What About Paris? ™

All this time Dean was telling Marylou things like this: «Now, darling, here we are in New York and although I haven't quite told you everything that I was tliinking about when we crossed Missouri
and especially at the point when we passed the Booneville reformatory which reminded me of my jail problem, it is absolutely necessary now to postpone all those leftover things concerning our personal lovethings and at once begin thinking of specific worklife plans . . . and so on in the way that he had in those early days.

I went to the cold-water flat with the boys, and Dean came to the door in his shorts. Marylou was jumping off the couch; Dean had dispatched the occupant of the apartment to the kitchen, probably
to make coffee, while he proceeded with his loveproblems, for to him sex was the one and only holy and important thing in life, although he had to sweat and curse to make a living and so on. You saw
that in the way he stood bobbing his head, always looking down, nodding, like a young boxer to instructions, to make you think he was listening to every word, throwing in a thousand «Yeses» and
«That's rights.» My first impression of Dean was of a young Gene Autry - trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent - a sidebumed hero of the snowy West. In fact he'd just been
working on a ranch, Ed Wall's in Colorado, before marrying Marylou and coming East. Marylou was a pretty blonde with immense ringlets of hair like a sea of golden tresses; she sat there on the
edge of the couch with her hands hanging in her lap and her smoky blue country eyes fixed in a wide stare because she was in an evil gray New York pad that she'd heard about back West, and waiting
like a longbodied emaciated Modigliani surrealist woman in a serious room. But, outside of being a sweet lMe girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things. That night we all drank
beer and pulled wrists and talked till dawn, and in the morning, while we sat around dumbly smoking butts from ashtrays in the gray light of a gloomy day, Dean got up nervously, paced around, thinking,
and decided the thing to do was to have Marylou make breakfast and sweep the floor. "In other words we've got to get on the ball, darling, what I'm saying, otherwise it'll be fluctuating and lack of
true knowledge or crystallization of our plans.» Then I went away.

During the following week he confided in Chad King that he absolutely had to learn how to write
from him; Chad said I was a writer and he should come to me for advice. Meanwhile Dean had
gotten a job in a parking lot, had a fight with Marylou in their Hoboken apartment - God knows why
they went there - and she was so mad and so down deep vindictive that she reported to the police
some false trumped-up hysterical crazy charge, and Dean had to lam from Hoboken. So he had no
place to live. He came right out to Paterson, New Jersey, where I was living with my aunt, and one
night while I was studying there was a knock on the door, and there was Dean, bowing, shuffling
obsequiously in the dark of the hall, and saying, «Hello, you remember me - Dean Moriarty? I've
come to ask you to show me how to write.»

«And where's Marylou?» I asked, and Dean said she'd apparently whored a few dollars together
and gone back to Denver - »the whore!» So we went out to have a few beers because we couldn't
talk like we wanted to talk in front of my aunt, who sat in the living room reading her paper. She
took one look at Dean and decided that he was a madman.

In the bar I told Dean, «Hell, man, I know very well you didn't come to me only to want to
become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except you've got to stick to it with the
energy of a benny addict.» And he said, «Yes, of course, I know exactly what you mean and in fact
all those problems have occurred to me, but the thing that I want is the realization of those factors
that should one depend on Schopenhauer's dichotomy for any inwardly realized . . .» and so on in
that way, things I understood not a bit and he himself didn't. In those days he really didn't know
what he was talking about; that is to say, he was a young jailkid all hung-up on the wonderful
possibilities of becoming a real intellectual, and he liked to talk in the tone and using the words, but in
a jumbled way, that he had heard from «real intellectuals* - although, mind you, he wasn't so naive
as that in all other things, and it took him just a few months with Carlo Marx to become completely
in there with all the terms and jargon. Nonetheless we understood each other on other levels of
madness, and I agreed that he could stay at my house till he found a job and furthermore we agreed
to go out West sometime. That was the winter of 1947.

One night when Dean ate supper at my house - he already had the parking-lot job in New York -
he leaned over my shoulder as I typed rapidly away and said, «Come on man, those girls won't wait,
make it fast.»

I said, «Hold on just a minute, I'll be right with you soon as I finish this chapter,» and it was one
of the best chapters in the book. Then I dressed and off we flew to New York to meet some girls.
As we rode in the bus in the weird phosphorescent void of the Lincoln Tunnel we leaned on each
other with fingers waving and yelled and talked excitedly, and I was beginning to get the bug like
Dean. He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was
only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would
otherwise pay no attention to him. He was conning me and I knew it (for room and board and «how-
to-write,» etc.), and he knew I knew (this has been the basis of our relationship), but I didn't care
and we got along fine - no pestering, no catering; we tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking
new friends. I began to learn from him as much as he probably learned from me. As far as my work
was concerned he said, «Go ahead, everything you do is great. » He watched over my shoulder as I
wrote stories, yelling, «Yes! That's right! Wow! Man!» and «Phew!» and wiped his face with his
handkerchief. «Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even
begin to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and
grammatical fears . . .»

«That's right, man, now you're talking.» And a kind of holy Ughtning I saw flashing from his
excitement and his visions, which he described so torrentially that people in buses looked around to
see the «overexcited nut.» In the West he'd spent a third of his time in the poolhall, a third in jail, and
a third in the public library. They'd seen him rushing eagerly down the winter streets, bareheaded,
carrying books to the poolhall, or climbing trees to get into the attics of buddies where he spent days
reading or hiding from the law.

We went to New York - 1 forget what the situation was, two colored girls - there were no girls
there; they were supposed to meet him in a diner and didn't show up. We went to his parking lot
where he had a few things to do - change his clothes in the shack in back and spruce up a bit in front
of a cracked mirror and so on, and then we took off. And that was the night Dean met Carlo Marx.
A tremendous thing happened when Dean met Carlo Marx. Two keen minds that they are, they took
to each other at the drop of a hat. Two piercing eyes glanced into two piercing eyes - the holy con-
man with the shining mind, and the sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind that is Carlo Marx.
From that moment on I saw very little of Dean, and I was a little sorry too. Their energies met head-
on, I was a lout compared, I couldn't keep up with them.

The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then; it would mix up all my friends
and all I had left of my family in a big dust cloud over the American Night. Carlo told him of Old Bull
Lee, Elmer Hassel, Jane: Lee in Texas growing weed, Hassel on Riker's Island, Jane wandering on
Times Square in a benzedrine hallucination, with her baby girl in her arms and ending up in Bellevue.
And Dean told Carlo of unknown people in the West like Tommy Snark, the clubfooted poolhall
rotation shark and cardplayer and queer saint. He told him of Roy Johnson, Big Ed Dunkel, his
boyhood buddies, his street buddies, his innumerable girls and sex-parties and pornographic
pictures, his heroes, heroines, adventures. They rushed down the street together, digging everything
in the early way they had, which later became so much sadder and perceptive and blank. But then
they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life
after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are
mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who
never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but bum, bum, bum like fabulous yellow roman candles
exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and
everybody goes «Awww!» What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany? Wanting
dearly to learn how to write like Carlo, the first thing you know, Dean was attacking him with a great
amorous soul such as only a con-man can have. «Now, Carlo, let me speak - here's what I'm
saying ...» I didn't see them for about two weeks, during which time they cemented their relationship
to fiendish allday-allnight-talk proportions.

