curves ninety miles an hour..
.I didn’t see you..
.We didn’t know you were there..
.Well, man, I’m going to San Francisco..
.Dean has Rita lined up for you tonight..
.Well, then, I’ll put it off.. I had no money. I sent my aunt an airmail letter asking her for fifty
dollars and said it would be the last money I’d ask; after that she would be getting money back from
me, as soon as I got that ship.
Then I went to meet Rita Bettencourt and took her back to the apartment. I got her in my
bedroom after a long talk in the dark of the front room. She was a nice little girl, simple and true, and
tremendously frightened of sex. I told her it was beautiful. I wanted to prove this to her. She let me
prove it, but I was too impatient and proved nothing. She sighed in the dark. .What do you want out
of life?. I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls.
.I don’t know,. she said. .Just wait on tables and try to get along.. She yawned. I put my hand
over her mouth and told her not to yawn. I tried to tell her how excited I was about life and the things
we could do together; saying that, and planning to leave Denver in two days. She turned away
wearily. We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when He
made life so sad. We made vague plans to meet in Frisco.
My moments in Denver were coming to an end, I could feel it when I walked her home, on the
way back I stretched out on the grass of an old church with a bunch of hobos, and their talk made
me want to get back on that road. Every now and then one would get up and hit a passer-by for a
dime. They talked of harvests moving north. It was warm and soft. I wanted to go and get Rita again
and tell her a lot more things, and really make love to her this time, and calm her fears about men.
Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to
sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk - real straight talk about souls, for
life is holy and every moment is precious. I heard the Denver and Rio Grande locomotive howling off
to the mountains. I wanted to pursue my star further.
Major and I sat sadly talking in the midnight hours. .Have you ever read Green Hills of Africa?
It’s Hemingway’s best.. We wished each other luck. We would meet in Frisco. 1 saw Rawlins
under a dark tree in the street. .Good-by, Ray. When do we meet again?. I went to look for Carlo
and Dean - nowhere to be found. Tim Gray shot his hand up in the air and said, .So you’re leaving,
Yo.. We called each other Yo. .Yep,. I said. The next few days I wandered around Denver.
It seemed to me every bum on Larimer Street maybe was Dean Moriarty’s father; Old Dean
Moriarty they called him, the Tinsmith. I went in the Windsor Hotel, where father and son had lived
and where one night Dean was frightfully waked up by the legless man on the rollerboard who
shared the room with them; he came thundering across the floor on his terrible wheels to touch the
boy. I saw the little midget newspaper-selling woman with the short legs, on the corner of Curtis and
15th. I walked around the sad honkytonks of Curtis Street; young kids in jeans and red shirts;
peanut shells, movie marquees, shooting parlors. Beyond the glittering street was darkness, and
beyond the darkness the West. I had to go.
37
At dawn I found Carlo. I read some of his enormous journal, slept there, and in the morning,
drizzly and gray, tall, six-foot Ed Dunkel came in with Roy Johnson, a handsome kid, and Tom
Snark, the clubfooted poolshark. They sat around and listened with abashed smiles as Carlo Marx
read them his apocalyptic, mad poetry. I slumped in my chair, finished. .Oh ye Denver birds!. cried
Carlo. We all filed out and went up a typical cobbled Denver alley between incinerators smoking
slowly. .I used to roll my hoop up this alley,. Chad King had told me. I wanted to see him do it; I
wanted to see Denver ten years ago when they were all children, and in the sunny cherry blossom
morning of springtime in the Rockies rolling their hoops up the joyous alleys full of promise - the
whole gang. And Dean, ragged and dirty, prowling by himself in his preoccupied frenzy.
Roy Johnson and I walked in the drizzle; I went to Eddie’s girl’s house to get back my wool plaid
shirt, the shirt of Shelton, Nebraska. It was there, all tied up, the whole enormous sadness of a shirt.
Roy Johnson said he’d meet me in Frisco. Everybody was going to Frisco. I went and found my
money had arrived. The sun came out, and Tim Gray rode a trolley with me to the bus station. I
bought my ticket to San Fran, spending half of the fifty, and got on at two o’clock in the afternoon.
Tim Gray waved good-by. The bus rolled out of the storied, eager Denver streets. .By God, I gotta
come back and see what else will happen!. I promised. In a last-minute phone call Dean said he and
Carlo might join me on the Coast; I pondered this, and realized I hadn’t talked to Dean for more
than five minutes in the whole time.
