#or maybe Bliss found Sal?

[libidomechanica]

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[chimchiri]

(Based on this post from @killemwithkawaii)

Me reading about Bliss' species going from minuscule to gigantic sizes immediately made me go "ok but what if it was tiny hand sized when Sal found it?" and then this happened.

[quixotic-writer]

I’m Always On Top

Request: Anon(s)

Summary: It started out as a fun game between Sal and Q at the gay bar they found themselves at: get as many drinks and as drunk as you can. Jealousy soon takes over Sal and it leads to the two going home. But Sal decides to try and put Q in his place by playing dominant and taking the role of top for the evening. But as Q had always said: “i’m always on top.”

—————————————————————————

They had come to the bar together with friendly competition in the back of their heads: get as many free drinks as they can. It wasn’t just any bar, it was the local gay bar. It didn’t matter who won, the only thing they cared about was that they go home together.

The music was flooding the club and people of all walks of life from anywhere you could imagine were swaying and moving in tune with the music. Those who were sitting at the bar or leaning against it were engaged in their own social exchanges. With a shot in their hands, they toasted to each other.

“May the best man drink.” Q said. Glasses raised and it was down the hatch in a second. A shot of confidence burned their throats and they split from one another and made their way through the bar. Q had found himself sitting at the bar and someone was quick to approach him and give a little bit of sweet talk while flagging a bartender down. Sal felt a pinch of discouragement when no one was as quick to approach him, but he would soon find his confidence once he worked his personable charm.

As Q was in his seat, his eyes wandered and saw Sal across the bar. He was talking it up with a bunch of people, eyes hungry and eating him up as his hands moved around as he talked. One hand held a drink and there was another one sitting in front of him along with a little shot glass. Q felt proud of him in a weird way, managing to finesse that many drinks in such a short period of time was truly a feat. He would have thought that he would have been jealous, but for some reason he didn’t. He was absolutely crazy for Sal and he knew had those same feelings, but within Sal, that crazed love was something magnified to significant levels.

Sal was the one who got jealous, probably because he knew of Q’s vast and diverse fan base that would thirst over him and would often be all he saw online. Q could have anyone he wanted really, and he often worried if he was enough. This led to fits of jealousy and clinginess for Sal, a reaction he wished he could better control but it always got the better of him.

The night continued and drinks flowed endlessly. Q was on his 7th or maybe 8th drink and he was off on the dance floor, completely forgetting about the little competition he had agreed to for the night. Sal had totally lost track of his drink count as shots were poured endlessly. He was absolutely intoxicated, he couldn’t remember the last time he had been bought so many drinks, it made him feel special in a way. His eyes looked around for Q as he decided to slow things down a bit and sober up a little with some water. When his eyes found his boyfriend, hot anger filled him in a second.

Q was out dancing with guys all around him, not a care in the world. In his drunken brain, Sal believed that Q didn’t care about him at that moment. He was quick to leave his spot at the bar and make a bee line over to his boyfriend. He quickly grabbed him by his shirt collar and smashed his lips against his. When he pulled away, Q was excited to see him.

“Hey Sally! Surprised you don’t have a drink in your hand.” Sal glared at every one that was feeling up Q and they all quickly backed away. He reconnected their lips and quickly darted his tongue into Q’s mouth and Q moaned at the sensation, bringing Sal in closer to him. The tempo and bass of the music was vibrating in them as they flowed to the tune, hips sinfully close and grinding together. Sal finally pulled away just to catch his breath and Q was left almost speechless, hungry for something else.

“I think we’ve had enough to drink… Let’s go.” Sal said in a very demanding tone. It took Q aback a little, but took it as Sal being needy for some sexual relief after their little stunt on the dance floor together. He agreed with his lover and they called a cab.

When they reached home and made their way to the bedroom, Sal was quick and rough with his movement. He ripped open Q’s button down, exposing his chest and his lips were quickly attached to the skin leaving hickeys all over and everywhere his lips could reach as fast as possible.

“Fuck, Sal. Slow down baby.” Q felt Sal attempting to overpower him, and he didn’t even know what brought this on. But, if he kept this up, Q wasn’t afraid to put him back in his place.

Sal ignored Q as clothing was shed away. Layer after layer until they were in nothing but their boxers. Q was sitting at the edge of the bed, Sal was straddling him. Lips were intertwined, only occasionally leaving when each of them were painting the other’s skin with bruises. Their lips were smacking together, moans loud in their throats, and then Sal made the next move. He shoved Q back into the bed and was over him.

“You’re fucking mine.” He mumbled harshly before he bit down onto the flesh of Q’s neck earning a groan from him. The next thing Sal knew, there was a hand on his throat. Q sat up straight with Sal’s face mere inches away from his and a hand was gripping the sides of his throat, nothing threatening or endangering in the slightest, but something to earn dominance back. It showed signs of working as Sal let out a little whimper.

“What is your deal tonight?” Sal’s dominance quickly began melting away as Q began taking control, “I try to have fun tonight and you cut in, and now you’re trying to top me?”

“They were all over you Brian.” He mustered out trying to keep a brave face. He tried to resist falling into submission, but the way Q was looking at him, the way his hand was on his neck, the posture he was holding, he knew this momentary bliss of being in the dominant role would soon dissipate.

“Because you’re being a little brat you think you’re all of a sudden dominant sweetheart?” Regret filled Sal as he felt an impending punishment coming clear into view, and it was, once again, because he let his jealousy get the better of him. The rush of momentary power was exhilarating, but not worth the cost of the punishment he was about to receive. “I’m always on top.”

“I-I’m sorry!”

“You’re sorry, what?” Sal was now backed down to lay in the bed as Q hovered over him with lust filled eyes.

“I’m sorry daddy! Please!” Q chuckled as he watched Sal squirm beneath him. He rubs his hand over his clothed erection earning more whimpers as his back arches, seeking more contact from the dominant.

“You’re only saying that because you’re in trouble.” His lips made contact with Sal’s bare skin and littered the untainted skin with marks of his own. His hands were delicate, finger tips tracing over his skin making goosebumps form wherever he touched. Sal’s skin felt like it was on fire. The juxtaposition of Q’s careful hands and his rough mouth made him strain painfully against his boxers, aching for more as he tangled a hand into Q’s hair, physically begging for more sensations, and above all: friction. “You don’t get to cum ‘til I say. Got it?” Q reached underneath the bed and pulled out a box of toys that they had begun collecting since they had been together.

“Please just touch me, I'm sorry, please I need you! I won’t do it again, I'm sorry!” Q promptly removed Sal’s boxers, watching as he sprung free and was twitching like crazy already. This was gonna be fun.

“I don’t want to hear anymore. You’ll learn now. On your stomach.” Sal listened, not wanting anything to be worse. He dreaded what Q was about to do to him, but at the same time, it sent a pleasurable chill down his spine that made pulsate. He felt Q’s hands smooth over the curve of his ass before his cold fingers found their way to Sal’s entrance. He let out a shaky sigh before lube covered fingers found their way in him and stretched him out.

One finger, then another, then another was added. Each time he was stretched out more, the louder his pleasured noises became. Strained mewls, prolonged moans, throat wrenching gasps.

“You should hear yourself, you filthy slut. Making so many noises already and you only have my fingers in you.” The dirty talk only made Sal’s hips buck backward into the fingers that slid in and out of him. His cock was rubbing against the sheets below him and only added to his growing pleasure. His eyes were closed as he savored each sensation. “You take my fingers so well though, don’t you? I know just how to make you feel good, I know you in and out, and I know just how to get you off.” His hot breath was in his ear and it only brought him closer and closer to ecstasy. Truly Q was the only person that knew just how to pleasure him, and his confidence in knowing that as a fact was so hot.

“God, daddy. More! I’m gonna cum!” After that last sentence fell out of his mouth, Sal was left empty as Q removed his fingers. “No, please!”

“Remember sweetheart, you’re getting punished. If you cum at all, it’ll only be worse for you.” Q sat himself on the bed with a hitachi wand in his hand. Back against the headrest, he pulled Sal between his legs and had him resting against his chest. Sal could feel his hard on pressing against his ass, he was always impressed with the will power Q had when it came to being hard. When he fell into a dominant position, he held himself back. Q found more sexual gratification in pleasuring others than himself.

Q placed the wand aside for the moment, and instead, his hand took grasp of Sal’s now leaking cock. A shallow pump around the head of his cock easily made Sal’s hips jerk off the bed and hands grip at the thighs that encased him where he was.

“So sensitive already baby?” Q teased as his hand kept pumping Sal. Sal watched, hypnotized by the hand moving up and down, watching as the tip of his cock poked between the top of Q’s fist only to disappear once again as it rose again. Q would twist his fist, tighten his grip, and kiss and lick at Sal’s exposed skin as he pleasured him, savoring the noises that came out of the submissive. “Tell me baby, tell me how it feels.” Sal was gasping for air and almost felt like he would never be able to form a sentence with the amount of blissed out fog that clouded his brain. “Tell me or I'll stop now and go to bed.” The commanding tone forced Sal’s lips to part as he tried to form anything, something comprehensible.

“It feels… mmm… so… so good. I… I can’t… I–”

“Can’t what sweetheart?” The innocent tone felt mocking. It frustrated Sal as all he wanted to do was cum.

“I just… I just wanna… Cum!” Sal’s hips started bucking into Q’s fist, and Q kept his hand still for just a moment. He watched as Sal tried so desperately to please himself, but as soon as he knew that he was dangerously close, he took his hand away and watched again as Sal squirmed and whined.

“Not so fast Sally. Good things come to those who wait.” He lays tender kisses on the sides of his face and his shoulder as his hands smooth over the skin of his inner thighs, so close to being where Sal wanted them, but never giving him the satisfaction. A hand strayed away and took the hitachi wand that was set aside. “I know just how much you love this toy. The many times I've had you tied up,” he switches it on, low hum filling the room, “left you for hours just to see how much you had in you.” He glides it along Sal’s thighs, hovering around his most sensitive spots where he could sense the vibrations but feel none of the sensation he craved.

Q took the wand and ran it quickly on the underside of Sal’s cock and watched him moan and squirm. Sal kept trying to keep Q’s hand where he wanted it, kept trying to gain some control over everything, but it was no use because Q would simply overpower Sal and pull away, straying him away from climax.

“You’re so impatient.” The teasing went on for what felt like forever to Sal. Circles around the head of his cock, delicate strokes at the base, vibrator held under his balls. No matter how much Sal begged, whined, pleaded, and apologized, it seemed as though Q had tuned him out fully and was getting pure enjoyment out of the sadistic sexual torture he was putting his boyfriend through. He loved watching how much Sal’s cock was twitching at the faintest sensation, how much precum was slowly spilling out of his slit, and all the noises that made that made his own cock pulsate and twitch. He would let out an occasional moan or grunt whenever Sal would buck his hips, causing a little bit of friction on his cock that rested against his back, or whenever he made a particularly delicious sound.

After a while, Sal had once again lost all ability to remotely let out any words that would make any sort of sense. His speech skills had withered away as he drowned in his own pleasure as a means to reach his high that he knew he wouldn’t get to until Q gave him the word.

“Why don’t we have a little change in pace?” Q turned the vibrator off and Sal was yet again left to step away from the edge of euphoria as he was so close once again. He was panting and he looked at his cock; Slick with precum, the once rose colored tip was now red and begging for release, he could feel his crotch pulsating. He was panting and he felt spent but he hadn’t even gotten to cum yet. Q stepped away and reached into the box of toys once again, pulling out a decent sized dildo and giving it to Sal. “Go ahead, pleasure yourself for me.” Sal felt almost like it was a joke, that there was going to be something more. He didn’t question though as he teased his eager hole with the tip of the dildo, pushing himself up against some pillows on the bed and spreading his legs. Q sat across from him, legs touching Sal’s as he watched his lover’s movements closely.

Sal relished in the sensation of the dildo entering him. It didn’t feel nearly as good as Q does, but after the time spent left on edge and feeling empty after Q had removed his fingers, this felt like heaven for him. Slowly, he pushed it all the way in up until the base and he held his motions still, taking in the full sensation that he craved as his head rolled back and his eyes closed, a breathy moan and relieved sigh filled the quiet room.

“Go ahead baby, make as much noise as you want. You know I love it. Put on a show.” Per his request, Sal went on to make a sinfully gorgeous and pornographic display just for his lover. He kept his motions fluid and sensual, biting his lip but never holding back on any noises, mewling out a little ‘yes’ or ‘fuck’ here and there, eyes half hooded and going back and forth between eye contact with Q and his cock that he was stroking in a tight fist. “Tell me how it feels sweetheart.”

“Oh, daddy! It feels so… mmm… so fucking good.” Sal felt himself start to get close again and watching Q get himself off as hard as he was wasn’t helping him hold out at all.

“Yeah?” Q was close, he felt as though he had been teasing himself all evening, but neglecting his own pleasure for however long they had been encased in the bedroom was well worth witnessing the display of sexual torture he had been putting Sal through. He was sadistic, but he knew Sal loved it, it was evident by how much Sal was loving it now.

“Fuck yeah… But it doesn’t feel nearly… nearly as good as you.” He had to take pauses between his words to let out more pleasurable noises, hoping that if Q came, he would get to as well. “Your thick cock in my ass… tearing me in two… and you know… you know I love the pain.” Sal had hit a particularly sweet spot inside of himself and he almost toppled over. He started slowing his movements more despite wanting to cum so badly, but he didn’t want a worse punishment. He knew the next consequence would be not cumming at all or not being able to cum for a period of time no matter how often they had sex.

“I fuck you so good, huh, baby? Better than that piece of silicone you have in your ass? I know you love it rough, I know you love the torture. You just love being dominated, being played with, my little fuck toy.” Q’s fist tightened more and his hand was a blur as he chased his high.

“I want you to fuck me so bad daddy.” Q didn’t need to hear anything else, he was all over Sal. He quickly threw the dildo aside and locked lips with Sal, grinding their hard-ons together as tongues swirled about.

“I’m gonna fuck you better than you ever could with that dildo.” He grunted as he lined himself up with Sal’s entrance.

“Fuck me ‘til I can’t walk.” Q’s eyes met Sal’s in that moment, his normally tender cocoa eyes were gleaming with love, but now, they were filled with a fire ignited from within that spelled out one word: lust.

Q bucked his hips and almost knocked the wind out of Sal in that single motion.

“Gonna cum!” The dirty talk, finally feeling Q inside of him, and the (what felt like) hours of teasing is starting to send him into a spiral of blinding ecstasy.

“You fucking better not! You better hold it in, you do not get to cum yet.” Sal raked his fingers down Q’s back, doing his best to hold on and hold back for his own sake. Tears were streaming down his face, half of it was from pleasure, half of it was from pain because he had been holding back for so long already. Sal’s lips were parted as painful and pleasured cries fell out of his mouth. “That’s right, let the neighbors hear how bad you’ve been, let them know who owns you.”

“Daddy! Please! I… I can’t! I…” It started to become painful, he knew he could safeword at any time and it would be over, but he had come this far and he was going to deal with his punishment. As Q continued thrusting, he felt Sal tighten around him and he felt like he was seeing stars as he was just at the edge,

“Gonna… Fucking… Cum!” With a few rough, slow thrusts, Q buried himself to the hilt as he released himself into Sal with a long moan. Both men were panting, but Q knew that it wasn’t over just yet. He took Sal’s cock in hand and started pumping him hard and fast in a tight fist, “C’mon baby you wanted it so bad, take it. Cum for me!” Sal was practically screaming as he came explosively all over his chest in big thick spurts. Q kept pumping him and pumping him until Sal felt as though there was nothing left in him.

Once his orgasm had finished ripping through him, both were left on the bed panting, exhausted from their strenuous night.

“You Okay?” Q asked as he shifted his head to look at Sal. He didn’t say anything but nodded his head to respond. “You know I'm crazy for you and only you, right?”

“I know,” Sal spoke softly. “I guess it was a bit of the alcohol and my jealousy problems again. You’re just so good looking and I just feel like you could have anyone you want.”

“But I chose you. And I will always choose you.” Sal looked over and smiled. Their lips met in a soft kiss and they giggled together. “Let’s get you cleaned up and in bed. I bet you’re tired as hell… You sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine, I promise. Even though it was torture, one of the best orgasms I ever felt.” They got up off the bed and went into the bathroom,

“So good you’d want me to do it again?” Q teased.

“Not for a fucking long while!”

“Or whenever your jealousy gets the best of you again and you try to top again.” Q laughed and Sal felt a little ashamed because of it.

“I don’t even know what possessed me to even try and do that.”

“Jealousy.” Sal just rolled his eyes as he stepped into the shower. “C’mon Sally you know i’m just teasing. You love me.” He stepped in behind Sal and peppered his cheek with kisses,

“I guess I do.” He said with a smirk.

[settersloveletters]

NO. 1 FAN

• part nineteen; call me daddy coach

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⤷ y/n will always go out of her way for her family, especially for her 7 year old niece, who happens to be kageyama tobio’s number one fan. what happens when the charming sweetheart, y/n, meets the emotionally null, kageyama tobio? and what happens when those two fall in love at first sight?

a/n: we’ve converted to the moon icon for kags. just to keep it consistent hahah. anyways, this is 90% shameless smut and 10% sum serious shit :)) ALSO i removed the cut for both parts cuz tumblr is being fucky wucky rn. will add them back when its normal

[!] below this is lots of smut. BOLDED TEXT IS IMPORTANT TO THE STORY [!]

➳ word count: 3k

➳ warnings: smut!!! coach-kink??? raw sex, creampie, the slightest amount of pregnancy kink and size kink.

“Hey, are you alright, baby? What’s up with that text you sent?” You greet Kageyama right when you open the door for him. Wrapping your arms around him, you give a gentle kiss on his cheek. Shutting the door behind him, he sighs as he sets his bags down and removes his shoes. “It’s nothing,” placing a kiss on your head before pulling you into the living room.

“Hm.. okay. What did you want to do today? Since, we’re all alone,” you push Kageyama onto the couch, grabbing his face and getting a good look into his eyes. Maybe it’s your mind playing games and overthinking, but he’s very tired; a distant emptiness in him.

“Anything you want, Y/n,” breaking eye contact with you to instead pull you into his embrace. Feeling your small warmth press against him eases all the stresses, tensions, doubts in his heart. You’re the medicine that heals him of all his pains.

“Sal’s not here. So you aren’t gonna get your Sunday workout..”

“Yes, and what about it?”

“How about,” clasping your hands in his, you pull him off the cushions of the couch and slowly lead him towards your bedroom, “you be my coach today?” His typical stern expression almost cracks at your words. Before he can even interject, you’ve guided him into your bedroom which is dimly lit regardless of the peak sunlight outside. Counting your frequent excursions and chill hangouts, Kageyama is very familiar with this room. The smell, the look, the plush sheets and what can be found where. It’s comfortable.

“I’m your coach for today? What are we practicing today though?” he teasingly asks, well knowing what you want. He stands in front of your bed as you lay yourself down, admiring the Adonis in the room. Far bigger, taller and stronger than you, he always has you weak at the legs and embarrassingly sore the next day. He’s also so stubborn; when he has a goal and motive, he’ll accomplish it even if it means spending that extra hour.

“Endurance training, of course,” you chuckle while copying his exact words from that first time, waiting for him to bed you. “You think this is funny?” He’s quickly making his way to the bed, finding his spot right on top of you, looking down at you with slight agitation. The more you two have fun, the bolder you two get. You’ve learned the pleasures of provoking Kageyama, teasing him, convincing him he can’t do something, just for him to come back with ten times more passion and aggression. And he’s learned how far you like being pushed, held, edged, tortured even. You have aligned perfectly with each other.

