furniture was gone; he and his wife and baby were moving closer to the town of Testament. They
had bought a new parlor set and their old one was going to my aunt’s house in Paterson, though we
hadn’t yet decided how. When Dean heard this he at once offered his services with the Hudson. He
and I would carry the furniture to Paterson in two fast trips and bring my aunt back at the end of the
second trip. This was going to save us a lot of money and trouble. It was agreed upon. My sister-inlaw
made a spread, and the three battered travelers sat down to eat. Marylou had not slept since
Denver. I thought she looked older and more beautiful now.
I learned that Dean had lived happily with Camille in San Francisco ever since that fall of 1947;
he got a job on the railroad and made a lot of money. He became the father of a cute little girl, Amy
Moriarty. Then suddenly he blew his top while walking down the street one day. He saw a ‘49
Hudson for sale and rushed to the bank for his entire roll. He bought the car on the spot. Ed Dunkel
was with him. Now they were broke. Dean calmed Camille’s fears and told her he’d be back in a
month. .I’m going to New York and bring Sal back.. She wasn’t too pleased at this prospect.
.But what is the purpose of all this? Why are you doing this to me?.
.It’s nothing, it’s nothing, darling - ah - hem - Sal has pleaded and begged with me to come and
get him, it is absolutely necessary for me to - but we won’t go into all these explanations - and I’ll tell
you why . . . No, listen, I’ll tell you why.. And he told her why, and of course it made no sense.
Big tall Ed Dunkel also worked on the railroad. He and Dean had just been laid off during a
seniority lapse because of a drastic reduction of crews. Ed had met a girl called Galatea who was
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living in San Francisco on her savings. These two mindless cads decided to bring the girl along to the
East and have her foot the bill. Ed cajoled and pleaded; she wouldn’t go unless he married her. In a
whirlwind few days Ed Dunkel married Galatea, with Dean rushing around to get the necessary
papers, and a few days before Christmas they rolled out of San Francisco at seventy miles per,
headed for LA and the snowless southern road. In LA they picked up a sailor in a travel bureau and
took him along for fifteen dollars’ worth of gas. He was bound for Indiana. They also picked up a
woman with her idiot daughter, for four dollars’ gas fare to Arizona. Dean sat the idiot girl with him
up front and dug her, as he said, .All the way, man! such a gone sweet little soul. Oh, we talked, we
talked of fires and the desert turning to a paradise and her parrot that swore in Spanish.. Dropping
off these passengers, they proceeded to Tucson. All along the way Galatea Dunkel, Ed’s new wife,
kept complaining that she was tired and wanted to sleep in a motel. If this kept up they’d spend all
her money long before Virginia. Two nights she forced a stop and blew tens on motels. By the time
they got to Tucson she was broke. Dean and Ed gave her the slip in a hotel lobby and resumed the
voyage alone, with the sailor, and without a qualm.
Ed Dunkel was a tall, calm, unthinking fellow who was completely ready to do anything Dean
asked him; and at this time Dean was too busy for scruples. He was roaring through Las Cruces,
New Mexico, when he suddenly had an explosive yen to see his sweet first wife Marylou again. She
was up in Denver. He swung the car north, against the feeble protests of the sailor, and zoomed into
Denver in the evening. He ran and found Marylou in a hotel. They had ten hours of wild lovemaking.
Everything was decided again: they were going to stick. Marylou was the only girl Dean ever really
loved. He was sick with regret when he saw her face again, and, as of yore, he pleaded and begged
at her knees for the joy of her being. She understood Dean; she stroked his hair; she knew he was
mad. To soothe the sailor, Dean fixed him up with a girl in a hotel room over the bar where the old
poolhall gang always drank. But the sailor refused the girl and in fact walked off in the night and they
never saw him again; he evidently took a bus to Indiana.
