.That’s where I’m going too!. I cried. .I’m very glad you let me sit with you, I was very lonely
and I’ve been traveling a hell of a lot.. And we settled down to telling our stories. Her story was this:
She had a husband and child. The husband beat her, so she left him, back at Sabinal, south of
Fresno, and was going to LA to live with her sister awhile. She left her little son with her family, who
were grape-pickers and lived in a shack in the vineyards. She had nothing to do but brood and get
mad. I felt like putting my arms around her right away. We talked and talked. She said she loved to
talk with me. Pretty soon she was saying she wished she could go to New York too. .Maybe we
could!. I laughed. The bus groaned up Grapevine Pass and then we were coming down into the
great sprawls of light. Without coming to any particular agreement we began holding hands, and in
the same way it was mutely and beautifully and purely decided that when I got my hotel room in LA
she would be beside me. I ached all over for her; I leaned my head in her beautiful hair. Her little
shoulders drove me mad; I hugged her and hugged her. And she loved it.
.I love love,. she said, closing her eyes. I promised her beautiful love. I gloated over her. Our
stories were told; we subsided into silence and sweet anticipatory thoughts. It was as simple as that.
You could have all your Peaches and Bettys and Marylous and Ritas and Camilles and Inezes in this
world; this was my girl and my kind of girlsoul, and I told her that. She confessed she saw me
watching her in the bus station. .I thought you was a nice college boy..
.Oh, I’m a college boy!. I assured her. The bus arrived in Hollywood. In the gray, dirty dawn,
like the dawn when Joel McCrea met Veronica Lake in a diner, in the picture Sullivan’s Travels,
she slept in my lap. I looked greedily out tine window: stucco houses and palms and drive-ins, the
whole mad thing, the ragged promised land, the fantastic end of America. We got off the bus at Main
Street, which was no different from where you get off a bus in Kansas City or Chicago or Boston red
brick, dirty, characters drifting by, trolleys grating in the hopeless dawn, the whorey smell of a
big city.
And here my mind went haywire, I don’t know why. I began getting the foolish paranoiac visions
that Teresa, or Terry - her name - was a common little hustler who worked the buses for a guy’s
bucks by making appointments like ours in LA where she brought the sucker first to a breakfast
place, where her pimp waited, and then to a certain hotel to which he had access with his gun or his
whatever. I never confessed this to her. We ate breakfast and a pimp kept watching us; I fancied
Terry was making secret eyes at him. I was tired and felt strange and lost in a faraway, disgusting
place. The goof of terror took over my thoughts and made me act petty and cheap. .Do you know
that guy?. I said.
.What guy you mean, honey?. I let it drop. She was slow and hung-up about everything she did;
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it took her a long time to eat; she chewed slowly and stared into space, and smoked a cigarette, and
kept talking, and I was like a haggard ghost, suspicioning every move she made, thinking she was
stalling for time. This was all a fit of sickness. I was sweating as we went down the street hand in
hand. The first hotel we hit had a room, and before I knew it I was locking the door behind me and
she was sitting on the bed taking off her shoes. I kissed her meekly. Better she’d never know. To
relax our nerves I knew we needed whisky, especially me. I ran out and fiddled all over twelve
blocks, hurrying till I found a pint of whisky for sale at a newsstand. I ran back, all energy. Terry was
in the bathroom, fixing her face. I poured one big drink in a water glass, and we had slugs. Oh, it was
sweet and delicious and worth my whole lugubrious voyage. I stood behind her at the mirror, and we
danced in the bathroom that way. I began talking about my friends back east.
I said, .You ought to meet a great girl I know called Doric. She’s a six-foot redhead. If you came
to New York she’d show you where to get work..
.Who is this six-foot redhead?. she demanded suspiciously. .Why do you tell me about her?. In
her simple soul she couldn’t fathom my kind of glad, nervous talk. I let it drop. She began to get
drunk in the bathroom.
.Come on to bed!. I kept saying.
.Six-foot redhead, hey? And I thought you was a nice college boy, I saw you in your lovely
sweater and I said to myself, Hmm, ain’t he nice? No! And no! And no! You have to be a goddam
pimp like all of them!.