Then came spring, the great time of traveling, and everybody in the scattered gang was getting
ready to take one trip or another. I was busily at work on my novel and when I came to the halfway
mark, after a trip down South with my aunt to visit my brother Rocco, I got ready to travel West for
the very first time.

Dean had already left. Carlo and I saw him off at the 34th Street Greyhound station. Upstairs
they had a place where you could make pictures for a quarter. Carlo took off his glasses and looked
sinister. Dean made a profile shot and looked coyly around. I took a straight picture that made me
look like a thirty-year-old Italian who'd kill anybody who said anything against his mother. This
picture Carlo and Dean neatly cut down the middle with a razor and saved a half each in their
wallets. Dean was wearing a real Western business suit for his big trip back to Denver; he'd finished
his first fling in New York. I say fling, but he only worked like a dog in parking lots. The most
fantastic parking-lot attendant in the world, he can back a car forty miles an hour into a tight squeeze

and stop at the wall, jump out, race among fenders, leap into another car, circle it fifty miles an hour
in a narrow space, back swiftly into tight spot, hump, snap the car with the emergency so that you
see it bounce as he flies out; then clear to the ticket shack, sprinting like a track star, hand a ticket,
leap into a newly arrived car before the owner's half out, leap literally under him as he steps out, start
the car with the door flapping, and roar off to the next available spot, arc, pop in, brake, out, run;
working like that without pause eight hours a night, evening rush hours and after-theater rush hours,
in greasy wino pants with a frayed fur-lined jacket and beat shoes that flap. Now he'd bought a new
suit to go back in; blue with pencil stripes, vest and all - eleven dollars on Third Avenue, with a
watch and watch chain, and a portable typewriter with which he was going to start writing in a
Denver rooming house as soon as he got a job there. We had a farewell meal of franks and beans in
a Seventh Avenue Riker's, and then Dean got on the bus that said Chicago and roared off into the
night. There went our wrangler. I promised myself to go the same way when spring really bloomed
and opened up the land.

And this was really the way that my whole road experience began, and the things that were to
come are too fantastic not to tell.

Yes, and it wasn't only because I was a writer and needed new experiences that I wanted to
know Dean more, and because my life hanging around the campus had reached the completion of its
cycle and was stultified, but because, somehow, in spite of our difference in character, he reminded
me of some long-lost brother; the sight of his suffering bony face with the long sideburns and his
straining muscular sweating neck made me remember my boyhood in those dye-dumps and swim-
holes and riversides of Paterson and the Passaic. His dirty workclothes clung to him so gracefully, as
though you couldn't buy a better fit from a custom tailor but only earn it from the Natural Tailor of
Natural Joy, as Dean had, in his stresses. And in his excited way of speaking I heard again the voices
of old companions and brothers under the bridge, among the motorcycles, along the wash-lined
neighborhood and drowsy doorsteps of afternoon where boys played guitars while their older
brothers worked in the mills. All my other current friends were «intellectuals» - Chad the Nietzschean
anthropologist, Carlo Marx and his nutty surrealist low-voiced serious staring talk, Old Bull Lee and
his critical anti-every-thing drawl - or else they were slinking criminals like Elmer Hassel, with that hip
sneer; Jane Lee the same, sprawled on the Oriental cover of her couch, sniffing at the New Yorker.
But Dean's intelligence was every bit as formal and shining and complete, without the tedious
intellectualness. And his <> was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-
saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something
new, long prophesied, long a-coming (he only stole cars for joy rides). Besides, all my New York
friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish
or political or psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love; he
didn't care one way or the other, «so long's I can get that lil ole gal with that lil sumpin down there
tween her legs, boy,» and «so long's we can eat, son, y'ear me? I'm hungry, I'm starving, let's eat
right now\» - and off we'd rush to eat, whereof, as saith Ecclesiastes, «It is your portion under the
sun.»

A western kinsman of the sun, Dean. Although my aunt warned me that he would get me in
trouble, I could hear a new call and see a new horizon, and believe it at my young age; and a little bit
of trouble or even Dean's eventual rejection of me as a buddy, putting me down, as he would later,
on starving sidewalks and sickbeds - what did it matter? I was a young writer and I wanted to take
off.

Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line

the pearl would be handed to me.

In the month of July 1947, having saved about fifty dollars from old veteran benefits, I was ready
to go to the West Coast. My friend Remi Boncceur had written me a letter from San Francisco,
saying I should come and ship out with him on an around-the- world liner. He swore he could get me
into the engine room. I wrote back and said I'd be satisfied with any old freighter so long as I could
take a few long Pacific trips and come back with enough money to support myself in my aunt's
house while I finished my book. He said he had a shack in Mill City and I would have all the time in
the world to write there while we went through the rigmarole of getting the ship. He was living with a
girl called Lee Ann; he said she was a marvelous cook and everything would jump. Remi was an old
prep-school friend, a Frenchman brought up in Paris and a really mad guy - 1 didn't know how mad
at this time. So he expected me to arrive in ten days. My aunt was all in accord with my trip to the
West; she said it would do me good, I'd been working so hard all winter and staying in too much;
she even didn't complain when I told her I'd have to hitchhike some. All she wanted was for me to
come back in one piece. So, leaving my big half-manuscript sitting on top of my desk, and folding
back my comfortable home sheets for the last time one morning, I left with my canvas bag in which a
few fundamental things were packed and took off for the Pacific Ocean with the fifty dollars in my
pocket.