“Yes, it’s so funny, Kags,” you laugh at him again while wrapping your arms around his neck, pulling him in to kiss you. He doesn’t budge though, instead choosing to place a firm hand on your jaw, so close to gripping your neck in the softest of squeezes. “I don’t think that’s how you address your coach.” He’s almost there.

“Oh, you liked that idea? Me calling you coach? How perverted, Kageyama,” you smirk, knowing exactly what to do to change the calm stoic boy into a man who only shows himself to you alone. And all he wants to do is to unravel you like he plans.

Kageyama doesn’t miss a beat, swiftly unbuttoning the front of your too tight top, watching the way he unwraps you like a birthday gift. “You don’t get to talk to me like that, pretty girl,” he says, low and steadily, before using both hands to rub along your body. His touch trails your exposed skin, stopping at your breasts which are hidden beneath your bra, tempting him to just strip you bare and take you right there. “Coach, take it off me.”

“You just don’t know your place today, huh?” feeling no remorse, Kageyama roughly flips you over, laying you on your stomach and wasting no time in ripping all the clothes off your body. First, that stupid bra that is the exact shade of blue he loves seeing on you, then those poor excuse of shorts that do no good at hiding that cute little behind of yours. He leaves you trembling there in his presence, and in the soaked matching red thong that hugs your hips so well.

Palming his large hands on the flesh of your ass, Kageyama lands an experimental tap, sending fiery jolts across your skin and a yelp out your lips. “Baby, I’ll give you a second chance. But if you choose to test me again,” rubbing your reddening cheek softly, “you’re not going to get your needy pussy fucked, okay?”

You would have never expected such a dork like Kageyama to have such a filthy mouth. He never fails to surprise you. Grinding back against his touch, you give him a nod in response. Face flush flat into the pillows, you have no clue what he’s doing, what his face looks like, what he’s thinking. It isn’t until both his hands grab the sides of your hip, pulling you so your ass is up, back arched.

“Well, since I’m your coach today, I think we should start with basic stretches. Sounds good?”

“Mhm, things have been feeling too tight lately, coach..”

“Don’t worry, doll. I’ll help you out with that,” he stifles a laugh while reassuring his cute student. Peeling back the panties that hug your ass, removing them completely, Kageyama sits back to revel in the sight of your glistening cunt. You shiver at the feeling of the room’s draft against your exposed pussy, pulsing around nothing, much to his enjoyment. Using his thumbs, he pulls the skin of your lips apart, collecting the honey and massaging it into your sensitive skin.

“Hm, this is a tough job. I’m not sure if you’ll stretch too well. Your cunt looks too tight, doll,” Kageyama chides, giving another playful spank on your ass. You whine against the pillow, too frustrated to express your feelings through words. All you can manage to do is turn your head back, looking at him, eyes borderline glossy with tears and arousal which sends a tang straight to his heart.

“Fuck, if you look at me like that.. might just have to force it to open up. Is that what you want?” You eagerly nod in approval, slightly swaying your hips left and right to entice him all the more. The twisted thought of Kageyama, a man that towers over you, has a cock far too big for your pussy, and can physically do whatever he pleases with you, excites you two to no end.

You watch in anticipation as he gets off the bed, never breaking eye contact with each other as he tugs his shirt off. You’ve seen it more than a handful of times now, but the built structure of his body, toned muscles and all, has your mouth agape and legs shaking. He begins undoing the drawstring of his sweatpants, allowing them to drop onto the ground, leaving him in only his boxers. A visible tent already pinching the fabric at a point. He’s lowering the waistband and revealing the girth underneath, tossing the fabric aside. You never fail to rile him up, and that’s what he loves so much.

“Baby, I don’t know how many times I have to say it. But, why are you so hot?”

“I don’t know, doll. I’ll ask you the same,” he gives you the softest of smiles.

Getting on the bed again, Kageyama leans in against you, trailing warm kissing on the surface of your back, along your spine and stopping at your sensitive neck.

“We haven’t kissed at all today, did you notice?” claiming a long kiss on the nape of your neck, leaving a light bruise that has you getting chills across your skin. He slightly bucks his hips against yours, loving the way his cock brushes against your soothing touch.

“‘Course I noticed. I tried, but you wouldn’t let me..” you respond in a meek tone, which has him flipping you around, face to face once again. Looking into your hazed gaze, Kageyama inches closer before locking his lips with yours. Gentle lips that kiss him back, and tongues connecting sensually. Occasionally gasping for air, you two engage in kisses, both kind and devilish, for what seems to be a full lifetime.

Without even realizing it, Kageyama begins rubbing his fingers along your slit, lips muffling your sudden squeak. His cold digits collect your love juices, before using a single finger to probe your entrance. Your hips involuntarily grind against him, voice humming for more, for him to give you more.

“Doll, gotta take things slow. I don’t want to hurt you, okay?” he asserts, using his non-dominant hand to pet your hair in comforting strokes. Steadily moving his finger in and out of your pussy, he indulges in quiet flutters of your walls around him, the way you tighten whenever he looks into your eyes, or breaths against your tender skin. “Coach, another, please?”

“I call the shots here. I’ll know when you’re ready.”

“Hm, but your fingers always feel so good in me. I can’t handle it anymore,” you praise, hitting those happy nerves in his brain.

“Fine. Don’t complain to me after for being sore,” he spits before forcing another cold finger into you, pushing satisfyingly deep. “Yes, coach. Won’t complain,” you gasp through the thrusts of his fingers. Your blissed face has Kageyama growing painfully hard and in need for your heat to finally engulf him. His two fingers turn into three, make audible noises as he scissors and pulls in and out, stretching you just like your coach promised.

Kageyama’s aching for your touch at this point, so without question, he removes his digits, inspecting the honey-like accumulation of love that coats his fingers. “Nice and wet for him, huh?” he teasingly comments, and all you can do is squint your eyes back at him, with your typical bratty attitude. He firmly grabs at your jaw again as a warning, knowing he’s given far too many chances for your insolent behaviour, but can never fully bear torturing or punishing you because his love is just that strong.

“Okay, get up. You’re doing glute workouts now that you’re properly stretched.”

“W-what?” you stutter, genuinely believing he was serious. You wouldn’t be surprised if he was going to make you follow through. Kageyama moves your body aside, only to take your spot and sit up against your bed’s headboard. Tilting his head to look at you with those piercing eyes, “C’mon, it’s no time for a break. Ride me.”

“Ka- coach..” you lugg yourself up so you can seat yourself in his lap, arms wrapping around his neck to support yourself in the new position. Seeing you breathless without even putting it in you has Kageyama flustered and his heart beating. You grab his girth and rub it against your entrance, not yet putting it in. “You’re okay with doing it raw today?” he grabs onto your waist, before you can lower yourself any further, reassuring you were okay with this. This vulnerable feeling, this closeness both you and him share, you were fine with doing anything as long as it’s with him.

Weaving your fingers through his dark locks, you look Kageyama in the eyes, “Yes, my love. It’s a safe day, so let’s have some fun, yeah?” Engaging in one last kiss, he allows you to lower down onto the head of cock, the stinging stretch of your walls around him. The feeling of your bare pussy squeezing against his cock has Kageyama bucking his hips, in desperation to feel more.

“Hey there, you gotta start moving. This is still part of our training,” urging you to take him deeper, to which you do. Inch by inch, you relax yourself onto his length, down down down until all eight inches are buried within you. Kageyama grunts, wallowings in the tightness of your heat wrapped graciously around his cock. You whine loudly against his neck, too overwhelmed over the intrusive size inside you.

“C-coach, why is your cock so big?” moaning as you raise your hips slowly, allowing him to feel every rib of your walls hug his shaft. His face grows redder at your words, and you swear he grows just a tiny bit harder too. “Don’t say those types of things to m-”

“Fuck, it reaches so damn deep, baby. Feels so fucking good, oh my god,” interrupting him, you continue your obscensent sighs and praise as your hips build a steady rhythm. Rolling your hips, you grind against all the good parts while continuing to give him the steady satisfying friction for his cock. Kageyama’s given up on trying to talk to you, or scold you, instead leaking quiet whines and less than quiet moans. “Why don’t you try fucking me now, huh? I’m getting tir-” A firm strike to your ass cuts you off mid sentence as Kageyama firmly grabs onto your hips, setting his own pace now.

“How does it feel to be interrupted, huh?” he mocks you, before slamming his hips into yours, in a quickening pace the room begins filling with the sounds of wet thrusts and skin on skin. You squeak when he lays another spank across your ass, cheek burning up from the impact. He’s a pro athlete with extremely toned arms, so those harsh love taps are bound to leave marks.

“I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to int-”

“S’okay, doll,” right after cutting you off once more, he looks down at you with the most condescending look and thrusts his cock, perfectly hitting your sweet spot. Repeatedly targeting that spot has you becoming a babbling mess. His hold on your hips prevents you from moving, as he thrusts up into your cunt like you’re some doll. You love the way he has you seeing fireworks, the way his cock stretches you out so well, and the way he reaches insanely deep, up against your cervix. You love it so much actually, to the point where you start saying things you didn’t mean to say… Well, not yet at least.

“Baby, I love you so much, oh gosh. Can’t.. Your cock feels so good, ahhh.”

“(Y/n), did y-”

“Fuck, please, please, please. Cum inside me, please? I wanna feel ya up against my womb when you c-”

“What the fuck are you saying, (Y/n)?” Regardless of his presumably concerned words, Kageyama quickens the speed of his hips, chasing this desired high and forbidden idea of cumming inside the love of his life.

“Mmm, you know exactly what I’m saying. I know you aren’t that dumb,” you brain is too fried to know when to stop with your words. “I’m not the fucking dumb one when you are the one who’s basically begging to be knocked up. Is that what you want, doll?” he leans up close to your ear and hums those tempting words as he stops his rapid thrusts, instead grinding his cock against the deepest parts of your sopping cunt.

“‘Course, baby. Want your cum right inside here,” you whine again as you pull his hand, placing it on the surface of your tummy, reveling in the way he moans loudly. There was something about what you said that had Kageyama in a loss for thoughts, heart skipping every other beat. Even if this was all in the heat of the moment, heat of lust and desire, what he felt far surpassed mere infatuation.

“Gonna cum..” he whispers, groaning at the way you swivel your hips in his lap, bringing you both closer and closer. He wraps his arms around you in a tight embrace, tipping you over the edge. He loves you. His cock twitches, once, twice, three times, feeling the warmth seep through your core as he paints your walls white. You’re left breathless as Kageyama basks in the event of his high.

“I can’t believe I actually c.. inside you..”

“Felt nice though, right?” you coo into his ear. His face and ears burning up as you lift yourself off his lap, releasing the softening cock from your insides. The mix of your juices and his cum slowly drips out, which has him groaning at the sight. With a soft kiss on the lips, Kageyama lays you on the bed again before getting up to prepare a warm towel.

Patting you clean of all the grime of the dirty encounter, he takes one good look at your body, face, eyes and sighs. For a man with no true understanding of his own emotions, you’ve learned to read and interpret them in lieu of that. But right now, for the first time, you don’t know what he’s thinking, what he’s feeling.

“Was it bad, or something..? We can talk about it,” you pull him in to rest and lay beside you, face to face. Those deep blue eyes say so many things, intense love and desire, but also, grief and sadness, all at the same time. He doesn’t respond to you. “Are you feeling okay? What’s wrong?” You grab onto his hand, feeling the slight tremble and shake beneath his skin.

He can't leave you when you look at him with such love, or hold his hands with such care, or speak to him with such concern. He just can’t.

“I’m leaving, Y/n.. I got an offer for Team Italy.”

- TAGLIST -

@anhphunnnn | @adamarvv | @asahiswaifu | @fangirling-25-8 | @kei-kui | @lilacshouko | @smol-enbybackup | @gyubit17 | @renee1414 | @denkiwenki | @xanaxdeity | @cuddlesslut | @nikkipea | @lovemesomehwa | @muiyuuuu | @oikawalmart-hq | @mirdy47707 | @lumiriai | @notamazinglizzy | @starwrite-er | @dearkags | @hamsterfan17 | @sugawsites | @anime-simp | @singleandlonely | @levisackerwoman | @cactuski6 | @kingkagss | @gentlechainsaws | @h0wab0utw3d0ntd0that | @prettymuchboo | @highlyanxiousintroverted | @anna-pcy21 | @sweetlysugawara | @yqshirov | @kingkags | @marifujioka | @luna-barnes14 | @musekala | @thechaosoflonging | @oikawasphlatass | @tremendousglitterthing | @kathya420 | @daninaninani | @maii-flowers | @akakuzumo | @tycrackculture | @gaychemicalwater | @mariachiii | @kiyoomile | @jaxneedshelp | @xs-hoodie | @preparingtofall |

(taglist continues in the replies!!)

[chicagocryptid]

For sal x reader, Halestorm "let me in your room" I'm not sure if this is how you want this request done pls let me know if there's something I need to add!

Show Me // Sal x Reader 

Warnings: none! 

It was always an easy sort of feeling with Sal. He made you laugh when you least expected, was more than willing to stay up late chit chatting, always seemed to know when you wanted to be close, and when you needed space. It was never really butterflies or nerves, and in a way that’s how you knew he was someone special. Wasn’t the person you loved supposed to feel like home? 

But he was also mysterious. You had tried, hard, to be careful when you talked about his past. You never pried, and always looked for the shift in his gaze that alerted you to the crossing into forbidden territory, an accidental step on holy ground. Most of it was easy to avoid; His mother, the accident, hospital stays. You didn’t complain that he hadn’t taken his mask off around you yet. Everything would come in its own time. But it was inevitable, and no matter how you tiptoed, there seemed to be something that would make him square his shoulders and go glassy eyed. Monotone until you changed the subject to something more on the surface, something less heavy. 

You had shared everything with him. Partially because he wasn’t much of a talker, so he listened better than anyone, and partially because if you talked about yourself, there was less of a chance of royally screwing up and making him uncomfortable. But after a few, otherwise blissful, weeks, you were running out of things to say. And it was starting to feel a little unfair, like the balance wasn’t right. Now Sal had all of his secrets, and all of yours too, and there was an ache deep in your heart that wanted to share his burden. The way he was helping you carry yours. 

It was a late night. Later than you usually allowed yourself to stay over, but the two of you had gotten wrapped up in a Nightmare on Elm Street marathon - Sal’s choice, of course - and time had slipped right through your fingers. Not that either of you were complaining. It was preferable to be wrapped up safe in each other, listening to the wind howling outside, than for you to be trying to battle it on your way home. In any case, the movie had ended, and now there was just the familiar sound of breathing, Sal’s head against your chest, your fingers in his hair. Every so often, they brushed against the strap of his mask, and maybe it was the sound of fabric against skin that finally allowed you to gather enough courage to speak. 

“Sal?” 

“Hmm?” His eyes were closed, but he opened them just a little to look up at you. 

“Can I ask you something?” 

“You just did.”

“Good one, Henry.” He laughed and sat up, shifting on the couch to look at you properly. 

“Shoot, Butch Cassidy.” 

“It’s about...” You reached up, gesturing to your own face. He looked away briefly. 

“I told you about it when we first met.” 

“No, I know. But...” Your hands found his, and you laced your fingers together. His hands were smaller than yours, and you could feel the callouses he’d built up from the guitar. “Things have been going really well. Except... I don’t feel like I know you. Not really. I’ve told you so much about me, my family, my past. Don’t you trust me?” 

He sighed and looked down at your hands interlocked. “Of course I do.” 

“I just want to connect with you, Sal. I’m fine with taking things as slow as you want but...”

“No, I understand. I... I can try.” 

“That’s all I’m asking.” He kept his gaze on your hands, running his thumb over your knuckles. 

He took a deep breath, and then, “It was a dog.” He paused, and it seemed like that would be the extent of it, but he continued after a moment. “I don’t remember a ton about the actual accident. Just walking away from my mom, and then a lot of screaming. And the pain.” He looked back up, his eyes shiny. Your heart was thrumming, and you were starting to regret having brought it up at all. You opened your mouth to apologize, but something else came out. 

“Was it really bad?” Of course, you knew it was. They wouldn’t have given him a prosthetic for a few scratches. Part of you still couldn’t help it. “Like, really really bad?” 

For a moment the two of you just looked at each other, and then slowly, very slowly, he untangled his hands from yours and reached up behind his head. The sound of the buckle coming undone seemed to echo around you. One, and then two, and then in a deliberate movement, he lifted the plastic away from his face. He flinched, as though he expected you to gasp, or turn away, but you didn’t. Whatever you had been expecting, the reality was somehow both less than and worse. Bone missing, under his eye and part of his jaw. Teeth visible through his cheek. One side of his nose almost completely gone. And scars. So many, many scars. He was searching your face, waiting. 

“You still wanna connect?” The corner of his mouth turned up in a sadistic smile. He was so handsome when he smiled. How sad that you had been missing it this whole time. Cautiously, so he could stop you if he wanted, you lifted your hand to brush against his cheek. He leaned into the touch, just a little. 

“I think we just did.”  

[funtryandthepaladudes]

Previously, I made an observation that there’s a possibility that the Voltron Movie that’s currently in development hell would be the true ending to this version of the Voltron property. And then what was supposed to be a summary of the kind of movie I would like this to be turned into this monstrosity. Despite it being essentially just my rambling thoughts without any proper structure, people seemed to like it, and many even said they would be willing to watch this if it were made into a movie. Sure, there’s only a bit over a Hundred notes, but that’s almost enough to fill a small Cinema room, and isn’t that all you really need? But seriously, thank you all for being sweet. I really expected more criticism, but everybody who has reacted to this had lovely things to say. Here’s to you all! Don’t worry, I didn’t forget about you @sillygurl1021. Let’s do this!

Edit: Here’s a link to the Next part.

Allura is asleep in the medical bay of the Space Craft (Battle Ship?) looking every bit the fairytale princess that she is. ‘She hasn’t aged a day.’ you hear Lance say. We pan out, and the former Paladins are all gathered in Hunk’s restaurant again, but the mood is less festive than it was earlier. They are watching a livecast from some kind of telecommunication device. ‘I know.’ Keith responds on his end. ‘I’m right here. I’ve touched her heard her voice, and I can still scarcely believe it.’

‘I’m not sure I do, I mean, people don’t just come back from the dead. Right?’ Hunk comments, trying to process everything.

‘To be fair, she didn’t die so much as merge with all of reality. And face it, we don’t have a clue how all that mystical stuff works. Not for the lack of trying.’ Pidge mutters the last sentence. ‘And come on, Hunk. This entire Galra Galaxy Conquest started because two people refused to die.’

‘Oh right. I keep forgetting that.’

‘Be that as it may, I must confess I have my doubts as well. I may not have been as well acquainted with her as you all, but if I were some kind of malevolent entity, disguising myself in a form you all trusted.’ Acxa, who is also there, comments. 

‘If she was the entity, why would Voltron be protecting her? Why would I have had these dreams that lead me here?’ 

‘Wait, dreams? You’ve been dreaming about Allura? Since when?’ Lance speaks up again. (In the background, you can see Pidge visibly deflate.) 

‘Since a little after last Allura Day. It’s not what you think!’ 

 ‘What? Dude! Nobody, cares about your weird subconscious! We’re your friends, you should be able to tell us if you’re having cryptic dreams about our mutual friend.’

‘I told Shiro about them. I - I just didn’t know if they were really anything.’