.What on earth are you talking about?.
.Don’t stand there and tell me that six-foot redhead ain’t a madame, ‘cause I know a madame
when I hear about one, and you, you’re just a pimp like all the rest I meet, everybody’s a pimp..
.Listen, Terry, I am not a pimp. I swear to you on the Bible I am not a pimp. Why should I be a
pimp? My only interest is you..
.All the time I thought I met a nice boy. I was so glad, I hugged myself and said, Hmm, a real
nice boy instead of a pimp..
.Terry,. I pleaded with all my soul. .Please listen to me and understand, I’m not a pimp.. An
hour ago I’d thought she was a hustler. How sad it was. Our minds, with their store of madness, had
diverged. O gruesome life, how I moaned and pleaded, and then I got mad and realized I was
pleading with a dumb little Mexican wench and I told her so; and before I knew it I picked up her
red pumps and hurled them at the bathroom door and told her to get out. .Go on, beat it!. I’d sleep
and forget it; I had my own life, my own sad and ragged life forever. There was a dead silence in the
bathroom. I took my clothes off and went to bed.
Terry came out with tears of sorriness in her eyes. In her simple and funny little mind had been
decided the fact that a pimp does not throw a woman’s shoes against the door and does not tell her
to get out. In reverent and sweet little silence she took all her clothes off and slipped her tiny body
into the sheets with me. It was brown as grapes. I saw her poor belly where there was a Caesarian
scar; her hips were so narrow she couldn’t bear a child without getting gashed open. Her legs were
like little sticks. She was only four foot ten. I made love to her in the sweetness of the weary
morning. Then, two tired angels of some kind, hung-up forlornly in an LA shelf, having found the
closest and most delicious thing in life together, we fell asleep and slept till late afternoon.
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13
For the next fifteen days we were together for better or for worse. When we woke up we
decided to hitchhike to New York together; she was going to be my girl in town. I envisioned wild
complexities with Dean and Marylou and everybody - a season, a new season. First we had to work
to earn enough money for the trip. Terry was all for starting at once with the twenty dollars I had left.
I didn’t like it. And, like a damn fool, I considered the problem for two days, as we read the want
ads of wild LA papers I’d never seen before in my life, in cafeterias and bars, until my twenty
dwindled to just over ten. We were very happy in our little hotel room. In the middle of the night I
got up because I couldn’t sleep, pulled the cover over baby’s bare brown shoulder, and examined
the LA night. What brutal, hot, siren-whining nights they are! Right across the street there was
trouble. An old rickety rundown rooming house was the scene of some kind of tragedy. The cruiser
was pulled up below and the cops were questioning an old man with gray hair. Sobbings came from
within. I could hear everything, together with the hum of my hotel neon. I never felt sadder in my life.
LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets god-awful cold in the winter
but there’s a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.
South Main Street, where Terry and I took strolls with hot dogs, was a fantastic carnival of lights
and wildness. Booted cops frisked people on practically every corner. The beatest characters in the
country swarmed on the sidewalks - all of it under those soft Southern California stars that are lost
in the brown halo of the huge desert encampment LA really is. You could smell tea, weed, I mean
marijuana, floating in the air, together with the chili beans and beer. That grand wild sound of bop
floated from beer parlors; it mixed medleys with every kind of cowboy and boogie-woogie in the
American night. Everybody looked like Hassel. Wild Negroes with bop caps and goatees came
laughing by; then long-haired brokendown hipsters straight off Route 66 from New York; then old
desert rats, carrying packs and heading for a park bench at the Plaza; then Methodist ministers with
raveled sleeves, and an occasional Nature Boy saint in beard and sandals. I wanted to meet them all,
talk to everybody, but Terry and I were too busy trying to get a buck together.
We went to Hollywood to try to work in the drugstore at Sunset and Vine. Now there was a
corner! Great families off jalopies from the hinterlands stood around the sidewalk gaping for sight of
some movie star, and the movie star never showed up. When a limousine passed they rushed eagerly
to the curb and ducked to look: some character in dark glasses sat inside with a bejeweled blonde.