38
11
I was two weeks late meeting Remi Boncoeur. The bus trip from Denver to Frisco was uneventful
except that my whole soul leaped to it the nearer we got to Frisco. Cheyenne again, in the afternoon
this time, and then west over the range; crossing the Divide at midnight at Creston, arriving at Salt
Lake City at dawn - a city of sprinklers, the least likely place for Dean to have been born; then out
to Nevada in the hot sun, Reno by nightfall, its twinkling Chinese streets; then up the Sierra Nevada,
pines, stars, mountain lodges signifying Frisco romances - a little girl in the back seat, crying to her
mother, .Mama when do we get home to Truckee?. And Truckee itself, homey Truckee, and then
down the hill to the flats of Sacramento. I suddenly realized I was in California. Warm, palmy air - air
you can kiss - and palms. Along the storied Sacramento River on a superhighway; into the hills again;
up, down; and suddenly the vast expanse of bay (it was just before dawn) with the sleepy lights of
Frisco festooned across. Over the Oakland Bay Bridge I slept soundly for the first time since
Denver; so that I was rudely jolted in the bus station at Market and Fourth into the memory of the
fact that I was three thousand two hundred miles from my aunt’s house in Paterson, New Jersey. I
wandered out like a haggard ghost, and there she was, Frisco - long,. bleak streets with trolleywires
all shrouded in fog and whiteness. I stumbled around a few blocks. Weird bums (Mission and Third)
asked me for dimes in the dawn. I heard music somewhere. .Boy, am I going to dig all this later! But
now I’ve got to find Remi Boncoeur..
Mill City, where Remi lived, was a collection of shacks in a valley, housing-project shacks built
for Navy Yard workers during the war; it was in a canyon, and a deep one, treed profusedly on all
slopes. There were special stores and barber shops and tailor shops for the people of the project. It
was, so they say, the only community in America where whites and Negroes lived together
voluntarily; and that was so, and so wild and joyous a place I’ve never seen since. On the door of
Remi’s shack was the note he had pinned up there three weeks ago.
SAL PARADISE! [in huge letters, printed]
If nobody’s home climb in through the window.
Signed,
Remi Boncoeur.
The note was weatherbeaten and gray by now.
I climbed in and there he was, sleeping with his girl, Lee Ann - on a bed he stole from a merchant
ship, as he told me later; imagine the deck engineer of a merchant ship sneaking over the side in the
middle of the night with a bed, and heaving and straining at the oars to shore. This barely explains
Remi Boncoeur.
The reason I’m going into everything that happened in San Fran is because it ties up with
everything else all the way down the line. Remi Boncoeur and I met at prep school years ago; but the
thing that really linked us together was my former wife. Remi found her first. He came into my dorm
room one night and said, .Paradise, get up, the old maestro has come to see you.. I got up and
dropped some pennies on the floor when I put my pants on. It was four in the afternoon; I used to
sleep all the time in college. .All right, all right, don’t drop your gold all over the place. I have found
the gonest little girl in the world and I am going straight to the Lion’s Den with her tonight.. And he
dragged me to meet her. A week later she was going with me. Remi was a tall, dark, handsome
Frenchman (he looked like a kind of Marseille black-marketeer of twenty); because he was French
39
he had to talk in jazz American; his English was perfect, his French was perfect. He liked to dress
sharp, slightly on the collegiate side, and go out with fancy blondes and spend a lot of money. It’s not
that he ever blamed me for taking off with his girl; it was only a point that always tied us together;
that guy was loyal to me and had real affection for me, and God knows why.
When I found him in Mill City that morning he had fallen on the beat and evil days that come to
young guys in their middle twenties. He was hanging around waiting for a ship, and to earn his living
he had a job as a special guard in the barracks across the canyon. His girl Lee Ann had a bad tongue
and gave him a calldown every day. They spent all week saving pennies and went out Saturdays to
spend fifty bucks in three hours. Remi wore shorts around the shack, with a crazy Army cap on his
head. Lee Ann went around with her hair up in pincurls. Thus attired, they yelled at each other all
week. 1 never saw so many snarls in all my born days. But on Saturday night, smiling graciously at
each other, they took off like a pair of successful Hollywood characters and went on the town.
Remi woke up and saw me come in the window. His great laugh, one of the greatest laughs in the
world, dinned in my ear. .Aaaaah Paradise, he comes in through the window, he follows instructions
to a T. Where have you been, you’re two weeks late!. He slapped me on the back, he punched Lee
Ann in the ribs, he leaned on the wall and laughed and cried, he pounded the table so you could hear
it everywhere in Mill City, and that great long .Aaaaah. resounded around the canyon. .Paradise!.
he screamed. .The one and only indispensable Paradise..
I had just come through the little fishing village of Sausalito, and the first thing I said was, .There
must be a lot of Italians in Sausalito..