I'd been poring over maps of the United States in Paterson for months, even reading books about
the pioneers and savoring names like Platte and Cimarron and so on, and on the road-map was one
long red line called Route 6 that led from the tip of Cape Cod clear to Ely, Nevada, and there
dipped down to Los Angeles. I'll just stay on 6 all the way to Ely, I said to myself and confidently
started. To get to 6 I had to go up to Bear Mountain. Filled with dreams of what I'd do in Chicago,
in Denver, and then finally in San Fran, I took the Seventh Avenue subway to the end of the line at
242nd Street, and there took a trolley into Yonkers; in downtown Yonkers I transferred to an
outgoing trolley and went to the city limits on the east bank of the Hudson River. If you drop a rose
in the Hudson River at its mysterious source in the Adirondacks, think of all the places it journeys by
as it goes out to sea forever - think of that wonderful Hudson Valley. I started hitching up the thing.
Five scattered rides took me to the desired Bear Mountain Fridge, where Route 6 arched in from
New England. It began to rain in torrents when I was let off there. It was mountainous. Route 6
came over the river, wound around a traffic circle, and disappeared into the wilderness. Not only
was there no traffic but the rain came down in buckets and I had no shelter. I had to run under some
pines to take cover; this did no good; I began crying and swearing and socking myself on the head
for being such a damn fool. I was forty miles north of New York; all the way up I'd been worried
about the fact that on this, my big opening day, I was only moving north instead of the so-longed-for
west. Now I was stuck on my northernmost hangup. I ran a quarter-mile to an abandoned cute
English-style filling station and stood under the dripping eaves. High up over my head the great hairy
Bear Mountain sent down thunderclaps that put the fear of God in me. All I could see were smoky
trees and dismal wilderness rising to the skies. «What the hell am I doing up here?»

I cursed, I cried for Chicago. «Even now they're all having a big time, they're doing this, I'm not
there, when will I get there !» - and so on. Finally a car stopped at the empty filling station; the man
and the two women in it wanted to study a map. I stepped right up and gestured in the rain; they
consulted; I looked like a maniac, of course, with my hair all wet, my shoes sopping. My shoes,
damn fool that I am, were Mexican huaraches, plantlike sieves not fit for the rainy night of America
and the raw road night. But the people let me in and rode me north to Newburgh, which I accepted

10

as a better alternative than being trapped in the Bear Mountain wilderness all night. «Besides,» said
the man, «there's no traffic passes through 6. If you want to go to Chicago you'd do better going
across the Holland Tunnel in New York and head for Pittsburgh,* and I knew he was right. It was
my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow one great
red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes.

In Newburgh it had stopped raining. I walked down to the river, and I had to ride back to New
York in a bus with a delegation of schoolteachers coming back from a weekend in the mountains -
chatter-chatter blah-blah, and me swearing for all the time and the money I'd wasted, and telling
myself, I wanted to go west and here I've been all day and into the night going up and down, north
and south, like something that can't get started. And I swore I'd be in Chicago tomorrow, and made
sure of that, taking a bus to Chicago, spending most of my money, and didn't give a damn, just as
long as I'd be in Chicago tomorrow.

11

It was an ordinary bus trip with crying babies and hot sun, and countryfolk getting on at one Penn
town after another, till we got on the plain of Ohio and really rolled, up by Ashtabula and straight
across Indiana in the night. I arrived in Chi quite early in the morning, got a room in the Y, and went
to bed with a very few dollars in my pocket. I dug Chicago after a good day's sleep.

The wind from Lake Michigan, bop at the Loop, long walks around South Halsted and North
Clark, and one long walk after midnight into the jungles, where a cruising car followed me as a
suspicious character. At this time, 1947, bop was going like mad all over America. The fellows at the
Loop blew, but with a tired air, because bop was somewhere between its Charlie Parker
Ornithology period and another period that began with Miles Davis. And as I sat there listening to
that sound of the .light which bop has come to represent for all of us, I thought of all my friends from
one end of the country to the other and how they were really all in the same vast backyard doing
something so frantic and rushing-about. And for the first time in my life, the following afternoon, I
went into the West. It was a warm and beautiful day for hitchhiking. To get out of the impossible
complexities of Chicago traffic I took a bus to Joliet, Illinois, went by the Joliet pen, stationed myself
just outside town after a walk through its leafy rickety streets behind, and pointed my way. All the
way from New York to Joliet by bus, and I had spent more than half my money.

My first ride was a dynamite truck with a red flag, about thirty miles into great green Illinois, the
truckdriver pointing out the place where Route 6, which we were on, intersects Route 66 before they
both shoot west for incredible distances. Along about three in the afternoon, after an apple pie and
ice cream in a roadside stand, a woman stopped for me in a little coupe. I had a twinge of hard joy
as I ran after the car. But she was a middle-aged woman, actually the mother of sons my age, and
wanted somebody to help her drive to Iowa. I was all for it. Iowa! Not so far from Denver, and
once I got to Denver I could relax. She drove the first few hours, at one point insisted on visiting an
old church somewhere, as if we were tourists, and then I took over the wheel and, though I'm not
much of a driver, drove clear through the rest of Illinois to Davenport, Iowa, via Rock Island. And
here for the first time in my life I saw my beloved Mississippi River, dry in the summer haze, low
water, with its big rank smell that smells like the raw body of America itself because it washes it up.
Rock Island - railroad tracks, shacks, small downtown section; and over the bridge to Davenport,
same kind of town, all smelling of sawdust in the warm midwest sun. Here the lady had to go on to
her Iowa hometown by another route, and I got out.

The sun was going down. I walked, after a few cold beers, to the edge of town, and it was a long
walk. All the men were driving home from work, wearing railroad hats, baseball hats, all kinds of
hats, just like after work in any town anywhere. One of them gave me a ride up the hill and left me at
a lonely crossroads on the edge of the prairie. It was beautiful there. The only cars that came by
were farmer-cars; they gave me suspicious looks, they clanked along, the cows were coming home.
Not a truck. A few cars zipped by. A hotrod kid came by with his scarf flying. The sun went all the
way down and I was standing in the purple darkness. Now I was scared. There weren't even any
lights in the Iowa countryside; in a minute nobody would be able to see me. Luckily a man going
back to Davenport gave me a lift downtown. But I was right where I started from.

I went to sit in the bus station and think this over. I ate another apple pie and ice cream; that's
practically all I ate all the way across the country, I knew it was nutritious and it was delicious, of
course. I decided to gamble. I took a bus in downtown Davenport, after spending a half-hour
watching a waitress in the bus-station cafe, and rode to the city limits, but this time near the gas

12

stations. Here the big tracks roared, wham, and inside two minutes one of them cranked to a stop
for me. I ran for it with my soul whoopeeing. And what a driver - a great big tough truckdriver with
popping eyes and a hoarse raspy voice who just slammed and kicked at everything and got his rig
under way and paid hardly any attention to me. So I could rest my tired soul a little, for one of the
biggest troubles Wtchhiking is having to talk to innumerable people, make them feel that they didn't
make a mistake picking you up, even entertain them almost, all of which is a great strain when you're
going all the way and don't plan to sleep in hotels. The guy just yelled above the roar, and all I had to
do was yell back, and we relaxed. And he balled that thing clear to Iowa City and yelled me the
funniest stories about how he got around the law in every town that had an unfair speed limit, saying
over and over again, «Them goddam cops can't put no flies on my ass!» Just as we rolled into Iowa
Qty he saw another truck coming behind us, and because he had to turn off at Iowa City he blinked
his tail lights at the other guy and slowed down for me to jump out, which I did with my bag, and the
other truck, acknowledging this exchange, stopped for me, and once again, in the twink of nothing, I
was in another big high cab, all set to go hundreds of miles across the night, and was I happy! And
the new truckdriver was as crazy as the other and yelled just as much, and all I had to do was lean
back and roll on. Now I could see Denver looming ahead of me like the Promised Land, way out
there beneath the stars, across the prairie of Iowa and the plains of Nebraska, and I could see the
greater vision of San Francisco beyond, like jewels in the night. He balled the jack and told stories
for a couple of hours, then, at a town in Iowa where years later Dean and I were stopped on
suspicion in what looked like a stolen Cadillac, he slept a few hours in the seat. I slept too, and took
one little walk along the lonely brick walls illuminated by one lamp, with the prairie brooding at the
end of each little street and the smell of the com like dew in the night.