‘Well, that tracks.’ Lance states, satisfied with Keith’s response. 

‘Either way, the fact that she was protected by a fully formed Voltron, sans Paladins, makes me optimistic. Just out of curiosity, are they still in formation?’ 

‘Not as far as I know.’ Keith answers, as he moves a way from the Medical Bay, Acxa right behind him. ‘The disengaged once I pulled her into my cruiser. Our Craft is not the largest, so we didn’t have any space in our Cargo Hold. They’ve just been flying alongside us since.’ 

‘Have you told Coran and Romelle yet?’ Shiro asks.

‘I, didn’t know if I should say anything yet. When she passed, they didn’t get to say goodbye, and I just wanted to make sure.’ He admits meekly. 

‘Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but if both the return of Voltron and Allura is any indication, then we have got to get on top of this. Let’s rendezvous at New Altea, ASAP. And tell them about this, man. They have a right to know. Plus, Coran knows her better than anyone. If anybody should be able to tell Allura from a cosmic demon, it should be him.’ Hunk adds. 

‘Sounds like a solid plan. I’ll see you then.’ And he hangs up. The Paladins discuss who is willing to go on this impromptu road trip. Shiro declines, but everybody can tell that he wants to go, but they don’t say anything because they don’t want to make things more awkward. Pidge talks about having to work on lesson plans with Chip, and sighs about the fact that she’s not going to shake her reputation as an absentee professor this year either. During all this, she makes it a point not to even look in Lance’s direction, and this visibly frustrates him. Hunk is frustrated that he has to put up with all this, and tries to cut the tension by dismissing, because it has been an eventful day, and he would like to go home to his wife. (Sorry, the wedding happened off-screen. Maybe in another draft. And yeah, I’m scrapping the Romelle vs Vrepits Sal rivalry subplot, because it was kinda dumb.) Everybody goes their separate ways.

We are back in space. Keith is just finishing off a conversation with Coran and Romelle. It’s very emotional, and they promise to be ready for everybody’s arrival. Once the conversation is done, Keith and Acxa start heading somewhere (It doesn’t really matter because they never get there. You’ll see why.). At first they’re quiet. Then, surprisingly, Acxa speaks first.

‘What happens now?’

‘We’re going to New Altea, I thought that was obvious.’

‘I meant with you. If this is Princess Allura, are you going to tell her.’

‘Tell her what?’

‘What you told me two Allura Days ago.’

Keith is visibly out of sorts. I just realized I use the word ‘visibly’ a lot. He rallies, and tries to play his reaction off. ‘That’s not important right now.’ 

‘So you’ll tell her once this ordeal is over?’

‘Acxa.’

‘What if she doesn’t stay?’

‘Then that’s all the more reason not to bring it up.’

‘Keith, you know keeping that to yourself is not doing you any good. You didn’t even tell Shiro, and I’m aware that you probably wouldn’t have told me either if circumstances weren’t what they were.’

‘Why are you bringing this up now? These past two Deca-Pheobs you didn’t so much as allude to that conversation, so why is this a topic now.’

‘I was waiting for you to speak on your own terms. But the situation is different now that she is here. I just don’t want you to make your regrets any deeper than they already are. This is me talking as a friend. Don’t keep this to yourself too long. You’re only going to hurt yourself.’

‘I just don’t want to...’

‘Uh, Boss?’ Ezor interjects from a communicator.

Keith, eager to get out of the current conversation, immediately turns his attention to her. ‘What do you need?’

‘Well, you told us to let you know if there are any changes in the Princess’ condition.’

‘Did she wake up.’ 

‘Actually, it’s more like she’s...missing.’

‘What do you mean, she’s missing?’

‘I mean her bed is empty and we can’t find her anywhere on board. Even your teleporting doggy can’t find her.’ 

‘Keep looking. We don’t know what condition she’s in, so we need to find her fast. Spread the word out, this is our number 1 priority. Have everybody keep their com-links open, I want to hear about it as soon as she’s found. Over and out.’ He’s about to rush off himself, when Acxa grabs his shoulder.

‘Keith!’

‘Acxa, I’m pretty sure we can agree that now is not the time to have this conv...’

‘Look outside the window.’

Confused he obeys her and almost has a heart attack. Allura is floating in deep space along with the Lions, and doesn’t seem to be wearing a spacesuit. 

‘Quiznack! How did she get out there?’ he turns the com-link again. ‘I’ve found her. I need whoever’s closest to the hanger to prepare my spacesuit and jet-pack. I’ll be there in a few ticks. Over.’ 

We focus on Allura, who despite not having any protective gear, seems to be doing fine. In fact, she looks blissful; you’d think she was just swimming in a peaceful pond and not the cold vacuum of space. A panicked Keith collides with her, upsetting the calm mood, but she doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, it seems like soundless giggles have escaped her. When she looks at Keith, she sees that he seems to be talking at a frantic speed, but she can’t hear him. She then notices that he has an extra helmet in his hand, and casually slips it on. She is barraged with Keith’s concerned yammering.

‘...how was I going to face everybody, if I had lost you right after getting you back. They wouldn’t be able to handle it. I wouldn’t...’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to alarm you. It slipped by mind that lifeforms typically need equipment to breath out here.’

‘...You...what?...’

‘It’s beautiful out here, isn’t it? I’ve experienced so many things lately, but it’s quite different from this perspective.’ 

‘...You are Allura, right?’

‘I, I believe I am.’

‘Do you know who I am?’

‘I know you’re important. And I think we did something like this once before.’ 

Keith smiles a bit as he thinks back to that memory, but then frowns. ‘You can’t remember?’

‘It’s hard to explain. I have so many things in my mind, they feel less like thoughts and memories and more like a strange and beautiful dream someone shared with me. I’m not sure of anything, but I know once I find the Catalyst everything will make sense.’ 

‘What’s the Catalyst?’

‘I’m not sure of that either.’

‘...Would it help if I told you what I remember?’

‘Perhaps, it couldn’t hurt to give it a try. The sooner I sort out my memory the better. I don’t know why, but something inside of me tells me it is immensely important now.’ 

‘I’ll do whatever I can.’

‘Thank you,...’

‘Keith.’

‘Keith. It suits you.’ She readjusts her grip on him, winding up closer. ‘Do you mind if we stay here a bit longer? I’ll keep the breathing device on if it will but you at ease.’ 

‘Sure, but are you sure you want me to stay? If I’m disrupting your, uhm, space appreciation, then I can wait for you inside.’

‘No, it’s fine. I don’t know for certain if it was the same for the Allura you remember, but I enjoy your company. It’s...soothing.’ Keith looks surprised at this comment, but that soon melts into a very soft look. 

Well, that was considerably shorter than the last one, I think. Though still very long nevertheless. Hope you all enjoyed this. I’m going to keep updating this regardless, but if you shower this post with notes--likes, comments, or reblogs. I’m not picky.--that will make me want to update sooner. And if you want this to be turned into a movie, share this with your local Dreamworks Execs! This is joke, please don’t actually do this! It will only make everybody involved miserable. I’ll see you when I see you. Funtry.

[writersrealmbts]

Never Alone - Jimin

Description: JiminXReader, Zombie Apocalypse AU

What about you?

Warnings: Suicidal thoughts, depression, various

Posted: 9/22/2018

Tags: Jimin, Zombie AU, Zombie Apocalypse

Angst, with end fluff:  2,353 words

A/N: @bangtantannie because you inspired this. I needed a break from my other WIPs. Take a look at the inspiring post and let me know why you would or wouldn’t survive!

You closed the door to the roof behind you, surprised that there weren’t more zombies in that building. Not that it mattered. You were done running and fighting. You had already watched all of your friends and family get taken. You had watched strangers fall to the hands of zombies. You didn’t know why or how you had survived, but the constant fear was too much to handle. Especially while you were alone. Everyone knew that to even get to safety you needed two people. You walked to the edge of the roof, shivering slightly in the wind. If you had planned on being around longer, you might have taken the time to ransack some of the apartments and try and find a coat. The cold was making the zombies move more slowly, which only made it easier to come up here and end it all. You wouldn’t be a zombie. You would just be a splat on the sidewalk that had no one left to care. “Are…you alive?” A soft voice asked from behind you. You flinched and turned, losing your balance. “No!” He lunged forward and grabbed you, then pulled you farther onto the roof for safety, crushing you in a hug. You were still a little stunned, but you weren’t about to object. Just having someone else alive for a moment that seemed to be just as desperate as you was such a relief. Finally he pulled away and looked down at you. “Hi.” “Hello.” “Uh, sorry, I…don’t speak English good,” He said carefully, gripping your hands. “Please don’t jump. I…don’t…alone…” You looked up at him. “You don’t want to be alone.” He shook his head, eyes sad and plaintive. “I am from Korea. My…family…gone.” He said something else in Korean, but you didn’t understand. You nodded slowly. “My family too.” “My friends…they waiting…” He struggled to get the words out. “They’re somewhere safe?” He nodded, holding up a phone. “Before died, call.” Realization sunk in. He couldn’t get there alone. He had people who cared about him waiting, but his family had been overtaken by the zombies. He needed you. Alive. “Please,” He said, his voice so sad and plaintive. You looked down, then back up and tapped your chest. “Y/n.” He managed a wavering smile. “Jimin.” “The apartments, we have to be careful, but we can get supplies. I need a coat.” You pointed toward the roof door. He nodded, understanding at least. “Maybe we can find a charger?” You suggested. Actually, from what you could tell, there was still electricity and the water supply was still clean here so if you two found an empty apartment it would do you both good to shower and eat and stock up on whatever supplies you could find. He seemed to understand where you were going with it and nodded. He picked up his weapon, a baseball bat, and he opened the door first, leading the way down. You picked up the machete you had taken from a stranger that was infected. You had been using an axe, but it was too heavy and too slow for you to continue carrying. The two of you inspected the first apartment that had the door opened. It was dangerous to open closed doors because it was impossible to tell what was behind the door. Zombies were apparently unable to open the doors, and had to be motivated to try and break down the doors. You two looked at each other and nodded. He hurried to close the door and barricade it while you started searching the closets for a coat that would keep you warm, and maybe a new backpack to shove supplies in since yours ripped last night while you were fighting off a horde of zombies. This had definitely been a bachelor’s apartment. A very tall bachelor. You tested the shower, finding towels and soap in the cabinet. Jimin found you in there. “You shower. I find food. Then I shower.” You nodded, hesitating, and then hugging him. He held you tightly, breathing shakily. “Thank you for being alive,” You whispered, then pulled away. You then grabbed one of the clean t-shirts from the closet of the former resident. Your shirt was disgusting. It’d be nice to wear something clean for the first time in a while. The water wasn’t hot, but it was blissful to get all the dirt, blood, and grime off and to just smell like soap. When you went back out, he had found some food and was heating it up carefully on the stove. He looked over and gave you a smile. “Better?” You nodded. “Your turn. Did you find a charger?” He nodded, pointing over to where his phone was charging. “I call after we eat. If I can.” You took over cooking. “Go shower.” He nodded and went to raid the closet before taking his shower. You looked through what else he had found, checking the things he had set aside. It should be enough to last you guys a week. Maybe there was more food in the other apartments. You two had to make it down another thirty stories, it couldn’t hurt to ransack a few more apartments. Maybe find some women’s clothing that fit you. He came back out not long after the food was finished cooking, and the two of you scarfed down the meager portion you both allowed yourselves in relative silence. Then you nodded toward his phone. “Call.” He nodded going over and grabbing his phone. “They call me…much.” “They tried calling you while your phone was dead.” He nodded, bringing his phone over to show you the notifications. Then he brought up a picture of him with six other guys. You smiled. “Call.” He chewed his lip and went into his contacts, picking the one that had called him most recently and hitting the call button. He put it on speaker. “Jimin?!” The person answered after two rings, and soon other voices were exclaiming in the background. Jimin almost sobbed. “Hyung? Byeolil eobji?” There were multiple voices overlapping each other, all speaking so quickly you couldn’t make out what was being said. “Ye,” He replied. “Naneun sal-a issda.” Someone on the other end got the others to be quiet with a loud yell, then spoke to Jimin. “Ye. Ye, hyung,” Jimin looked at you then took your hand. He kept speaking with them, and you just listened, not understanding and yet seeing that his motivation to survive was rising. The other men on the line would pipe up now and then, asking questions. Four of them from what you could tell. “Bogo sipeo, Jimin-ssi,” A new voice said as the conversation started to slow down. “Bogo sipeo. Saranghae,” Jimin replied, looking down at you. He said something that was obviously him saying he needed to hang up. That made them get a little louder, but they mostly seemed to be saying they loved him, and probably to be careful. “Annyeonghaseyo,” He said it a little stronger, though you could tell he just wanted to sound stronger so they wouldn’t worry. You wiped a tear that escaped away from his cheek as he hung up. “We’ll get to them.” He offered you the phone. You stared at it, then looked up at him and shook your head. “No one.” He squeezed your hand. “We get to them. Safe. You and me. Team.” You nodded and turned back toward the table, wrapping your arms around your knees. “Team.” You sat there another moment, then took a deep breath and forced yourself back to your feet to finish searching the house for supplies. You went into the bathroom first, opening all the usual places one would keep medicine, grabbing the bottles of over-the-counter drugs and then reading the prescription labels. You recognized some of the drugs, but couldn’t place what they were for from memory. You bagged them. You could figure out what they did later. Maybe you could find some sort of clinic that wasn’t flooded with zombies and find a medical dictionary or something. “Here,” He said beside you, making you jump. He was holding a bag. “I keep medicine here.” You nodded, dumping the medicine in the bag. “I need a backpack.” You mimicked having straps on both of your shoulders, just in case he didn’t understand. He nodded. “I look.” He went back out. You went out and started tearing up one of the clean sheets into strips that could be used for bandaging. He came back in shaking his head, then just stared for a moment and smiled. “No backpack. I get some clothes. We check other place.” “Okay,” You said, rolling the bandages up. He sat next to you. “We survive together. No more alone.” You sighed, relief flooding over you again. “No more alone.” ——— “Just a little farther,” You murmured, breathing heavily. He nodded, tucking his arm around you so that you could both support each other. “We’re almost there.” You adjusted your grip on the machete. The two of you had been fighting and making your way toward the sanctuary for a month now. You both had cried on each other’s shoulders, saved each other’s lives, and kept the other going. You taught each other your languages, and he picked up yours much better than you picked up his. He told you about his friends, now his only family. His motivation for making it to safety. “Call them. We’ll need them to open the gate for us,” You told him, turning to look around and make sure the two of you were safe. He nodded and pulled out the phone, turning it on. “Last call.” You pulled away from him, keeping an eye on your surroundings to protect him while he made the call. Two zombies attacked while he made the call, but they were moving slowly and you easily killed them. Jimin hung up and turned to you. “Come on, y/n. They waiting for us. They’re excited to meet you.” “They’re more excited to see you again.” You hugged him, grateful again that he was with you. The horrors you had seen since meeting him had almost doubled, and you were sure that if you had faced them alone or lost him you would easily have given up and just died. Maybe called his friends and told them not to expect him. If they even understood. He placed a kiss on your head. “Let’s go.” The two of you made your way downhill, ready to fight. And you did fight. You lost count of how many zombies you had to face to get to the gate. He constantly checked to make sure you were with him, and you did the same with him. You both were too close to freedom to lose the other. Finally, the two of you reached the gate, clearing the area in front of it while the gate was opened. Some people came out and helped hold back the zombies until you were both inside and the gate was closed. They checked you both over, making sure neither of you were infected, giving you clean clothing after making sure you were both clean. It was unnerving, being separated from him and surrounded by strangers after so long. The longer you were away from him, the more wound up you got. They cut your hair since it was a matted mess, and the clothes they gave you fit you better than what you had been wearing before. All of which just kept you away from him longer. You were ready to panic, following the women out into the clear air of the town. Jimin emerged from the building next to you and hurried to your side, pulling you into his grasp. “Hi.” You smiled, relaxing into his grasp. Finally letting your guard down. “We’re safe.” “We’re safe,” He replied, echoing your words and kissing your head as he had become accustomed to doing after the two of you almost lost each other two weeks ago. “Let’s find your friends,” You told him, pulling away and smiling up at him. He grinned and nodded. The two of you started walking along the road, knowing that his friends were waiting for him. “Jimin-ssi!” Someone hollered, racing toward the two of you. You stepped away as Jimin was tackled in a hug by one, then six boys, all speaking rapid Korean. Jimin broke down in tears along with a few of the other boys, hugging all of them individually and clinging to them with relief. One of them, Namjoon, looked at you finally, obviously emotional. “You’re y/n.” You nodded. He took your hand, holding in both of yours. “Thank you. Thank you for getting him here.” You looked at him, surprised at how well he spoke English. “Actually, he got me here. I was…” Jimin met your gaze. He and all of his friends were listening. You recognized them from his photo. You could name all of them, and knew stories about all of them. “He saved me.” Jimin pushed through them all to hold you close in his arms. “We saved each other.” The boys surrounded you with relieved looks. Yoongi looked at Namjoon, then pointed up the street. “We have a house, you two stay with us?” You dropped your gaze. “I should probably find my own place.” “No. Team,” Jimin murmured. “You and me. Neither of us will be alone. Ever.” “You’re our family now,” Namjoon said, still holding your hand. “We’ve all been waiting to meet you. Jimin’s told us so much about you. We’ve also all lost people we care about. We all stick together. We’re family.” Jimin placed a kiss on your temple. “Saranghae,” He whispered in your ear, holding you tightly. You smiled, looking up at him. You knew that your relationship with him would change when the two of you reached the sanctuary, but you had thought he would leave you behind. “I love you too.”

Masterlist.   What about you?

[nowontheroad]

5

I left everybody and went home to rest. My aunt said I was wasting my time hanging around with Dean and his gang. I knew that was wrong, too. Life is life, and kind is kind. What I wanted was to take one more magnificent trip to the West Coast and get back in time for the spring semester in school. And what a trip it turned out to be! I only went along for the ride, and to see what else Dean was going to do, and finally, also, knowing Dean would go back to Camille in Frisco, I wanted to have an affair with Marylou. We got ready to cross the groaning continent again. I drew my GI check and gave Dean eighteen dollars to mail to his wife; she was waiting for him to come home and she was broke. What was on Marylou's mind I don't know. Ed Dunkel, as ever, just followed.

There were long, funny days spent in Carlo's apartment before we left. He went around in his bathrobe and made semi-ironical speeches: "Now I'm not trying to take your hincty sweets from you, but it seems to me the time has come to decide what you are and what you're going to do." Carlo was working as typist in an office. "I want to know what all this sitting around the house all day is intended to mean. What all this talk is and what you propose to do. Dean, why did you leave Camille and pick up Marylou?" No answer-giggles. "Marylou, why are you traveling around the country like this and what are your womanly intentions concerning the shroud?" Same answer. "Ed Dunkel, why did you abandon your new wife in Tucson and what are you doing here sitting on your big fat ass? Where's your home? What's your job?" Ed Dunkel bowed his head in genuine befuddlement. "Sal -how comes it you've fallen on such sloppy days and what have you done with Lucille?" He adjusted his bathrobe and sat facing us all. "The days of wrath are yet to come. The balloon won't sustain you much longer. And not only that, but it's an abstract balloon. You'll all go flying to the West Coast and come staggering back in search of your stone."

