curves ninety miles an hour...I didn’t see you...We didn’t know you were there...Well, man, I’m going to San Francisco...Dean has Rita lined up for you tonight...Well, then, I’ll put it off.. I had no money. I sent my aunt an airmail letter asking her for fiftydollars and said it would be the last money I’d ask; after that she would be getting money back fromme, as soon as I got that ship.Then I went to meet Rita Bettencourt and took her back to the apartment. I got her in mybedroom after a long talk in the dark of the front room. She was a nice little girl, simple and true, andtremendously frightened of sex. I told her it was beautiful. I wanted to prove this to her. She let meprove it, but I was too impatient and proved nothing. She sighed in the dark. .What do you want outof life?. I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of girls..I don’t know,. she said. .Just wait on tables and try to get along.. She yawned. I put my handover her mouth and told her not to yawn. I tried to tell her how excited I was about life and the thingswe could do together; saying that, and planning to leave Denver in two days. She turned awaywearily. We lay on our backs, looking at the ceiling and wondering what God had wrought when Hemade life so sad. We made vague plans to meet in Frisco.My moments in Denver were coming to an end, I could feel it when I walked her home, on theway back I stretched out on the grass of an old church with a bunch of hobos, and their talk mademe want to get back on that road. Every now and then one would get up and hit a passer-by for adime. They talked of harvests moving north. It was warm and soft. I wanted to go and get Rita againand tell her a lot more things, and really make love to her this time, and calm her fears about men.Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit tosex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk - real straight talk about souls, forlife is holy and every moment is precious. I heard the Denver and Rio Grande locomotive howling offto the mountains. I wanted to pursue my star further.Major and I sat sadly talking in the midnight hours. .Have you ever read Green Hills of Africa?It’s Hemingway’s best.. We wished each other luck. We would meet in Frisco. 1 saw Rawlinsunder a dark tree in the street. .Good-by, Ray. When do we meet again?. I went to look for Carloand Dean - nowhere to be found. Tim Gray shot his hand up in the air and said, .So you’re leaving,Yo.. We called each other Yo. .Yep,. I said. The next few days I wandered around Denver.It seemed to me every bum on Larimer Street maybe was Dean Moriarty’s father; Old DeanMoriarty they called him, the Tinsmith. I went in the Windsor Hotel, where father and son had livedand where one night Dean was frightfully waked up by the legless man on the rollerboard whoshared the room with them; he came thundering across the floor on his terrible wheels to touch theboy. I saw the little midget newspaper-selling woman with the short legs, on the corner of Curtis and15th. I walked around the sad honkytonks of Curtis Street; young kids in jeans and red shirts;peanut shells, movie marquees, shooting parlors. Beyond the glittering street was darkness, andbeyond the darkness the West. I had to go.37At dawn I found Carlo. I read some of his enormous journal, slept there, and in the morning,drizzly and gray, tall, six-foot Ed Dunkel came in with Roy Johnson, a handsome kid, and TomSnark, the clubfooted poolshark. They sat around and listened with abashed smiles as Carlo Marxread them his apocalyptic, mad poetry. I slumped in my chair, finished. .Oh ye Denver birds!. criedCarlo. We all filed out and went up a typical cobbled Denver alley between incinerators smokingslowly. .I used to roll my hoop up this alley,. Chad King had told me. I wanted to see him do it; Iwanted to see Denver ten years ago when they were all children, and in the sunny cherry blossommorning of springtime in the Rockies rolling their hoops up the joyous alleys full of promise - thewhole gang. And Dean, ragged and dirty, prowling by himself in his preoccupied frenzy.Roy Johnson and I walked in the drizzle; I went to Eddie’s girl’s house to get back my wool plaidshirt, the shirt of Shelton, Nebraska. It was there, all tied up, the whole enormous sadness of a shirt.Roy Johnson said he’d meet me in Frisco. Everybody was going to Frisco. I went and found mymoney had arrived. The sun came out, and Tim Gray rode a trolley with me to the bus station. Ibought my ticket to San Fran, spending half of the fifty, and got on at two o’clock in the afternoon.Tim Gray waved good-by. The bus rolled out of the storied, eager Denver streets. .By God, I gottacome back and see what else will happen!. I promised. In a last-minute phone call Dean said he andCarlo might join me on the Coast; I pondered this, and realized I hadn’t talked to Dean for morethan five minutes in the whole time.3811I was two weeks late meeting Remi Boncoeur. The bus trip from Denver to Frisco was uneventfulexcept that my whole soul leaped to it the nearer we got to Frisco. Cheyenne again, in the afternoonthis time, and then