在路上 英文版-15

strange sense of maternal satisfaction in the air, for the girls were really looking at Dean the way amother looks at the dearest and most errant child, and he with his sad thumb and all his revelationsknew it well, and that was why he was able, in tick-tocking silence, to walk out of the apartmentwithout a word, to wait for us downstairs as soon as we’d made up our minds about time. This waswhat we sensed about the ghost on the sidewalk. I looked out the window. He was alone in thedoorway, digging the street. Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness - everything wasbehind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being..Come on, Galatea, Marie, let’s go hit the jazz joints and forget it. Dean will be dead someday.Then what can you say to him?..The sooner he’s dead the better,. said Galatea, and she spoke officially for almost everyone inthe room..Very well, then,. I said, .but now he’s alive and I’ll bet you want to know what he does nextand that’s because he’s got the secret that we’re all busting to find and it’s splitting his head wideopen and if he goes mad don’t worry, it won’t be your fault but the fault of God..They objected to this; they said I really didn’t know Dean; they said he was the worst scoundrelthat ever lived and I’d find out someday to my regret. I was amused to hear them protest so much.Roy Johnson rose to the defense of the ladies and said he knew Dean better than anybody, and allDean was, was just a very interesting and even amusing con-man. I went out to find Dean and wehad a brief talk about it..Ah, man, don’t worry, everything is perfect and fine.. He was rubbing his belly and licking hislips.1154The girls came down and we started out on our big night, once more pushing the car down thestreet. .Wheeoo! let’s go!. cried Dean, and we jumped in the back seat and clanked to the littleHarlem on Folsom Street.Out we jumped in the warm, mad night, hearing a wild tenorman bawling horn across the way,going .EE-YAH! EE-YAH! EE-YAH!. and hands clapping to the beat and folks yelling, .Go, go,go!. Dean was already racing across the street with his thumb in the air, yelling, .Blow, man, blow!.A bunch of colored men in Saturday-night suits were whooping it up in front. It was a sawdustsaloon with a small bandstand on which the fellows huddled with their hats on, blowing over people’sheads, a crazy place; crazy floppy sponren wandered around sometimes in their bathrobes, bottlesclanked in alleys. In back of the joint in a dark corridor beyond the splattered toilets scores of menand women stood against the wall drinking wine-spodiodi and spitting at the stars - wine and whisky.The behatted tenorman was blowing at the peak of a wonderfully satisfactory free idea, a rising andfalling riff that went from .EE-yah!. to a crazier .EE-de-lee-yah!. and blasted along to the rollingcrash of butt-scarred drums hammered by a big brutal Negro with a bullneck who didn’t give adamn about anything but punishing his busted tubs, crash, rattle-ti-boom, crash. Uproars of musicand the tenorman had it and everybody knew he had it. Dean was clutching his head in the crowd,and it was a mad crowd. They were all urging that tenorman to hold it and keep it with cries and wildeyes, and he was raising himself from a crouch and going down again with his horn, looping it up in aclear cry above the furor. A six-foot skinny Negro woman was rolling her bones at the man’shornbell, and he just jabbed it at her, .Ee! ee! ee!.Everybody was rocking and roaring. Galatea and Marie with beer in their hands were standing ontheir chairs, shaking and jumping. Groups of colored guys stumbled in from the street, falling overone another to get there. .Stay with it, man!. roared a man with a foghorn voice, and let out a biggroan that must have been heard clear out in Sacramento, ah-haa! .Whoo!. said Dean. He wasrubbing his chest, his belly; the sweat splashed from his face. Boom, kick, that drummer was kickinghis drums down the cellar and rolling the beat upstairs with his murderous sticks, rattlety-boom! Abig fat man was jumping on the platform, making it sag and creak. .Yoo!. The pianist was onlypounding the keys with spread-eagled fingers, chords, at intervals when the great tenorman wasdrawing breath for another blast - Chinese chords, shuddering the piano in every timber, chink, andwire, boing! The tenorman jumped down from the platform and stood in the crowd, blowing around;his hat was over his eyes; somebody pushed it back for him. He just hauled back and stamped hisfoot and blew down a hoarse, laughing blast, and drew breath, and raised the horn and blew high,wide, and screaming in the air. Dean was directly in front of him with his face lowered to the bell ofthe horn, clapping his hands, pouring sweat on the man’s keys, and the man noticed and laughed inhis horn a long