6
Now we had a number of circumstances to deal with in Denver, and they were of an entirely different order from those of 1947. We could either get another travel-bureau car at once or stay a few days for kicks and look for his father.
We were both exhausted and dirty. In the john of a restaurant I was at a urinal blocking Dean’s way to the sink and I stepped out before I was finished and resumed at another urinal, and said to Dean, “Dig this trick.”
“Yes, man,” he said, washing his hands at the sink, “it’s a very good trick but awful on your kidneys and because you’re getting a little older now every time you do this eventually years of misery in your old age, awful kidney miseries for the days when you sit in parks.”
It made me mad. “Who’s old? I’m not much older than you are!”
“I wasn’t saying that, man!”
“Ah,” I said, “you’re always making cracks about my age. I’m no old fag like that fag, you don’t have to warn me about my kidneys.” We went back to the booth and just as the waitress set down the hot-roast-beef sandwiches—and ordinarily Dean would have leaped to wolf the food at once—I said to cap my anger, “And I don’t want to hear any more of it.” And suddenly Dean’s eyes grew tearful and he got up and left his food steaming there and walked out of the restaurant. I wondered if he was just wandering off forever. I didn’t care, I was so mad—I had flipped momentarily and turned it down on Dean. But the sight of his uneaten food made me sadder than anything in years. I shouldn’t have said that ... he likes to eat so much ... He’s never left his food like this ... What the hell. That’s showing him, anyway.
Dean stood outside the restaurant for exactly five minutes and then came back and sat down. “Well,” I said, “what were you doing out there, knotting up your fists? Cursing me, thinking up new gags about my kidneys?”
Dean mutely shook his head. “No, man, no, man, you’re all completely wrong. If you want to know, well—”
“Go ahead, tell me.” I said all this and never looked up from my food. I felt like a beast.
“I was crying,” said Dean.
“Ah hell, you never cry.”
“You say that? Why do you think I don’t cry?”
“You don’t die enough to cry.” Every one of these things I said was a knife at myself. Everything I had ever secretly held against my brother was coming out: how ugly I was and what filth I was discovering in the depths of my own impure psychologies.
Dean was shaking his head. “No, man, I was crying.”
“Go on, I bet you were so mad you had to leave.”
“Believe me, Sal, really do believe me if you’ve ever believed anything about me.” I knew he was telling the truth and yet I didn’t want to bother with the truth and when I looked up at him I think I was cockeyed from cracked intestinal twistings in my awful belly. Then I knew I was wrong.
“Ah, man, Dean, I’m sorry, I never acted this way before with you. Well, now you know me. You know I don’t have close relationships with anybody any more—I don’t know what to do with these things. I hold things in my hand like pieces of crap and don’t know where to put it down. Let’s forget it.” The holy con-man began to eat. “It’s not my fault! It’s not my fault!” I told him. “Nothing in this lousy world is my fault, don’t you see that? I don’t want it to be and it can’t be and it won’t be.”
“Yes, man, yes, man. But please harken back and believe me.”
“I do believe you, I do.” This was the sad story of that afternoon. All kinds of tremendous complications arose that night when Dean and I went to stay with the Okie family.
These had been neighbors of mine in my Denver solitude of two weeks before. The mother was a wonderful woman in jeans who drove coal trucks in winter mountains to support her kids, four in all, her husband having left her years before when they were traveling around the country in a trailer. They had rolled all the way from Indiana to LA in that trailer. After many a good time and a big Sunday-afternoon drunk in crossroads bars and laughter and guitar-playing in the night, the big lout had suddenly walked off across the dark field and never returned. Her children were wonderful. The eldest was a boy, who wasn’t around that summer but in a camp in the mountains; next was a lovely thirteen-year-old daughter who wrote poetry and picked flowers in the fields and wanted to grow up and be an actress in Hollywood, Janet by name; then came the little ones, little Jimmy who sat around the campfire at night and cried for his “pee-tater” before it was half roasted, and little Lucy who made pets of worms, horny toads, beetles, and anything that crawled, and gave them names and places to live. They had four dogs. They lived their ragged and joyous lives on the little new-settlement street and were the butt of the neighbors’ semi-respectable sense of propriety only because the poor woman’s husband had left her and because they littered up the yard. At night all the lights of Denver lay like a great wheel on the plain below, for the house was in that part of the West where the mountains roll down foothilling to the plain and where in primeval times soft waves must have washed from sealike Mississippi to make such round and perfect stools for the island-peaks like Evans and Pike and Longs. Dean went there and of course he was all sweats and joy at the sight of them, especially Janet, but I warned him not to touch her, and probably didn’t have to. The woman was a great man’s woman and took to Dean right away but she was bashful and he was bashful. She said Dean reminded her of the husband gone. “Just like him—oh, he was a crazy one, I tell ya!”
The result was uproarious beer-drinking in the littered living room, shouting suppers, and booming Lone Ranger radio. The complications rose like clouds of butterflies: the woman—Frankie, everyone called her—was finally about to buy a jalopy as she had been threatening to do for years, and had recently come into a few bucks toward one. Dean immediately took over the responsibility of selecting and naming the price of the car, because of course he wanted to use it himself so as of yore he could pick up girls coming out of high school in the afternoons and drive them up to the mountains. Poor innocent Frankie was always agreeable ‘to anything. But she was afraid to part with her money when they got to the car lot and stood before the salesman. Dean sat right down in the dust of Alameda Boulevard and beat his fists on his head. “For a hunnerd you can’t get anything better!” He swore he’d never talk to her again, he cursed till his face was purple, he was about to jump in the car and drive it away anyway. “Oh these dumb dumb dumb Okies, they’ll never change, how com-pletely and how unbelievably dumb, the moment it comes time to act, this paralysis, scared, hysterical, nothing frightens em more than what they want—it’s my father my father my father all over again!”