west over the range; crossing the Divide at midnight at Creston, arriving at SaltLake City at dawn - a city of sprinklers, the least likely place for Dean to have been born; then outto Nevada in the hot sun, Reno by nightfall, its twinkling Chinese streets; then up the Sierra Nevada,pines, stars, mountain lodges signifying Frisco romances - a little girl in the back seat, crying to hermother, .Mama when do we get home to Truckee?. And Truckee itself, homey Truckee, and thendown the hill to the flats of Sacramento. I suddenly realized I was in California. Warm, palmy air - airyou can kiss - and palms. Along the storied Sacramento River on a superhighway; into the hills again;up, down; and suddenly the vast expanse of bay (it was just before dawn) with the sleepy lights ofFrisco festooned across. Over the Oakland Bay Bridge I slept soundly for the first time sinceDenver; so that I was rudely jolted in the bus station at Market and Fourth into the memory of thefact that I was three thousand two hundred miles from my aunt’s house in Paterson, New Jersey. Iwandered out like a haggard ghost, and there she was, Frisco - long,. bleak streets with trolleywiresall shrouded in fog and whiteness. I stumbled around a few blocks. Weird bums (Mission and Third)asked me for dimes in the dawn. I heard music somewhere. .Boy, am I going to dig all this later! Butnow I’ve got to find Remi Boncoeur..Mill City, where Remi lived, was a collection of shacks in a valley, housing-project shacks builtfor Navy Yard workers during the war; it was in a canyon, and a deep one, treed profusedly on allslopes. There were special stores and barber shops and tailor shops for the people of the project. Itwas, so they say, the only community in America where whites and Negroes lived togethervoluntarily; and that was so, and so wild and joyous a place I’ve never seen since. On the door ofRemi’s shack was the note he had pinned up there three weeks ago.SAL PARADISE! [in huge letters, printed]If nobody’s home climb in through the window.Signed,Remi Boncoeur.The note was weatherbeaten and gray by now.I climbed in and there he was, sleeping with his girl, Lee Ann - on a bed he stole from a merchantship, as he told me later; imagine the deck engineer of a merchant ship sneaking over the side in themiddle of the night with a bed, and heaving and straining at the oars to shore. This barely explainsRemi Boncoeur.The reason I’m going into everything that happened in San Fran is because it ties up witheverything else all the way down the line. Remi Boncoeur and I met at prep school years ago; but thething that really linked us together was my former wife. Remi found her first. He came into my dormroom one night and said, .Paradise, get up, the old maestro has come to see you.. I got up anddropped some pennies on the floor when I put my pants on. It was four in the afternoon; I used tosleep all the time in college. .All right, all right, don’t drop your gold all over the place. I have foundthe gonest little girl in the world and I am going straight to the Lion’s Den with her tonight.. And hedragged me to meet her. A week later she was going with me. Remi was a tall, dark, handsomeFrenchman (he looked like a kind of Marseille black-marketeer of twenty); because he was French39he had to talk in jazz American; his English was perfect, his French was perfect. He liked to dresssharp, slightly on the collegiate side, and go out with fancy blondes and spend a lot of money. It’s notthat he ever blamed me for taking off with his girl; it was only a point that always tied us together;that guy was loyal to me and had real affection for me, and God knows why.When I found him in Mill City that morning he had fallen on the beat and evil days that come toyoung guys in their middle twenties. He was hanging around waiting for a ship, and to earn his livinghe had a job as a special guard in the barracks across the canyon. His girl Lee Ann had a bad tongueand gave him a calldown every day. They spent all week saving pennies and went out Saturdays tospend fifty bucks in three hours. Remi wore shorts around the shack, with a crazy Army cap on hishead. Lee Ann went around with her hair up in pincurls. Thus attired, they yelled at each other allweek. 1 never saw so many snarls in all my born days. But on Saturday night, smiling graciously ateach other, they took off like a pair of successful Hollywood characters and went on the town.Remi woke up and saw me come in the window. His great laugh, one of the greatest laughs in theworld, dinned in my ear. .Aaaaah Paradise, he comes in through the window, he follows instructionsto a T. Where have you been, you’re two weeks late!. He slapped me on the back, he punched LeeAnn in the ribs, he leaned on the wall and laughed and cried, he pounded the table so you could hearit everywhere in Mill City, and that great long .Aaaaah. resounded around the canyon. .Paradise!.he screamed. .The one and only indispensable Paradise..I had just come through the little fishing village of Sausalito, and the first thing I said was, .Theremust be a lot of Italians in Sausalito...There must be a lot