quivering crazy laugh, and everybody else laughed and they rocked and rocked; andfinally the tenorman decided to blow his top and crouched down and held a note in high C for a longtime as everything else crashed along and the cries increased and I thought the cops would comeswarming from the nearest precinct. Dean was in a trance. The tenorman’s eyes were fixed straighton him; he had a madman who not only understood but cared and wanted to understand more andmuch more than there was, and they began dueling for this; everything came out of the horn, no morephrases, just cries, cries, .Baugh. and down to .Beep!. and up to .EEEEE!. and down to clinkersand over to sideways-echoing horn-sounds. He tried everything, up, down, sideways, upside down,horizontal, thirty degrees, forty degrees, and finally he fell back in somebody’s arms and gave up and116everybody pushed around and yelled, .Yes! Yes! He blowed that one!. Dean wiped himself with hishandkerchief.Then up stepped the tenorman on the bandstand and asked for a slow beat and looked sadly outthe open door over people’s heads and began singing .Close Your Eyes.. Things quieted down aminute. The tenorman wore a tattered suede jacket, a purple shirt, cracked shoes, and zoot pantswithout press; he didn’t care. He looked like a Negro Hassel. His big brown eyes were concernedwith sadness, and the singing of songs slowly and with long, thoughtful pauses. But in the secondchorus he got excited and grabbed the mike and jumped down from the bandstand and bent to it. Tosing a note he had to touch his shoetops and pull it all up to blow, and he blew so much he staggeredfrom the effect, and only recovered himself in time for the next long slow note. .Mu-u-u-usic pla-aa-a-a-a-ay!. He leaned back with his face to the ceiling, mike held below. He shook, he swayed.Then he leaned in, almost falling with his face against the mike. .Ma-a-a-ake it dream-y for dancing. - and he looked at the street outside with his lips curled in scorn, Billie Holiday’s hip sneer.while we go ro-man-n-n-cing. - he staggered sideways - .Lo-o-o-ove’s holi-da-a-ay. - he shookhis head with disgust and weariness at the whole world - .Will make it seem. - what would it makeit seem? everybody waited; he mourned - .O-kay.. The piano hit a chord. .So baby come on justclo-o-o-ose your pretty little ey-y-y-y-yes. - his mouth quivered, he looked at us, Dean and me,with an expression that seemed to say, Hey now, what’s this thing we’re all doing in this sad brownworld? -and then he came to the end of his song, and for this there had to be elaboratepreparations, during which time you could send all the messages to Garcia around the world twelvetimes and what difference did it make to anybody? because here we were dealing with the pit andprunejuice of poor beat life itself in the god-awful streets of man, so he said it and sang it, .Close your- . and blew it way up to the ceiling and through to the stars and on out - .Ey-y-y-y-y-y-es. andstaggered off the platform to brood. He sat in the corner with a bunch of boys and paid noattention to them. He looked down and wept. He was the greatest.Dean and I went over to talk to him. We invited him out to the car. In the car he suddenly yelled,.Yes! ain’t nothin I like better than good kicks! Where do we go?. Dean jumped up and down inthe seat, giggling maniacally. .Later! later!. said the tenorman. .I’ll get my boy to drive us down toJamson’s Nook, I got to sing. Man, I live to sing. Been singin ’Close Your Eyes’ for two weeks - Idon’t want to sing nothin else. What are you boys up to?. We told him we were going to New Yorkin two days. .Lord, I ain’t never been there and they tell me it’s a real jumpin town but I ain’t got nocause complainin where I am. I’m married, you know...Oh yes?. said Dean, lighting up. .And where is the darling tonight?..What do you mean?. said the tenorman, looking at him out of the corner of his eye. .I tole youI was married to her, didn’t I?..Oh yes, oh yes,. said Dean. .I was just asking. Maybe she has friends? or sisters? A ball, youknow, I’m just looking for a ball...Yah, what good’s a ball, life’s too sad to be ballin all the time,. said the tenorman, lowering hiseye to the street. .Shh-eee-it!. he said. .I ain’t got no money and I don’t care tonight..We went back in for more. The girls were so disgusted with Dean and me for gunning off andjumping around that they had left and gone to Jamson’s Nook on foot; the car wouldn’t run anyway.We saw a horrible sight in the bar: a white hipster fairy had come in wearing a Hawaiian shirt andwas asking the big drummer if he could sit in. The musicians looked at him suspiciously. .Do youblow?. He said he did, mincing. They looked at one another and said, .Yeah, yeah, that’s what theman does, shhh-ee-it!. So the fairy sat down at the tubs and they started the beat of a