.There must be a lot of Italians in Sausalito!. he shouted at the top of his lungs. .Aaaaah!. He
pounded himself, he fell on the bed, he almost rolled on the floor. .Did you hear what Paradise said?
There must be a lot of Italians in Sausalito? Aaaah-haaa! Hoo! Wow! Wheel. He got red as a beet,
laughing. .Oh, you slay me, Paradise, you’re the funniest man in the world, and here you are, you
finally got here, he came in through the window, you saw him, Lee Ann, he followed instructions and
came in through the window. Aaah! Hooo!.
The strange thing was that next door to Remi lived a Negro called Mr. Snow whose laugh, I
swear on the Bible, was positively and finally the one greatest laugh in all this world. This Mr. Snow
began his laugh from the supper table when his old wife said something casual; he got up, apparently
choking, leaned on the wall, looked up to heaven, and started; he staggered through the door,
leaning on neighbors’ walls; he was drunk with it, he reeled throughout Mill City in the shadows,
raising his whooping triumphant call to the demon god that must have prodded him to do it. I don’t
know if he ever finished supper. There’s a possibility that Remi, without knowing it, was picking up
from this amazing man, Mr. Snow. And though Remi was having worklife problems and bad lovelife
with a sharp-tongued woman, he at least had learned to laugh almost better than anyone in the world,
and I saw all the fun we were going to have in Frisco.
The pitch was this: Remi slept with Lee Ann in the bed across the room, and I slept in the cot by
the window. I was not to touch Lee Ann. Remi at once made a speech concerning this. .I don’t
want to find you two playing around when you think I’m not looking. You can’t teach the old
maestro a new tune. This is an original saying of mine.. I looked at Lee Ann. She was a fetching
hunk, a honey-colored creature, but there was hate in her eyes for both of us. Her ambition was to
marry a rich man. She came from a small town in Oregon. She rued the day she ever took up with
Remi. On one of his big showoff weekends he spent a hundred dollars on her and she thought she’d
found an heir. Instead she was hung-up in this shack, and for lack of anything else she had to stay
there. She had a job in Frisco; she had to take the Greyhound bus at the crossroads and go in every
day. She never forgave Remi for it.
40
I was to stay in the shack and write a shining original story for a Hollywood studio. Remi was
going to fly down in a stratosphere liner with this harp under his arm and make us all rich; Lee Ann
was to go with him; he was going to introduce her to his buddy’s father, who was a famous director
and an intimate of W. C. Fields. So the first week I stayed in the shack in Mill City, writing furiously
at some gloomy tale about New York that I thought would satisfy a Hollywood director, and the
trouble with it was that it was too sad. Remi could barely read it, and so he just carried it down to
Hollywood a few weeks later. Lee Ann was too bored and hated us too much to bother reading it. I
spent countless rainy hours drinking coffee and scribbling. Finally I told Remi it wouldn’t do; I
wanted a job; I had to depend on them for cigarettes. A shadow of disappointment crossed Remi’s
brow - he was always being disappointed about the funniest things. He had a heart of gold.
He arranged to get me the same kind of job he had, as a guard in the barracks. I went through the
necessary routine, and to my surprise the bastards hired me. I was sworn in by the local police chief,
given a badge, a club, and now I was a special policeman. I wondered what Dean and Carlo and
Old Bull Lee would say about this. I had to have navy-blue trousers to go with my black jacket and
cop cap; for the first two weeks I had to wear Remi’s trousers; since he was so tall, and had a
potbelly from eating voracious meals out of boredom, I went flapping around like Charlie Chaplin to
my first night of work. Remi gave me a flashlight and his .32 automatic.
.Where’d you get this gun?. I asked.
.On my way to the Coast last summer I jumped off the train at North Platte, Nebraska, to stretch
my legs, and what did I see in the window but this unique little gun, which I promptly bought and
barely made the train..
And I tried to tell him what North Platte meant to me, buy-mg the whisky with the boys, and he
slapped me on the back and said I was the funniest man in the world.
With the flashlight to illuminate my way, I climbed the steep walls of the south canyon, got up on
the highway streaming! with cars Frisco-bound in the night, scrambled down the other! side, almost
falling, and came to the bottom of a ravine where! a little farmhouse stood near a creek and where
every blessed! night the same dog barked at me. Then it was a fast walk along a silvery, dusty road
beneath inky trees of California - a I road like in The Mark of Zorro and a road like all the roads!
you see in Western B movies. I used to take out my gun and] play cowboys in the dark. Then I
climbed another hill and! there were the barracks. These barracks were for the temporary quartering
of overseas construction workers. The men who came through stayed there, waiting for their ship.