.Don Ameche! Don Ameche!. .No, George Murphy! George Murphy!. They milled around,
looking at one another. Handsome queer boys who had come to Hollywood to be cowboys walked
around, wetting their eyebrows with hincty fingertip. The most beautiful little gone gals in the world
cut by in slacks; they came to be starlets; they ended up in drive-ins. Terry and I tried to find work at
the drive-ins. It was no soap anywhere. Hollywood Boulevard was a great, screaming frenzy of cars;
there were minor accidents at least once a minute; everybody was rushing off toward the farthest
palm - and beyond that was the desert and nothingness. Hollywood Sams stood in front of swank
restaurants, arguing exactly the same way Broadway Sams argue at Jacob’s Beach, New York, only
here they wore light-weight suits and their talk was cornier. Tall, cadaverous preachers shuddered
by. Fat screaming women ran across the boulevard to get in line for the quiz shows. I saw Jerry
Colonna buying a car at Buick Motors; he was inside the vast plate-glass window, fingering his
mustachio. Terry and I ate in a cafeteria downtown which was decorated to look like a grotto, with
metal tits spurting everywhere and great impersonal stone buttockses belonging to deities and soapy
Neptune. People ate lugubrious meals around the waterfalls, their faces green with marine sorrow.
53
All the cops in LA looked like handsome gigolos; obviously they’d come to LA to make the movies.
Everybody had come to make the movies, even me. Terry and I were finally reduced to trying to get
jobs on South Main Street among the beat countermen and dishgirls who made no bones about their
beatness, and even there it was no go. We still had ten dollars.
.Man, I’m going to get my clothes from Sis and we’ll hitchhike to New York,. said Terry.
.Come on, man. Let’s do it. If you can’t boogie I know I’ll show you how.’. That last part was a
song of hers she kept singing. We hurried to her sister’s house in the sliverous Mexican shacks
somewhere beyond Alameda Avenue. I waited in a dark alley behind Mexican kitchens because her
sister wasn’t supposed to see me. Dogs ran by. There were little lamps illuminating the little rat alleys.
I could hear Terry and her sister arguing in the soft, warm night. I was ready for anything.
Terry came out and led me by the hand to Central Avenue, which is the colored main drag of LA.
And what a wild place it is, with chickenshacks barely big enough to house a jukebox, and the
jukebox blowing nothing but blues, bop, and jump. We went up dirty tenement stairs and came to
the room of Terry’s friend Margarina, who owed Terry a skirt and a pair of shoes. Margarina was a
lovely mulatto; her husband was black as spades and kindly. He went right out and bought a pint of
whisky to host me proper. I tried to pay part of it, but he said no. They had two little children. The
kids bounced on the bed; it was their play-place. They put their arms around me and looked at me
with wonder. The wild humming night of Central Avenue - the night of Hamp’s .Central Avenue
Breakdown. - howled and boomed along outside. They were singing in the halls, singing from their
windows, just hell be damned and look out. Terry got her clothes and we said good-by. We went
down to a chickenshack and played records on the jukebox. A couple of Negro characters
whispered in my ear about tea. One buck. I said okay, bring it. The connection came in and
motioned me to the cellar toilet, where I stood around dumbly as he said, .Pick up, man, pick up..
.Pick up what?. I said.
He had my dollar already. He was afraid to point at the floor. It was no floor, just basement.
There lay something that looked like a little brown turd. He was absurdly cautious. .Got to look out
for myself, things ain’t cool this past week.. I picked up the turd, which was a brown-paper
cigarette, and went back to Terry, and off we went to the hotel room to get high. Nothing happened.
It was Bull Durham tobacco. I wished I was wiser with my money.
Terry and I had to decide absolutely and once and for all what to do. We decided to hitch to
New York with our remaining money. She picked up five dollars from her sister that night. We had
about thirteen or less. So before the daily room rent was due again we packed up and took off on a
red car to Arcadia, California, where Santa Anita racetrack is located under snow-capped
mountains. It was night. We were pointed toward the American continent. Holding hands, we
walked several miles down the road to get out of the populated district. It was a Saturday night. We
stood under a roadlamp, thumbing, when suddenly cars full of young kids roared by with streamers
flying. .Yaah! Yaah! we won! we won!. they all shouted. Then they yoohooed us and got great glee
out of seeing a guy and a girl on the road. Dozens of such cars passed, full of young faces and
.throaty young voices,. as the saying goes. I hated every one of them. Who did they think they
were, yaahing at somebody on the road just because they were little high-school punks and their
parents carved the roast beef on Sunday afternoons? Who did they think they were, making fun of a
girl reduced to poor circumstances with a man who wanted to belove? We were minding our own
business. And we didn’t get a blessed ride.