jump numberand he began stroking the snares with soft goofy bop brushes, swaying his neck with that complacent117Reich-analyzed ecstasy that doesn’t mean anything except too much tea and soft foods and goofykicks on the cool order. But he didn’t care. He smiled joyously into space and kept the beat, thoughsoftly, with bop subtleties, a giggling, rippling background for big solid foghorn blues the boys wereblowing, unaware of him. The big Negro bullneck drummer sat waiting for his turn. .What that mandoing?. he said. .Play the music!. he said. .What in hell!. he said. .Shh-ee-eet!. and looked away,disgusted.The tenorman’s boy showed up; he was a little taut Negro with a great big Cadillac. We alljumped in. He hunched over the wheel and blew the car clear across Frisco without stopping once,seventy miles an hour, right through traffic and nobody even noticed him, he was so good. Dean wasin ecstasies. .Dig this guy, man! dig the way he sits there and don’t move a bone and just balls thatjack and can talk all night while he’s doing it, only thing is he doesn’t bother with talking, ah, man, thethings, the things I could - I wish - oh, yes. Let’s go, let’s not stop - go now! Yes!. And the boywound around a corner and bowled us right in front of Jamson’s Nook and was parked. A cabpulled up; out of it jumped a skinny, withered little Negro preacherman who threw a dollar at thecabby and yelled, .Blow!. and ran into the club and dashed right through the downstairs bar, yelling,.Blowblowblow!. and stumbled upstairs, almost falling on his face, and blew the door open and fellinto the jazz-session room with his hands out to support him against anything he might fall on, and hefell right on Lampshade, who was working as a waiter in Jamson’s Nook that season, and the musicwas there blasting and blasting and he stood transfixed in the open door, screaming, .Blow for me,man, blow!. And the man was a little short Negro with an alto horn that Dean said obviously livedwith his grandmother just like Tom Snark, slept all day and blew all night, and blew a hundredchoruses before he was ready to jump for fair, and that’s what he was doing..It’s Carlo Marx!. screamed Dean above the fury.And it was. This little grandmother’s boy with the taped-up alto had beady, glittering eyes; small,crooked feet; spindly legs; and he hopped and flopped with his horn and threw his feet around andkept his eyes fixed on the audience (which was just people laughing at a dozen tables, the room thirtyby thirty feet and low ceiling), and he never stopped. He was very simple in his ideas. What he likedwas the surprise of a new simple variation of a chorus. He’d go from .ta-tup-tader-rara . . . ta-tuptader-rara,. repeating and hopping to it and kissing and smiling into his horn, to .ta-tup-EE-da-dedera-RUP! ta-tup-EE-da-de-dera-RUP!. and it was all great moments of laughter andunderstanding for him and everyone else who heard. His tone was clear as a bell, high, pure, andblew straight in our faces from two feet away. Dean stood in front of him, oblivious to everything elsein the world, with his head bowed, his hands socking in together, his whole body jumping on hisheels and the sweat, always the sweat, pouring and splashing down his tormented collar to lieactually in a pool at his feet. Galatea and Marie were there, and it took us five minutes to realize it.Whoo, Frisco nights, the end of the continent and the end of doubt, all dull doubt and tomfoolery,good-by. Lampshade was roaring around with his trays of beer; everything he did was in rhythm; heyelled at the waitress with the beat; .Hey now, baby baby, make a way, make a way, it’sLampshade comin your way,. and he hurled by her with the beers in the air and roared through theswinging doors into the kitchen and danced with the cooks and came sweating back. The hornmansat absolutely motionless at a corner table with an untouched drink in front of him, staring gook-eyedinto space, his hands hanging at his sides till they almost touched the floor, his feet outspread likelolling tongue his body shriveled into absolute weariness and entranced sorrow and what-all was onhis mind: a man who knocked self out every evening and let the others put the quietus him in thenight. Everything swirled around him like a cloud. And that little grandmother’s alto, that little CarloMarx hopped and monkeydanced with his magic horn and blew two hundred choruses of blues,118each one more frantic than the! other, and no signs of failing energy or willingness to call any-| thing aday. The whole room shivered.On the corner of Fourth and Folsom an hour later I stood 1 with Ed Fournier, a San Franciscoalto man who waited with! me while Dean made a phone call in a saloon to have Roy I Johnson pickus up. It wasn’t anything much, we were just I talking, except that suddenly we saw a very strangeand insane