Most of them were bound for Okinawa. Most of them were running | away from something - usually
the law. There were tough 9 groups from Alabama, shifty men from New York, all kinds j from all
over. And, knowing full well how horrible it would be to work a full year in Okinawa, they drank.
The job of the special guards was to see that they didn’t tear the barracks’ down. We had our
headquarters in the main building, just a wooden contraption with panel-walled offices. Here at a
roll- \ top desk we sat around, shifting our guns off our hips and! yawning, and the old cops told
stories.
It was a horrible crew of men, men with cop-souls, all except Remi and myself. Remi was only
trying to make a living, and so was I, but these men wanted to make arrests and compliments from
the chief of police in town. They even said < that if you didn’t make at least one a month you’d be
fired. I. gulped at the prospect of making an arrest. What actually’ happened was that I was as
drunk as anybody in the barracks -the night all hell broke loose.
This was a night when the schedule was so arranged that 1 was all alone for six hours - the only
cop on the grounds; and everybody in the barracks seemed to have gotten drunk that’ night. It was
because their ship was leaving in the morning. < They drank like seamen the night before the anchor
41
goes up. I sat in the office with my feet on the desk, reading Blue Book adventures about Oregon
and the north country, when suddenly I realized there was a great hum of activity in the usually quiet
night. I went out. Lights were burning in practically every damned shack on the grounds. Men were
shouting, bottles were breaking. It was do or die for me. I took my flashlight and went to the noisiest
door and knocked. Someone opened it about six inches.
.What do you want?.
I said, .I’m guarding these barracks tonight and you boys are supposed to keep quiet as much as
you can. - or some such silly remark. They slammed the door in my face. I stood looking at the
wood of it against my nose. It was like a Western movie; the time had come for me to assert myself.
I knocked again. They opened up wide this time. .Listen,. I said, .I don’t want to come around
bothering you fellows, but I’ll lose my job if you make too much noise..
.Who are you?.
.I’m a guard here..
.Never seen you before..
.Well, here’s my badge..
.What are you doing with that pistolcracker on your ass?.
.It isn’t mine,. I apologized. .I borrowed it..
.Have a drink, fer krissakes.. I didn’t mind if I did. I took two.
I said, .Okay, boys? You’ll keep quiet, boys? I’ll get hell, you know..
.It’s all right, kid,. they said. .Go make your rounds. Come back for another drink if you want
one..
And I went to all the doors in this manner, and pretty soon I was as drunk as anybody else.
Come dawn, it was my duty to put up the American flag on a sixty-foot pole, and this morning I put
it up upside down and went home to bed. When I came back in the evening the regular cops were
sitting around grimly in the office.
.Say, bo, what was all the noise around here last night? We’ve had complaints from people who
live in those houses across the canyon..
.I don’t know,. I said. .It sounds pretty quiet right now..
.The whole contingent’s gone. You was supposed to keep order around here last night - the chief
is yelling at you. And another thing - do you know you can go to jail for putting the American flag
upside down on a government pole?.
.Upside down?. I was horrified; of course I hadn’t realized it. I did it every morning
mechanically.
.Yessir,. said a fat cop who’d spent twenty-two years as a guard in Alcatraz. .You could go to
jail for doing something like that.. The others nodded grimly. They were always sitting around on
their asses; they were proud of their jobs. They handled their guns and talked about them. They were
itching to shoot somebody. Remi and me.
The cop who had been an Alcatraz guard was potbellied and about sixty, retired but unable to
keep away from the atmospheres that had nourished his dry soul all his life. Every night he drove to
work in his ‘35 Ford, punched the clock exactly on time, and sat down at the rolltop desk. He
labored painfully over the simple form we all had to fill out every night - rounds, time, what
happened, and so on. Then he leaned back and told stories. .You should have been here about two
months ago when me and Sledge. (that was another cop, a youngster who wanted to be a Texas
Ranger and had to be satisfied with his present lot) .arrested a drunk in Barrack G. Boy, you should
have seen the blood fly. I’ll take you over there tonight and show you the stains on the wall. We had
him bouncing from one wall to another. First Sledge hit him, and then me, and then he subsided and
42
went quietly. That fellow swore to kill us when he got out of jail - got thirty days. Here it is sixty
days, and he ain’t showed up.. And this was the big point of the story. They’d put such a fear in him
that he was too yellow to come back and try to kill them.
The old cop went on, sweetly reminiscing about the horrors of Alcatraz. .We used to march ‘em
like an Army platoon to breakfast. Wasn’t one man out of step. Everything went like clockwork.