We had to walk back to town, and worst of all we needed coffee and had the misfortune of going
into the only place open, which was a high-school soda fountain, and all the kids were there and
remembered us. Now they saw that Terry was Mexican, a Pachuco wildcat; and that her boy was
54
worse than that.
With her pretty nose in the air she cut out of there and we wandered together in the dark up along
the ditches of the highways. I carried the bags. We were breathing fogs in the cold night air. I finally
decided to hide from the world one more night with her, and the morning be damned. We went into
a motel court and bought a comfortable little suite for about four dollars - shower, bathtowels, wall
radio, and all. We held each other tight. We had long, serious talks and took baths and discussed
things with the light on and then with the light out. Something was being proved, I was convincing her
of something, which she accepted, and we concluded the pact in the dark, breathless, then pleased,
like little lambs.
In the morning we boldly struck out on our new plan. We were going to take a bus to Bakersfield
and work picking grapes. After a few weeks of that we were headed for New York in the proper
way, by bus. It was a wonderful afternoon, riding up to Bakersfield with Terry: we sat back, relaxed,
talked, saw the countryside roll by, and didn’t worry about a thing. We arrived in Bakersfield in late
afternoon. The plan was to hit every fruit wholesaler in town. Terry said we could live in tents on the
job. The thought of living in a tent and picking grapes in the cool California mornings hit me right. But
there were no jobs to be had, and much confusion, with everybody giving us innumerable tips, and
no job materialized. Nevertheless we ate a Chinese dinner and set out with reinforced bodies. We
went across the SP tracks to Mexican town. Terry jabbered with her brethren, asking for jobs. It
was night now, and the little Mextown street was one blazing bulb of lights: movie marquees, fruit
stands, penny arcades, five-and-tens, and hundreds of rickety trucks and mud-spattered jalopies,
parked. Whole Mexican fruit-picking families wandered around eating popcorn. Terry talked to
everybody. I was beginning to despair. What I needed -what Terry needed, too -was a drink, so
we bought a quart of California port for thirty-five cents and went to the railroad yards to drink. We
found a place where hobos had drawn up crates to sit over fires. We sat there and drank the wine.
On our left were the freight cars, sad and sooty red beneath the moon; straight ahead the lights and
airport pokers of Bakersfield proper; to our right a tremendous aluminum Quonset warehouse. Ah, it
was a fine night, a warm night, a wine-drinking night, a moony night, and a night to hug your girl and
talk and spit and be heavengoing. This we did. She was a drinking little fool and kept up with me and
passed me and went right on talking till midnight. We never budged from those crates. Occasionally
bums passed, Mexican mothers passed with children, and the prowl car came by and the cop got
out to leak, but most of the time we were alone and mixing up our souls ever more and ever more till
it would be terribly hard to say good-by. At midnight we got up and goofed toward the highway.
Terry had a new idea. We would hitchhike to Sabinal, her hometown, and live in her brother’s
garage. Anything was all right with me. On the road I made Terry sit down on my bag to make her
look like a woman in distress, and right off a truck stopped and we ran for it, all glee-giggles. The
man was a good man; his truck was poor. He roared and crawled on up the valley. We got to
Sabinal in the wee hours before dawn. I had finished the wine while Terry slept, and I was proper
stoned. We got out and roamed the quiet leafy square of the little California town -a whistle stop
on the SP. We went to find her brother’s buddy, who would tell us where he was. Nobody home.
As dawn began to break I lay flat on my back in the lawn of the town square and kept saying over
and over again, .You won’t tell what he done up in Weed, will you? What’d he do up in Weed?