of Italians in Sausalito!. he shouted at the top of his lungs. .Aaaaah!. Hepounded himself, he fell on the bed, he almost rolled on the floor. .Did you hear what Paradise said?There must be a lot of Italians in Sausalito? Aaaah-haaa! Hoo! Wow! Wheel. He got red as a beet,laughing. .Oh, you slay me, Paradise, you’re the funniest man in the world, and here you are, youfinally got here, he came in through the window, you saw him, Lee Ann, he followed instructions andcame in through the window. Aaah! Hooo!.The strange thing was that next door to Remi lived a Negro called Mr. Snow whose laugh, Iswear on the Bible, was positively and finally the one greatest laugh in all this world. This Mr. Snowbegan his laugh from the supper table when his old wife said something casual; he got up, apparentlychoking, leaned on the wall, looked up to heaven, and started; he staggered through the door,leaning on neighbors’ walls; he was drunk with it, he reeled throughout Mill City in the shadows,raising his whooping triumphant call to the demon god that must have prodded him to do it. I don’tknow if he ever finished supper. There’s a possibility that Remi, without knowing it, was picking upfrom this amazing man, Mr. Snow. And though Remi was having worklife problems and bad lovelifewith a sharp-tongued woman, he at least had learned to laugh almost better than anyone in the world,and I saw all the fun we were going to have in Frisco.The pitch was this: Remi slept with Lee Ann in the bed across the room, and I slept in the cot bythe window. I was not to touch Lee Ann. Remi at once made a speech concerning this. .I don’twant to find you two playing around when you think I’m not looking. You can’t teach the oldmaestro a new tune. This is an original saying of mine.. I looked at Lee Ann. She was a fetchinghunk, a honey-colored creature, but there was hate in her eyes for both of us. Her ambition was tomarry a rich man. She came from a small town in Oregon. She rued the day she ever took up withRemi. On one of his big showoff weekends he spent a hundred dollars on her and she thought she’dfound an heir. Instead she was hung-up in this shack, and for lack of anything else she had to staythere. She had a job in Frisco; she had to take the Greyhound bus at the crossroads and go in everyday. She never forgave Remi for it.40I was to stay in the shack and write a shining original story for a Hollywood studio. Remi wasgoing to fly down in a stratosphere liner with this harp under his arm and make us all rich; Lee Annwas to go with him; he was going to introduce her to his buddy’s father, who was a famous directorand an intimate of W. C. Fields. So the first week I stayed in the shack in Mill City, writing furiouslyat some gloomy tale about New York that I thought would satisfy a Hollywood director, and thetrouble with it was that it was too sad. Remi could barely read it, and so he just carried it down toHollywood a few weeks later. Lee Ann was too bored and hated us too much to bother reading it. Ispent countless rainy hours drinking coffee and scribbling. Finally I told Remi it wouldn’t do; Iwanted a job; I had to depend on them for cigarettes. A shadow of disappointment crossed Remi’sbrow - he was always being disappointed about the funniest things. He had a heart of gold.He arranged to get me the same kind of job he had, as a guard in the barracks. I went through thenecessary routine, and to my surprise the bastards hired me. I was sworn in by the local police chief,given a badge, a club, and now I was a special policeman. I wondered what Dean and Carlo andOld Bull Lee would say about this. I had to have navy-blue trousers to go with my black jacket andcop cap; for the first two weeks I had to wear Remi’s trousers; since he was so tall, and had apotbelly from eating voracious meals out of boredom, I went flapping around like Charlie Chaplin tomy first night of work. Remi gave me a flashlight and his .32 automatic..Where’d you get this gun?. I asked..On my way to the Coast last summer I jumped off the train at North Platte, Nebraska, to stretchmy legs, and what did I see in the window but this unique little gun, which I promptly bought andbarely made the train..And I tried to tell him what North Platte meant to me, buy-mg the whisky with the boys, and heslapped me on the back and said I was the funniest man in the world.With the flashlight to illuminate my way, I climbed the steep walls of the south canyon, got up onthe highway streaming! with cars Frisco-bound in the night, scrambled down the other! side, almostfalling, and came to the bottom of a ravine where! a little farmhouse stood near a creek and whereevery blessed! night the same dog barked at me. Then it was a fast walk along a silvery, dusty roadbeneath inky trees of California - a I road like in The Mark of Zorro and a road like all the roads!you see in Western B movies. I used to take out my gun and] play cowboys in the dark. Then Iclimbed another hill and! there were the barracks. These barracks were for the temporary quarteringof overseas construction workers. The men who came through stayed there, waiting for their ship.Most of them were bound for Okinawa. Most of them were running | away from something - usuallythe law. There were tough 9 groups from Alabama, shifty men from New York, all kinds j from allover. And, knowing full well how horrible it would be to work a full year in Okinawa, they drank.The job of the special guards was to see that they didn’t tear the barracks’ down. We had ourheadquarters in the main building, just a wooden contraption with panel-walled offices. Here at aroll- 。 