The endless poem.
I don’t know when we’ll meet again or what’ll happen in the future, but Desolation, Desolation, I owe so much to Desolation, thank you forever for guiding me to the place where I learned all. Now comes the sadness of coming back to cities and I’ve grown two months older and there’s all that humanity of bars and burlesque shows and gritty love, all upsidedown in the void God bless them, but Japhy you and me forever we know, O ever youthful, O ever weeping.
Then Indiana fields again, and St. Louis as ever in its great valley clouds of afternoon. The muddy cobbles and the Montana logs, the broken steamboats, the ancient signs, the grass and the ropes by the river. The endless poem.
Fury spat out of his eyes when he told of things he hated; great glows of joy replaced this when he suddenly got happy; every muscle twitched to live and go.
I felt like laughing, he loomed so funny. But the moutains were mighty solemn, and so was Japhy, and for that matter so was I, and in fact, laughter is solemn.
I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.
The world ain’t so bad, when you got Japhies, I thought, and felt glad.
In fact we’re all strangers with strange eyes sitting in a midnight livingroom for nothing.
Where go? what do? what for? – sleep.
That same night I dug Lampshade on Fillmore and Geary. Lampshade is a big colored guy who comes into musical Frisco saloons with coat, hat, and scarf and jumps on the bandstand and starts singing; the veins pop in his forehead; he heaves back and blows a big foghorn blues out of every muscle in his soul.
As in a dream we zoomed through small crossroads towns smack out of the darkness, and passed long lines of lounging harvest hands and cowboys in the night.
But what’s all this giving of ourselves, what’s there to give that’ll help anybody.
When you write about the Banana King you write about the human-interest things of life.” I told him I didn’t give a damn about the Banana King. “Until you learn to realize the importance of the Banana King you will know absolutely nothing about the human-interest things of the world,” said Remi emphatically.
For a moment it was no different from being in Newark, except for the great hugeness outside that I loved so much.
Chad is a slim blond boy with a strange witch-doctor face that goes with his interest in anthropology and prehistory Indians, His nose beaks softly and almost creamily under a golden flare of hair; he has the beauty and grace of a Western hotshot who’s danced in roadhouses and played a little football. A quavering twang comes out when he speaks.
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.
Bull had a sentimental streak about the old days in America, especially 1910, when you could get morphine in a drugstore without prescription and Chinese smoked opium.
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.
Carlo’s basement apartment was on Grant Street in an old red-brick rooming house near a church. You went down an alley, down some stone steps, opened an old raw door, and went through a kind of cellar till you came to his board door. It was like the room of a Russian saint: one bed, a candle burning, stone walls that oozed moisture, and a crazy makeshift ikon of some kind that he had made. He read me his poetry.
I looked greedily out the window: stucco houses and palms and drive-ins, the whole mad thing, the ragged promised land, the fantastic end of America.