You should have seen it. I was a guard there for twenty-two years. Never had any trouble. Those
boys knew we meant business. A lot of fellows get soft guarding prisoners, and they’re the ones that
usually get in trouble. Now you take you - from what I’ve been observing about you, you seem to
me a little bit too leenent with the men.. He raised his pipe and looked at me sharp. .They take
advantage of that, you know..
I knew that. I told him I wasn’t cut out to be a cop.
.Yes, but that’s the job that you applied for. Now you got to make up your mind one way or the
other, or you’ll never get anywhere. It’s your duty. You’re sworn in. You can’t compromise with
things like this. Law and order’s got to be kept..
I didn’t know what to say; he was right; but all I wanted to do was sneak out into the night and
disappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country.
The other cop, Sledge, was tall, muscular, with a black-haired crew-cut and a nervous twitch in
his neck - like a boxer who’s always punching one fist into another. He rigged himself out like a
Texas Ranger of old. He wore a revolver down low, with ammunition belt, and carried a small quirt
of some kind, and pieces of leather hanging everywhere, like a walking torture chamber: shiny shoes,
low-hanging jacket, cocky hat, everything but boots. He was always showing me holds -reaching
down under my crotch and lifting me up nimbly. In point of strength I could have thrown him clear to
the ceiling with the same hold, and I knew it well; but I never let him know for fear he’d want a
wrestling match. A wrestling match with a guy like that would end up in shooting. I’m sure he was a
better shot; I’d never had a gun in my life. It scared me even to load one. He desperately wanted to
make arrests. One night we were alone on duty and he came back red-faced mad.
.I told some boys in there to keep quiet and they’re still making noise. I told them twice. I always
give a man two chances. Not three. You come with me and I’m going back there and arrest them..
.Well, let me give them a third chance,. I said. .I’ll talk to them..
.No, sir, I never gave a man more than two chances.. I sighed. Here we go. We went to the
offending room, and Sledge opened the door and told everybody to file out. It was embarrassing.
Every single one of us was blushing. This is the story of America. Everybody’s doing what they think
they’re supposed to do. So what if a bunch of men talk in loud voices and drink the night? But
Sledge wanted to prove something. He made sure to bring me along in case they jumped him. They
might have. They were all brothers, all from Alabama. We strolled back to the station, Sledge in
front and me in back.
One of the boys said to me, .Tell that crotch-eared mean-ass to take it easy on us. We might get
fired for this and never get to Okinawa..
.I’ll talk to him..
In the station I told Sledge to forget it. He said, for everybody to hear, and blushing, .I don’t give
anybody no more than two chances..
.What the hail,. said the Alabaman, .what difference does it make? We might lose our jobs..
Sledge said nothing and filled out the arrest forms. He arrested only one of them; he called the prowl
car in town. They came and took him away. The other brothers walked off sullenly. .What’s Ma
going to say?. they said. One of them came back to me. .You tell that Tex-ass son of a bitch if my
brother ain’t out of jail tomorrow night he’s going to get his ass fixed.. I told Sledge, in a neutral
43
way, and he said nothing. The brother was let off easy and nothing happened. The contingent
shipped out; a new wild bunch came in. If it hadn’t been for Remi Boncoeur I wouldn’t have stayed
at this job two hours.
But Remi Boncoeur and I were on duty alone many a night, and that’s when everything jumped.
We made our first round of the evening in a leisurely way, Remi trying all the doors to see if they
were locked and hoping to find one unlocked. He’d say, .For years I’ve an idea to develop a dog
into a super thief who’d go into these guys’ rooms and take dollars out of their pockets. I’d train him
to take nothing but green money; I’d make him smell it all day long. If there was any humanly
possible way, I’d train him to take only twenties.. Remi was full of mad schemes; he talked about
that dog for weeks. Only once he found an unlocked door. I didn’t like the idea, so I sauntered on
down the hall. Remi stealthily opened it up. He came face to face with the barracks supervisor. Remi
hated that man’s face. He asked me, .What’s the name of that Russian author you’re always talking
about - the one who put the newspapers in his shoe and walked around in a stovepipe hat he found
in a garbage pail?. This was an exaggeration of what I’d told Remi of Dostoevski. .Ah, that’s it that’s
it -Dostioffski. A man with a face like that supervisor can only have one name - it’s
Dostioffski.. The only unlocked door he ever found belonged to Dostioffski. D. was asleep when he
heard someone fiddling with his doorknob. He got up in his pajamas. He came to the door looking
twice as ugly as usual. When Remi opened it he saw a haggard face suppurated with hatred and dull
fury.