top desk we sat around, shifting our guns off our hips and! yawning, and the old cops toldstories.It was a horrible crew of men, men with cop-souls, all except Remi and myself. Remi was onlytrying to make a living, and so was I, but these men wanted to make arrests and compliments fromthe chief of police in town. They even said < that if you didn’t make at least one a month you’d befired. I. gulped at the prospect of making an arrest. What actually’ happened was that I was asdrunk as anybody in the barracks -the night all hell broke loose.This was a night when the schedule was so arranged that 1 was all alone for six hours - the onlycop on the grounds; and everybody in the barracks seemed to have gotten drunk that’ night. It wasbecause their ship was leaving in the morning. < They drank like seamen the night before the anchor41goes up. I sat in the office with my feet on the desk, reading Blue Book adventures about Oregonand the north country, when suddenly I realized there was a great hum of activity in the usually quietnight. I went out. Lights were burning in practically every damned shack on the grounds. Men wereshouting, bottles were breaking. It was do or die for me. I took my flashlight and went to the noisiestdoor and knocked. Someone opened it about six inches..What do you want?.I said, .I’m guarding these barracks tonight and you boys are supposed to keep quiet as much asyou can. - or some such silly remark. They slammed the door in my face. I stood looking at thewood of it against my nose. It was like a Western movie; the time had come for me to assert myself.I knocked again. They opened up wide this time. .Listen,. I said, .I don’t want to come aroundbothering you fellows, but I’ll lose my job if you make too much noise...Who are you?..I’m a guard here...Never seen you before...Well, here’s my badge...What are you doing with that pistolcracker on your ass?..It isn’t mine,. I apologized. .I borrowed it...Have a drink, fer krissakes.. I didn’t mind if I did. I took two.I said, .Okay, boys? You’ll keep quiet, boys? I’ll get hell, you know...It’s all right, kid,. they said. .Go make your rounds. Come back for another drink if you wantone..And I went to all the doors in this manner, and pretty soon I was as drunk as anybody else.Come dawn, it was my duty to put up the American flag on a sixty-foot pole, and this morning I putit up upside down and went home to bed. When I came back in the evening the regular cops weresitting around grimly in the office..Say, bo, what was all the noise around here last night? We’ve had complaints from people wholive in those houses across the canyon...I don’t know,. I said. .It sounds pretty quiet right now...The whole contingent’s gone. You was supposed to keep order around here last night - the chiefis yelling at you. And another thing - do you know you can go to jail for putting the American flagupside down on a government pole?..Upside down?. I was horrified; of course I hadn’t realized it. I did it every morningmechanically..Yessir,. said a fat cop who’d spent twenty-two years as a guard in Alcatraz. .You could go tojail for doing something like that.. The others nodded grimly. They were always sitting around ontheir asses; they were proud of their jobs. They handled their guns and talked about them. They wereitching to shoot somebody. Remi and me.The cop who had been an Alcatraz guard was potbellied and about sixty, retired but unable tokeep away from the atmospheres that had nourished his dry soul all his life. Every night he drove towork in his ‘35 Ford, punched the clock exactly on time, and sat down at the rolltop desk. Helabored painfully over the simple form we all had to fill out every night - rounds, time, whathappened, and so on. Then he leaned back and told stories. .You should have been here about twomonths ago when me and Sledge. (that was another cop, a youngster who wanted to be a TexasRanger and had to be satisfied with his present lot) .arrested a drunk in Barrack G. Boy, you shouldhave seen the blood fly. I’ll take you over there tonight and show you the stains on the wall. We hadhim bouncing from one wall to another. First Sledge hit him, and then me, and then he subsided and42went quietly. That fellow swore to kill us when he got out of jail - got thirty days. Here it is sixtydays, and he ain’t showed up.. And this was the big point of the story. They’d put such a fear in himthat he was too yellow to come back and try to kill them.The old cop went on, sweetly reminiscing about the horrors of Alcatraz. .We used to march ‘emlike an Army platoon to breakfast. Wasn’t one man out of step. Everything went like