In these days Carlo had developed a tone of voice which he hoped sounded like what he called The Voice of Rock; the whole idea was to stun people into the realization of the rock. "You pin a dragon to your hats," he warned us; "you're up in the attic with the bats." His mad eyes glittered at us. Since the Dakar Doldrums he had gone through a terrible period which he called the Holy Doldrums, or Harlem Doldrums, when he lived in Harlem in midsummer and at night woke up in his lonely room and heard "the great machine" descending from the sky; and when he walked on 12 5th Street "under water" with all the other fish. It was a riot of radiant ideas that had come to enlighten his brain. He made Marylou sit on his lap and commanded her to subside. He told Dean, "Why don't you just sit down and relax? Why do you jump around so much?" Dean ran around, putting sugar in his coffee and saying, "Yes! Yes! Yes!" At night Ed Dunkel slept on the floor on cushions, Dean and Marylou pushed Carlo out of bed, and Carlo sat up in the kitchen over his kidney stew, mumbling the predictions of the rock. I came in days and watched everything.

Ed Dunkel said to me, "Last night I walked clear down to Times Square and just as I arrived I suddenly realized I was a ghost-it was my ghost walking on the sidewalk." He said these things to me without comment, nodding his head emphatically. Ten hours later, in the midst of someone else's conversation, Ed said, "Yep, it was my ghost walking on the sidewalk."

Suddenly Dean leaned to me earnestly and said, "Sal, I have something to ask of you-very important to me-I wonder how you'll take it-we're buddies, aren't we?"

"Sure are, Dean." He almost blushed. Finally he came out with it: he wanted me to work Marylou. I didn't ask him why because I knew he wanted to see what Marylou was like with another man. We were sitting in Ritzy's Bar when he proposed the idea; we'd spent an hour walking Times Square, looking for Hassel. Ritzy's Bar is the hoodlum bar of the streets around Times Square; it changes names every year. You walk in there and you don't see a single girl, even in the booths, just a great mob of young men dressed in all varieties of hoodlum cloth, from red shirts to zoot suits. It is also the hustlers' bar -the boys who make a living among the sad old homos of the Eighth Avenue night. Dean walked in there with his eyes slitted to see every single face. There were wild Negro queers, sullen guys with guns, shiv-packing seamen, thin, noncommittal junkies, and an occasional well-dressed middle-aged detective, posing as a bookie and hanging around half for interest and half for duty. It was the typical place for Dean to put down his request. All kinds of evil plans are hatched in Ritzy's Bar-you can sense it in the air-and all kinds of mad sexual routines are initiated to go with them. The safecracker proposes not only a certain loft on 14th Street to the hoodlum, but that they sleep together. Kinsey spent a lot of time in Ritzy's Bar, interviewing some of the boys; I was there the night his assistant came, in 1945. Hassel and Carlo were interviewed.

Dean and I drove back to the pad and found Marylou in bed. Dunkel was roaming his ghost around New York. Dean told her what we had decided. She said she was pleased. I wasn't so sure myself. I had to prove that I'd go through with it. The-bed had been the deathbed of a big man and sagged in the middle. Marylou lay there, with Dean and myself on each side of her, poised on the upjutting mattress-ends, not knowing what to say. I said, "Ah hell, I can't do this."

"Go on, man, you promised!" said Dean.

"What about Marylou?" I said. "Come on, Marylou, what do you think?"

"Go ahead," she said.

She embraced me and I tried to forget old Dean was there. Every time I realized he was there in the dark, listening for every sound, I couldn't do anything but laugh. It was horrible.

"We must all relax," said Dean.

"I'm afraid I can't make it. Why don't you go in the kitchen a minute?"

Dean did so. Marylou was so lovely, but I whispered, "Wait until we be lovers in San Francisco; my heart isn't in it." I was right, she could tell. It was three children of the earth trying to decide something in the night and having all the weight of past centuries ballooning in the dark before them. There was a strange quiet in the apartment. I went and tapped Dean and told him to go to Marylou; and I retired to the couch. I could hear Dean, blissful and blabbering and frantically rocking. Only a guy who's spent five years in jail can go to such maniacal helpless extremes; beseeching at the portals of the soft source, mad with a completely physical realization of the origins of life-bliss; blindly seeking to return the way he came. This is the result of years looking at sexy pictures behind bars; looking at the legs and breasts of women in popular magazines; evaluating the hardness of the steel halls and the softness of the woman who is not there. Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live. Dean had never seen his mother's face. Every new girl, every new wife, every new child was an addition to his bleak impoverishment. Where was his father?-old bum Dean Moriarty the Tinsmith, riding freights, working as a scullion in railroad cookshacks, stumbling, down-crashing in wino alley nights, expiring on coal piles, dropping his yellowed teeth one by one in the gutters of the West. Dean had every right to die the sweet deaths of complete love of his Marylou-1 didn't want to interfere, I just wanted to follow.

Carlo came back at dawn and put on his bathrobe. He wasn't sleeping any more those days. "Ech!" he screamed. He was going out of his mind from the confusion of jam on the floor, pants, dresses thrown around, cigarette butts, dirty dishes, open books-it was a great forum we were having. Every day the world groaned to turn and we were making our appalling studies of the night. Marylou was black and blue from a fight with Dean about something; his face was scratched. It was time to go.

We drove to my house, a whole gang of ten, to get my bag and call Old Bull Lee in New Orleans from the phone in the bar where Dean and I had our first talk years ago when he came to my door to learn to write. We heard Bull's whining voice eighteen hundred miles away. "Say, what do you boys expect me to do with this Galatea Dunkel? She's been here two weeks now, hiding in her room and refusing to talk to either Jane or me. Have you got this character Ed Dunkel with you? For krissakes bring him down and get rid of her. She's sleeping in our best bedroom and's run clear out of money. This ain't a hotel." He assured Bull with whoops and cries over the phone-there was Dean, Marylou, Carlo, Dunkel, me, Ian MacArthur, his wife, Tom Saybrook, God knows who else, all yelling and drinking beer over the phone at befuddled Bull, who above all things hated confusion. "Well," he said, "maybe you'll make better sense when you gets down here if you gets down here." I said good-by to my aunt and promised to be back in two weeks and took off for California again.

6

It was drizzling and mysterious at the beginning of our journey. I could see that it was all going to be one big saga of the mist. "Whooee!" yelled Dean. "Here we go!" And he hunched over the wheel and gunned her; he was back in his element, everybody could see that. We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move.

And we moved! We flashed past the mysterious white signs in the night somewhere in New Jersey that say SOUTH (with an arrow) and WEST (with an arrow) and took the south one. New Orleans! It burned in our brains. From the dirty snows of "frosty fagtown New York," as Dean called it, all the way to the greeneries and river smells of old New Orleans at the washed-out bottom of America; then west. Ed was in the back seat; Marylou and Dean and I sat in front and had the warmest talk about the goodness and joy of life. Dean suddenly became tender. "Now dammit, look here, all of you, we all must admit that everything is fine and there's no need in the world to worry, and in fact we should realize what it would mean to us to UNDERSTAND that we're not REALLY worried about ANYTHING. Am I right?" We all agreed. "Here we go, we're all together . . . What did we do in New York? Let's forgive." We all had our spats back there. "That's behind us, merely by miles and inclinations. Now we're heading down to New Orleans to dig Old Bull Lee and ain't that going to be kicks and listen will you to this old tenorman blow his top"-he shot up the radio volume till the car shuddered-"and listen to him tell the story and put down true relaxation and knowledge."

We all jumped to the music and agreed. The purity of the road. The white line in the middle of the highway unrolled and hugged our left front tire as if glued to our groove. Dean hunched his muscular neck, T-shirted in the winter night, and blasted the car along. He insisted I drive through Baltimore for traffic practice; that was all right, except he and Marylou insisted on steering while they kissed and fooled around. It was crazy; the radio was on full blast. Dean beat drums on the dashboard till a great sag developed in it; I did too. The poor Hudson-the slow boat to China-was receiving her beating.

"Oh man, what kicks!" yelled Dean. "Now Marylou, listen really, honey, you know that I'm hotrock capable of everything at the same time and I have unlimited energy-now in San Francisco we must go on living together. I know just the place for you-at the end of the regular chain-gang run-I'll be home just a cut-hair less than every two days and for twelve hours at a stretch, and man, you know what we can do in twelve hours, darling. Meanwhile I'll go right on living at Camille's like nothin, see, she won't know. We can work it, we've done it before." It was all right with Marylou, she was really out for Camille's scalp. The understanding had been that Marylou would switch to me in Frisco, but I now began to see they were going to stick and I was going to be left alone on my butt at the other end of the continent. But why think about that when all the golden land's ahead of you and all kinds of unforeseen events wait lurking to surprise you and make you glad you're alive to see?

We arrived in Washington at dawn. It was the day of Harry Truman's inauguration for his second term. Great displays of war might were lined along Pennsylvania Avenue as we rolled by in our battered boat. There were 6-295, PT boats, artillery, all kinds of war material that looked murderous in the snowy grass; the last thing was a regular small ordinary lifeboat that looked pitiful and foolish. Dean slowed down to look at it. He kept shaking his head in awe. "What are these people up to? Harry's sleeping somewhere in this town. . . . Good old Harry. . . . Man from Missouri, as I am. . . . That must be his own boat."

Dean went to sleep in the back seat and Dunkel drove. We gave him specific instructions to take it easy. No sooner were we snoring than he gunned the car up to eighty, bad bearings and all, and not only that but he made a triple pass at a spot where a cop was arguing with a motorist-he was in the fourth lane of a four-lane highway, going the wrong way. Naturally the cop took after us with his siren whining. We were stopped. He told us to follow him to the station house. There was a mean cop in there who took an immediate dislike to Dean; he could smell jail all over him. He sent his cohort outdoors to question Marylou and me privately. They wanted to know how old Marylou was, they were trying to whip up a Mann Act idea. But she had her marriage certificate. Then they took me aside alone and wanted to know who was sleeping with Marylou. "Her husband," I said quite simply. They were curious. Something was fishy. They tried some amateur Sherlocking by asking the same questions twice, expecting us to make a slip. I said, "Those two fellows are going back to work on the railroad in California, this is the short one's wife, and I'm a friend on a two-week vacation from college."

The cop smiled and said, "Yeah? Is this really your own wallet?"

Finally the mean one inside fined Dean twenty-five dollars. We told them we only had forty to go all the way to the Coast; they said that made no difference to them. When Dean protested, the mean cop threatened to take him back to Pennsylvania and slap a special charge on him.

"What charge?"

"Never mind what charge. Don't worry about that, wiseguy."

We had to give them the twenty-five. But first Ed Dunkel, that culprit, offered to go to jail. Dean considered it. The cop was infuriated; he said, "If you let your partner go to jail I'm taking you back to Pennsylvania right now. You hear that?" All we wanted to do was go. "Another speeding ticket in Virginia and you lose your car," said the mean cop as a parting volley. Dean was red in the face. We drove off silently. It was just like an invitation to steal to take our trip-money away from us. They knew we were broke and had no relatives on the road or to wire to for money. The American police are involved in psychological warfare against those Americans who don't frighten them with imposing papers and threats. It's a Victorian police force; it peers out of musty windows and wants to inquire about everything, and can make crimes if the crimes don't exist to its satisfaction. "Nine lines of crime, one of boredom," said Louis-Ferdinand Celine. Dean was so mad he wanted to come back to Virginia and shoot the cop as soon as he had a gun.

"Pennsylvania!" he scoffed. "I wish I knew what that charge was! Vag, probably; take all my money and charge me vag. Those guys have it so damn easy. They'll out and shoot you if you complain, too." There was nothing to do but get happy with ourselves again and forget about it. When we got through Richmond we began forgetting about it, and soon everything was okay.

Now we had fifteen dollars to go all the way. We'd have to pick up hitchhikers and bum quarters off them for gas. In the Virginia wilderness suddenly we saw a man walking on the road. Dean zoomed to a stop. I looked back and said he was only a bum and probably didn't have a cent.

"We'll just pick him up for kicks!" Dean laughed. The man was a ragged, bespectacled mad type, walking along reading a paperbacked muddy book he'd found in a culvert by the road. He got in the car and went right on reading; he was incredibly filthy and covered with scabs. He said his name was Hyman Solomon and that he walked all over the USA, knocking and sometimes kicking at Jewish doors and demanding money: "Give me money to eat, I am a Jew."

He said it worked very well and that it was coming to him. We asked him what he was reading. He didn't know. He didn't bother to look at the title page. He was only looking at the words, as though he had found the real Torah where it belonged, in the wilderness.

"See? See? See?" cackled Dean, poking my ribs. "I told you it was kicks. Everybody's kicks, man!" We carried Solomon all the way to Testament. My brother by now was in his new house on the other side of town. Here we were back on the long, bleak street with the railroad track running down the middle and the sad, sullen Southerners loping in front of hardware stores and five-and-tens.

Solomon said, "I see you people need a little money to continue your journey. You wait for me and I'll go hustle up a few dollars at a Jewish home and I'll go along with you as far as Alabama." Dean was all beside himself with happiness; he and I rushed off to buy bread and cheese spread for a lunch in the car. Marylou and Ed waited in the car. We spent two hours in Testament waiting for Hyman Solomon to show up; he was hustling for his bread somewhere in town, but we couldn't see him. The sun began to grow red and late.

Solomon never showed up so we roared out of Testament. "Now you see, Sal, God does exist, because we keep getting hung-up with this town, no matter what we try to do, and you'll notice the strange Biblical name of it, and that strange Biblical character who made us stop here once more, and all things tied together all over like rain connecting everybody the world over by chain touch. . . ." Dean rattled on like this; he was overjoyed and exuberant. He and I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there. Off we roared south. We picked up another hitchhiker. This was a sad young kid who said he had an aunt who owned a grocery store in Dunn, North Carolina, right outside Fayetteville. "When we get there can you bum a buck off her? Right! Fine! Let's go!" We were in Dunn in an hour, at dusk. We drove to where the kid said his aunt had the grocery store. It was a sad little street that dead-ended at a factory wall. There was a grocery store but there was no aunt. We wondered what the kid was talking about. We asked him how far he was going; he didn't know. It was a big hoax; once upon a time, in some lost back-alley adventure, he had seen the grocery store in Dunn, and it was the first story that popped into his disordered, feverish mind. We bought him a hot dog, but Dean said we couldn't take him along because we needed room to sleep and room for hitchhikers who could buy a little gas. This was sad but true. We left him in Dunn at nightfall.

I drove through South Carolina and beyond Macon, Georgia, as Dean, Marylou, and Ed slept. All alone in the night I had my own thoughts and held the car to the white line in the holy road. What was I doing? Where was I going? I'd soon find out. I got dog-tired beyond Macon and woke up Dean to resume. We got out of the car for air and suddenly both of us were stoned with joy to realize that in the darkness all around us was fragrant green grass and the smell of fresh manure and warm waters. "We're in the South! We've left the winter!" Faint daybreak illuminated green shoots by the side of the road. I took a deep breath; a locomotive howled across-the darkness, Mobile-bound. So were we. I took off my shirt and exulted. Ten miles down the road Dean drove into a filling-station with the motor off, noticed that the attendant was fast asleep at the desk, jumped out, quietly filled the gas tank, saw to it the bell didn't ring, and rolled off like an Arab with a five-dollar tankful of gas for our pilgrimage.

I slept and woke up to the crazy exultant sounds of music and Dean and Marylou talking and the great green land rolling by. "Where are we?"

"Just passed the tip of Florida, man-Flomaton, it's called." Florida! We were rolling down to the coastal plain and Mobile; up ahead were great soaring clouds of the Gulf of Mexico. It was only thirty-two hours since we'd said good-by to everybody in the dirty snows of the North. We stopped at a gas station, and there Dean and Marylou played piggyback around the tanks and Dunkel went inside and stole three packs of cigarettes without trying. We were fresh out. Rolling into Mobile over the long tidal highway, we all took our winter clothes off and enjoyed the Southern temperature. This was when Dean started telling his life story and when, beyond Mobile, he came upon an obstruction of wrangling cars at a crossroads and instead of slipping around them just balled right through the driveway of a gas station and went right on without relaxing his steady continental seventy. We left gaping faces behind us. He went right on with his tale. "I tell you it's true, I started at nine, with a girl called Milly Mayfair in back of Rod's garage on Grant Street-same street Carlo lived on in Denver. That's when my father was still working at the smithy's a bit. I remember my aunt yelling out the window, 'What are you doing down there in back of the garage?' Oh honey Marylou, if I'd only known you then! Wow! How sweet you musta been at nine." He tittered maniacally; he stuck his finger in her mouth and licked it; he took her hand and rubbed it over himself. She just sat there, smiling serenely.

Big long Ed Dunkel sat looking out the window, talking to himself. "Yes sir, I thought I was a ghost that night." He was also wondering what Galatea Dunkel would say to him in New Orleans.

Dean went on. "One time I rode a freight from New Mexico clear to LA-I was eleven years old, lost my father at a siding, we were all in a hobo jungle, I was with a man called Big Red, my father was out drunk in a boxcar-it started to roll-Big Red and I missed it-I didn't see my father for months. I rode a long freight all the way to California, really flying, first-class freight, a desert Zipper. All the way I rode over the couplings-you can imagine how dangerous, I was only a kid, I didn't know-clutching a loaf of bread under one arm and the other hooked around the brake bar. This is no story, this is true. When I got to LA I was so starved for milk and cream I got a job in a dairy and the first thing I did I drank two quarts of heavy cream and puked."

"Poor Dean," said Marylou, and she kissed him. He stared ahead proudly. He loved her.

We were suddenly driving along the blue waters of the Gulf, and at the same time a momentous mad thing began on the radio; it was the Chicken Jazz'n Gumbo disk-jockey show from New Orleans, all mad jazz records, colored records, with the disk jockey saying, "Don't worry 'bout nothing!" We saw New Orleans in the night ahead of us with joy. Dean rubbed his hands over the wheel. "Now we're going to get our kicks!" At dusk we were coming into the humming streets of New Orleans. "Oh, smell the people!" yelled Dean with his face out the window, sniffing. "Ah! God! Life!" He swung around a trolley. "Yes!" He darted the car and looked in every direction for girls. "Look at her!" The air was so sweet in New Orleans it seemed to come in soft bandannas; and you could smell the river and really smell the people, and mud, and molasses, and every kind of tropical exhalation with your nose suddenly removed from the dry ices of a Northern winter. We bounced in our seats. "And dig her!" yelled Dean, pointing at another woman. "Oh, I love, love, love women! I think women are wonderful! I love women!" He spat out the window; he groaned; he clutched his head. Great beads of sweat fell from his forehead from pure excitement and exhaustion.

We bounced the car up on the Algiers ferry and found ourselves crossing the Mississippi River by boat. "Now we must all get out and dig the river and the people and smell the world," said Dean, bustling with his sunglasses and cigarettes and leaping out of the car like a jack-in-the-box. We followed.

On rails we leaned and looked at the great brown father of waters rolling down from mid-America like the torrent of broken souls-bearing Montana logs and Dakota muds and Iowa vales and things that had drowned in Three Forks, where the secret began in ice. Smoky New Orleans receded on one side; old, sleepy Algiers with its warped woodsides bumped us on the other. Negroes were working in the hot afternoon, stoking the ferry furnaces that burned red and made our tires smell. Dean dug them, hopping up and down in the heat. He rushed around the deck and upstairs with his baggy pants hanging halfway down his belly. Suddenly I saw him eagering on the flying bridge. I expected him to take off on wings. I heard his mad laugh all over the boat-"Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee!" Marylou was with him. He covered everything in a jiffy, came back with the full story, jumped in the car just as everybody was tooting to go, and we slipped off, passing two or three cars in a narrow space, and found ourselves darting through Algiers.