sight. It was Dean. He wanted to give Roy Johnson the I address of the bar, so he toldhim to hold the phone a minute ] and ran out to see, and to do this he had to rush pellmell through along bar of brawling drinkers in white shirtsleeves, go to the middle of the street, and look at the postsigns. He did this, crouched low to the ground like Groucho Marx, his feet carrying him with amazingswiftness out of the bar, like an apparition, with his balloon thumb stuck up in the night, and came toa whirling stop in the middle of the road, looking everywhere above him for the signs. They werehard to see in the dark, and he spun a dozen times in the road, thumb upheld, in a wild, anxioussilence, a wild-haired person with a ballooning thumb held up like a great goose of the sky, spinningand spinning in the dark, the other hand distractedly inside his pants. Ed Fournier was saying, .Iblow a sweet tone wherever I go and if people don’t like it ain’t nothin I can do about it. Say, man,that buddy of yours is a crazy cat, looka him over there. - and we looked. There was a big silenceeverywhere as Dean saw the signs and rushed back in the bar, practically going under someone’slegs as they came out and gliding so fast through the bar that everybody had to do a double take tosee him. A moment later Roy Johnson showed up, and with the same amazing swiftness. Dean glidedacross the street and into the car, without a sound. We were off again..Now, Roy, I know you’re all hung-up with your wife about this thing but we absolutely mustmake Forty-sixth and Geary in the incredible time of three minutes or everything is lost. Ahem! Yes!(Cough-cough.) In the morning Sal and I are leaving for New York and this is absolutely our lastnight of kicks and I know you won’t mind..No, Roy Johnson didn’t mind; he only drove through every red light he could find and hurried usalong in our foolishness. At dawn he went home to bed. Dean and I had ended up with a coloredguy called Walter who ordered drinks at the bar and had them lined up and said, .Wine-spodiodi!.which was a shot of port wine, a shot of whisky, and a shot of port wine. .Nice sweet jacket for allthat bad whisky!. he yelled.He invited us to his home for a bottle of beer. He lived in the tenements in back of Howard. Hiswife was asleep when we came in. The only light in the apartment was the bulb over her bed. Wehad to get up on a chair and unscrew the bulb as she lay smiling there; Dean did it, fluttering hislashes. She was about fifteen years older than Walter and the sweetest woman in the world. Then wehad to plug in the extension over her bed, and she smiled and smiled. She never asked Walter wherehe’d been, what time it was, nothing. Finally we were set in the kitchen with the extension and satdown around the humble table to drink the beer and tell the stories. Dawn. It was time to leave andmove the extension back to the bedroom and screw back the bulb. Walter’s wife smiled and smiledas we repeated the insane thing all over again. She never said a word.Out on the dawn street Dean said, .Now you see, man, there’s real woman for you. Never aharsh word, never a complaint, or modified; her old man can come in any hour of the night withanybody and have talks in the kitchen and drink the beer and leave any old time. This is a man, andthat’s his castle.. He pointed up at the tenement. We stumbled off. The big night was over, Acruising car followed us suspiciously for a few blocks. We bought fresh doughnuts in a bakery onThird Street and ate them in the gray, ragged street. A tall, bespectacled, well-dressed fellow camestumbling down the street with a Negro in a truck-driving cap. They were a strange pair. A big truckrolled by and the Negro pointed at it excitedly and tried to express his feeling. The tall white man119furtively looked over his shoulder and counted his money. .It’s Old Bull Lee!. giggled Dean..Counting his money and worried about everything, and all that other boy wants to do is talk abouttrucks and things he knows.. We followed them awhile.Holy flowers floating in the air, were all these tired faces in the dawn of Jazz America.We had to sleep; Galatea Dunkel’s was out of the question. Dean knew a railroad brakemancalled Ernest Burke who lived with his father in a hotel room on Third Street. Originally he’d been ongood terms with them, but lately not so, and the idea was for me to try persuading them to let ussleep on their floor. It was horrible. I had to call from a morning diner. The old man answered thephone suspiciously. He remembered me from what his son had told him. To our surprise he camedown to the lobby and let us in. It was just a sad old brown Frisco hotel. We went upstairs and theold man was kind enough to give us the entire bed. .I have to get up anyway,. he said and retired tothe little kitchenette to brew coffee. He began