He woke up with a start at dawn. Off we roared, and an hour later the smoke of Des Moines
appeared ahead over the green cornfields. He had to eat his breakfast now and wanted to take it
easy, so I went right on into Des Moines, about four miles, hitching a ride with two boys from the
University of Iowa; and it was strange sitting in their brand-new comfortable car and hearing them
talk of exams as we zoomed smoothly into town. Now I wanted to sleep a whole day. So I went to
the Y to get a room; they didn't have any, and by instinct I wandered down to the railroad tracks -
and there're a lot of them in Des Moines - and wound up in a gloomy old Plains inn of a hotel by the
locomotive roundhouse, and spent a long day sleeping on a big clean hard white bed with dirty
remarks carved in the wall beside my pillow and the beat yellow windowshades pulled over the
smoky scene of the rail-yards. I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct
time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was - I was far away from
home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam
outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds,
and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange
seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted
life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my
youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that strange
red afternoon.

But I had to get going and stop moaning, so I picked up my bag, said so long to the old
hotelkeeper sitting by his spittoon, and went to eat. I ate apple pie and ice cream - it was getting
better as I got deeper into Iowa, the pie bigger, the ice cream richer. There were the most beautiful
bevies of girls everywhere I looked in Des Moines that afternoon - they were coming home from
high school - but I had no time now for thoughts like that and promised myself a ball in Denver.
Carlo Marx was already in Denver; Dean was there; Chad King and Tim Gray were there, it was

13

their hometown; Marylou was there; and there was mention of a mighty gang including Ray Rawlins
and his beautiful blond sister Babe Rawlins; two waitresses Dean knew, the Bettencourt sisters; and
even Roland Major, my old college writing buddy, was there. I looked forward to all of them with
joy and anticipation. So I rushed .past the pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des
Moines.

A guy with a kind of toolshack on wheels, a truck full of tools that he drove standing up like a
modem milkman, gave me a ride up the long hill, where I immediately got a ride from a farmer and
his son heading out for Adel in Iowa. In this town, under a big elm tree near a gas station, I made the
acquaintance of another hitchhiker, a typical New Yorker, an Irishman who'd been driving a truck
for the post office most of his work years and was now headed for a girl in Denver and a new life. I
think he was mnning away from something in New York, the law most likely. He was a real red-
nose young drunk of thirty and would have bored me ordinarily, except that my senses were sharp
for any kind of human friendship. He wore a beat sweater and baggy pants and had nothing with him
in the way of a bag - just a toothbrush and handkerchiefs. He said we ought to hitch together. I
should have said no, because he looked pretty awful on the road. But we stuck together and got a
ride with a taciturn man to Stuart, Iowa, a town in which we were really stranded. We stood in front
of the railroad-ticket shack in Stuart, waiting for the westbound traffic till the sun went down, a good
five hours, dawdling away the time, at first telling about ourselves, then he told dirty stories, then we
just kicked pebbles and made goofy noises of one kind and another. We got bored. I decided to
spend a buck on beer; we went to an old saloon in Stuart and had a few. There he got as drunk as
he ever did in his Ninth Avenue night back home, and yelled joyously in my ear all the sordid dreams
of his life. I kind of liked him; not because he was a good sort, as he later proved to be, but because
he was enthusiastic about things. We got back on the road in the darkness, and of course nobody
stopped and nobody came by much. That went on till three o'clock in the morning. We spent some
time trying to sleep on the bench at the railroad ticket office, but the telegraph clicked all night and
we couldn't sleep, and big freights were slamming around outside. We didn't know how to hop a
proper chain gang; we'd never done it before; we didn't know whether they were going east or west
or how to find out or what boxcars and flats and de-iced reefers to pick, and so on. So when the
Omaha bus came through just before dawn we hopped on it and joined the sleeping passengers - 1
paid for his fare as well as mine. His name was Eddie. He reminded me of my cousin-in-law from the
Bronx. That was why I stuck with him. It was like having an old friend along, a smiling good-natured
sort to goof along with.

We arrived at Council Bluffs at dawn; I looked out. All winter I'd been reading of the great
wagon parties that held council there before hitting the Oregon and Santa Fe trails; and of course
now it was only cute suburban cottages of one damn kind and another, all laid out in the dismal gray
dawn. Then Omaha, and, by God, the first cowboy I saw, walking along the bleak walls of the
wholesale meat warehouses in a ten-gallon hat and Texas boots, looked like any beat character of
the brickwall dawns of the East except for the getup. We got off the bus and walked clear up the hill,
the long hill formed over the millenniums by the mighty Missouri, alongside of which Omaha is built,
and got out to the country and stuck our thumbs out. We got a brief ride from a wealthy rancher in a
ten-gallon hat, who said the valley of the Platte was as great as the Nile Valley of Egypt, and as he
said so I saw the great trees in the distance that snaked with the riverbed and the great verdant fields
around it, and almost agreed with him. Then as we were standing at another crossroads and it was
starting to get cloudy another cowboy, this one six feet tall in a modest half-gallon hat, called us over
and wanted to know if either one of us could drive. Of course Eddie could drive, and he had a
license and I didn't. Cowboy had two cars with him that he was driving back to Montana,

14

His wife was at Grand Island, and he wanted us to drive one of the cars there, where she'd take
over. At that point he was going north, and that would be the limit of our ride with him. But it was a
good hundred miles into Nebraska, and of course ,we jumped for it. Eddie drove alone, the cowboy
and myself following, and no sooner were we out of town than Eddie started to ball that jack ninety
miles an hour out of sheer exuberance. «Damn me, what's that boy doing !» the cowboy shouted,
and took off after him. It began to be like a race. For a minute I thought Eddie was trying to get
away with the car - and for all I know that's what he meant to do. But the cowboy stuck to him and
caught up with him and tooted the horn. Eddie slowed down. The cowboy tooted to stop. «Damn,
boy, you're liable to get a flat going that speed. Can't you drive a little slower?»