"Where? Where?" Dean was yelling.

We decided first to clean up at a gas station and inquire for Bull's whereabouts. Little children were playing in the drowsy river sunset; girls were going by with bandannas and cotton blouses and bare legs. Dean ran up the street to see everything. He looked around; he nodded; he rubbed his belly. Big Ed sat back in the car with his hat over his eyes, smiling at Dean. I sat on the fender. Marylou was in the women's John. From bushy shores where infinitesimal men fished with sticks, and from delta sleeps that stretched up along the reddening land, the big humpbacked river with its mainstream leaping came coiling around Algiers like a snake, with a nameless rumble. Drowsy, peninsular Algiers with all her bees and shanties was like to be washed away someday. The sun slanted, bugs flip-flopped, the awful waters groaned.

We went to Old Bull Lee's house outside town near the river levee. It was on a road that ran across a swampy field. The house was a dilapidated old heap with sagging porches running around and weeping willows in the yard; the grass was a yard high, old fences leaned, old barns collapsed. There was no one in sight. We pulled right into the yard and saw washtubs on the back porch. I got out and went to the screen door. Jane Lee was standing in it with her eyes cupped toward the sun. "Jane," I said. "It's me. It's us."

She knew that. "Yes, I know. Bull isn't here now. Isn't that a fire or something over there?" We both looked toward the sun.

"You mean the sun?"

"Of course I don't mean the sun-I heard sirens that way. Don't you know a peculiar glow?" It was toward New Orleans; the clouds were strange.

"I don't see anything," I said.

Jane snuffed down her nose. "Same old Paradise."

That was the way we greeted each other after four years; Jane used to live with my wife and me in New York. "And is Galatea Dunkel here?" I asked. Jane was still looking for her fire; in those days she ate three tubes of benzedrine paper a day. Her face, once plump and Germanic and pretty, had become stony and red and gaunt. She had caught polio in New Orleans and limped a little. Sheepishly Dean and the gang came out of the car and more or less made themselves at home. Galatea Dunkel came out of her stately retirement in the back of the house to meet her tormentor. Galatea was a serious girl. She was pale and looked like tears all over. Big Ed passed his hand through his hair and said hello. She looked at him steadily.

"Where have you been? Why did you do this to me?" And she gave Dean a dirty look; she knew the score. Dean paid absolutely no attention; what he wanted now was food; he asked Jane if there was anything. The confusion began right there.

Poor Bull came home in his Texas Chevy and found his house invaded by maniacs; but he greeted me with a nice warmth I hadn't seen in him for a long time. He had bought this house in New Orleans with some money he had made growing black-eyed peas in Texas with an old college schoolmate whose father, a mad-paretic, had died and left a fortune. Bull himself only got fifty dollars a week from his own family, which wasn't too bad except that he spent almost that much per week on his drug habit-and his wife was also expensive, gobbling up about ten dollars' worth of benny tubes a week. Their food bill was the lowest in the country; they hardly ever ate; nor did the children-they didn't seem to care. They had two wonderful children: Dodie, eight years old; and little Ray, one year. Ray ran around stark naked in the yard, a little blond child of the rainbow. Bull called him "the Little Beast," after W. C. Fields. Bull came driving into the yard and unrolled himself from the car bone by bone, and came over wearily, wearing glasses, felt hat, shabby suit, long, lean, strange, and laconic, saying, "Why, Sal, you finally got here; let's go in the house and have a drink."

It would take all night to tell about Old Bull Lee; let's just say now, he was a teacher, and it may be said that he had every right to teach because he spent all his time learning; and the things he learned were what he considered to be and called "the facts of life," which he learned not only out of necessity but because he wanted to. He dragged his long, thin body around the entire United States and most of Europe and North Africa in his time, only to see what was going on; he married a White Russian countess in Yugoslavia to get her away from the Nazis in the thirties; there are pictures of him with the international cocaine set of the thirties-gangs with wild hair, leaning on one another; there are other pictures of him in a Panama hat, surveying the streets of Algiers; he never saw the White Russian countess again. He was an exterminator in Chicago, a bartender in New York, a summons-server in Newark. In Paris he sat at cafe tables, watching the sullen French faces go by. In Athens he looked up from his ouzo at what he called the ugliest people in the world. In Istanbul he threaded his "way through crowds of opium addicts and rug-sellers, looking for the facts. In English hotels he read Spengler and the Marquis de Sade. In Chicago he planned to hold up a Turkish bath, hesitated just for two minutes too long for a drink, and wound up with two dollars and had to make a run for it. He did all these things merely for the experience. Now the final study was the drug habit. He was now in New Orleans, slipping along the streets with shady characters and haunting connection bars.

There is a strange story about his college days that illustrates something else about him: he had friends for cocktails in his well-appointed rooms one afternoon when suddenly his pet ferret rushed out and bit an elegant teacup queer on the ankle and everybody hightailed it out the door, screaming. Old Bull leaped up and grabbed his shotgun and said, "He smells that old rat again," and shot a hole in the wall big enough for fifty rats. On the wall hung a picture of an ugly old Cape Cod house. His friends said, "Why do you have that ugly thing hanging there?" and Bull said, "I like it because it's ugly." All his life was in that line. Once I knocked on his door in the 60th Street slums of New York and he opened it wearing a derby hat, a vest with nothing underneath, and long striped sharpster pants; in his hands he had a cookpot, birdseed in the pot, and was trying to mash the seed to roll in cigarettes. He also experimented in boiling codeine cough syrup down to a black mash - that didn't work too well. He spent long hours with Shakespeare - the "Immortal Bard," he called him - on his lap. In New Orleans he had begun to spend long hours with the Mayan Codices on his lap, and, although he went on talking, the book lay open all the time. I said once, "What's going to happen to us when we die?" and he said, "When you die you're just dead, that's all." He had a set of chains in his room that he said he used with his psychoanalyst; they were experimenting with narcoanalysis and found that Old Bull had seven separate personalities, each growing worse and worse on the way down, till finally he was a raving idiot and had to be restrained with chains. The top personality was an English lord, the bottom the idiot. Halfway he was an old Negro who stood in line, waiting with everyone else, and said, "Some's bastards, some's ain't, that's the score."

Bull had a sentimental streak about the old days m America, especially 1910, when you could get morphine in a drugstore without prescription and Chinese smoked opium in their evening windows and the country was wild and brawling and free, with abundance and any kind of freedom for everyone. His chief hate was Washington bureaucracy; second to that, liberals; then cops. He spent all his time talking and teaching others. Jane sat at his feet; so did I; so did Dean; and so had Carlo Marx. We'd all learned from him. He was a gray, nondescript-looking fellow you wouldn't notice on the street, unless you looked closer and saw his mad, bony skull with its strange youthfulness-a Kansas minister with exotic, phenomenal fires and mysteries. He had studied medicine in Vienna; had studied anthropology, read everything; and now he was settling to his life's work, which was the study of things them-selves.-in the streets of life and the night. He sat in his chair; Jane brought drinks, martinis. The shades by his chair were always drawn, day and night; it was his corner of the house. On his lap were the Mayan Codices and an air gun which he occasionally raised to pop benzedrine tubes across the room. I kept rushing around, putting up new ones. We all took shots and meanwhile we talked. Bull was curious to know the reason for this trip. He peered at us and snuffed down his nose, thfump, like a sound in a dry tank.

"Now, Dean, I want you to sit quiet a minute and tell me what you're doing crossing the country like this."

Dean could only blush and say, "Ah well, you know how it is."

"Sal, what are you going to the Coast for?" "Only for a few days. I'm coming back to school." "What's the score with this Ed Dunkel? What kind of character is he?" At that moment Ed was making up to Galatea in the bedroom; it didn't take him long. We didn't know what to tell Bull about Ed Dunkel. Seeing that we didn't know anything about ourselves, he whipped out three sticks of tea and said to go ahead, supper'd be ready soon.

"Ain't nothing better in the world to give you an appetite. I once ate a horrible lunchcart hamburg on tea and it seemed like the most delicious thing in the world. I just got back from Houston last week, went to see Dale about our black-eyed peas. I was sleeping in a motel one morning when all of a sudden I was blasted out of bed. This damn fool had just shot his wife in the room next to mine. Everybody stood around confused, and the guy just got in his car and drove off, left the shotgun on the floor for the sheriff. They finally caught him in Houma, drunk as a lord. Man ain't safe going around this country any more without a gun." He pulled back his coat and showed us his revolver. Then he opened the drawer and showed us the rest of his arsenal. In New York he once had a sub-machine-gun under his bed. "I got something better than that now - a German Scheintoth gas gun; look at this beauty, only got one shell. I could knock out a hundred men with this gun and have plenty of time to make a getaway. Only thing wrong, I only got one shell."

"I hope I'm not around when you try it," said Jane from the kitchen. "How do you know it's a gas shell?" Bull snuffed; he never paid any attention to her sallies but he heard them. His relation with his wife was one of the strangest: they talked till late at night; Bull liked to hold the floor, he went right on in his dreary monotonous voice, she tried to break in, she never could; at dawn he got tired and then Jane talked and he listened, snuffing and going thfump down his nose. She loved that man madly, but in a delirious way of some kind; there was never any mooching and mincing around, just talk and a very deep companionship that none of us would ever be able to fathom. Something curiously unsympathetic and cold between them was really a form of humor by which they communicated their own set of subtle vibrations. Love is all; Jane was never more than ten feet away from Bull and never missed a word he said, and he spoke in a very low voice, too.

Dean and I were yelling about a big night in New Orleans and wanted Bull to show us around. He threw a damper on this. "New Orleans is a very dull town. It's against the law to go to the colored section. The bars are insufferably dreary."

I said, "There must be some ideal bars in town."

"The ideal bar doesn't exist in America. An ideal bar is something that's gone beyond our ken. In nineteen ten a bar was a place where men went to meet during or after work, and all there was was a long counter, brass rails, spittoons, player piano for music, a few mirrors, and barrels of whisky at ten cents a shot together with barrels of beer at five cents a mug. Now all you get is chromium, drunken women, fags, hostile bartenders, anxious owners who hover around the door, worried about their leather seats and the law; just a lot of screaming at the wrong time and deadly silence when a stranger walks in."

We argued about bars. "All right," he said, "I'll take you to New Orleans tonight and show you what I mean." And he deliberately took us to the dullest bars. We left Jane with the children; supper was over; she was reading the want ads of the New Orleans Times-Picayune. I asked her if she was looking for a job; she only said it was the most interesting part of the paper. Bull rode into town with us and went right on talking. "Take it easy, Dean, we'll get there, I hope; hup, there's the ferry, you don't have to drive us clear into the river." He held on. Dean had gotten worse, he confided in me. "He seems to me to be headed for his ideal fate, which is compulsive psychosis dashed with a jigger of psychopathic irresponsibility and violence." He looked at Dean out of the corner of his eye. "If you go to California with this madman you'll never make it. Why don't you stay in New Orleans with me? We'll play the horses over to Graetna and relax in my yard. I've got a nice set of knives and I'm building a target. Some pretty juicy dolls downtown, too, if that's in your line these days." He snuffed. We were on the ferry and Dean had leaped out to lean over the rail. I followed, but Bull sat on in the car, snuffing, thfump. There was a mystic wraith of fog over the brown waters that night, together with dark driftwoods; and across the way New Orleans glowed orange-bright, with a few dark ships at her hem, ghostly fogbound Cereno ships with Spanish balconies and ornamental poops, till you got up close and saw they were just old freighters from Sweden and Panama. The ferry fires glowed in the night; the same Negroes plied the shovel and sang. Old Big Slim Hazard had once worked on the Algiers ferry as a deckhand; this made me think of Mississippi Gene too; and as the river poured down from mid-America by starlight I knew, I knew like mad that everything I had ever known and would ever know was One. Strange to say, too, that night we crossed the ferry with Bull Lee a girl committed suicide off the deck; either just before or just after us; we saw it in the paper the next day.

We hit all the dull bars in the French Quarter with Old Bull and went back home at midnight. That night Marylou took everything in the books; she took tea, goofballs, benny, liquor, and even asked Old Bull for a shot of M, which of course he didn't give her; he did give her a martini. She was so saturated with elements of all kinds that she came to a standstill and stood goofy on the porch with me. It was a wonderful porch Bull had. It ran clear around the house; by moonlight with the willows it looked like an old Southern mansion that had seen better days. In the house Jane sat reading the want ads in the living room; Bull was in the bathroom taking his fix, clutching his old black necktie in his teeth for a tourniquet and jabbing with the needle into his woesome arm with the thousand holes; Ed Dunkel was sprawled out with Galatea in the massive master bed that Old Bull and Jane never used; Dean was rolling tea; and Marylou and I imitated Southern aristocracy.

"Why, Miss Lou, you look lovely and most fetching tonight."

"Why, thank you, Crawford, I sure do appreciate the nice things you do say."

Doors kept opening around the crooked porch, and members of our sad drama in the American night kept popping out to find out where everybody was. Finally I took a walk alone to the levee. I wanted to sit on the muddy bank and dig the Mississippi River; instead of that I had to look at it with my nose against a wire fence. When you start separating the people from their rivers what have you got? "Bureaucracy!" says Old Bull; he sits with Kafka on his lap, the lamp burns above him, he snuffs, thfump. His old house creaks. And the Montana log rolls by in the big black river of the night. " 'Tain't nothin but bureaucracy. And unions! Especially unions!" But dark laughter would come again.

7

It was there in the morning when I got up bright and early and found Old Bull and Dean in the back yard. Dean was wearing his gas-station coveralls and helping Bull. Bull had found a great big piece of thick rotten wood and was desperately yanking with a hammerhook at little nails imbedded in it. We stared at the nails; there were millions of them; they were like worms.

"When I get all these nails out of this I'm going to build me a shelf that'll last a thousand years!" said Bull, every bone shuddering with boyish excitement. "Why, Sal, do you realize the shelves they build these days crack under the weight of knickknacks after six months or generally collapse? Same with houses, same with clothes. These bastards have invented plastics by which they could make houses that last forever. And tires. Americans are killing themselves by the millions every year with defective rubber tires that get hot on the road and blow up. They could make tires that never blow up. Same with tooth powder. There's a certain gum they've invented and they won't show it to anybody that if you chew it as a kid you'll never get a cavity for the rest of your born days. Same with clothes. They can make clothes that last forever. They prefer making cheap goods so's everybody'll have to go on working and punching timeclocks and organizing themselves in sullen unions and floundering around while the big grab goes on in Washington and Moscow." He raised his big piece of rotten wood. "Don't you think this'll make a splendid shelf?"

It was early in the morning; his energy was at its peak. The poor fellow took so much junk into his system he could only weather the greater proportion of his day in that chair with the lamp burning at noon, but in the morning he was magnificent. We began throwing knives at the target. He said he'd seen an Arab in Tunis who could stick a man's eye from forty feet. This got him going on his aunt, who went to the Casbah in the thirties. "She was with a party of tourists led by a guide. She had a diamond ring on her little finger. She leaned on a wall to rest a minute and an Ay-rab rushed up and appropriated her ring finger before she could let out a cry, my dear. She suddenly realized she had no little finger. Hi-hi-hi-hi-hi!" When he laughed he compressed his lips together and made it come out from his belly, from far away, and doubled up to lean on his knees. He laughed a long time. "Hey Jane!" he yelled gleefully. "I was just telling Dean and Sal about my aunt in the Casbah!"

"I heard you," she said across the lovely warm Gulf morning from the kitchen door. Great beautiful clouds floated overhead, valley clouds that made you feel the vastness of old tumbledown holy America from mouth to mouth and tip to tip. All pep and juices was Bull. "Say, did I ever tell you about Dale's father? He was the funniest old man you ever saw in your life. He had paresis, which eats away the forepart of your brain and you get so's you're not responsible for any­thing that comes into your mind. He had a house in Texas and had carpenters working twenty-four hours a day putting on new wings. He'd leap up in the middle of the night and say, 'I don't want that goddam wing; put it over there.' The carpenters had to take everything down and start all over again. Come dawn you'd see them hammering away at the new wing. Then the old man'd get bored with that and say, 'Goddammit, I wanta go to Maine!' And he'd get into his car and drive off a hundred miles an hour-great showers of chicken feathers followed his track for hundreds of miles. He'd stop his car in the middle of a Texas town just to get out and buy some whisky. Traffic would honk all around him and he'd come rushing out of the store, yelling, 'Thet your goddam noith, you bunth of bathats!' He lisped; when you have paresis you lips, I mean you lisps. One night he came to my house in Cincinnati and tooted the horn and said, 'Come on out and let's go to Texas to see Dale.' He was going back from Maine. He claimed he bought a house-oh, we wrote a story about him at college, where you see this horrible shipwreck and people in the water clutching at the sides of the lifeboat, and the old man is there with a machete, hackin at their fingers. 'Get away, ya bunth a bathats, thith my cottham boath!' Oh, he was horrible. I could tell you stories about him all day. Say, ain't this a nice day?"

And it sure was. The softest breezes blew in from the levee; it was worth the whole trip. We went into the house after Bull to measure the wall for a shelf. He showed us the dining-room table he built. It was made of wood six inches thick. "This is a table that'll last a thousand years!" said Bull, leaning his long thin face at us maniacally. He banged on it.

In the evenings he sat at this table, picking at his food and throwing the bones to the cats. He had seven cats. "I love cats. I especially like the ones that squeal when I hold 'em over the bathtub." He insisted on demonstrating; someone was in the bathroom. "Well," he said, "we can't do that now. Say, I been having a fight with the neighbors next door." He told us about the neighbors; they were a vast crew with sassy children who threw stones over the rickety fence at Dodie and Ray and sometimes at Old Bull. He told them to cut it out; the old man rushed out and yelled something in Portuguese. Bull went in the house and came back with his shotgun, upon which he leaned demurely; the incredible simper on his face beneath the long hatbrim, his whole body writhing coyly and snakily as he waited, a grotesque, lank, lonely clown beneath the clouds. The sight of him the Portuguese must have thought something out of an old evil dream.

We scoured the yard for things to do. There was a tremendous fence Bull had been working on to separate him from the obnoxious neighbors; it would never be finished, the task was too much. He rocked it back and forth to show how solid it was. Suddenly he grew tired and quiet and went in the house and disappeared in the bathroom for his pre-lunch fix. He came out glassy-eyed and calm, and sat down under his burning lamp. The sunlight poked feebly behind the drawn shade. "Say, why don't you fellows try my orgone accumulator? Put some juice in your bones. I always rush up and take off ninety miles an hour for the nearest whorehouse, hor-hor-hor!" This was his "laugh" laugh-when he wasn't really laughing. The orgone accumulator is an ordinary box big enough for a man to sit inside on a chair: a layer of wood, a layer of metal, and another layer of wood gather in orgones from the atmosphere and hold them captive long enough for the human body to absorb more than a usual share. According to Reich, orgones are vibratory atmospheric atoms of the life-principle. People get cancer because they run out of orgones. Old Bull thought his orgone accumulator would be improved if the wood he used was as organic as possible, so he tied bushy bayou leaves and twigs to his mystical outhouse. It stood there in the hot, flat yard, an exfoliate machine clustered and bedecked with maniacal contrivances. Old Bull slipped off his clothes and went in to sit and moon over his navel. "Say, Sal, after lunch let's you and me go play the horses over to the bookie joint in Graetna." He was magnificent. He took a nap after lunch in his chair, the air gun on his lap and little Ray curled around his neck, sleeping. It was a pretty sight, father and son, a father who would certainly never bore his son when it came to finding things to do and talk about. He woke up with a start and stared at me. It took him a minute to recognize who I was. "What are you going to the Coast for, Sal?" he asked, and went back to sleep in a moment.

