself. Is it true you’re going to Mexico? Hot damn, I could go with you? I can
get a hundred bucks and once I get there sign up for GI Bill in Mexico City College..
Okay, it was agreed, Stan was coming with me. He was a rangy, bashful, shock-haired Denver
boy with a big con-man smile and slow, easy-going Gary Cooper movements. .Hot damn!. he said
and stuck his thumbs on his belt and ambled down the street, swaying from side to side but slowly.
His grandfather was having it out with him. He had been opposed to France and now he was
opposed to the idea of going to Mexico. Stan was wandering around Denver like a bum because of
his fight with his grandfather. That night after we’d done all our drinking and restrained Henry from
getting his nose opened up in the Hot Shoppe on Colfax, Stan scraggled off to sleep in Henry’s hotel
room on Glenarm. .I can’t even come home late - my grandfather starts fighting with me, then he
turns on my mother. I tell you, Sal, I got to get out of Denver quick or I’ll go crazy..
Well, I stayed at Tim Gray’s and then later Babe Rawlins fixed up a neat little basement room for
me and we all ended up there with parties every night for a week. Henry vanished off to his brother’s
and we never saw him again and never will know if anybody’s signified with him since and if they’ve
put him away in an iron hall or if he busts his gaskets in the night free.
Tim Gray, Stan, Babe, and I spent an entire week of afternoons in lovely Denver bars where the
waitresses wear slacks and cut around with bashful, loving eyes, not hardened waitresses but
waitresses that fall in love with the clientele and have explosive affairs and huff and sweat and suffer
from one bar to another; and we spent the same week in nights at Five Points listening to jazz,
drinking booze in crazy Negro saloons and gabbing till five o’clock in the morn in my basement.
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Noon usually found us reclined in Babe’s back yard among the little Denver kids who played
cowboys and Indians and dropped on us from cherry trees in bloom. I was having a wonderful time
and the whole world opened up before me because I had no dreams. Stan and I plotted to make
Tim Gray come with us, but Tim was stuck to his Denver life.
I was getting ready to go to Mexico when suddenly Denver Doll called me one night and said,
.Well, Sal, guess who’s coming to Denver?. I had no idea. .He’s on his way already, I got this
news from my grapevine. Dean bought a car and is coming out to join you.. Suddenly I had a vision
of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching
like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing
down on me. I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes;
I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparking flames shooting out from it; I
saw the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, through
cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers. It came like wrath to the West. I knew Dean had gone mad
again. There was no chance to send money to either wife if he took all his savings out of the bank
and bought a car. Everything was up, the jig and all. Behind him charred ruins smoked. He rushed
westward over the groaning and awful continent again, and soon he would arrive. We made hasty
preparations for Dean. News was that he was going to drive me to Mexico.
.Do you think he’ll let me come along?. asked Stan in awe.
.I’ll talk to him,. I said grimly. We didn’t know what to expect. .Where will he sleep? What’s he
going to eat? Are there any girls for him?. It was like the imminent arrival of Gargantuan preparations
had to be made to widen the gutters of Denver and foreshorten certain laws to fit his suffering bulk
and bursting ecstasies.
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3
It was like an old-fashioned movie when Dean arrived. I was in Babe’s house in a golden
afternoon. A wore about the house. Her mother was away in Europe. The chaperon aunt was called
Charity; she was seventy-five years old and spry as a chicken. In the Rawlins family, which stretched
all over the West, she was continually shuttling from one house to another and making herself
generally useful. At one time she’d had dozens of sons. They were all gone; they’d all abandoned
her. She was old but she was interested in everything we did and said. She shook her head sadly
when we took slugs of whisky in the living room. .Now you might go out in the yard for that, young
man.. Upstairs - it was a kind of boarding house that summer - lived a guy called Tom who was
hopelessly in love with Babe. He came from Vermont, from a rich family, they said, and had a career
waiting for him there and everything, but he preferred being where Babe was. In the evenings he sat
in the living room with his face burning behind a newspaper and every time one of us said anything he
heard but made no sign. He particularly burned when Babe said something. When we forced him to
put down the paper he looked at us with incalculable boredom and suffering. .Eh? Oh yes, I
suppose so.. He usually said just that.
Charity sat in her corner, knitting, watching us all with her birdy eyes. It was her job to chaperon,
it was up to her to see nobody swore. Babe sat giggling on the couch. Tim Gray, Stan Shephard,
and I sprawled around in chairs. Poor Tom suffered the tortures. He got up, yawned, and said,
.Well, another day another dollar, good night,. and disappeared upstairs. Babe had no use whatever
for him as a lover. She was in love with Tim Gray; he wriggled like an eel out of her grasp. We were
sitting around like this on a sunny afternoon toward suppertime when Dean pulled up in front in his
jalopy and jumped out in a tweed suit with vest and watch chain.
