3
It was like an old-fashioned movie when Dean arrived. I was in Babe’s house in a golden afternoon. A word 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.
“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 am sure. 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—bitity—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 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 locking 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 ’n’ 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 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! Whee!”
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 large almond eyes and a tense, mad neck.
“Stan,” he simply said, “don’t go. Don’t make your old grandfather cry. Don’t leave me alone again.” It broke my heart to see all this.
“Dean,” said the old man, addressing me, “don’t take my Stan away from me. I used to take him to the park when he was a little boy and explain the swans to him. Then his little sister drowned in the same pond. I don’t want you to take my boy away.”
“No,” said Stan, “we’re leaving now. Good-by.” He struggled with his grips.
His grandfather took him by the arm. “Stan, Stan, Stan, don’t go, don’t go, don’t go.”
We fled with our heads bowed, and the old man still stood in the doorway of his Denver side-street cottage with the beads hanging in the doors and the overstuffed furniture in the parlor. He was as white as a sheet. He was still calling Stan. There was something paralyzed about his movements, and he did nothing about leaving the doorway, but just stood in it, muttering, “Stan,” and “Don’t go,” and looking after us anxiously as we rounded the corner.
“God, Shep, I don’t know what to say.”
“Never mind!” Stan moaned. “He’s always been like that.”
We met Stan’s mother at the bank, where she was drawing money for him. She was a lovely white-haired woman, still very young in appearance. She and her son stood on the marble floor of the bank, whispering. Stan was wearing a levi outfit, jacket and all, and looked like a man going to Mexico sure enough. This was his tender existence in Denver, and he was going off with the flaming tyro Dean. Dean came popping around the corner and met us just on time. Mrs. Shephard insisted on buying us all a cup of coffee.
“Take care of my Stan,” she said. “No telling what things might happen in that country.”
“We’ll all watch over each other,” I said. Stan and his mother strolled on ahead, and I walked in back with crazy Dean; he was telling me about the inscriptions carved on toilet walls in the East and in the West.
“They’re entirely different; in the East they make cracks and corny jokes and obvious references, scatological bits of data and drawings; in the West they just write their names, Red O‘Hara, Blufftown Montana, came by here, date, real solemn, like, say, Ed Dunkel, the reason being the enormous loneliness that differs just a shade and cut hair as you move across the Mississippi.” Well, there was a lonely guy in front of us, for Shephard’s mother was a lovely mother and she hated to see her son go but knew he had to go. I saw he was fleeing his grandfather. Here were the three of us—Dean looking for his father, mine dead, Stan fleeing his old one, and going off into the night together. He kissed his mother in the rushing crowds of 17th and she got in a cab and waved at us. Good-by, good-by.
We got in the car at Babe’s and said good-by to her. Tim was riding with us to his house outside town. Babe was beautiful that day; her hair was long and blond and Swedish, her freckles showed in the sun. She looked exactly like the little girl she had been. There was a mist in her eyes. She might join us later with Tim—but she didn’t. Good-by. Good-by.
We roared off. We left Tim in his yard on the Plains outside town and I looked back to watch Tim Gray recede on the plain. That strange guy stood there for a full two minutes watching us go away and thinking God knows what sorrowful thoughts. He grew smaller and smaller, and still he stood motionless with one hand on a washline, like a captain, and I was twisted around to see more of Tim Gray till there was nothing but a growing absence in space, and the space was the eastward view toward Kansas that led all the way back to my home in Atlantis.
Now we pointed our rattle snout south and headed for Castle Rock, Colorado, as the sun turned red and the rock of the mountains to the west looked like a Brooklyn brewery in November dusks. Far up in the purple shades of the rock there was someone walking, walking, but we could not see; maybe that old man with the white hair I had sensed years ago up in the peaks. Zacatecan Jack. But he was coming closer to me, if only ever just behind. And Denver receded back of us like the city of salt, her smokes breaking up in the air and dissolving to our sight.