Dean, Marylou, and Ed Dunkel roared east along Colfax and out to the Kansas plains. Great
snowstorms overtook them. In Missouri, at night, Dean had to drive with his scarf-wrapped head
stuck out the window, with snowglasses that made him look like a monk peering into the manuscripts
of the snow, because the windshield was covered with an inch of ice. He drove by the birth county
of his forebears without a thought. In the morning the car skidded on an icy hill and flapped into a
ditch. A farmer offered to help them out. They got hung-up when they picked up a hitchhiker who
promised them a dollar if they’d let him ride to Memphis. In Memphis he went into his house,
puttered around looking for the dollar, got drunk, and said he couldn’t find it. They resumed across
Tennessee; the bearings were beat from the accident. Dean had been driving ninety; now he had to
stick to a steady seventy or the whole motor would go whirring down the mountainside. They
crossed the Great Smoky Mountains in midwinter. When they arrived at my brother’s door they had
not eaten for thirty hours - except for candy and cheese crackers.
They ate voraciously as Dean, sandwich in hand, stood bowed and jumping before the big
phonograph, listening to a wild bop record I had just bought called .The Hunt,. with Dexter Gordon
and Wardell Gray blowing their tops before a screaming audience that gave the record fantastic
frenzied volume. The Southern folk looked at one another and shook their heads in awe. .What kind
of friends does Sal have, anyway?. they said to my brother. He was stumped for an answer.
Southerners don’t like madness the least bit, not Dean’s kind. He paid absolutely no attention to
them. The madness of Dean had bloomed into a weird flower. I didn’t realize this till he and I and
Marylou and Dunkel left the house for a brief spin-the-Hudson, when for the first time we were alone
and could talk about anything we wanted. Dean grabbed the wheel, shifted to second, mused a
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minute, rolling, suddenly seemed to decide something and shot the car full-jet down the road in a fury
of decision.
.All right now, children,. he said, rubbing his nose and bending down to feel the emergency and
pulling cigarettes out of the compartment, and swaying back and forth as he did these things and
drove. .The time has come for us to decide what we’re going to do for the next week. Crucial,
crucial. Ahem!. He dodged a mule wagon; in it sat an old Negro plodding along. .Yes!. yelled
Dean. .Yes! Dig him! Now consider his soul - stop awhile and consider.. And he slowed down the
car for all of us to turn and look at the old jazzbo moaning along. .Oh yes, dig him sweet; now
there’s thoughts in that mind that I would give my last arm to know; to climb in there and find out just
what he’s poor-ass pondering about this year’s turnip greens and ham. Sal, you don’t know it but I
once lived with a farmer in Arkansas for a whole year, when I was eleven. I had awful chores, I had
to skin a dead horse once. Haven’t been to Arkansas since Christmas nineteen-forty-three, five
years ago, when Ben Gavin and I were chased by a man with a gun who owned the car we were
trying to steal; I say all this to show you that of the South I can speak. 1 have known - I mean, man,
I dig the South, I know it in and out - I’ve dug your letters to me about it. Oh yes, oh yes,. he said,
trailing off and stopping altogether, and suddenly jumping the car back to seventy and hunching over
the wheel. He stared doggedly ahead. Marylou was smiling serenely. This was the new and complete
Dean, grown to maturity. I said to myself, My God,, he’s changed. Fury spat out of his eyes when he
told of things he hated; great glows of joy replaced this when he suddenly got happy; every muscle
twitched to live and go. .Oh, man, the things I could tell you,. he said, poking me, .Oh, man, we
must absolutely find the time -What has happened to Carlo? We all get to see Carlo, darlings, first
thing tomorrow. Now, Marylou, we’re getting some bread and meat to make a lunch for New York.
How much money do you have, Sal? We’ll put everything in the back seat, Mrs. P’s furniture, and
all of us will sit up front cuddly and close and tell stories as we zoom to New York. Marylou,
honeythighs, you sit next to me, Sal next, then Ed at the window, big Ed to cut off drafts, whereby he
comes into using the robe this time. And then we’ll all go off to sweet life, ‘cause now is the time and
we all know time!. He rubbed his jaw furiously, he swung the car and passed three trucks, he roared
into downtown Testament, looking in every direction and seeing everything in an arc of 180 degrees
around his eyeballs without moving his head. Bang, he found a parking space in no time, and we
were parked. He leaped out of the car. Furiously he hustled into the railroad station; we followed
sheepishly. He bought cigarettes. He had become absolutely mad in his movements; he seemed to be
doing everything at the same time. It was. a shaking of the head, up and down, sideways; jerky,
vigorous hands; quick walking, sitting, crossing the legs, uncrossing, getting up, rubbing the hands,
rubbing his fly, hitching his pants, looking up and saying .Am,. and sudden slitting of the eyes to see
everywhere; and all the time he was grabbing me by the ribs and talking, talking.