.Hup! hup!. I heard out on the street. He was with Roy Johnson, who’d just returned from
Frisco with his wife Dorothy and was living in Denver again. So were Dunkel and Galatea Dunkel,
and Tom Snark. Everybody was in Denver again. I went out on the porch. .Well, m’boy,. said
Dean, sticking out his big hand, .I see everything is all right on this end of the stick. Hello hello
hello,. he said to everybody. .Oh yes, Tim Gray, Stan Shephard, howd’y’do!. We introduced him
to Charity. .Oh yass, howd’y’do. This is m’friend Roy Johnson here, was so kind as to accompany
me, harrumph! egad! kaff! kaff! Major Hoople, sir,. he said, sticking out his hand to Tom, who
stared at him. .Yass, yass. Well, Sal old man, what’s the story, when do we take off for Mexico?
Tomorrow afternoon? Fine, fine. Ahem! And now, Sal, I have exactly sixteen minutes to make it to
Ed Dunkel’s house, where I am about to recover my old railroad watch which I can pawn on
Larimer Street before closing time, meanwhile buzzing very quickly and as thoroughly as time allows
to see if my old man by chance may be in Jiggs’ Buffet or some of the other bars and then I have an
appointment with the barber Doll always told me to patronize and I have not myself changed over
the years and continue with that policy - kaff! kaff! At six o’clock sharp.’ - sharp, hear me? - I want
you to be right here where I’ll come buzzing by to get you for one quick run to Roy Johnson’s house,
play Gillespie and assorted bop records, an hour of relaxation prior to any kind of further evening
you and Tim and Stan and Babe may have planned for tonight irrespective of my arrival which
incidentally was exactly forty-five minutes ago in my old thirty-seven Ford which you see parked out
there, I made it together with a long pause in Kansas City seeing my cousin, not Sam Brady but the
younger one . . .. And saying all these things, he was busily changing from his suitcoat to T-shirt in
the living-room alcove just out of sight of everyone and transferring his watch to another pair of pants
that he got out of the same old battered trunk.
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.And Inez?. I said. .What happened in New York?.
.Officially, Sal, this trip is to get a Mexican divorce, cheaper and quicker than any kind. I’ve
Camille’s agreement at last and everything is straight, everything is fine, everything is lovely and we
know that we are now not worried about a single thing, don’t we, Sal?.
Well, okay, I’m always ready to follow Dean, so we all bustled to the new set of plans and
arranged a big night, and it was an unforgettable night. There was a party at Ed Dunkel’s brother’s
house. Two of his other brothers are bus-drivers. They sat there in awe of everything that went on.
There was a lovely spread on the table, cake and drinks. Ed Dunkel looked happy and prosperous.
.Well, are you all set with Galatea now?.
.Yessir,. said Ed, .I sure am. I’m about to go to Denver U, you know, me and Roy..
.What are you going to take up?.
.Oh, sociology and all that field, you know. Say, Dean gets crazier every year, don’t he?.
.He sure does..
Galatea Dunkel was there. She was trying to talk to somebody, but Dean held the whole floor.
He stood and performed before Shephard, Tim, Babe, and myself, who all sat side by side in kitchen
chairs along the wall. Ed Dunkel hovered nervously behind him. His poor brother was thrust into the
background. .Hup! hup!. Dean was saying, tugging at his shirt, rubbing his belly, jumping up and
down. .Yass, well - we’re all together now and the years have rolled severally behind us and yet you
see none of us have really changed, that’s what so amazing, the dura - the dura - bility - in fact to
prove that I have here a deck of cards with which I can tell very accurate fortunes of all sorts.. It
was the dirty deck. Dorothy Johnson and Roy Johnson sat stiffly in a corner. It was a mournful party.
Then Dean suddenly grew quiet and sat in a kitchen chair between Stan and me and stared straight
ahead with rocky doglike wonder and paid no attention to anybody.
He simply disappeared for a moment to gather up more energy. If you touched him he would
sway like a boulder suspended on a pebble on the precipice of a cliff. He might come crashing down
or just sway rocklike. Then the boulder exploded into a flower and his face lit up with a lovely smile
and he looked around like a man waking up and said, .Ah, look at all the nice people that are sitting
here with me. Isn’t it nice! Sal, why, like I was tellin Min just t’other day, why, urp, ah, yes!. He got
up and went across the room, hand outstretched to one of the bus-drivers in the party. .Howd’y’do.
My name is Dean Moriarty. Yes, I remember you well. Is everything all right? Well, well. Look at
the lovely cake. Oh, can I have some? Just me? Miserable me?. Ed’s sister said yes. .Oh, how
wonderful. People are so nice. Cakes and pretty things set out on a table and all for the sake of
wonderful little joys and delights. Hmm, ah, yes, excellent, splendid, harrumph, egad!. And he stood
swaying in the middle of the room, eating his cake and looking at everyone with awe. He turned and
looked around behind him. Everything amazed him, everything he saw. People talked in groups all
around the room, and he said, .Yes! That’s right!. A picture on the wall made him stiffen to
attention. He went up and looked closer, he backed up, he stooped, he jumped up, he wanted to
see from all possible levels and angles, he tore at his T-shirt in exclamation, .Damn!. He had no idea
of the impression he was making and cared less. People were now beginning to look at Dean with
maternal and paternal affection glowing in their faces. He was finally an Angel, as I always knew he
would become; but like any Angel he still had rages and furies, and that night when we all left the
party and repaired to the Windsor bar in one vast brawling gang, Dean became frantically and
demoniacally and seraphically drunk.