clockwork.You should have seen it. I was a guard there for twenty-two years. Never had any trouble. Thoseboys knew we meant business. A lot of fellows get soft guarding prisoners, and they’re the ones thatusually get in trouble. Now you take you - from what I’ve been observing about you, you seem tome a little bit too leenent with the men.. He raised his pipe and looked at me sharp. .They takeadvantage of that, you know..I knew that. I told him I wasn’t cut out to be a cop..Yes, but that’s the job that you applied for. Now you got to make up your mind one way or theother, or you’ll never get anywhere. It’s your duty. You’re sworn in. You can’t compromise withthings like this. Law and order’s got to be kept..I didn’t know what to say; he was right; but all I wanted to do was sneak out into the night anddisappear somewhere, and go and find out what everybody was doing all over the country.The other cop, Sledge, was tall, muscular, with a black-haired crew-cut and a nervous twitch inhis neck - like a boxer who’s always punching one fist into another. He rigged himself out like aTexas Ranger of old. He wore a revolver down low, with ammunition belt, and carried a small quirtof some kind, and pieces of leather hanging everywhere, like a walking torture chamber: shiny shoes,low-hanging jacket, cocky hat, everything but boots. He was always showing me holds -reachingdown under my crotch and lifting me up nimbly. In point of strength I could have thrown him clear tothe ceiling with the same hold, and I knew it well; but I never let him know for fear he’d want awrestling match. A wrestling match with a guy like that would end up in shooting. I’m sure he was abetter shot; I’d never had a gun in my life. It scared me even to load one. He desperately wanted tomake arrests. One night we were alone on duty and he came back red-faced mad..I told some boys in there to keep quiet and they’re still making noise. I told them twice. I alwaysgive a man two chances. Not three. You come with me and I’m going back there and arrest them...Well, let me give them a third chance,. I said. .I’ll talk to them...No, sir, I never gave a man more than two chances.. I sighed. Here we go. We went to theoffending room, and Sledge opened the door and told everybody to file out. It was embarrassing.Every single one of us was blushing. This is the story of America. Everybody’s doing what they thinkthey’re supposed to do. So what if a bunch of men talk in loud voices and drink the night? ButSledge wanted to prove something. He made sure to bring me along in case they jumped him. Theymight have. They were all brothers, all from Alabama. We strolled back to the station, Sledge infront and me in back.One of the boys said to me, .Tell that crotch-eared mean-ass to take it easy on us. We might getfired for this and never get to Okinawa...I’ll talk to him..In the station I told Sledge to forget it. He said, for everybody to hear, and blushing, .I don’t giveanybody no more than two chances...What the hail,. said the Alabaman, .what difference does it make? We might lose our jobs..Sledge said nothing and filled out the arrest forms. He arrested only one of them; he called the prowlcar in town. They came and took him away. The other brothers walked off sullenly. .What’s Magoing to say?. they said. One of them came back to me. .You tell that Tex-ass son of a bitch if mybrother ain’t out of jail tomorrow night he’s going to get his ass fixed.. I told Sledge, in a neutral43way, and he said nothing. The brother was let off easy and nothing happened. The contingentshipped out; a new wild bunch came in. If it hadn’t been for Remi Boncoeur I wouldn’t have stayedat this job two hours.But Remi Boncoeur and I were on duty alone many a night, and that’s when everything jumped.We made our first round of the evening in a leisurely way, Remi trying all the doors to see if theywere locked and hoping to find one unlocked. He’d say, .For years I’ve an idea to develop a doginto a super thief who’d go into these guys’ rooms and take dollars out of their pockets. I’d train himto take nothing but green money; I’d make him smell it all day long. If there was any humanlypossible way, I’d train him to take only twenties.. Remi was full of mad schemes; he talked aboutthat dog for weeks. Only once he found an unlocked door. I didn’t like the idea, so I sauntered ondown the hall. Remi stealthily opened it up. He came face to face with the barracks supervisor. Remihated that man’s face. He asked me, .What’s the name of that Russian author you’re always talkingabout - the one who put the newspapers in his shoe and walked around in a stovepipe hat he foundin a garbage pail?. This was an exaggeration of what I’d told Remi of Dostoevski. .Ah, that’s it that’sit -Dostioffski. A man with a face like that supervisor can only have one name - it’sDostioffski.. The only unlocked door he ever found belonged to Dostioffski. D. was asleep when heheard someone fiddling with his doorknob. He got up in his pajamas. He came to the door lookingtwice as ugly as usual. When Remi opened it he saw a haggard face suppurated with hatred and dullfury.