telling stories about his railroading days. He remindedme of my father. I stayed up and listened to the stories. Dean, not listening, was washing his teethand bustling around and saying, .Yes, that’s right,. to everything he said. Finally we slept; and in themorning Ernest came back from a Western Division run and took the bed as Dean and I got up.Now old Mr. Burke dolled himself up for a date with his middle-aged sweetheart. He put on a greentweed suit, a cloth cap, also green tweed, and stuck a flower in his lapel..These romantic old broken-down Frisco brakemen live sad but eager lives of their own,. I toldDean in the toilet. .It was very kind of him to let us sleep here...Yass, yass,. said Dean, not listening. He rushed out to get a travel-bureau car. My job was tohurry to Galatea Dunkel’s for our bags. She was sitting on the floor with her fortune-telling cards..Well, good-by, Galatea, and I hope everything works out fine...When Ed gets back I’m going to take him to Jamson’s Nook every night and let him get his fillof madness. Do you think that’ll work, Sal? I don’t know what to do...What do the cards say?..The ace of spades is far away from him. The heart cards always surround him - the queen ofhearts is never far. See this jack of spades? That’s Dean, he’s always around...Well, we’re leaving for New York in an hour...Someday Dean’s going to go on one of these trips and never come back..She let me take a shower and shave, and then I said good-by and took the bags downstairs andhailed a Frisco taxi-jitney, which was an ordinary taxi that ran a regular route and you could hail itfrom any corner and ride to any corner you want for about fifteen cents, cramped in with otherpassengers like on a bus, but talking and telling jokes like in a private car. Mission Street that lastday in Frisco was a great riot of construction work, children playing, whooping Negroes cominghome from work, dust, excitement, the great buzzing and vibrating hum of what is really America’smost excited city -and overhead the pure blue sky and the joy of the foggy sea that always rolls inat night to make everybody hungry for food and further excitement. I hated to leave; my stay hadlasted sixty-odd hours. With frantic Dean I was rushing through the world without a chance to see it.In the afternoon we were buzzing toward Sacramento and eastward again.1205The car belonged to a tall, thin fag who was on his way home to Kansas and wore dark glassesand drove with extreme care; the car was what Dean called a .fag Plymouth.; it had no pickup andno real power. .Effeminate car!. whispered Dean in my ear. There were two other passengers, acouple, typical halfway tourist who wanted to stop and sleep everywhere. The first stop would haveto be Sacramento, which wasn’t even the faintest beginning of the trip to Denver. Dean and I satalone in the back seat and left it up to them and talked. .Now, man, that alto man last night had IT heheld it once he found it; I’ve never seen a guy who could hold so long.. I wanted to know what.IT. meant. .Ah well. -Dean laughed - .now you’re asking me impon-de-rables - ahem! Here’s aguy and everybody’s there, right? Up to him to put down what’s on everybody’s mind. He starts thefirst chorus, then lines up his ideas, people, yeah, yeah, but get it, and then he rises to his fate and hasto blow equal to it. All of a sudden somewhere in the middle of the chorus he gets it -everybodylooks up and knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries. Time stops. He’s filling empty space withthe substance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes ofold blowing. He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it’s not the tune that counts but IT - .Dean could go no further; he was sweating telling about it.Then I began talking; I never talked so much in all my life. I told Dean that when I was a kid androde in cars I used to imagine I held a big scythe in my hand and cut down all the trees and posts andeven sliced every hill that zoomed past the window. .Yes! Yes!. yelled Dean. .I used to do it tooonly different scythe - tell you why. Driving across the West with the long stretches my scythe had tobe immeasurably longer and it had to curve over distant mountains, slicing off their tops, and reachanother level to get at further mountains and at the same time clip off every post along the road,regular throbbing poles. For this reason - O man, I have to tell you, NOW, I have IT - I have to tellyou the time my father and I and a pisspoor bum from Larimer Street took a trip to Nebraska in themiddle of the depression to sell flyswatters. And how we made them, we bought pieces of ordinaryregular old screen and pieces of wire that we twisted double and little pieces of blue and red cloth tosew around the edges and all of it for a matter of cents in a five-and-ten and made thousands offlyswatters and got in the old bum’s jalopy and went clear around Nebraska to every farmhouse andsold them for a nickel apiece - mostly for charity the nickels were given us, two bums and a boy,apple pies in the sky, and my old man in those days was always singing ’Hallelujah, I’m a bum, bumagain.’ And man, now listen to this, after two whole weeks of incredible hardship and bouncingaround and hustling in the heat to sell these awful makeshift flyswatters they started to argue aboutthe division of the proceeds and had a big fight on the side of the road and then made up and boughtwine and began drinking wine and didn’t stop for five days and five nights while I huddled and criedin the background, and when they were finished every last cent was spent and we were right backwhere we started from, Larimer Street. And my old man was arrested and I had to plead at court tothe judge to let him go cause he was my pa and I had no mother. Sal, I made great mature speechesat the age of eight in front of interested lawyers . . .. We were hot; we were going east; we wereexcited..Let me tell you more,. I said, .and only as a parenthesis within what you’re saying and toconclude my last thought. As a child lying back in my father’s car in the back seat I also had a visionof myself on a white horse riding alongside over every possible obstacle that presented itself: thisincluded dodging posts, hurling around houses, sometimes jumping over when I looked too late,121running over hills, across sudden squares with traffic that I had to dodge through incredibly - . .Yes!Yes! Yes!. breathed Dean ecstatically. .Only difference with me was, I myself ran, I had no horse.You were a Eastern kid and dreamed of horses; of course we won’t assume such things as we bothknow they are really dross and literary ideas, but merely that I in my perhaps wilder schizophreniaactually ran on foot along the car and at incredible speeds sometimes ninety, making it over everybush and fence and farmhouse and sometimes taking quick dashes to the hills and back withoutlosing a moment’s ground . . ..We were telling these things and both sweating. We had completely forgotten the people up frontwho had begun to wonder what was going on in the back seat. At one point the driver said, .ForGod’s sakes, you’re rocking the boat back there.. Actually we were; the car was swaying as Deanand I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blanktranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all ourlives..Oh, man! man! man!. moaned Dean. .And it’s not even the beginning of it - and now here weare at last going east together, we’ve never gone east together, Sal, think of it, we’ll dig Denvertogether and see what everybody’s doing although that matters little to us, the point being that weknow what IT is and we know TIME and we know that everything is really FINE.. Then hewhispered, clutching my sleeve, sweating, .Now you just dig them in front. They have worries,they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas,the weather, how they’ll get there - and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see. But they needto worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their soulsreally won’t be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and havingonce found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, andall the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end. Listen! Listen! Wellnow,’ he mimicked, .I don’t know - maybe we shouldn’t get gas in that station. I read recently inNational Petroffious Petroleum News that this kind of gas has a great deal of O-Octane gook in itand someone once told me it even had semi-official high-frequency cock in it, and I don’t know, wellI just don’t feel like it anyway . . .’ Man, you dig all this.. He was poking me furiously in the ribs tounderstand. I tried my wildest best. Bing, bang, it was all Yes! Yes! Yes! in the back seat and thepeople up front were mopping their brows with fright and wishing they’d never picked us up at thetravel bureau. It was only the beginning, too.In Sacramento the fag slyly bought a room in a hotel and invited Dean and me to come up for adrink, while the couple went to sleep at relatives’, and in the hotel room Dean tried everything in thebook to get money from the fag. It was insane. The fag began by saying he was very glad we hadcome along because he liked young men like us, and would we believe it, but he really didn’t likegirls and had recently concluded an affair with a man in Frisco in which he had taken the male roleand the man the female role. Dean plied him with businesslike questions and nodded eagerly. The fagsaid he would like nothing better than to know what Dean thought about all this. Warning him firstthat he had once been a hustler in his youth, Dean asked him how much money he had. I was in the