«Well, I'll be damned, was I really going ninety ?» said Eddie. «I didn't realize it on this smooth
road.»

«Just take it a little easy and we'll all get to Grand Island in one piece.»

«Sure thing.» And we resumed our journey. Eddie had calmed down and probably even got
sleepy. So we drove a hundred miles across Nebraska, following the winding Platte with its verdant
fields.

«During the depression,* said the cowboy to me, «I used to hop freights at least once a month. In
those days you'd see hundreds of men riding a flatcar or in a boxcar, and they weren't just bums,
they were all kinds of men out of work and going from one place to another and some of them just
wandering. It was like that all over the West. Brakemen never bothered you in those days. I don't
know about today. Nebraska I ain't got no use for. Why in the middle nineteen thirties this place
wasn't nothing but a big dustcloud as far as the eye could see. You couldn't breathe. The ground
was black. I was here in those days. They can give Nebraska back to the Indians far as I'm
concerned. I hate this damn place more than' any place in the world. Montana's my home now -
Missoula. You come up there sometime and see God's country. » Later in the afternoon I slept when
he got tired talking - he was an interesting talker.

We stopped along the road for a bite to eat. The cowboy went off to have a spare tire patched,
and Eddie and I sat down in a kind of homemade diner. I heard a great laugh, the greatest laugh in
the world, and here came this rawhide old-timer Nebraska farmer with a bunch of other boys into
the diner; you could hear his raspy cries clear across the plains, across the whole gray world of them
that day. Everybody else laughed with him. He didn't have a care in the world and had the hugest
regard for everybody. I said to myself, Wham, listen to that man laugh. That's the West, here I am in
the West. He came booming into the diner, calling Maw's name, and she made the sweetest cherry
pie in Nebraska, and I had some with a mountainous scoop of ice cream on top. «Maw, rustle me
up some grub afore I have to start eatin myself raw or some damn silly idee like that.» And he threw
himself on a stool and went hyaw hyaw hyaw hyaw. «And throw some beans in it.» It was the spirit
of the West sitting right next to me. I wished I knew his whole raw life and what the hell he'd been
doing all these years besides laughing and yelling like that. Whooee, I told my soul, and the cowboy
came back and off we went to Grand Island.

We got there in no time flat. He went to fetch his wife and off to whatever fate awaited him, and
Eddie and I resumed on the road. We got a ride from a couple of young fellows - wranglers,
teenagers, country boys in a put-together jalopy - and were left off somewhere up the line in a thin
drizzle of rain. Then an old man who said nothing - and God knows why he picked us up - took us
to Shelton. Here Eddie stood forlornly in the road in front of a staring bunch of short, squat Omaha
Indians who had nowhere to go and nothing to do. Across the road was the railroad track and the
watertank saying SHELTON. «Damn me,» said Eddie with amazement, «I've been in this town
before. It was years ago, during the war, at night, late at night when everybody was sleeping. I went

15

out on the platform to smoke, and there we was in the middle of nowhere and black as hell, and I
look up and see that name Shelton written on the watertank. Bound for the Pacific, everybody
snoring, every damn dumb sucker, and we only stayed a few minutes, stoking up or something, and
off we went. Damn me, this Shelton! I hated this place ever since !» And we were stuck in Shelton.
As in Davenport, Iowa, somehow all the cars were farmer-cars, and once in a while a tourist car,
which is worse, with old men driving and their wives pointing out the sights or poring over maps, and
sitting back looking at everything with suspicious faces.

The drizzle increased and Eddie got cold; he had very little clothing. I fished a wool plaid shirt
from my canvas bag and he put it on. He felt a little better. I had a cold. I bought cough drops in a
rickety Indian store of some kind. I went to the little two-by-four post office and wrote my aunt a
penny postcard. We went back to the gray road. There she was in front of us, Shelton, written on
the watertank. The Rock Island balled by. We saw the faces of Pullman passengers go by in a blur.
The train howled off across the plains in the direction of our desires. It started to rain harder.

A tall, lanky fellow in a gallon hat stopped his car on the wrong side of the road and came over to
us; he looked like a sheriff. We prepared our stories secretly. He took his time coming over. «You
boys going to get somewhere, or just going?» We didn't understand his question, and it was a
damned good question.

«Why?» we said.

«Well, I own a lMe carnival that's pitched a few mile down the road and I'm looking for some
old boys willing to work and make a buck for themselves. I've got a roulette concession and a
wooden-ring concession, you know, the kind you throw around dolls and take your luck. You boys
want to work for me, you can get thirty per cent of the take.»

«Room and board?»

«You can get a bed but no food. You'll have to eat in town. We travel some.» We thought it
over. «It's a good opportunity, » he said, and waited patiently for us to make up our minds. We felt
silly and didn't know what to say, and I for one didn't want to get hung-up with a carnival. I was in
such a bloody hurry to get to the gang in Denver.

I said, «I don't know, I'm going as fast as I can and I don't think I have the time.» Eddie said the
same thing, and the old man waved his hand and casually sauntered back to his car and drove off.
And that was that. We laughed about it awhile and speculated about what it would have been like. I
had visions of a dark and dusty night on the plains, and the faces of Nebraska families wandering by,
with their rosy children looking at everything with awe, and I know I would have felt like the devil
himself rooking them with all those cheap carnival tricks. And the Ferris wheel revolving in the
flatlands darkness, and, God almighty, the sad music of the merry-go-round and me wanting to get
on to my goal - and sleeping in some gilt wagon on a bed of burlap.

Eddie turned out to be a pretty absent-minded pal of the road. A funny old contraption rolled by,
driven by an old man; it was made of some kind of aluminum, square as a box - a trailer, no doubt,
but a weird, crazy Nebraska homemade trailer. He was going very slow and stopped. We rushed
up; he said he could only take one; without a word Eddie jumped in and slowly rattled from my sight,
and wearing my wool plaid shirt. Well, alackaday, I kissed the shirt good-by; it had only sentimental
value in any case. I waited in our personal godawful Shelton for a long, long time, several hours, and
I kept thinking it was getting night; actually it was only early afternoon, but dark. Denver, Denver,
how would I ever get to Denver? I was just about giving up and planning to sit over coffee when a
fairly new car stopped, driven by a young guy. I ran like mad.

«Where you going?»

«Denver.»

16

«Well, I can take you a hundred miles up the line.»

«Grand, grand, you saved my life.»