In the afternoon we went to Graetna, just Bull and me. We drove in his old Chevy. Dean's Hudson was low and sleek; Bull's Chevy was high and rattly. It was just like 1910. The bookie joint was located near the waterfront in a big chromium-leather bar that opened up in the back to a tremendous hall where entries and numbers were posted on the wall. Louisiana characters lounged around with Racing Forms. Bull and I had a beer, and casually Bull went over to the slot machine and threw a half-dollar piece in. The counters I clicked "Jackpot"-"Jackpot"-"Jackpot"-and the last

"Jackpot" hung for just a moment and slipped back to "Cherry." He had lost a hundred dollars or more just by a hair. "Damn!" yelled Bull. "They got these things adjusted. You could see it right then. I had the jackpot and the mechanism clicked it back. Well, what you gonna do." We examined the Racing Form. I hadn't played the horses in years and was bemused with all the new names. There was one horse called Big Pop that sent me into a temporary trance thinking of my father, who used to play the horses with me. I was just about to mention it to Old Bull when he said, "Well I think I'll try this Ebony Corsair here."

Then I finally said it. "Big Pop reminds me of my father."

He mused for just a second, his clear blue eyes fixed on mine hypnotically so that I couldn't tell what he was thinking or where he was. Then he went over and bet on Ebony Corsair. Big Pop won and paid fifty to one.

"Damn!" said Bull. "I should have known better, I've had experience with this before. Oh, when will we ever learn?"

"What do you mean?"

"Big Pop is what I mean. You had a vision, boy, a vision. Only damn fools pay no attention to visions. How do you know your father, who was an old horseplayer, just didn't momentarily communicate to you that Big Pop was going to win the race? The name brought the feeling up in you, he took advantage of the name to communicate. That's what I was thinking about when you mentioned it. My cousin in Missouri once bet on a horse that had a name that reminded him of his mother, and it won and paid a big price. The same thing happened this afternoon." He shook his head. "Ah, let's go. This is the last time I'll ever play the horses with you around; all these visions drive me to distraction." In the car as we drove back to his old house he said, "Mankind will someday realize that we are actually in contact with the dead and with the other world, whatever it is; right now we could predict, if we only exerted enough mental will, what is going to happen within the next hundred years and be able to take steps to avoid all kinds of catastrophes. When a man dies he undergoes a mutation in his brain that we know nothing about now but which will be very clear someday if scientists get on the ball. The bastards right now are only interested in seeing if they can blow up the world."

We told Jane about it. She sniffed. "It sounds silly to me." She plied the broom around the kitchen. Bull went in the bathroom for his afternoon fix.

Out on the road Dean and Ed Dunkel were playing basketball with Dodie's ball and a bucket nailed on a lamppost. I joined in. Then we turned 10 feats of athletic prowess. Dean completely amazed me. He had Ed and me hold a bar of iron up to our waists, and just standing there he popped right over it, holding his heels. "Go ahead, raise it." We kept raising it till it was chest-high. Still he jumped over it with ease. Then he tried the running broad jump and did at least twenty feet and more. Then I raced him down the road. I can do the hundred in 10:5. He passed me like the wind. As we ran I had a mad vision of Dean running through all of life just like that -his bony face outthrust to life, his arms pumping, his brow sweating, his legs twinkling like Groucho Marx, yelling, "Yes! Yes, man, you sure can go!" But nobody could go as fast as he could, and that's the truth. Then Bull came out with a couple of knives and started showing us how to disarm a would-be shiver in a dark alley. I for my part showed him a very good trick, which is falling on the ground in front of your adversary and gripping him with your ankles and flipping him over on his hands and grabbing his wrists in full nelson. He said it was pretty good. He demonstrated some jujitsu. Little Dodie called her mother to the porch and said, "Look at the silly men." She was such a cute sassy little thing that Dean couldn't take his eyes off her.

"Wow. Wait till she grows up! Can you see her cuttin down Canal Street with her cute eyes. Ah! Oh!" He hissed through his teeth.

We spent a mad day in downtown New Orleans walking around with the Dunkels. Dean was out of his mind that day. When he saw the T & NO freight trains in the yard he wanted to show me everything at once. "You'll be brakeman 'fore I'm through with ya!" He and I and Ed Dunkel ran across the tracks and hopped a freight at three individual points; Marylou and Galatea were waiting in the car. We rode the train a half-mile into the piers, waving at switchmen and flagmen. They showed me the proper way to get off a moving car; the back foot first and let the train go away from you and come around and place the other foot down. They showed me the refrigerator cars, the ice compartments, good for a ride on any winter night in a string of empties. "Remember what I told you about New Mexico to LA?" cried Dean. "This was the way I hung on . . ."

We got back to the girls an hour late and of course they were mad. Ed and Galatea had decided to get a room in New Orleans and stay there and work. This was okay with Bull, who was getting sick and tired of the whole mob. The invitation, originally, was for me to come alone. In the front room, where Dean and Marylou slept, there were jam and coffee stains and empty benny tubes all over the floor; what's more it was Bull's workroom and he couldn't get on with his shelves. Poor Jane was driven to distraction by the continual jumping and running around on the part of Dean. We were waiting for my next GI check to come through; my aunt was forwarding it. Then we were off, the three of us-Dean, Marylou, me. When the check came I realized I hated to leave Bull's wonderful house so suddenly, but Dean was all energies and ready to do.

In a sad red dusk we were finally seated in the car and Jane, Dodie, little boy Ray, Bull, Ed, and Galatea stood around in the high grass, smiling. It was good-by. At the last moment Dean and Bull had a misunderstanding over money; Dean had wanted to borrow; Bull said it was out of the question. The feeling reached back to Texas days. Con-man Dean was antagonizing people away from him by degrees. He giggled maniacally and didn't care; he rubbed his fly, stuck his finger in Marylou's dress, slurped up her knee, frothed at the mouth, and said, "Darling, you know and I know that everything is straight between us at last beyond the furthest abstract definition in metaphysical terms or any terms you want to specify or sweetly impose or harken back . . ." and so on, and zoom went the car and we were off again for California.

8

What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?-it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

We wheeled through the sultry old light of Algiers, back on the ferry, back toward the mud-splashed, crabbed old ships across the river, back on Canal, and out; on a two-lane highway to Baton Rouge in purple darkness; swung west there, crossed the Mississippi at a place called Port Alien. Port Alien-where the river's all rain and roses in a misty pinpoint darkness and where we swung around a circular drive in yellow foglight and suddenly saw the great black body below a , bridge and crossed eternity again. What is the Mississippi River?-a washed clod in the rainy night, a soft plopping ( from drooping Missouri banks, a dissolving, a riding of the tide down the eternal waterbed, a contribution to brown foams, a voyaging past endless vales and trees and levees, * down along, down along, by Memphis, Greenville, Eudora, Vicksburg, Natchez, Port Alien, and Port Orleans and Port of the Deltas, by Potash, Venice, and the Night's Great Gulf, and out.

With the radio on to a mystery program, and as I looked out the window and saw a sign that said USE COOPER'S PAINT and I said, "Okay, I will." we rolled across the hoodwink night of the Louisiana plains-Lawtell, Eunice, Kinder, and De Ouincy, western rickety towns becoming more bayou-like as \\e reached the Sabine. In Old Opelousas I went into a grocery store to buy bread and cheese while Dean saw to gas and oil. It was just a shack; I could hear the family eating supper in the back. I waited a minute; they went on talking. I took bread and cheese and slipped out the door. We had barely enough money to make Frisco. Meanwhile Dean took a cartoon of cigarettes from the gas station and we were stocked for the voyage-gas, oil, cigarettes, and food. Crooks don't know. He pointed the car straight down the road.

Somewhere near Starks we saw a great red glow in the sky ahead; we wondered what it was; in a moment we were passing it. It was a fire beyond the trees; there were many cars parked on the highway. It must have been some kind of fish-fry, and on the other hand it might have been anything. The country turned strange and dark near Deweyville. Suddenly we were in the swamps.

"Man, do you imagine what it would be like if we found a jazzjoint in these swamps, with great big black fellas moanin guitar blues and drinkin snakejuice and makin signs at us?"

"Yes!"

There were mysteries around here. The car was going over a dirt road elevated off the swamps that dropped on both sides and drooped with vines. We passed an apparition; it was a Negro man in a white shirt walking along with his arms up-spread to the inky firmament. He must have been praying or calling down a curse. We zoomed right by; I looked out the back window to see his white eyes. "Whoo!" said Dean. "Look out. We better not stop in this here country." At one point we got stuck at a crossroads and stopped the car anyway. Dean turned off the headlamps. We were surrounded by a great forest of viny trees in which we could almost hear the slither of a million copperheads. The only thing we could see was the red ampere button on the Hudson dashboard. Marylou squealed with fright. We began laughing maniac laughs to her. We were scared too. We wanted to get out of this mansion of the snake, this mireful drooping dark, and zoom on back to familiar American ground and cowtowns. There was a smell of oil and dead water in the air. This was a manuscript of the night we couldn't read. An owl hooted. We took a chance on one of the dirt roads, and pretty soon we were crossing the evil old Sabine River that is responsible for all these swamps. With amazement we saw great structures of light ahead of us. "Texas! It's Texas! Beaumont oil town!" Huge oil tanks and refineries loomed like cities in the oily fragrant air.

"I'm glad we got out of there," said Marylou. "Let's play some more mystery programs now."

We zoomed through Beaumont, over the Trinity River at Liberty, and straight for Houston. Now Dean got talking about his Houston days in 1947. "Hassel! That mad Hassel! I look for him everywhere I go and I never find him. He used to get us so hung-up in Texas here. We'd drive in with Bull for groceries and Hassel'd disappear. We'd have to go looking for him in every shooting gallery in town." We were entering Houston. "We had to look for him in this spade part of town most of the time. Man, he'd be blasting with every mad cat he could find. One night we lost him and took a hotel room. We were supposed to bring ice back to Jane because her food was rotting. It took us two days to find Hassel. I got hung-up myself-1 gunned shopping women in the afternoon, right here, downtown, supermarkets"-we flashed by in the empty night-"and found a real gone dumb girl who was out of her mind and just wandering, trying to steal an orange. She was from Wyoming. Her beautiful body was matched only by her idiot mind. I found her babbling and took her back to the room. Bull was drunk trying to get this young Mexican kid drunk. Carlo was writing poetry on heroin. Hassel didn't show up till midnight at the jeep. We found him sleeping in the back seat. The ice was all melted. Hassel said he took about five sleeping pills. Man, if my memory could only serve me right the way my mind works I could tell you every detail of the things we did. Ah, but we know time. Everything takes care of itself. I could close my eyes and this old car would take care of itself."

In the empty Houston streets of four o'clock in the morning a motorcycle kid suddenly roared through, all bespangled and bedecked with glittering buttons, visor, slick black jacket, a Texas poet of the night, girl gripped on his back like a papoose, hair flying, onward-going, singing, "Houston, Austin, Fort Worth, Dallas-and sometimes Kansas City-and sometimes old Antone, ah-haaaaa!" They pinpointed out of sight. "Wow! Dig that gone gal on his belt! Let's all blow!" Dean tried to catch up with them. "Now wouldn't it be fine if we could all get together and have a real going goofbang together with everybody sweet and fine and agreeable, no> hassles, no infant rise of protest or body woes misconceptalized or sumpin? Ah! but we know time." He bent to it and pushed the car.

Beyond Houston his energies, great as they were, gave out and I drove. Rain began to fall just as I took the wheel. Now we were on the great Texas plain and, as Dean said, "You drive and drive and you're still in Texas tomorrow night." The rain lashed down. I drove through a rickety little cowtown with a muddy main street and found myself in a dead end. "Hey, what do I do?" They were both asleep. I turned and crawled back through town. There wasn't a soul in sight and not a single light. Suddenly a horseman in a raincoat appeared in my headlamps. It was the sheriff. He had a ten-gallon hat, drooping in the torrent. "Which way to Austin?" He told me politely and I started off. Outside town I suddenly saw two headlamps flaring directly at me in the lashing rain, Whoops, I thought I was on the wrong side of the road; { eased right and found myself rolling in the mud; I rolled back to the road. Still the headlamps came straight for me. At the last moment I realized the other driver was on the wrong side of the road and didn't know it. I swerved at thirty into the mud; it was flat, no ditch, thank God. The offending car backed up in the downpour. Four sullen fieldworkers, snuck from their chores to brawl in drinking fields, all white shirts and dirty brown arms, sat looking at me dumbly in the night. The driver was as drunk as the lot.

He said, "Which way t'Houston?" I pointed my thumb back. I was thunderstruck in the middle of the thought that they had done this on purpose just to ask directions, as a panhandler advances on you straight up the sidewalk to bar your way. They gazed ruefully at the floor of their car, where empty bottles rolled, and clanked away. I started the car; it was stuck in the mud a foot deep. I sighed in the rainy Texas wilderness.

"Dean," I said, "wake up."

"What?"

"We're stuck in the mud."

"What happened?" I told him. He swore up and down. We put on old shoes and sweaters and barged out of the car into the driving rain. I put my back on the rear fender and lifted and heaved; Dean stuck chains under the swishing wheels. In a minute we were covered with mud. We woke up Marylou to these horrors and made her gun the car while we pushed. The tormented Hudson heaved and heaved. Suddenly it jolted out and went skidding across the road. Marylou pulled it up just in time, and we got in. That was that- the work had taken thirty minutes and we were soaked and miserable.

I fell asleep, all caked with mud; and in the morning when I woke up the mud was solidified and outside there was snow. We were near Fredericksburg, in the high plains. It was one of the worst winters in Texas and Western history, when cattle perished like flies in great blizzards and snow fell on San Francisco and LA. We were all miserable. We wished we were back in New Orleans with Ed Dunkel. Marylou was driving; Dean was sleeping. She drove with one hand on the wheel and the other reaching back to me in the back seat. She cooed promises about San Francisco. I slavered miserably over it. At ten I took the wheel-Dean was out for hours-and drove several hundred dreary miles across the bushy snows and ragged sage hills. Cowboys went by in baseball caps and earmuffs, looking for cows. Comfortable little homes with chimneys smoking appeared along the road at intervals. I wished we could go in for buttermilk and beans in front of the fireplace.

At Sonora I again helped myself to free bread and cheese while the proprietor chatted with a big rancher on the other side of the store. Dean huzzahed when he heard it; he was hungry. We couldn't spend a cent on food. "Yass, yass," said Dean, watching the ranchers loping up and down Sonora main street, "every one of them is a bloody millionaire, thousand head of cattle, workhands, buildings, money in the bank. If I lived around here I'd go be an idjit in the sagebrush, I'd be jackrabbit, I'd lick up the branches, I'd look for pretty cowgirls-hee-hee-hee-hee! Damn! Bam!" He socked himself. "Yes! Right! Oh me!" We didn't know what he was talking about any more. He took the wheel and flew the rest of the way across the state of Texas, about five hundred miles, clear to El Paso, arriving at dusk and not stopping except once when he took all his clothes off, near Ozona, and ran yipping and leaping naked in the sage. Cars zoomed by and didn't see him. He scurried back to the car and drove on. "Now Sal, now Marylou, I want both of you to do as I'm doing, disemburden yourselves of all that clothes-now what's the sense of clothes? now that's what I'm sayin-and sun your pretty bellies with me. Come on!" We were driving west into the sun; it fell in through the windshield. "Open your belly as we drive into it." Marylou complied; unfuddyduddied, so did I. We sat in the front seat, all three. Marylou took out cold cream and applied it to us for kicks. Every now and then a big truck zoomed by; the driver in high cab caught a glimpse of a golden beauty sitting naked with two naked men: you could see them swerve a moment as they vanished in our rear-view window. Great sage plains, snowless now, rolled on. Soon we were in the orange-rocked Pecos Canyon country. Blue distances opened up in the sky. We got out of the car to examine an old Indian ruin. Dean did so stark naked. Marylou and I put on our overcoats. We wandered among the old stones, hooting and howling. Certain tourists caught sight of Dean naked in the plain but they could not believe their eyes and wobbled on.

Dean and Marylou parked the car near Van Horn and made love while I went to sleep. I woke up just as we were rolling down the tremendous Rio Grande Valley through Glint and Ysleta to El Paso. Marylou jumped to the back seat, I jumped to the front seat, and we rolled along. To our left across the vast Rio Grande spaces were the moorish-red mounts of the Mexican border, the land of the Tarahumare; soft dusk played on the peaks. Straight ahead lay the distant lights of El Paso and Juarez, sown in a tremendous valley so big that you could see several railroads puffing at the same time in every direction, as though it was the Valley of the World. We descended into it. - -

"Clint, Texas!" said Dean. He had the radio on to the Glint station. Every fifteen minutes they played a record; the rest of the time it was commercials about a high-school correspondence course. "This program is beamed all over the West," cried Dean excitedly. "Man, I used to listen to it day and night in reform school and prison. All of us used to write in. You get a high-school diploma by mail, facsimile thereof, if you pass the test. All the young wranglers in the West, I don't care who, at one time or another write in for this; it's all they hear; you tune the radio in Sterling, Colorado, Lusk, Wyoming, I don't care where, you get Glint, Texas, Glint, Texas. And the music is always cowboy hillbilly and Mexican, absolutely the worst program in the entire history of the country and nobody can do anything about it. They have a tremendous beam; they've got the whole land hogtied." We saw the high antenna beyond the shacks of Glint. "Oh, man, the things I could tell you!" cried Dean, almost weeping. Eyes bent on Frisco and the Coast, we came into El Paso as it got dark, broke. We absolutely had to get some money for gas or we'd never make it.

We tried everything. We buzzed the travel bureau, but no one was going west that night. The travel bureau is where you go for share-the-gas rides, legal in the West. Shifty characters wait with battered suitcases. We went to the Greyhound bus station to try to persuade somebody to give us the money instead of taking a bus for the Coast. We were too bashful to approach anyone. We wandered around sadly. It was cold outside. A college boy was sweating at the sight of luscious Marylou and trying to look unconcerned. Dean and I consulted but decided we weren't pimps. Suddenly a crazy dumb young kid, fresh out of reform school, attached himself to us, and he and Dean rushed out for a beer. "Come on, man, let's go mash somebody on the head and get his money."

"I dig you, man!" yelled Dean. They dashed off. For a moment I was worried; but Dean only wanted to dig the streets of El Paso with the kid and get his kicks. Marylou and I waited in the car. She put her arms around me. I said, "Dammit, Lou, wait till we get to Frisco."

"I don't care. Dean's going to leave me anyway."

"When are you going back to Denver?" "I don't know. I don't care what I'm doing. Can I go back east with you?"

"We'll have to get some money in Frisco." "I know where you can get a job in a lunchcart behind the counter, and I'll be a waitress. I know a hotel where we can stay on credit. We'll stick together. Gee, I'm sad." "What are you sad about, kid?"

"I'm sad about everything. Oh damn, I wish Dean wasn't so crazy now." Dean came twinkling back, giggling, and jumped in the car.