You won’t tell will you? What’d he do up in Weed?. This was from the picture Of Mice and Men,
with Burgess Meredith talking to the foreman of the ranch. Terry giggled. Anything I did was all right
with her. I could lie there and go on doing that till the ladies came out for church and she wouldn’t
care. But finally I decided we’d be all set soon because of her brother, and I took her to an old hotel
by the tracks and we went to bed comfortably.
55
In the bright, sunny morning Terry got up early and went to find her brother. I slept till noon; when
I looked out the window I suddenly saw an SP freight going by with hundreds of hobos reclining on
the flatcars and rolling merrily along with packs for pillows and funny papers before their noses, and
some munching on good California grapes pickfed up by the siding. .Damn!. I yelled. .Hooee! It is
the promised land.. They were all coming from Frisco; in a week they’d all be going back in the
same grand style.
Terry arrived with her brother, his buddy, and her child. Her brother was a wild-buck Mexican
hotcat with a hunger for booze, a great good kid. His buddy was a big flabby Mexican who spoke
English without much accent and was loud and overanxious to please. I could see he had eyes for
Terry. Her little boy was Johnny, seven years old, dark-eyed and sweet. Well, there we were, and
another wild day began.
Her brother’s name was Rickey. He had a ‘38 Chevy. We piled into that and took off for parts
unknown. .Where we going?. I asked. The buddy did the explaining - his name was Ponzo, that’s
what everybody called him. He stank. I found out why. His business was selling manure to farmers;
he had a truck. Rickey always had three or four dollars in his pocket and was happy-go-lucky about
things. He always said, .That’s right, man, there you go - dah you go, dah you go!. And he went.
He drove seventy miles an hour in the old heap, and we went to Madera beyond Fresno to see some
farmers about manure.
Rickey had a bottle. .Today we drink, tomorrow we work. Dah you go, man - take a shot!.
Terry sat in back with her baby; I looked back at her and saw the flush of homecoming joy on her
face. The beautiful green countryside of October in California reeled by madly. I was guts and juice
again and ready to go. .Where do we go now, man?.
.We go find a farmer with some manure laying around. Tomorrow we drive back in the truck and
pick it up. Man, we’ll make a lot of money. Don’t worry about nothing..
.We’re all in this together!. yelled Ponzo. I saw that was so - everywhere I went, everybody was
in it together. We raced through the crazy streets of Fresno and on up the valley to some farmers in
back roads. Ponzo got out of the car and conducted confused conversations with old Mexican
farmers; nothing, of course, came of it.
.What we need is a drink!. yelled Rickey, and off we went to a crossroads saloon. Americans
are always drinking in crossroads saloons on Sunday afternoon; they bring their kids; they gabble
and brawl over brews; everything’s fine. Come nightfall the kids start crying and the parents are
drunk. They go weaving back to the house. Everywhere in America I’ve been in crossroads saloons
drinking with dull; whole families. The kids eat popcorn and chips and play in back. This we did.
Rickey and I and Ponzo and Terry sat drinking and shouting with the music; little baby Johnny
goofed with other children around the jukebox. The sun began to get red. Nothing had been
accomplished. What was there to accomplish? .Mariana. said Rickey. .Manana, man, we make it;
have another beer, man, dah you go, dab you go!.
We staggered out and got in the car; off we went to a highway bar. Ponzo was a big, loud,
vociferous type who knew everybody in San Joaquin Valley. From the highway bar I went with him
alone in the car to find a farmer; instead we wound up in Madera Mextown, digging the girls and
trying to pick up a few for him and Rickey. And then, as purple dusk descended over the grape
country, I found myself sitting dumbly in the car as he argued with some old Mexican at the kitchen
door about the price of a watermelon the old man grew in the back yard. We got the watermelon;
we ate it on the spot and threw the rinds on the old man’s dirt sidewalk. All kinds of pretty little girls
were cutting down the darkening street. I said, .Where in the hell are we?.