Dean was very excited that night because his cousin Sam Brady, was meeting us at a bar. He was wearing a clean T-shirt and beaming all over. “Now listen, Sal, I must tell you about Sam—he’s my cousin.”
“By the way, have you looked for your father?”
“This afternoon, man, I went down to Jiggs’ Buffet where he used to pour draft beer in tender befuddlement and get hell from the boss and go staggering out—no—and I went to the old barber-shop next to the Windsor—no, not there—old fella told me he thought he was—imagine!—working in a railroad gandy-dancing cookshack or sumpin for the Boston and Maine in New England! But I don’t believe him, they make up fractious stories for a dime. Now listen to hear. In my childhood Sam Brady my close cousin was my absolute hero. He used to bootleg whisky from the mountains and one time he had a tremendous fist fight with his brother that lasted two hours in the yard and had the women screaming and terrified. We used to sleep together. The one man in the family who took tender concern for me. And tonight I’m going to see him again for the first time in seven years, he just got back from Missouri.”
“And what’s the pitch?”
“No pitch, man, I only want to know what’s been happening in the family—I have a family, remember—and most particularly, Sal, I want him to tell me things that I’ve forgotten in my childhood. I want to remember, remember, I do!” I never saw Dean so glad and excited. While we waited for his cousin in the bar he talked to a lot of younger downtown hipsters and hustlers and checked on new gangs and goings-on. Then he made inquiries after Marylou, since she’d been in Denver recently. “Sal, in my young days when I used to come to this corner to steal change off the newsstand for bowery beef stew, that rough-looking cat you see out there standing had nothing but murder in his heart, got into one horrible fight after another, I remember his scars even, till now years and y-e-a-r-s of standing on the corner have finally softened him and chastened him ragely, here completely he’s become sweet and willing and patient with everybody, he’s become a fixture on the corner, you see how things happen?”
Then Sam arrived, a wiry, curly-haired man of thirty-five with work-gnarled hands. Dean stood in awe before him. “No,” said Sam Brady, “I don’t drink any more.”
“See? See?” whispered Dean in my ear. “He doesn’t drink any more and he used to be the biggest whiskyleg in town, he’s got religion now, he told me over the phone, dig him, dig the change in a man—my hero has become so strange.” Sam Brady was suspicious of his young cousin. He took us out for a spin in his old rattly coupe and immediately he made his position clear in regard to Dean.
“Now look, Dean, I don’t believe you any more or anything you’re going to try to tell me. I came to see you tonight because there’s a paper I want you to sign for the family. Your father is no longer mentioned among us and we want absolutely nothing to do with him, and, I’m sorry to say, with you either, any more.” I looked at Dean. His face dropped and darkened.
“Yass, yass,” he said. The cousin continued to drive us around and even bought us ice-cream pops. Nevertheless Dean plied him with innumerable questions about the past and the cousin supplied the answers and for a moment Dean almost began to sweat again with excitement. Oh, where was his raggedy father that night? The cousin dropped us off at the sad lights of a carnival on Alameda Boulevard at Federal. He made an appointment with Dean for the paper-signing next afternoon and left. I told Dean I was sorry he had nobody in the world to believe in him.
“Remember that I believe in you. I’m infinitely sorry for the foolish grievance I held against you yesterday afternoon.”
“All right, man, it’s agreed,” said Dean. We dug the carnival together. There were merry-go-rounds, Ferris wheels, popcorn, roulette wheels, sawdust, and hundreds of young Denver kids in jeans wandering around. Dust rose to the stars together with every sad music on earth. Dean was wearing washed-out tight levis and a T-shirt and looked suddenly like a real Denver character again. There were motorcycle kids with visors and mustaches and beaded jackets hanging around the shrouds in back of the tents with pretty girls in levis and rose shirts. There were a lot of Mexican girls too, and one amazing little girl about three feet high, a midget, with the most beautiful and tender face in the world, who turned to her companion and said, “Man, let’s call up Gomez and cut out.” Dean stopped dead in his tracks at the sight of her. A great knife stabbed him from the darkness of the night. “Man, I love her, oh, love her ...” We had to follow her around for a long time. She finally went across the highway to make a phone call in a motel booth and Dean pretended to be looking through the pages of the directory but was really all wound tight watching her. I tried to open up a conversation with the lovey-doll’s friends but they paid no attention to us. Gomez arrived in a rattly truck and took the girls off. Dean stood in the road, clutching his breast. “Oh, man, I almost died....”
“Why the hell didn’t you talk to her?”
“I can‘t, I couldn’t ...” We decided to buy some beer and go up to Okie Frankie’s and play records. We hitched on the road with a bag of beer cans. Little Janet, Frankie’s thirteen-year-old daughter, was the prettiest girl in the world and was about to grow up into a gone woman. Best of all were her long, tapering, sensitive fingers that she used to talk with, like a Cleopatra Nile dance. Dean sat in the farthest corner of the room, watching her with slitted eyes and saying, “Yes, yes, yes.” Janet was already aware of him; she turned to me for protection. Previous months of that summer I had spent a lot of time with her, talking about books and little things she was interested in.