knew you’d tell everybody I had the gun, so I said I did. Didnt you feel better walking off the ship?”
“Where is it?”
“I didnt even go.”
“Then it’s still there. We’ll have to pick it up tonight.” He was lost in thought—it was okay.
Deni had big plans for what was going to happen at the hotel, which was the El Carrido Per to Motpaotta Calfiornia potator hotel as I say with potted palmettos and seamen inside and also hotrod champion sons of aircraft computators of Long Beach, the whole general and really dismal California culture a palpable hangout for it, where you saw the dim interiors where you saw the Hawaiian shirted and be-wristwatched, tanned strong young men tilting long thin beers to their mouths and leering and mincing with broads in fancy necklaces and with little white ivory things at their tanned ears and a whole blank blue in their eyes that you saw, also a bestial cruelty hidden and the smell of the beer and smoke and smart smell of the cool inside plush cocktail lounge all that Americanness that in my youth had me get wild to be in it and leave my home and go off be big hero in the American romance-me-jazz night.—That had made Deni lose his head too, at one time he had been a sad infuriated French boy brought over on a ship to attend American private schools at which time hate smoldered in his bones and in his dark eyes and he wanted to kill the world—but a little of the Sage and Wisdom education from the Masters of the High West and he wanted to do his hating and killing in cocktail lounges learned from Franchot Tone movies and God knows where and what else.—We come up to this thing down the drear boulevard, phantasm street with its very bright street lamps and very bright but somber palms jutting out of the sidewalk all pineapple-ribbed and rising into the indefinable California night sky and no wind.— Inside there was no one to meet Deni as usual mistaken and completely ignored by everyone (good for him but he dont know it) so we have a couple beers, ostensibly waiting, Deni outlines me more facts & personal sophistries, there aint no one coming, no friends, no enemies either, Deni is a perfect Taoist, nothing happens to him, the trouble runs off his shoulders like water, as if he had pig grease on em, he dont know how luck he is, and here he’s got his boy at his side old Ti Jean who’ll go anywhere follow anyone for adventure.— Suddenly in the middle of our third or so beer he whoops and realizes we missed the hourly Red Car train and that is going to hold us up another hour in dismal Pedro, we want to get to the glitters of Los Angeles if possible or Hollywood before all the bars closed, in my mind’s eye I see all the wonderful things Deni has planned for us there and see, incomprehensible, unrememberable what the images were I was now inventing ere we got going and arrived at the actual scene, not the screen but the dismal four-dimensional scene itself.— Bang, Deni wants to take a cab and chase the Red Car also with our beer cans in hand cartons we go jogging down the street to a cab stand and hire one to chase the Red Car, which the guy does without comment, knowing the egocentricities of seamen as a O how dismal cabdriver in a O how dismal pierhead jumpin town.— Off we go—it’s my suspicion he isnt really driving as fast as he ought to actually catch the Red Car, which hiballs right down that line, towards Compton and environs of L.A., at 60 per.—My suspicion is he doesnt want to get a ticket and at the same time seem to go fast enough to satisfy the whims of the seamen in the back—it’s my suspicion he’s just gonna gyp old Den out of a 5 dollar bill.— Nothing Den likes better than throw away his 5 dollar bills, too—He thrives on it, he lives for it, he all take voyages around the world working belowdecks among electrical equipment but worse than that take the abuse off officers and men (at four o’clock in the Morning he’s asleep in his bunk, “Hey Carptenter, are you the carpenter or are you the chief bottlestopper or shithouse watcher, that goddam forward boom light is out again, I dont know who is using slingshots around here, and but I want that goddam light fixed we’ll pulling into Penang in 2 hours and goddam it if it’s still dark at that time and I, and we dong got no light it’s your ass not mine, see the chief about it”) so Deni has to get up, and I can just see him do it, rub the innocent sleep from his eyes and wake to the cold howling world and wish he had a sword so he could cut the man’s head off but at the same time he doesnt want to spend the rest of his life in a prison either, or get his own head partially cut off and spend the rest of his life paralyzed with a shoe brace in his neck and people bring him crap pans, so he crawls outa bed and does the bidding of every beast that has every yell to throw at him for every reason in the thousand and one electrical apparati on the goddamn stinking steel jail which as far as I’m concerned, and floating on water too, is what they call a ship.— What is 5 dollars to a martyr?—“Step on the gas, we gotta catch that car.”
“I’m going fast enough you’ll get it.” He passes right through Cucamonga. “At exactly 11:38 in 1947 or 1948, one, now I cant remember which one exactly, but I remember I done this for another seaman couple years ago and he passed right through—” and he goes on talking easing up so’s not to pass through the insulting part of just barely beating a red light and I lay back in the seat and say:
“You coulda made that red light, we’ll never make it now.”
“Listen Jack you wanta make it dontcha and not get fined by some traffic cop.”
“Where?” I say looking out the window and all over the horizon at those marshes of night for signs of a cop on a motorcycle or a cruiser—all you see is marshes and great black distances of night and far off, on hills, the little communities with Christmas lights in their windows blearing red, blearing green, blearing blue, suddenly sending pangs thru me and I think, “Ah America, so big, so sad, so black, you’re like the leafs of a dry summer that go crinkly ere August found its end, you’re hopeless, everyone you look on you, there’s nothing but the dry drear hopelessness, the knowledge of impending death, the suffering of present life, lights of Christmas wont save you or anybody, any more you could put Christmas lights on a dead bush in August, at night, and make it look like something, what is this Christmas you profess, in this void? … in this nebulous cloud?”
“That’s perfectly alright” says Deni. “Move right along, we’ll make it.”—He beats, the next light to make it look good but eases up for the next, and up the track and back, you can’t see any sign of the rear or the front of no Red Car, shoot—he comes to his place where coupla years ago he’d dropped that seaman, no Red Car, you can feel its absence, it’s come and gone, empty smell—You can tell by the electric stillness on the corner that something just was, & aint.
“Well I guess I missed it, goldang it,” says the cabdriver pushing his hat back to apologize and looking real hypocritical about it, so Deni gives him five dollars and we get out and Deni says:
“Kerouac this means we have an hour to wait here by the cold tracks, in the cold foggy night, for the next train to L.A.”
“That’s okay” I say “we got beer aint we, open one up” and Deni fishes down for the old copper churchkey and up comes two cans of beer spissing all over the sad night and we up end the tin, and go slurp—two cans each and we start throwing rocks at signs, dancing around to keep warm, squatting, telling jokes, remembering the past, Deni’s going “Hyra rrour Hoo” and again I hear his great laugh ringing in the American night and I try to tell him “Deni the reason I followed the ship all the way 3,200 miles from Staten Island to goddam Pedro is not only because I wanta get on and be seen going around the world and have myself a ball in Port Swettenham and pick up on gangee in Bombay and find the sleepers and the fluteplayers in filthy Karachi and start revolutions of my own in the Cairo Casbah and make it from Marseilles to the other side, but because of you, because, the things we used to do, where, I have a hell of a good time with you Den, there’s no two ways about… I never have any money that I admit, I already owe you sixty for the bus fare, but you must admit I try—I’m sorry that I dont have any money ever, but you know I tried with you, that time … Well goddam, wa ahoo, shit, I want get drunk tonight.—” And Deni says “We dont have to hang around in the cold like this Jack, look there’s a bar, over there” (a roadhouse gleaming redly in the misty night) “it may be a Mexican Pachuco bar and we might