.Don’t worry, man,. said big Ponzo. .Tomorrow we make a lot of money; tonight we don’t
56
worry.. We went back and picked up Terry and her brother and the kid and drove to Fresno in the
highway lights of night. We were all raving hungry. We bounced over the railroad tracks in Fresno
and hit the wild streets of Fresno Mextown. Strange Chinese hung out of windows, digging the
Sunday night streets; groups of Mex chicks swaggered around in slacks; mambo blasted from
jukeboxes; the lights were festooned around like Halloween. We went into a Mexican restaurant and
had tacos and mashed pinto beans rolled in tortillas; it was delicious. I whipped out my last shining
five-dollar bill which stood between me and the New Jersey shore and paid for Terry and me. Now
I had four bucks. Terry and I looked at each other.
.Where we going to sleep tonight, baby?.
.I don’t know..
Rickey was drunk; now all he was saying was, .Dah you go, man - dah you go, man,. in a tender
and tired voice. It had been a long day. None of us knew what was going on, or what the Good
Lord appointed. Poor little Johnny fell asleep on my arm. We drove back to Sabinal. On the way we
pulled up sharp at a roadhouse on Highway 99. Rickey wanted one last beer. In back of the
roadhouse were trailers and tents and a few rickety motel-style rooms. I inquired about the price and
it was two bucks. I asked Terry how about it, and she said fine because we had the kid on our
hands now and had to make him comfortable. So after a few beers in the saloon, where sullen Okies
reeled to the music of a cowboy band, Terry and I and Johnny went into a motel room and got ready
to hit the sack. Ponzo kept hanging around; he had no place to sleep. Rickey slept at his father’s
house in the vineyard shack.
.Where do you live, Ponzo?. I asked.
.Nowhere, man. I’m supposed to live with Big Rosey but she threw me out last night. I’m gonna
get my truck and sleep in it tonight.. Guitars tinkled. Terry and I gazed at the stars together and
kissed. .Manana. she said. .Everything’ll be all right tomorrow, don’t you think, Sal-honey, man?.
.Sure, baby, manana.. It was always manana. For the next week that was all I heard manana,
a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.
Little Johnny jumped in bed, clothes and all, and went to sleep; sand spilled out of his shoes,
Madera sand. Terry and I got up in the middle of the night and brushed the sand off the sheets. In the
morning I got up, washed, and took a walk around the place. We were five miles out of Sabinal in
the cotton fields and grape vineyards. I asked the big fat woman who owned the camp if any of the
tents were vacant. The cheapest one, a dollar a day, was vacant. I fished up a dollar and moved into
it. There were a bed, a stove, and a cracked mirror hanging from a pole; it was delightful. I had to
stoop to get in, and when I did there was my baby and my baby boy. We waited for Rickey and
Ponzo to arrive with the truck. They arrived with beer bottles and started to get drunk in the tent.
.How about the manure?.
.Too late today. Tomorrow, man, we make a lot of money; today we have a few beers. What do
you say, beer?. I didn’t have to be prodded. .Dah you go -dah you go!. yelled Rickey. I began to
see that our plans for making money with the manure truck would never materialize. The truck was
parked outside the tent. It smelled like Ponzo.
That night Terry and I went to bed in the sweet night air beneath our dewy tent. I was just getting
ready to go to sleep when she said, .You want to love me now?.
I said, .What about Johnny?.
.He don’t mind. He’s asleep.. But Johnny wasn’t asleep and he said nothing.
The boys came back the next day with the manure truck and drove off to find whisky; they came
back and had a big time in the tent. That night Ponzo said it was too cold and slept on the ground in
our tent, wrapped in a big tarpaulin smelling of cowflaps. Terry hated him; she said he hung around
57
with her brother in order to get close to her.
Nothing was going to happen except starvation for Terry and me, so in the morning I walked
around the countryside asking for cotton-picking work. Everybody told me to go to the farm across
the highway from the camp. I went, and the farmer was in the kitchen with his women. He came out,
listened to my story, and warned me he was paying only three dollars per hundred pounds of picked
cotton. I pictured myself picking at least three hundred pounds a day and took the job. He fished out
some long canvas bags from the barn and told me the picking started at dawn. I rushed back to
Terry, all glee. On the way a grape truck went over a bump in the road and threw off great bunches
of grapes on the hot tar. I picked them up and took them home. Terry was glad. .Johnny and me’ll
come with you and help..
.Pshaw!. I said. .No such thing!.
.You see, you see, it’s very hard picking cotton. I show you how..