«I used to hitchhike myself, that's why I always pick up a fellow.»
«I would too if I had a car.» And so we talked, and he told me about his life, which wasn't very
interesting, and I started to sleep some and woke up right outside the town of Gothenburg, where he
let me off

17

The greatest ride in my life was about to come up, a truck, with a flatboard at the back, with
about six or seven boys sprawled out on it, and the drivers, two young blond farmers from
Minnesota, were picking up every single soul they found on that road - the most smiling, cheerful
couple of handsome bumpkins you could ever wish to see, both wearing cotton shirts and overalls,
nothing else; both thick- wristed and earnest, with broad howareyou smiles for anybody and anything
that came across their path. I ran up, said «Is there room?» They said, «Sure, hop on, 'sroom for
everybody. »

I wasn't on the flatboard before the truck roared off; I lurched, a rider grabbed me, and I sat
down. Somebody passed a bottle of rotgut, the bottom of it. I took a big swig in the wild, lyrical,
drizzling air of Nebraska. «Whooee, here we go!» yelled a kid in a baseball cap, and they gunned up
the truck to seventy and passed everybody on the road. «We been riding this sonofabitch since Des
Moines. These guys never stop. Every now and then you have to yell for pisscall, otherwise you have
to piss off the air, and hang on, brother, hang on.»

I looked at the company. There were two young farmer boys from North Dakota in red baseball
caps, which is the standard North Dakota farmer-boy hat, and they were headed for the harvests;
their old men had given them leave to hit the road for a summer. There were two young city boys
from Columbus, Ohio, high-school football players, chewing gum, winking, singing in the breeze, and
they said they were hitchhiking around the United States for the summer. «We're going to LA! «they
yelled.

«What are you going to do there?»

«Hell, we don't know. Who cares?»

Then there was a tall slim fellow who had a sneaky look. «Where you from?» I asked. I was lying
next to him on the platform; you couldn't sit without bouncing off, it had no rails. And he turned
slowly to me, opened his mouth, and said, «Mon-ta-na.»

Finally there were Mississippi Gene and his charge. Mississippi Gene was a little dark guy who
rode freight trains around the country, a thirty-year-old hobo but with a youthful look so you couldn't
tell exactiy what age he was. And he sat on the boards crosslegged, looking out over the fields
without saying anything for hundreds of miles, and finally at one point he turned to me and said,
« Where j/om headed ?»

I said Denver.

«I got a sister there but I ain't seed her for several couple years.» His language was melodious
and slow. He was patient. His charge was a sixteen-year-old tall blond kid, also in hobo rags; that is
to say, they wore old clothes that had been turned black by the soot of railroads and the dirt of
boxcars and sleeping on the ground. The blond kid was also quiet and he seemed to be running
away from something, and it figured to be the law the way he looked straight ahead and wet his lips
in worried thought. Montana Slim spoke to them occasionally with a sardonic and insinuating smile.
They paid no attention to him. Slim was all insinuation. I was afraid of his long goofy grin that he
opened up straight in your face and held there half-moronically.

«You got any money ?» he said to me.

«Hell no, maybe enough for a pint of whisky till I get to Denver. What about you?»

«I know where I can get some.»

«Where?»
«Anywhere. You can always folly a man down an alley, can't you?»

18

«Yeah, I guess you can.»

«I ain't beyond doing it when I really need some dough. Headed up to Montana to see my father.
I'll have to get off this rig at Cheyenne and move up some other way. These crazy boys are going to
Los Angeles.»

«Straight?»

«A11 the way - if you want to go to LA you got a ride.»

I mulled this over; the thought of zooming all night across Nebraska, Wyoming, and the Utah
desert in the morning, and then most likely the Nevada desert in the afternoon, and actually arriving in
Los Angeles within a foreseeable space of time almost made me change my plans. But I had to go to
Denver. I'd have to get off at Cheyenne too, and hitch south ninety miles to Denver.

I was glad when the two Minnesota farmboys who owned the truck decided to stop in North
Platte and eat; I wanted to have a look at them. They came out of the cab and smiled at all of us.
«Pisscall!» said one. «Time to eat!» said the other. But they were the only ones in the party who had
money to buy food. We all shambled after them to a restaurant run by a bunch of women, and sat
around over hamburgers and coffee while they wrapped away enormous meals just as if they were
back in their mother's kitchen. They were brothers; they were transporting farm machinery from Los
Angeles to Minnesota and making good money at it. So on their trip to the Coast empty they picked
up everybody on the road. They'd done this about five times now; they were having a hell of a time.
They liked everything. They never stopped smiling. I tried to talk to them - a kind of dumb attempt
on my part to befriend the captains of our ship - and the only responses I got were two sunny smiles
and large white corn-fed teeth.

Everybody had joined them in the restaurant except the two hobo kids, Gene and his boy. When
we all got back they were still sitting in the truck, forlorn and disconsolate. Now the darkness was
falling. The drivers had a smoke; I jumped at the chance to go buy a bottle of whisky to keep warm
in the rushing cold air of night. They smiled when I told them. «Go ahead, hurry up.»

«You can have a couple shots !» I reassured them.

«Oh no, we never drink, go ahead.»

Montana Slim and the two high-school boys wandered the streets of North Platte with me till I
found a whisky store. They chipped in some, and Slim some, and I bought a fifth. Tall, sullen men
watched us go by from false-front buildings; the main street was lined with square box-houses. There
were immense vistas of the plains beyond every sad street. I felt something different in the air in
North Platte, I didn't know what it was. In five minutes I did. We got back on the truck and roared
off. It got dark quickly. We all had a shot, and suddenly I looked, and the verdant farmfields of the
Platte began to disappear and in their stead, so far you couldn't see to the end, appeared long flat
wastelands of sand and sagebrush. I was astounded.

«What in the hell is this?» I cried out to Slim.

«This is the beginning of the rangelands, boy. Hand me another drink.»

«Whoopee!» yelled the high-school boys. «Columbus, so long! What would Sparkie and the
boys say if they was here. Yow!»

The drivers had switched up front; the fresh brother was gunning the truck to the limit. The road
changed too: humpy in the middle, with soft shoulders and a ditch on both sides about four feet deep,
so that the truck bounced and teetered from one side of the road to the other - miraculously only
when there were no cars coming the opposite way - and I thought we'd all take a somersault. But
they were tremendous drivers. How that truck disposed of the Nebraska nub - the nub that sticks
out over Colorado! And soon I realized I was actually at last over Colorado, though not officially in
it, but looking southwest toward Denver itself a few hundred miles away. I yelled for joy. We passed

19

the bottle. The great blazing stars came out, the far-receding sand hills got dim. I felt like an arrow
that could shoot out all the way.

And suddenly Mississippi Gene turned to me from his crosslegged, patient reverie, and opened
his mouth, and leaned close, and said, «These plains put me in the mind of Texas.»

«Are you from Texas ?»

«No sir, I'm from Green-veil Muzz-sippy.» And that was the way he said it.