It was very cold in Testament; they’d had an unseasonable snow. He stood in the long bleak main
street that runs along-the railroad, clad in nothing but a T-shirt and low-hanging pants with the belt
unbuckled, as though he was about to take them off. He came sticking his head in to talk to Marylou;
he backed away, fluttering his hands before her. .Oh yes, I know! I know you, I know you,
darling!. His laugh was. maniacal; it started low and ended high, exactly like the laugh of a radio
maniac, only faster and more like a titter. Then he kept reverting to businesslike tones. There was no
purpose in our coming downtown, but he found purposes. He made us all hustle, Marylou for the
lunch groceries, me for a paper to dig the weather report, Ed for cigars. Dean loved to smoke cigars.
He smoked one over the paper and talked. .Ah, our holy American slopjaws in Washington are
planning further inconveniences -ah-hem! -aw -hup! hup!. And he leaped off and rushed to
see a colored girl that just then passed outside the station. .Dig her,. he said, standing with limp
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finger pointed, fingering himself with a goofy smile, .that little gone black lovely. Ah! Hmm!. We got
in the car and flew back to my brother’s house.
I had been spending a quiet Christmas in the country, as I realized when we got back into the
house and I saw the Christmas tree, the presents, and smelled the roasting turkey and listened to the
talk of the relatives, but now the bug was on me again, and the bug’s name was Dean Moriarty and
1 was off on another spurt around the road.
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2
We packed my brother’s furniture in back of the car and took off at dark, promising to be back
in thirty hours - thirty hours for a thousand miles north and south. But that’s the way Dean wanted it.
It was a tough trip, and none of us noticed it; the heater was not working and consequently the
windshield developed fog and ice; Dean kept reaching out while driving seventy to wipe it with a rag
and make a hole to see the road. .Ah, holy hole!. In the spacious Hudson we had plenty of room
for all four of us to sit up front. A blanket covered our laps. The radio was not working. It was a
brand-new car bought five days ago, and already it was broken. There was only one installment paid
on it, too. Off we went, north to Washington, on 301, a straight two-lane highway without much
traffic. And Dean talked, no one else talked. He gestured furiously, he leaned as far as me sometimes
to make a point, sometimes he had no hands on the wheel and yet the car went as straight as an
arrow, not for once deviating from the white line in the middle of the road that unwound, kissing our
left front tire.
It was a completely meaningless set of circumstances that made Dean come, and similarly I went
off with him for no reason. In New York I had been attending school and romancing around with a
girl called Lucille, a beautiful Italian honey-haired darling that I actually wanted to marry. All these
years I was looking for the woman I wanted to marry. I couldn’t meet a girl without saying to myself,
What kind of wife would she make? I told Dean and Marylou about Lucille. Marylou wanted to
know all about Lucille, she wanted to meet her. We zoomed through Richmond, Washington,
Baltimore, and up to Philadelphia on a winding country road and talked. .I want to marry a girl,. I
told them, .so I can rest my soul with her till we both get old. This can’t go on all the time - all this
franticness and jumping around. We’ve got to go someplace, find something..
.Ah now, man,. said Dean, .I’ve been digging you for years about the home and marriage and
all those fine wonderful things about your soul.. It was a sad night; it was also a merry night. In
Philadelphia we went into a lunchcart and ate hamburgers with our last food dollar. The counterman
-it was three A.M. - heard us talk about money and offered to give us the hamburgers free, plus
more coffee, if we all pitched in and washed dishes in the back because his regular man hadn’t
shown up. We jumped to it. Ed Dunkel said he was an old pearldiver from way back and pitched his
long arms into the dishes. Dean stood googing around with a towel, so did Marylou. Finally they
started necking among the pots and pans; they withdrew to a dark corner in the pantry. The
counterman was satisfied as long as Ed and I did the dishes. We finished them in fifteen minutes.
When daybreak came we were zooming through New Jersey with the great cloud of Metropolitan
New York rising before us in the snowy distance. Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to
keep warm. He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York. We swished
through the Lincoln Tunnel and cut over to Times Square; Marylou wanted to see it.