Remember that the Windsor, once Denver’s great Gold Rush’ hotel and in many respects a point
of interest - in the big saloon downstairs bullet holes are still in the walls - had once been Dean’s
home. He’d lived here with his father in one of the rooms upstairs. He was no tourist. He drank in
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this saloon like the ghost of his father; he slopped down wine, beer, and whisky like water. His face
got red and sweaty and he bellowed and hollered at the bar and staggered across the dance-floor
where honkytonkers of the West danced with girls and tried to play the piano, and he threw his arms
around ex-cons and shouted with them in the uproar. Meanwhile everybody in our party sat around
two immense tables stuck together. There were Denver D. Doll, Dorothy and Roy Johnson, a girl
from Buffalo, Wyoming, who was Dorothy’s friend, Stan, Tim Gray, Babe, me, Ed Dunkel, Tom
Snark, and several others, thirteen in all. Doll was having a great time: he took a peanut machine and
set it on the table before him and poured pennies in it and ate peanuts. He suggested we all write
something on a penny postcard and mail it to Carlo Marx in New York. We wrote crazy things. The
fiddle music whanged in the Larimer Street night. .Isn’t it fun?. yelled Doll. In the men’s room Dean
and I punched the door and tried to break it but it was an inch thick. I cracked a bone in my middle
finger and didn’t even realize it till the next day. We were fumingly drunk. Fifty glasses of beer sat on
our tables at one time. All you had to do was rush around and sip from each one. Canyon City ex-
cons reeled and gabbled with us. In the foyer outside the saloon old former prospectors sat dreaming
over their canes under the tocking old clock. This fury had been known by them in greater days.
Everything swirled. There were scattered parties everywhere. There was even a party in a castle to
which we all drove - except Dean, who ran off elsewhere - and in this castle we sat at a great table
in the hall and shouted. There were a swimming pool and grottoes outside. I had finally found the
castle where the great snake of the world was about to rise up.
Then in the late night it was just Dean and I and Stan Shephard and Tim Gray and Ed Dunkel and
Tommy Snark in one car and everything ahead of us. We went to Mexican town, we went to Five
Points, we reeled around. Stan Shephard was out of his mind with joy. He kept yelling,
.Sonofabitch! Hot damn!. in a high squealing voice and slapping his knees. Dean was mad about
him. He repeated everything Stan said and phewed and wiped the sweat off his face. .Are we gonna
get our kicks, Sal, travelin down to Mexico with this cat Stan! Yes!. It was our last night in holy
Denver, we made it big and wild. It all ended up with wine in the basement by candlelight, and
Charity creeping around upstairs in her nightgown with a flashlight. We had a colored guy with us
now, called himself Gomez. He floated around Five Points and didn’t give a damn. When we saw
him, Tommy Snark called out, .Hey, is your name Johnny?.
Gomez just backed up and passed us once more and said, .Now will you repeat what you said?.
.I said are you the guy they call Johnny?.
Gomez floated back and tried again. .Does this look a little more like him? Because I’m tryin my
best to be Johnny but I just can’t find the way..
.Well, man, come on with us!. cried Dean, and Gomez jumped in and we were off. We
whispered frantically in the basement so as not to create disturbance with the neighbors. At nine
o’clock in the morning everybody had left except Dean and Shephard, who were still yakking like
maniacs. People got up to make breakfast and heard strange subterranean voices saying, .Yes!
Yes!. Babe cooked a big breakfast. The time was coming to scat off to Mexico.
Dean took the car to the nearest station and had everything shipshape. It was a ‘37 Ford sedan
with the right-side door unhinged and tied on the frame. The right-side front seat was also broken,
and you sat there leaning back with your face to the tattered roof. .Just like Min’ Bill,. said Dean.
.We’ll go coughing and bouncing down to Mexico; it’ll take us days and days.. I looked over the
map: a total of over a thousand miles, mostly Texas, to the border at Laredo, and then another 767
miles through all Mexico to the great city near the cracked Isthmus and Oaxacan heights. I couldn’t
imagine this trip. It was the most fabulous of all. It was no longer east-west, but magic south. We
saw a vision of the entire Western Hemisphere rockribbing clear down to Tierra del Fuego and us
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flying down the curve of the world into other tropics and other worlds. .Man, this will finally take us
to IT!. said Dean with definite faith. He tapped my arm. .Just wait and see. Hoo! Wheel.
I went with Shephard to conclude the last of his Denver business, and met his poor grandfather,
who stood in the door of the house, saying, .Stan - Stan - Stan..
.What is it, Granpaw?.
.Don’t go..
.Oh, it’s settled, I have to go now; why do you have to do that?. The old man had gray hair and