«Where's that kid from?»

«He got into some kind of trouble back in Mississippi, so I offered to help him out. Boy's never
been out on his own. I take care of him best as I can, he's only a child.» Although Gene was white
there was something of the wise and tired old Negro in him, and something very much like Elmer
Hassel, the New York dope addict, in him, but a railroad Hassel, a traveling epic Hassel, crossing
and recrossing the country every year, south in the winter and north in the summer, and only because
he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but
everywhere, keep rolling under the stars, generally the Western stars.

«I been to Ogden a couple times. If you want to ride on to Ogden I got some friends there we
could hole up with.»

«I'm going to Denver from Cheyenne. »

«Hell, go right straight thu, you don't get a ride like this every day.»

This too was a tempting offer. What was in Ogden? «What's Ogden?» I said.

«It's the place where most of the boys pass thu and always meet there; you're liable to see
anybody there.»

In my earlier days I'd been to sea with a tall rawboned fellow from Louisiana called Big Slim
Hazard, William Holmes Hazard, who was hobo by choice. As a little boy he'd seen a hobo come
up to ask his mother for a piece of pie, and she had given it to him, and when the hobo went off
down the road the little boy had said, «Ma, what is that fellow?» «Why. that's a ho-bo.» «Ma, I
want to be a ho-bo someday.» «Shut your mouth, that's not for the like of the Hazards.» But he
never forgot that day, and when he grew up, after a shortspell playing football at LSU, he did
become a hobo. Big Slim and I spent many nights telling stories and spitting tobacco juice in paper
containers. There was something so indubitably reminiscent of Big Slim Hazard in Mississippi Gene's
demeanor that I said, «Do you happen to have met a fellow called Big Slim Hazard somewhere?»

And he said, «You mean the tall fellow with the big laugh?»

«Well, that sounds like him. He came from Ruston, Louisiana. »

«That's right. Louisiana Slim he's sometimes called. Yes-sir, I shore have met Big Slim.»

«And he used to work in the East Texas oil fields?»

«East Texas is right. And now he's punching cows.»

And that was exactiy right; and still I couldn't believe Gene could have really known Slim, whom
I'd been looking for, more or less, for years. «And he used to work in tugboats in New York?»

«Well now, I don't know about that.»

«I guess you only knew him in the West.»

«I reckon. I ain't never been to New York.»

«Well, damn me, I'm amazed you know him. This is a big country. Yet I knew you must have
known him.»

«Yessir, I know Big Slim pretty well. Always generous with his money when he's got some.
Mean, tough fellow, too; I seen him flatten a policeman in the yards at Cheyenne, one punch.» That
sounded like Big Slim; he was always practicing that one punch in the air; he looked like Jack
Dempsey, but a young Jack Dempsey who drank.

20

«Damn!» I yelled into the wind, and I had another shot, and by now I was feeling pretty good.
Every shot was wiped away by the rushing wind of the open truck, wiped away of its bad effects,
and the good effect sank in my stomach. «Cheyenne, here I come!» I sang. «Denver, look out for
your boy. »

Montana Slim turned to me, pointed at my shoes, and commented, «You reckon if you put them
things in the ground something' 11 grow up?» - without cracking a smile, of course, and the other boys
heard him and laughed. And they were the silliest shoes in America; I brought them along specifically
because I didn't want my feet to sweat in the hot road, and except for the rain in Bear Mountain they
proved to be the best possible shoes for my journey. So I laughed with them. And the shoes were
pretty ragged by now, the bits of colored leather sticking up like pieces of a fresh pineapple and my
toes showing through. Well, we had another shot and laughed. As in a dream we zoomed through
small crossroads towns smack out of the darkness, and passed long lines of lounging harvest hands
and cowboys in the night. They watched us pass in one motion of the head, and we saw them slap
their thighs from the continuing dark the other side of town - we were a funny-looking crew.

A lot of men were in this country at that time of the year; it was harvest time. The Dakota boys
were fidgeting. «I think we'll get off at the next pisscall; seems like there's a lot of work around
here.»

«A11 you got to do is move north when it's over here,» counseled Montana Slim, «and jes follow
the harvest till you get to Canada.» The boys nodded vaguely; they didn't take much stock in his
advice.

Meanwhile the blond young fugitive sat the same way; every now and then Gene leaned out of his
Buddhistic trance over the rushing dark plains and said something tenderly in the boy's ear. The boy
nodded. Gene was taking care of him, of his moods and his fears. I wondered where the hell they
would go and what they would do. They had no cigarettes. I squandered my pack on them, I loved
them so. They were grateful and gracious. They never asked, I kept offering. Montana Slim had his
own but never passed the pack. We zoomed through another crossroads town, passed another line
of tall lanky men in jeans clustered in the dim light like moths on the desert, and returned to the
tremendous darkness, and the stars overhead were pure and bright because of the increasingly thin
air as we mounted the high hill of the western plateau, about a foot a mile, so they say, and no trees
obstructing any low-leveled stars anywhere. And once I saw a moody whitefaced cow in the sage by
the road as we flitted by. It was like riding a railroad train, just as steady and just as straight.

By and by we came to a town, slowed down, and Montana Slim said, «Ah, pisscall,» but the
Minnesotans didn't stop and went right on through. «Damn, I gotta go,» said Slim.

«Go over the side,» said somebody.

«Well, I will» he said, and slowly, as we all watched, he inched to the back of the platform on his
haunch, holding on as best he could, till his legs dangled over. Somebody knocked on the window of
the cab to bring this to the attention of the brothers. Their great smiles broke as they turned. And just
as Slim was ready to proceed, precarious as it was already, they began zigzagging the truck at
seventy miles an hour. He fell back a moment; we saw a whale's spout in the air; he struggled back
to a sitting position. They swung the truck. Wham, over he went on his side, watering all over
himself. In the roar we could hear him faintly cursing, like the whine of a man far across the hills.
«Damn . . . damn . . .» He never knew we were doing this deliberately; he just struggled, as grim as
Job. When he was finished, as such, he was wringing wet, and now he had to edge and shimmy his
way back, and with a most woebegone look, and everybody laughing, except the sad blond boy,
and the Minnesotans roaring in the cab. I handed him the bottle to make up for it.

«What the hail,» he said, «was they doing that on purpose?»

21

«They sure were.»

«Well, damn me, I didn't know that. I know I tried it back in Nebraska and didn't have half so
much trouble.»