.Oh damn, I wish I could find Hassel. Everybody look sharp, see if they can find him.. We all
scoured the sidewalks. .Good old gone Hassel. Oh you should have seen him in Texas..
So now Dean had come about four thousand miles from Frisco, via Arizona and up to Denver,
inside four days, with innumerable adventures sandwiched in, and it was only the beginning.
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3
We went to my house in Paterson and slept. I was the first to wake up, late in the afternoon.
Dean and Marylou were sleeping on my bed, Ed and I on my aunt’s bed. Dean’s battered unhinged
trunk lay sprawled on the floor with socks sticking out. A phone call came for me in the drugstore
downstairs. I ran down; it was from New Orleans. It was Old Bull Lee, who’d moved to New
Orleans. Old Bull Lee in his high, whining voice was making a complaint. It seemed a girl called
Galatea Dunkel had just arrived at his house for a guy Ed Dunkel; Bull had no idea who these people
were. Galatea Dunkel was a tenacious loser. I told Bull to reassure her that Dunkel was with Dean
and me and that most likely we’d be picking her up in New Orleans on the way to the Coast. Then
the girl herself talked on the phone. She wanted to know how Ed was. She was all concerned about
his happiness.
.How did you get from Tucson to New Orleans?. I asked. She said she wired home for money
and took a bus. She was determined to catch up with Ed because she loved him. I went upstairs and
told Big Ed. He sat in the chair with a worried look, an angel of a man, actually.
.All right, now,. said Dean, suddenly waking up and leaping out of bed, .what we must do is eat,
at once. Marylou, rustle around the kitchen see what there is. Sal, you and I go downstairs and call
Carlo. Ed, you see what you can do straightening out the house.. I followed Dean, bustling
downstairs.
The guy who ran the drugstore said, .You just got another call -this one from San Francisco for
a guy called Dean Moriarty. I said there wasn’t anybody by that name.. It was sweetest Camille,
calling Dean. The drugstore man, Sam, a tall, calm friend of mine, looked at me and scratched his
head. .Geez, what are you running, an international whorehouse?.
Dean tittered maniacally. .I dig you, man!. He leaped into the phone booth and called San
Francisco collect. Then we called Carlo at his home in Long Island and told him to come over. Carlo
arrived two hours later. Meanwhile Dean and I got ready for our return trip alone to Virginia to pick
up the rest of the furniture and bring my aunt back. Carlo Marx came, poetry under his arm, and sat
in an easy chair, watching us with beady eyes. For the first half-hour he refused to say anything; at
any rate, he refused to commit himself. He had quieted down since the Denver Doldrum days; the
Dakar Doldrums had done it. In Dakar, wearing a beard, he had wandered the back streets with
little children who led him to a witch-doctor who told him his fortune. He had snapshots of crazy
streets with grass huts, the hip back-end of Dakar. He said he almost jumped off the ship like Hart
Crane on the way back. Dean sat on the floor with a music box and listened with tremendous
amazement at the little song it played, .A Fine Romance. - .Little tinkling whirling doodlebells. Ah!
Listen! We’ll all bend down together and look into the center of the music box till we learn about the
secrets - tinklydoodle-bell, whee.. Ed Dunkel was also sitting on the floor; he had my drumsticks; he
suddenly began beating a tiny beat to go with the music box, that we barely could hear. Everybody
held his breath to listen. .Tick . . . tack . . . tick-tick . . . tack-tack.. Dean cupped a hand over his
ear; his mouth hung open; he said, .Ah! Whee!.
Carlo watched this silly madness with slitted eyes. Finally he slapped his knee and said, .I have
an announcement to make..
.Yes? Yes?.
.What is the meaning of this voyage to New York? What kind of sordid business are you on
now? I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?.
.Whither goest thou?. echoed Dean with his mouth open. We sat and didn’t know what to say;
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there was nothing to talk about any more. The only thing to do was go. Dean leaped up and said we
were ready to go back to Virginia. He took a shower, I cooked up a big platter of rice with all that
was left in the house, Marylou sewed his socks, and we were ready to go. Dean and Carlo and I
zoomed into New York. We promised to see Carlo in thirty hours, in time for New Year’s Eve. It
was night. We left him at Times Square and went back through the expensive tunnel and into New
Jersey and on the road. Taking turns at the wheel, Dean and I made Virginia in ten hours.