"What a crazy cat that was, whoo! Did I dig him! I used to know thousands of guys like that, they're all the same, their minds work in uniform clockwork, oh, the infinite ramifications, no time, no time . . ." And he shot up the car, hunched over the wheel, and roared out of El Paso. "We'll just have to pick up hitchhikers. I'm positive we'll find some. Hup! hup! here we go. Look out!" he yelled at a motorist, and swung around him, and dodged a truck and bounced over the city limits. Across the river were the jewel lights of Juarez and the sad dry land and the jewel stars of Chihuahua. Marylou was watching Dean as she had watched him clear across the country and back, out of the corner of her eye-with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hide it in her closet, an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all raging and sniffy and crazy-wayed, a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew would never bear fruit because when she looked at his hangjawed bony face with its male self-containment and absentmindedness she knew he was too mad. Dean was convinced Marylou was a whore; he confided in me that she was a pathological liar. But when she watched him like this it was love too; and when Dean noticed he always turned with his big false flirtatious smile, with the eyelashes fluttering and the teeth pearly white, while a moment ago he was only dreaming in his eternity. Then Marylou and I both laughed -and Dean gave no sign of discomfiture, just a goofy glad grin that said to us, Ain't we gettin our kicks anyway? And that was it.

Outside El Paso, in the darkness, we saw a small huddled figure with thumb stuck out. It was our promised hitchhiker. We pulled up and backed to his side. "How much money you got, kid?" The kid had no money; he was about seventeen, pale, strange, with one undeveloped crippled hand and no suitcase. "Ain't he sweet?" said Dean, turning to me with a serious awe. "Come on in, fella, we'll take you out-" The kid saw his advantage. He said he had an aunt in Tulare, California, who owned a grocery store and as soon as we got there he'd have some money for us. Dean rolled on the floor laughing, it was so much like the kid in North Carolina. "Yes! Yes!" he yelled. "We've all got aunts; well, let's go, let's see the aunts and the uncles and the grocery stores all the way ALONG that road!!" And we had a new passenger, and a fine little guy he turned out to be, too. He didn't say a word, he listened to us. After a minute of Dean's talk he was probably convinced he had joined a car of madmen. He said he was hitchhiking from Alabama to Oregon, where his home was. We asked him what he was doing in Alabama.

"I went to visit my uncle; he said he'd have a job for me in a lumber mill. The job fell through, so I'm comin back home."

"Coin home," said Dean, "goin home, yes, I know, we'll take you home, far as Frisco anyhow." But we didn't have any money. Then it occurred to me I could borrow five dollars from my old friend Hal Hingham in Tucson, Arizona. Immediately Dean said it was all settled and we were going to Tucson. And we did.

We passed Las Cruces, New Mexico, in the night and arrived in Arizona at dawn. I woke up from a deep sleep to find everybody sleeping like lambs and the car parked God knows where, because I couldn't see out the steamy windows. I got out of the car. We were in the mountains: there was a heaven of sunrise, cool purple airs, red mountainsides, emerald pastures in valleys, dew, and transmuting clouds of gold; on the ground gopher holes, cactus, mesquite. It was time for me to drive on. I pushed Dean and the kid over and went down the mountain with the clutch in and the motor off to save gas. In this manner I rolled into Benson, Arizona. It occurred to me that I had a pocket watch Rocco had just given me for a birthday present, a four-dollar watch. At the gas station I asked the man if he knew a pawnshop in Benson. It was right next door to the station. I knocked, someone got up out of bed, and in a minute I had a dollar for the watch. It went into the tank. Now we had enough gas for Tucson. But suddenly a big pistol-packing trooper appeared, just as I was ready to pull out, and asked to see my driver's license. "The fella in the back seat has the license," I said. Dean and Marylou were sleeping together under the blanket. The cop told Dean to come out. Suddenly he whipped out his gun and yelled, "Keep your hands up!"

"Offisah," I heard Dean say in the most unctious and ridiculous tones, "offisah, I was only buttoning my flah." Even the cop almost smiled. Dean came out, muddy, ragged, T-shirted, rubbing his belly, cursing, looking everywhere for his license and his car papers. The cop rummaged through our back trunk. All the papers were straight.

"Only checking up," he said with a broad smile. "You can go on now. Benson ain't a bad town actually; you might enjoy it if you had breakfast here."

"Yes yes yes," said Dean, paying absolutely no attention to him, and drove off. We all sighed with relief. The police are suspicious when gangs of youngsters come by in new cars without a cent in their pockets and have to pawn watches. "Oh, they're always interfering," said Dean, "but he was a much better cop than that rat in Virginia. They try to make headline arrests; they think every car going by is some big Chicago gang. They ain't got nothin else to do." We drove on to Tucson.

Tucson is situated in beautiful mesquite riverbed country, overlooked by the snowy Catalina range. The city was one big construction job; the people transient, wild, ambitious, busy, gay; washlines, trailers; bustling downtown streets with banners; altogether very Californian. Fort Lowell Road, out where Hingham lived, wound along lovely riverbed trees in the flat desert. We saw Hingham himself brooding in the yard. He was a writer; he had come to Arizona to work on his book in peace. He was a tall, gangly, shy satirist who mumbled to you with his head turned away and always said funny things. His wife and baby were with him in the dobe house, a small one that his Indian stepfather had built. His mother lived across the yard in her own house. She was an excited American woman who loved pottery, beads, and books. Hingham had heard of Dean through letters from New York. We came down on him like a cloud, every one of us hungry, even Alfred, the crippled hitchhiker. Hingham was wearing an old sweater and smoking a pipe in the keen desert air. His mother came out and invited us into her kitchen to eat. We cooked noodles in a great pot.

Then we all drove to a crossroads liquor store, where Hingham cashed a check for five dollars and handed me the money.

There was a brief good-by. "It certainly was pleasant," said Hingham, looking away. Beyond some trees, across the sand, a great neon sign of a roadhouse glowed red. Hingham always went there for a beer when he was tired of writing. He was very lonely, he wanted to get back to New York. It was sad to see his tall figure receding in the dark as we drove away, just like the other figures in New York and New Orleans: they stand uncertainly underneath immense skies, and everything about them is drowned. Where go? what do? what for? -sleep. But this foolish gang was bending onward.

9

Outside Tucson we saw another hitchhiker in the dark road. This was an Okie from Bakersfield, California, who put down his story. "Hot damn, I left Bakersfield with the travel-bureau car and left my gui-tar in the trunk of another one and they never showed up-guitar and cowboy duds; you see, I'm a moo-sician, I was headed for Arizona to play with Johnny Mackaw's Sagebrush Boys. Well, hell, here I am in Arizona, broke, and m'gui-tar's been stoled. You boys drive me back to Bakersfield and I'll get the money from my brother. How much you want?" We wanted just enough gas to make Frisco from Bakersfield, about three dollars. Now we were five in the car. "Evenin, ma'am," he said, tipping his hat to Marylou, and we were off.

In the middle of the night we overtopped the lights of Palm Springs from a mountain road. At dawn, in snowy passes, we labored toward the town of Mojave, which was the entryway to the great Tehachapi Pass. The Okie woke up and told funny stories; sweet little Alfred sat smiling. Okie told us he knew a man who forgave his wife for shooting him and got her out of prison, only to be shot a second time. We were passing the women's prison when he told it. Up ahead we saw Tehachapi Pass starting up. Dean took the wheel and carried us clear to the top of the world. We passed a great shroudy cement factory in the canyon. Then we started down. Dean cut off the gas, threw in the clutch, and negotiated every hairpin turn and passed cars and did everything in the books without the benefit of accelerator. I held on tight. Sometimes the road went up again briefly; he merely passed cars without a sound, on pure momentum. He knew every rhythm and every kick of a first-class pass. When it was time to U-turn left around a low stone wall that overlooked the bottom of the world, he just leaned far over to his left, hands on the wheel, stiff-armed, and carried it that way; and when the turn snaked to the right again, this time with a cliff on our left, he leaned far to the right, making Marylou and me lean with him. In this way we floated and flapped down to the San Joaquin Valley. It lay spread a mile below, virtually the floor of California, green and wondrous from our aerial shelf. We made thirty miles without using gas.

Suddenly we were all excited. Dean wanted to tell me everything he knew about Bakersfield as we reached the city limits. He showed me rooming houses where he stayed, railroad hotels, poolhalls, diners, sidings where he jumped off the engine for grapes, Chinese restaurants where he ate, park benches where he met girls, and certain places where he'd done nothing but sit and wait around. Dean's California-wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken-down, handsome, decadent movie actors. "Man, I spent hours on that very chair in front of that drugstore!" He remembered all-every pinochle game, every woman, every sad night. And suddenly we were passing the place in the railyards where Terry and I had sat under the moon, drinking wine, on those bum crates, in October 1947, and I tried to tell him. But he was too excited. "This is where Dunkel and I spent a whole morning drinking beer, trying to make a real gone little waitress from Watsonville-no, Tracy, yes, Tracy-and her name was Esmeralda-oh, man, something like that." Marylou was planning what to do the moment she arrived in Frisco. Alfred said his aunt would give him plenty of money up in Tulare.

The Okie directed us to his brother in the flats outside town.

We pulled up at noon in front of a little rose-covered shack, and the Okie went in and talked with some women. We waited fifteen minutes. "I'm beginning to think this guy has no more money than I have," said Dean. "We get more hung-up! There's probably nobody in the family that'll give him a cent after that fool escapade." The Okie came out sheepishly and directed us to town.

"Hot damn, I wisht I could find my brother." He made inquiries. He probably felt he was our prisoner. Finally we went to a big bread bakery, and the Okie came out with his brother, who was wearing coveralls and was apparently the truck mechanic inside. He talked with his brother a few minutes. We waited in the car. Okie was telling all his relatives his adventures and about the loss of his guitar. But he got the money, and he gave it to us, and we were all set for Frisco. We thanked him and took off.

Next stop was Tulare. Up the valley we roared. I lay in the back seat, exhausted, giving up completely, and sometime in the afternoon, while I dozed, the muddy Hudson zoomed by the tents outside Sabinal where I had lived and loved and worked in the spectral past. Dean was bent rigidly over the wheel, pounding the rods. I was sleeping when we finally arrived in Tulare; I woke up to hear the insane details. "Sal, wake up! Alfred found his aunt's grocery store, but do you know what happened? His aunt shot her husband and went to jail. The store's closed down. We didn't get a cent. Think of it! The things that happen; the Okie told us the same likewise story, the troubles on all sides, the complications of events-whee, damn!" Alfred was biting his fingernails. We were turning off the Oregon road at Madera, and there we made our farewell with little Alfred. We wished him luck and Godspeed to Oregon. He said it was the best ride he ever had.

It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time. "There she blows!" yelled Dean. "Wow! Made it! Just enough gas! Give me water! No more land! We can't go any further 'cause there ain't no more land! Now Marylou, darling, you and Sal go immediately to a hotel and wait for me to contact you in the morning as soon as I have definite arrangements made with Camille and call up Frenchman about my railroad watch and you and Sal buy the first thing hit town a paper for the want ads and workplans." And he drove into the Oakland Bay Bridge and it carried us in. The downtown office buildings were just sparkling on their lights; it made you think of Sam Spade. When we staggered out of the car on O'Farrell Street and sniffed and stretched, it was like getting on shore after a long voyage at sea; the slopy street reeled under our feet; secret chop sueys from Frisco Chinatown floated in the air. We took all our things out of the car and piled them on the sidewalk.

Suddenly Dean was saying good-by. He was bursting to see Camille and find out what had happened. Marylou and I stood dumbly in the street and watched him drive away. "You see what a bastard he is?" said Marylou. "Dean will leave you out in the cold any time it's in his interest."

"I know," I said, and I looked back east and sighed. We had no money. Dean hadn't mentioned money. "Where are we going to stay?" We wandered around, carrying our bundles of rags in the narrow romantic streets. Everybody looked like a broken-down movie extra, a withered starlet; disenchanted stunt-men, midget auto-racers, poignant California characters with their end-of-the-continent sadness, handsome, decadent, Casanovaish men, puffy-eyed motel blondes, hustlers, pimps, whores, masseurs, bellhops-a lemon lot, and how's a man going to make a living with a gang like that?

10

Nevertheless Marylou had been around these people-not far from the Tenderloin-and a gray-faced hotel clerk let us have a room on credit. That was the first step. Then we had to eat, and didn't do so till midnight, when we found a nightclub singer in her hotel room who turned an iron upside down on a coathanger in the wastebasket and warmed up a can of pork and beans. I looked out the window at the winking neons and said to myself, Where is Dean and why isn't he concerned about our welfare? I lost faith in him that year. I stayed in San Francisco a week and had the beatest time of my life. Marylou and I walked around for miles, looking for food-money. We even visited some drunken seamen in a flophouse on Mission Street that she knew; they offered us whisky.

In the hotel we lived together two days. I realized that, now Dean was out of the picture, Marylou had no real interest in me; she was trying to reach Dean through me, his buddy. We had arguments in the room. We also spent entire nights in bed and I told her my dreams. I told her about the big snake of the world that was coiled in the earth like a worm in an apple and would someday nudge up a hill to be thereafter known as Snake Hill and fold out upon the plain, a hundred miles long and devouring as it went along. I told her this snake was Satan. "What's going to happen?" she squealed; meanwhile she held me tight.

"A saint called Doctor Sax will destroy it with secret herbs which he is at this very moment cooking up in his underground shack somewhere in America. It may also be disclosed that the snake is just a husk of doves; when the snake dies great clouds of seminal-gray doves will flutter out and bring tidings of peace around the world." I was out of my mind with hunger and bitterness.

One night Marylou disappeared with a nightclub owner. I was waiting for her by appointment in a doorway across the street, at Larkin and Geary, hungry, when she suddenly stepped out of the foyer of the fancy apartment house with her girl friend, the nightclub owner, and a greasy old man with a roll. Originally she'd just gone in to see her girl friend. I saw what a whore she was. She was afraid to give me the sign, though she saw me in that doorway. She walked on little feet and got in the Cadillac and off they went. Now I had nobody, nothing.

I walked around, picking butts from the street. I passed a fish-'n-chips joint on Market Street, and suddenly the woman in there gave me a terrified look as I passed; she was the proprietress, she apparently thought I was coming in there with a gun to hold up the joint. I walked on a few feet. It suddenly occurred to me this was my mother of about two hundred years ago in England, and that I was her footpad son, returning from gaol to haunt her honest labors in the hashery. I stopped, frozen with ecstasy on the sidewalk. I looked down Market Street. I didn't know whether it was that or Canal Street in New Orleans: it led to water, ambiguous, universal water, just as 42nd Street, New York, leads to water, and you never know where you are. I thought of Ed Dunkel's ghost on Times Square. I was delirious. I wanted to go back and leer at my strange Dickensian mother in the hash joint. I tingled all over from head to foot. It seemed I had a whole host of memories leading back to 1750 in England and that I was in San Francisco now only in another life and in another body. "No," that woman seemed to say with that terrified glance, "don't come back and plague your honest, hard-working mother. You are no longer like a son to me - and like your father, my first husband. 'Ere this kindly Greek took pity on me." (The proprietor was a Greek with hairy arms.) "You are no good, inclined to drunkenness and routs and final disgraceful robbery of the fruits of my 'umble labors in the hashery. O son! did you not ever go on your knees and pray for deliverance for all your sins and scoundrel's acts? Lost boy! Depart! Do not haunt my soul; I have done well forgetting you. Reopen no old wounds, be as if you had never returned and looked in to me-to see my laboring humilities, my few scrubbed pennies-hungry to grab, quick to deprive, sullen, unloved, mean-minded son of my flesh. Son! Son!" It made me think of the Big Pop vision in Graetna with Old Bull. And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven. I could hear an indescribable seething roar which wasn't in my ear but everywhere and had nothing to do with sounds. I realized that I had died and been reborn numberless times but just didn't remember especially because the transitions from life to death and back to life are so ghostly easy, a magical action for naught, like falling asleep and waking up again a million times, the utter casualness and deep ignorance of it. I realized it was only because of the stability of the intrinsic Mind that these ripples of birth and death took place, like the action of wind on a sheet of pure, serene, mirror-like water. I felt sweet, swinging bliss, like a big shot of heroin in the mainline vein; like a gulp of wine late in the afternoon and it makes you shudder; my feet tingled. I thought I was going to die the very next moment. But I didn't die, and walked four miles and picked up ten long butts and took them back to Marylou's hotel room and poured their tobacco in my old pipe and lit up. I was too young to know what had happened. In the window I smelled all the food of San Francisco. There were seafood places out there where the buns were hot, and the baskets were good enough to eat too; where the menus themselves were soft with foody esculence as though dipped in hot broths and roasted dry and good enough to eat too. Just show me the bluefish spangle on a seafood menu and I'd eat it; let me smell the drawn butter and lobster claws. There were places where they specialized in thick red roast beef au jus, or roast chicken basted in wine. There were places where hamburgs sizzled on grills and the coffee was only a nickel. And oh, that pan-fried chow mein flavored air that blew into my room from Chinatown, vying with the spaghetti sauces of North Beach, the soft-shell crab of Fisherman's Wharf-nay, the ribs of Fillmore turning on spits! Throw in the Market Street chili beans, redhot, and french-fried potatoes of the Embarcadero wino night, and steamed clams from Sausalito across the bay, and that's my ah-dream of San Francisco. Add fog, hunger-making raw fog, and the throb of neons in the soft night, the clack of high-heeled beauties, white doves in a Chinese grocery window . . .

11

That was the way Dean found me when he finally decided I was worth saving. He took me home to Camille's house. "Where's Marylou, man?"

"The whore ran off." Camille was a relief after Marylou; a well-bred, polite young woman, and she was aware of the fact that the eighteen dollars Dean had sent her was mine. But O where went thou, sweet Marylou? I relaxed a few days in Camille's house. From her living-room window in the wooden tenement on Liberty Street you could see all of San Francisco burning green and red in the rainy night. Dean did the most ridiculous thing of his career the few days I was there. He got a job demonstrating a new kind of pressure cooker in the kitchens of homes. The salesman gave him piles of samples and pamphlets. The first day Dean was a hurricane of energy. I drove all over town with him as he made appointments. The idea was to get invited socially to a dinner party and then leap up and start demonstrating the pressure cooker. "Man," cried Dean excitedly, "this is even crazier than the time I worked for Sinah. Sinah sold encyclopedias in Oakland. Nobody could turn him down. He made long speeches, he jumped up and down, he laughed, he cried. One time we broke into an Okie house where everybody was getting ready to go to a funeral. Sinah got down on his knees and prayed for the deliverance of the deceased soul. All the Okies started crying. He sold a complete set of encyclopedias. He was the maddest guy in the world. I wonder where he is. We used to get next to pretty young daughters and feel them up in the kitchen. This afternoon I had the gonest housewife in her little kitchen-arm around her, demonstrating. Ah! Hmm! Wow!"

"Keep it up, Dean," I said. "Maybe someday you'll be mayor of San Francisco." He had the whole cookpot spiel worked out; he practiced on Camille and me in the evenings. One morning he stood naked, looking at all San Francisco out the window as the sun came up. He looked like someday he'd be the pagan mayor of San Francisco. But his energies ran out. One rainy afternoon the salesman came around to find out what Dean was doing. Dean was sprawled on the couch. "Have you been trying to sell these?" "No," said Dean, "I have another job coming up." "Well, what are you going to do about all these samples?" "I don't know." In a dead silence the salesman gathered up his sad pots and left. I was sick and tired of everything and so was Dean.