We came suddenly into the town of Ogallala, and here the fellows in the cab called out,
«Pisscall\» and with great good delight. Slim stood sullenly by the truck, ruing a lost opportunity.
The two Dakota boys said good-by to everybody and figured they'd start harvesting here. We
watched them disappear in the night toward the shacks at the end of town where lights were burning,
where a watcher of the night in jeans said the employment men would be. I had to buy more
cigarettes. Gene and the blond boy followed me to stretch their legs. I walked into the least likely
place in the world, a kind of lonely Plains soda fountain for the local teenage girls and boys. They
were dancing, a few of them, to the music on the jukebox. There was a lull when we came in. Gene
and Blondey just stood there, looking at nobody; all they wanted was cigarettes. There were some
pretty girls, too. And one of them made eyes at Blondey and he never saw it, and if he had he
wouldn't have cared, he was so sad and gone.

I bought a pack each for them; they thanked me. The truck was ready to go. It was getting on
midnight now, and cold. Gene, who'd been around the country more times than he could count on
his fingers and toes, said the best thing to do now was for all of us to bundle up under the big
tarpaulin or we'd freeze. In this manner, and with the rest of the bottle, we kept warm as the air grew
ice-cold and pinged our ears. The stars seemed to get brighter the more we climbed the High Plains.
We were in Wyoming now. Flat on my back, I stared straight up at the magnificent firmament,
glorying in the time I was making, in how far I had come from sad Bear Mountain after all, and
tingling with kicks at the thought of what lay ahead of me in Denver - whatever, whatever it would
be. And Mississippi Gene began to sing a song. He sang it in a melodious, quiet voice, with a river
accent, and it was simple, just «I got a purty little girl, she's sweet six-teen, she's the purti-est thing
you ever seen,» repeating it with other lines thrown in, all concerning how far he'd been and how he
wished he could go back to her but he done lost her.

I said, «Gene, that's the prettiest song.»

«It's the sweetest I know,» he said with a smile.

«I hope you get where you're going, and be happy when you do.»

«I always make out and move along one way or the other.»,

Montana Slim was asleep. He woke up and said to me,' «Hey, Blackie, how about you and me
investigatin' Cheyenne \ together tonight before you go to Denver?»

«Sure thing.» I was drunk enough to go for anything.

As the truck reached the outskirts of Cheyenne, we saw the high red lights of the local radio
station, and suddenly we were bucking through a great crowd of people that poured along both
sidewalks. «Hell's bells, it's Wild West Week,» said Slim. Big crowds of businessmen, fat
businessmen in boots and ten-gallon hats, with their hefty wives in cowgirl attire, bustled and
whoopeed on the wooden sidewalks of old Cheyenne; farther down were the long stringy boulevard
lights of new downtown Cheyenne, but the celebration was focusing on Oldtown. Blank guns went
off. The saloons were crowded to the sidewalk. I was amazed, and at the same time I felt it was
ridiculous: in my first shot at the West I was seeing to what absurd devices it had fallen to keep its
proud tradition. We had to jump off the truck and say good-by; the Minnesotans weren't interested
in hanging around. It was sad to see them go, and I realized that I would never see any of them
again, but that's the way it was. «You'll freeze your ass tonight,» I warned. «Then you'll bum 'em in
the desert tomorrow afternoon.»

«That's all right with me long's as we get out of this cold night,» said Gene. And the truck left,

22

threading its way through the crowds, and nobody paying attention to the strangeness of the kids
inside the tarpaulin, staring at the town like babes from a coverlet. I watched it disappear into the
night.

23

I was with Montana Slim and we started hitting the bars. I had about seven dollars, five of which I
foolishly squandered that night. First we milled with all the cowboy-dudded tourists and oilmen and
ranchers, at bars, in doorways, on the sidewalk; then for a while I shook Slim, who was wandering a
little slaphappy in the street from all the whisky and beer: he was that kind of drinker; his eyes got
glazed, and in a minute he'd be telling an absolute stranger about things. I went into a chili joint and
the waitress was Mexican and beautiful. I ate, and then I wrote her a little love note on the back of
the bill. The chili joint was deserted; everybody was somewhere else, drinking. I told her to turn the
bill over. She read it and laughed. It was a little poem about how I wanted her to come and see the
night with me.

«I'd love to, Chiquito, but I have a date with my boy friend.»

«Can't you shake him?»

«No, no, I don't,» she said sadly, and I loved the way she said it.

«Some other time I'll come by here,» I said, and she said, «Any time, kid.» Still I hung around,
just to look at her, and had another cup of coffee. Her boy friend came in sullenly and wanted to
know when she was off. She bustled around to close the place quick. I had to get out. I gave her a
smile when I left. Things were going on as wild as ever outside, except that the fat burpers were
getting drunker and whooping up louder. It was funny. There were Indian chiefs wandering around in
big headdresses and really solemn among the flushed drunken faces. I saw Slim tottering along and
joined him.

He said, «I just wrote a postcard to my Paw in Montana. You reckon you can find a mailbox and
put it in?» It was a strange request; he gave me the postcard and tottered through the swinging doors
of a saloon. I took the card, went to the box, and took a quick look at it. «Dear Paw, I'll be home
Wednesday. Everything's all right with me and I hope the same is with you. Richard.» It gave me a
different idea of him; how tenderly polite he was with his father. I went in the bar and joined him. We
picked up two girls, a pretty young blonde and a fat brunette. They were dumb and sullen, but we
wanted to make them. We took them to a rickety nightclub that was already closing, and there I
spent all but two dollars on Scotches for them and beer for us. I was getting drunk and didn't care;
everything was fine. My whole being and purpose was pointed at the little blonde. I wanted to go in
there with all my strength. I hugged her and wanted to tell her. The nightclub closed and we all
wandered out in the rickety dusty streets. I looked up at the sky; the pure, wonderful stars were still
there, burning. The girls wanted to go to the bus station, so we all went, but they apparently wanted
to meet some sailor who was there waiting for them, a cousin of the fat girl's, and the sailor had
friends with him. I said to the blonde, «What's up?» She said she wanted to go home, in Colorado
just over the line south of Cheyenne. «I'll take you in a bus,» I said.

«No, the bus stops on the highway and I have to walk across that damn prairie all by myself. I
spend all afternoon looking at the damn thing and I don't aim to walk over it tonight.»

«Ah, listen, we'll take a nice walk in the prairie flowers.»

«There ain't no flowers there,» she said. «I want to go to New York. I'm sick and tired of this.
Ain't no place to go but Cheyenne and ain't nothin in Cheyenne.»

«Ain't nothin in New York.»

«Hell there ain't,» she said with a curl of her lips.

The bus station was crowded to the doors. All kinds of people were waiting for buses or just
standing around; there were a lot of Indians, who watched everything with their stony eyes. The girl

24

disengaged herself from my talk and joined the sailor and the others. Slim was dozing on a bench. I
sat down. The floors of bus stations are the same all over the country, always covered with butts and
spit and they give a feeling of sadness that only bus stations have. For a moment it was no different
from