.Now this is the first time we’ve been alone and in a position to talk for years,. said Dean. And
he talked all night. As in a dream, we were zooming back through sleeping Washington and back in
the Virginia wilds, crossing the Appomattox River at daybreak, pulling up at my brother’s door at
eight A.M. And all this time Dean was tremendously excited about everything he saw, everything he
talked about, every detail of every moment that passed. He was out of his mind with real belief.
.And of course now no one can tell us that there is no God. We’ve passed through all forms. You
remember, Sal, when I first came to New York and I wanted Chad King to teach me about
Nietzsche. You see how long ago? Everything is fine, God exists, we know time. Everything since
the Greeks has been predicated wrong. You can’t make it with geometry and geometrical systems of
thinking. It’s all this!. He wrapped his finger in his fist; the car hugged the line straight and true. .And
not only that but we both understand that I couldn’t have time to explain why I know and you know
God exists.. At one point I moaned about life’s troubles - how poor my family was, how much I
wanted to help Lucille, who was also poor and had a daughter. .Troubles, you see, is the
generalization-word for what God exists in. The thing is not to get hung-up. My head rings!. he
cried, clasping his head. He rushed out of the car like Groucho Marx to get cigarettes -that furious,
ground-hugging walk with the coattails flying, except that he had no coattails. .Since Denver, Sal, a
lot of things -Oh, the things - I’ve thought and thought. I used to be in reform school all the time, I
was a young punk, asserting myself - stealing cars a psychological expression of my position, hincty
to show. All my jail-problems are pretty straight now. As far as I know I shall never be in jail again.
The rest is not my fault.. We passed a little kid who was throwing stones at the cars in the road.
.Think of it,. said Dean. .One day he’ll put a stone through a man’s windshield and the man will
crash and die - all on account of that little kid. You see what I mean? God exists without qualms. As
we roll along this way 1 am positive beyond doubt that everything will be taken care of for us - that
even you, as you drive, fearful of the wheel. (I hated to drive and drove carefully) - .the thing will go
along of itself and you won’t go off the road and I can sleep. Furthermore we know America, we’re
at home; I can go anywhere in America and get what I want because it’s the same in every corner, I
know the people, I know what they do. We give and take and go in the incredibly complicated
sweetness zigzagging every side.. There was nothing clear about the things he said, but what he
meant to say was somehow made pure and clear. He used the word .pure. a great deal. I had never
dreamed Dean would become a mystic. These were the first days of his mysticism, which would lead
to the strange, ragged W. C. Fields saintliness of his later days.
Even my aunt listened to him with a curious half-ear as we roared back north to New York that
same night with the furniture in the back. Now that my aunt was in the car, Dean settled down to
talking about his worklife in San Francisco. We went over every single detail of what a brakeman
has to do, demonstrating every time we passed yards, and at one point he even jumped out of the
car to show me how a brakeman gives a highball at a meet at a siding. My aunt retired to the back
seat and went to sleep. In Washington at four A.M. Dean again called Camille collect in Frisco.
Shortly after this, as we pulled out of Washington, a cruising car overtook us with siren going and we
had a speeding ticket in spite of the fact that we were going about thirty. It was the California license
plate that did it. .You guys think you can rush through here as fast as you want just because you
72
come from California?. said the cop.
I went with Dean to the sergeant’s desk and we tried to explain to the police that we had no
money. They said Dean would have to spend the night in jail if we didn’t round up the money. Of
course my aunt had it, fifteen dollars; she had twenty in all, and it was going to be just fine. And in
fact while we were arguing with the cops one of them went out to peek at my aunt, who sat wrapped
in the back of the car. She saw him.
.Don’t worry, I’m not a gun moll. If you want to come and search the car, go right ahead. I’m
going home with my nephew, and this furniture isn’t stolen; it’s my niece’s, she just had a baby and
she’s moving to her new house.. This flabbergasted Sherlock and he went back in the station house.
My aunt had to pay the fine for Dean or we’d be stuck in Washington; I had no license. He
promised to pay it back, and he actually did, exactly a year and a half later and to my aunt’s pleased
surprise. My aunt - a respectable woman hung-up in this sad world, and well she knew the world.