But one night we suddenly went mad together again; we went to see Slim Gaillard in a little Frisco nightclub. Slim Gaillard is a tall, thin Negro with big sad eyes who's always saying, "Right-orooni" and "How 'bout a little bourbon-

The last night Dean went mad and found Marylou somewhere downtown and we got in the car and drove all over Richmond across the bay, hitting Negro jazz shacks in the oil flats. Marylou went to sit down and a colored guy pulled the chair out from under her. The gals approached her in the John with propositions. I was approached too. Dean was sweating around. It was the end; I wanted to get out.

At dawn I got my New York bus and said good-by to Dean and Marylou. They wanted some of my sandwiches. I told them no. It was a sullen moment. We were all thinking we'd never see one another again and we didn't care.

PART THREE

1

In the spring of 1949 I had a few dollars saved from my GI education checks and I went to Denver, thinking of settling down there. I saw myself in Middle America, a patriarch. I was lonesome. Nobody was there-no Babe Rawlins, Ray Rawlins, Tim Gray, Betty Gray, Roland Major, Dean Moriarty, Carlo Marx, Ed Dunkel, Roy Johnson, Tommy Snark, nobody. I wandered around Curtis Street and Larimer Street, worked awhile in the wholesale fruit market where I almost got hired in 1947-the hardest job of my life; at one point the Japanese kids and I had to move a whole boxcar a hundred feet down the rail by hand with a jack-jet that made it move a quarter-inch with each yank. I lugged watermelon crates over the ice floor of reefers into the blazing sun, sneezing. In God's name and under the stars, what for?

At dusk I walked. I felt like a speck on the surface of the sad red earth. I passed the Windsor Hotel, where Dean Moriarty had lived with his father in the depression thirties, and as of yore I looked everywhere for the sad and fabled tinsmith of my mind. Either you find someone who! looks like your father in places like Montana or you look] for a friend's father where he is no more.

At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching] among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the] white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not \ enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night. I stopped at a little shack where a man sold hot red chili in paper containers; I bought some and ate it, strolling in the : dark mysterious streets. I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a "white man" disillusioned. All my life I'd had white ambitions; that was why I'd abandoned a good woman like Terry in the San Joaquin Valley I passed the dark porches of Mexican and Negro homes; soft voices were there, occasionally the dusky knee of some mysterious sensual gal; and dark faces of the men behind rose arbors. Little children sat like sages in ancient rocking chairs. A gang of colored women came by, and one of the young ones detached herself from motherlike elders and came to me fast-"Hello Joe!" -and suddenly saw it wasn't Joe, and ran back, blushing. I wished I were Joe. I was only myself, Sal Paradise, sad, strolling in this violet dark, this unbearably sweet night, wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic | Negroes of America. The raggedy neighborhoods reminded] me of Dean and Marylou, who knew these streets so well from] childhood. How I wished I could find them.

Down at 23rd and Welton a softball game was going on under floodlights which also illuminated the gas tank. A great 1 eager crowd roared at every play. The strange young heroes of all kinds, white, colored, Mexican, pure Indian, were on the field, performing with heart-breaking seriousness. Just sandlot kids in uniform. Never in my life as an athlete had I ever permitted myself to perform like this in front of families and girl friends and kids of the neighborhood, at night, under lights; always it had been college, big-time, sober-faced; no boyish, human joy like this. Now it was too late. Near me sat an old Negro who apparently watched the games every night. Next to him was an old white bum; then a Mexican family, then some girls, some boys-all humanity, the lot. Oh, the sadness of the lights that night! The young pitcher looked just like Dean. A pretty blonde in the seats looked just like Marylou. It was the Denver Night; all I did was die.

Down in Denver, down in Denver All I did was die

Across the street Negro families sat on their front steps, talking and looking up at the starry night through the trees and just relaxing in the softness and sometimes watching the game. Many cars passed in the street meanwhile, and stopped at the corner when the light turned red. There was excitement and the air was filled with the vibration of really joyous life that knows nothing of disappointment and "white sorrows" and all that. The old Negro man had a can of beer in his coat pocket, which he proceeded to open; and the old white man enviously eyed the can and groped in his pocket to see if he could buy a can too. How I died! I walked away from there.

I went to see a rich girl I knew. In the morning she pulled a hundred-dollar bill out of her silk stocking and said, "You've been talking of a trip to Frisco; that being the case, take this and go and have your fun." So all my problems were solved and I got a travel-bureau car for eleven dollars' gas-fare to Frisco and zoomed over the land.

Two fellows were driving this car; they said they were pimps. Two other fellows were passengers with me. We sat tight and bent our minds to the goal. We went over Berthoud Pass, down to the great plateau, Tabernash, Troublesome, Kremmling; down Rabbit Ears Pass to Steamboat Springs, and j out; fifty miles of dusty detour; then Craig and the Great) American Desert. As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border 11 saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, "Pass here and go on, you're on the road to heaven." I Ah well, alackaday, I was more interested in some old rotted! covered wagons and pool tables sitting in the Nevada desert] near a Coca-Cola stand and where there were huts with the! weatherbeaten signs still napping in the haunted shrouded 1 desert wind, saying, "Rattlesnake Bill lived here" or "Broken-j mouth Annie holed up here for years." Yes, zoom! In Salt! Lake City the pimps checked on their girls and we drove on. I Before I knew it, once again I was seeing the fabled city of] San Francisco stretched on the bay in the middle of the night. I ran immediately to Dean. He had a little house now. I was! burning to know what was on his mind and what would hap- j pen now, for there was nothing behind me any more, all my I bridges were gone and I didn't give a damn about anything at ] all. I knocked on his door at two o'clock in the morning.

2

He came to the door stark naked and it might have been the President knocking for all he cared. He received the world in the raw. "Sal!" he said with genuine awe. "I didn't think you'd actually do it. You've finally come to me."

"Yep," I said. "Everything fell apart in me. How are things with you?"

"Not so good, not so good. But we've got a million things to talk about. Sal, the time has finally come for us to talk and get with it." We agreed it was about time and went in. My arrival was somewhat like the coming of the strange most evil angel in the home of the snow-white fleece, as Dean and I began talking excitedly in the kitchen downstairs, which brought forth sobs from upstairs. Everything I said to Dean was answered with a wild, whispering, shuddering "Yes!" Camille knew what was going to happen. Apparently Dean had been quiet for a few months; now the angel had arrived and he was going mad again. "What's the matter with her?" I whispered. He said, "She's getting worse and worse, man, she cries and makes tantrums, won't let me out to see Slim Gaillard, gets mad every time I'm late, then when I stay home she won't talk to me and says I'm an utter beast." He ran upstairs to soothe her. I heard Camille yell, "You're a liar, you're a liar, you're a liar!" I took the opportunity to examine the very wonderful house they had. It was a two-story crooked, rickety wooden cottage in the middle of tenements, right on top of Russian Hill with a view of the bay; it had four rooms, three upstairs and one immense sort of basement kitchen downstairs. The kitchen door opened onto a grassy court where washlines were. In back of the kitchen was a storage room where Dean's old shoes still were caked an inch thick with Texas mud from the night the Hudson got stuck on the Brazos River. Of course the Hudson was gone; Dean hadn't been able to make further payments on it. He had no car at all now. Their second baby was accidentally coming. It was horrible to hear Camille sobbing so. We couldn't stand it and went out to buy beer and brought it back to the kitchen. Camille finally went to sleep or spent the night staring blankly at the dark. I had no idea-what was really wrong, except perhaps Dean had driven her mad after all.

After my last leaving of Frisco he had gone crazy over Marylou again and spent months haunting her apartment on Divisadero, where every night she had a different sailor in and he peeked down through her mail-slot and could see her bed. There he saw Marylou sprawled in the mornings with a-boy. He trailed her around town. He wanted absolute proof that she was a whore. He loved her, he sweated over her. Finally he got hold of some bad green, as it's called in the trade -green, uncured marijuana-quite by mistake, and smoked too much of it.

"The first day," he said, "I lay rigid as a board in bed and couldn't move or say a word; I just looked straight up with my eyes open wide. I could hear buzzing in my head and saw all kinds of wonderful technicolor visions and felt wonderful. The second day everything came to me, EVERYTHING I'd even done or known or read or heard of or conjectured came to me and rearranged itself in my mind in a brand-new logical way and because I could think of nothing else in the interior concerns of holding and catering to the amazement and gratitude I felt, I kept saying, 'Yes, yes, yes, yes.' Not loud. 'Yes,' real quiet, and these green tea visions lasted until the third day. I had understood everything by then, my life was decided, I knew I loved Marylou, I knew I had to fir my father wherever he is and save him, I knew you were buddy et cetera, I knew how great Carlo is. I knew a thousand things about everybody everywhere. Then the third day began having a terrible series of waking nightmares, and the were so absolutely horrible and grisly and green that I lay there doubled up with my hands around my knees, saying, 'Oh, oh, oh, ah, oh . . .' The neighbors heard me and sent for a doctor. Camille was away with the baby, visiting hot folks. The whole neighborhood was concerned. They came in and found me lying on the bed with my arms stretched out forever. Sal, I ran to Marylou with some of that tea. And do you know that the same thing happened to that dumb little box?-the same visions, the same logic, the same final decision about everything, the view of all truths in one painful In leading to nightmares and pain-ack! Then I knew I loved her so much I wanted to kill her. I ran home and beat my head on the wall. I ran to Ed Dunkel; he's back in Frisco with Galatea; I asked him about a guy we know has a gun, I went the guy, I got the gun, I ran to Marylou, I looked down mail-slot, she was sleeping with a guy, had to retreat and he hesitate, came back in an hour, I barged in, she was alone-and gave her the gun and told her to kill me. She held the gun in her hand the longest time. I asked her for a sweet dead pact. She didn't want. I said one of us had to die. She said no. I beat my head on the wall. Man, I was out of my mind. She'll tell you, she talked me out of it."

"Then what happened?"

"That was months ago-after you left. She finally married a used-car dealer, dumb bastit has promised to kill me if he finds me, if necessary I shall have to defend myself and kill him and I'll go to San Quentin, 'cause, Sal, one more rap of any kind and I go to San Quentin for life-that's the end of me. Bad hand and all." He showed me his hand. I hadn't noticed in the excitement that he had suffered a terrible accident to his hand. "I Ht Marylou on the brow on February twenty-sixth at six o'clock in the evening-in fact six-ten, because I remember I had to make my hotshot freight in an hour and twenty minutes-the last time we met and the last time we decided everything, and now listen to this: my thumb only deflected off her brow and she didn't even have a bruise and in fact laughed, but my thumb broke above the wrist and a horrible doctor made a setting of the bones that was difficult and took three separate castings, twenty-three combined hours of sitting on hard benches waiting, et cetera, and the final cast had a traction pin stuck through the tip of my thumb, so in April when they took off the cast the pin infected my bone and I developed osteomyelitis which has become chronic, and after an operation which failed and a month in a cast the result was the amputation of a wee bare piece off the tip-ass end."

He unwrapped the bandages and showed me. The flesh, about half an inch, was missing under the nail.

"It got from worse to worse. I had to support Camille and Amy and had to work as fast as I could at Firestone as mold man, curing recapped tires and later hauling big hunnerd-fifty-pound tires from the floor to the top of the cars-could only use my good hand and kept banging the bad-broke it again, had it reset again, and it's getting all infected and swoled again. So now I take care of baby while Camille works. You see? Heeby-jeebies, I'm classification three-A, jazz-hounded Mori-arty has a sore butt, his wife gives him daily injections of penicillin for his thumb, which produces hives, for he's allergic. He must take sixty thousand units of Fleming's juice within a month. He must take one tablet every four hours for this month to combat allergy produced from his juice. He must take codeine aspirin to relieve the pain in his thumb. He must have surgery on his leg for an inflamed cyst. He must rise next Monday at six A.M. to get his teeth cleaned. He must see a foot doctor twice a week for treatment. He must take cough syrup each night. He must blow and snort constantly to clear his nose, which has collapsed just under the bridge where an operation some years ago weakened it. He lost his thumb on his throwing arm. Greatest seventy-yard passer in the history of New Mexico State Reformatory. And yet-and yet, I've never felt better and finer and happier with the world and to see little lovely children playing in the sun and I am so glad to see you, my fine gone wonderful Sal, and I know, I know everything will be all right. You'll see her tomorrow, my terrific darling beautiful daughter can now stand alone for thirty seconds at a time, she weighs twenty-two pounds, is twenty-nine inches long. I've just figured out she is thirty-one-and-a-quarter-per-cent English, twenty-seven-and-a-half-per-cent Irish, twenty-five-per-cent German, eight-and-three-quarters-per-cent Dutch, seven-and-a-half-per-cent Scotch, one-hun-dred-per-cent wonderful." He fondly congratulated me for the book I had finished, which was now accepted by the publishers. "We know life, Sal, we're growing older, each of us, little by little, and are coming to know things. What you tell me about your life I understand well, I've always dug your feelings, and now in fact you're ready to hook up with a real great girl if you can only find her and cultivate her and make her mind your soul as I have tried so hard with these damned women of mine. Shit! shit! shit!" he yelled.

And in the morning Camille threw both of us out, baggage and all. It began when we called Roy Johnson, old Denver Roy, and had him come over for beer, while Dean minded the baby and did the dishes and the wash in the backyard but did a sloppy job of it in his excitement. Johnson agreed to drive us to Mill City to look for Remi Boncoeur. Camille came in from work at the doctor's office and gave us all the sad look of a harassed woman's life. I tried to show this haunted woman that I had no mean intentions concerning her home life by saying hello to her and talking as warmly as I could, but she knew it was a con and maybe one I'd learned from Dean, and only gave a brief smile. In the morning there was a terrible scene: she lay on the bed sobbing, and in the midst of this I suddenly had the need to go to the bathroom, and the only way I could get there was through her room. "Dean, Dean," I cried, "where's the nearest bar?"

"Bar?" he said, surprised; he was washing his hands in the kitchen sink downstairs. He thought I wanted to get drunk. I told him my dilemma and he said, "Go right ahead, she does that all the time." No, I couldn't do that. I rushed out to look for a bar; I walked uphill and downhill in a vicinity of four blocks on Russian Hill and found nothing but laundromats, cleaners, soda fountains, beauty parlors. I came back to the crooked little house. They were yelling at each other as I slipped through with a feeble smile and locked myself in the bathroom. A few moments later Camille was throwing Dean's things on the living-room floor and telling him to pack. To my amazement I saw a full-length oil painting of Galatea Dunkel over the sofa. I suddenly realized that all these women were spending months of loneliness and womanliness together, chatting about the madness of the men. I heard Dean's maniacal giggle across the house, together with the wails of his baby. The next thing I knew he was gliding around the house like Groucho Marx, with his broken thumb wrapped in a huge white bandage sticking up like a beacon that stands motionless above the frenzy of the waves. Once again I saw his pitiful huge battered trunk with socks and dirty underwear sticking out; he bent over it, throwing in everything he could find. Then he got his suitcase, the beatest suitcase in the USA. It was made of paper with designs on it to make it look like leather, and hinges of some kind pasted on. A great rip ran down the top; Dean lashed on a rope. Then he grabbed his seabag and threw things into that. I got my bag, stuffed it, and as Camille lay in bed saying, "Liar! Liar! Liar!" we leaped out of the house and struggled down the street to the nearest cable car-a mass of men and suitcases with that enormous bandaged thumb sticking up in the air.

That thumb became the symbol of Dean's final development. He no longer cared about anything (as before) but now he also cared about everything in principle; that is to say, it was all the same to him and he belonged to the world and there was nothing he could do about it. He stopped me in the middle of the street.

"Now, man, I know you're probably real bugged; you just got to town and we get thrown out the first day and you're wondering what I've done to deserve this and so on-together with all horrible appurtenances-hee-hee-hee!-but look at me. Please, Sal, look at me."

I looked at him. He was wearing a T-shirt, torn pants hanging down his belly, tattered shoes; he had not shaved, his hair was wild and bushy, his eyes bloodshot, and that tremendous bandaged thumb stood supported in midair at heart-level (he had to hold it up that way), and on his face was the goofiest grin I ever saw. He stumbled around in a circle and looked everywhere.

"What do my eyeballs see? Ah-the blue sky. Long-fellow!" He swayed and blinked. He rubbed his eyes. "Together with windows-have you ever dug windows? Now let's talk about windows. I have seen some really crazy windows that made faces at me, and some of them had shades drawn and so they winked." Out of his seabag he fished a copy of Eugene Sue's Mysteries of Paris and, adjusting the front of his T-shirt, began reading on the street corner with a pedantic air. "Now really, Sal, let's dig everything as we go along . . ." He forgot about that in an instant and looked around blankly. I was glad I had come, he needed me now.

"Why did Camille throw you out? What are you going to do?"

"Eh?" he said. "Eh? Eh?" We racked our brains for where to go and what to do. I realized it was up to me. Poor, poor Dean-the devil himself had never fallen farther; in idiocy, with infected thumb, surrounded by the battered suitcases of his motherless feverish life across America and back numberless times, an undone bird. "Let's walk to New York," he said, "and as we do so let's take stock of everything along the way -yass." I took out my money and counted it; I showed it to him.

"I have here," I said, "the sum of eighty-three dollars and change, and if you come with me let's go to New York-and after that let's go to Italy."

"Italy?" he said. His eyes lit up. "Italy, yass-how shall we get there, dear Sal?"

I pondered this. "I'll make some money, I'll get a thousand dollars from the publishers. We'll go dig all the crazy women in Rome, Paris, all those places; we'll sit at sidewalk cafes; we'll live in whorehouses. Why not go to Italy?"

"Why yass," said Dean, and then realized I was serious and looked at me out of the corner of his eye for the first time, for I'd never committed myself before with regard to his burdensome existence, and that look was the look of a man weighing his chances at the last moment before the bet. There were triumph and insolence in his eyes, a devilish look, and he never took his eyes off mine for a long time. I looked back at him and blushed.

I said, "What's the matter?" I felt wretched when I asked it. He made no answer but continued looking at me with the same wary insolent side-eye.

I tried to remember everything he'd done in his life and if there wasn't something back there to make him suspicious of something now. Resolutely and firmly I repeated what I said

-"Come to New York with me; I've got the money." I looked at him; my eyes were watering with embarrassment and tears. Still he stared at me. Now his eyes were blank and looking through me. It was probably the pivotal point of our friendship when he realized I had actually spent some hours thinking about him and his troubles, and he was trying to place that in his tremendously involved and tormented mental categories. Something clicked in both of us. In me it was suddenly concern for a man who was years younger than I, five years, and whose fate was wound with mine across the passage of the recent years; in him it was a matter that I can ascertain only from what he did afterward. He became extremely joyful and said everything was settled. "What was that look?" I asked. He was pained to hear me say that. He frowned. It was rarely that Dean frowned. We both felt perplexed and uncertain of something. We were standing on top of a hill on a beautiful sunny day in San Francisco; our shadows fell across the sidewalk. Out of the tenement next to Camille's house filed eleven Greek men and women who instantly lined themselves up on the sunny pavement while another backed up across the narrow street and smiled at them over a camera. We gaped at these ancient people who were having a wedding party for one of their daughters, probably the thousandth in an unbroken dark generation of smiling in the sun. They were well dressed, and they were strange. Dean and I might have been in Cyprus for all of that. Gulls flew overhead in the sparkling air.

"Well," said Dean in a very shy and sweet voice, "shall we go?"

"Yes," I said, "let's go to Italy." And so we picked up our bags, he the trunk with his one good arm and I the rest, and staggered to the cable-car stop; in a moment rolled down the hill with our legs dangling to the sidewalk from the jiggling shelf, two broken-down heroes of the Western night.