She told us about the cop. .He was hiding behind the tree, trying to see what I looked like. I told
him - I told him to search the car if he wanted. I’ve nothing to be ashamed of.. She knew Dean had
something to be ashamed of, and me too, by virtue of my being with Dean, and Dean and I accepted
this sadly.
My aunt once said the world would never find peace until men fell at their women’s feet and
asked for forgiveness. But Dean knew this; he’d mentioned it many times. .I’ve pleaded and
pleaded with Marylou for a peaceful sweet understanding of pure love between us forever with all
hassles thrown out -she understands; her mind is bent on something else - she’s after me; she won’t
understand how much I love her, she’s knitting my doom..
.The truth of the matter is we don’t understand our women; we blame on them and it’s all our
fault,. I said.
.But it isn’t as simple as that,. warned Dean. .Peace will come suddenly, we won’t understand
when it does - see, man?. Doggedly, bleakly, he pushed the car through New Jersey; at dawn I
drove into Paterson as he slept in the back. We arrived at the house at eight in the morning to find
Marylou and Ed Dunkel sitting around smoking butts from the ashtrays; they hadn’t eaten since Dean
and I left. My aunt bought groceries and cooked up a tremendous breakfast.
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4
Now it was time for the Western threesome to find new living quarters in Manhattan proper.
Carlo had a pad on York Avenue; they were moving in that evening. We slept all day, Dean and I,
and woke up as a great snowstorm ushered in New Year’s Eve, 1948. Ed Dunkel was sitting in my
easy chair, telling about the previous New Year’s. .I was in Chicago. I was broke. I was sitting at
the window of my hotel room on North Clark Street and the most delicious smell rose to my nostrils
from the bakery downstairs. I didn’t have a dime but I went down and talked to the girl. She gave
me bread and coffee cakes free. I went back to my room and ate them. I stayed in my room all
night. In Farmington, Utah, once, \\ here I went to work with Ed Wall - you know Ed Wall, the
rancher’s son in Denver - I was in my bed and all of a sudden I saw my dead mother standing in the
corner with light all around her. I said, ’Mother!’ She disappeared. I have visions all the time,. said
Ed Dunkel, nodding his head.
.What are you going to do about Galatea?.
.Oh, we’ll see. When we get to New Orleans. Don’t you think so, huh?. He was starting to turn
to me as well for advice; one Dean wasn’t enough for him. But he was already in love with Galatea,
pondering it.
.What are you going to do with yourself, Ed?. I asked.
.I don’t know,. he said. .I just go along. I dig life.. He repeated it, following Dean’s line. He had
no direction. He sat reminiscing about that night in Chicago and the hot coffee cakes in the lonely
room.
The snow whirled outside. A big party was on hand in New York; we were all going. Dean
packed his broken trunk, put it in the car, and we all took off for the big night. My aunt was happy
with the thought that my brother would be visiting her the following week; she sat with her paper and
waited for the midnight New Year’s Eve broadcast from Times Square. We roared into New York,
swerving on ice. I was never scared when Dean drove; he could handle a car under any
circumstances. The radio had been fixed and now he had wild bop to urge us along the night. I didn’t
know where all this was leading; I didn’t care.
Just about that time a strange thing began to haunt me. It was this: I had forgotten something.
There was a decision that I was about to make before Dean showed up, and now it was driven clear
out of my mind but still hung on the tip of my mind’s tongue. I kept snapping my fingers, trying to
remember it. I even mentioned it. And I couldn’t even tell if it was a real decision or just a thought I
had forgotten. It haunted and flabbergasted me, made me sad. It had to do somewhat with the
Shrouded Traveler. Carlo Marx and I once sat down together, knee to knee, in two chairs, facing,
and I told him a dream I had about a strange Arabian figure that was pursuing me across the desert;
that I tried to avoid; that finally overtook me just before I reached the Protective City. .Who is this?.
said Carlo. We pondered it. I proposed it was myself, wearing a shroud. That wasn’t it. Something,
someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us
before we reached heaven. Naturally, now that I look back on it, this is only death: death will
overtake us before heaven. The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and
groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was
probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in
death. But who wants to die? In the rush of events I kept thinking about this in the back of my mind.
I told it to Dean and he instantly recognized it as the mere simple longing for pure death; and because
we’re all of us never in life again, he, rightly, would have nothing to do with it, and I agreed with him
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then.
