05 October 2008

back to Philly and got on route one and arrived in Baltimore in an hour and a half. Neal insisted I drive thru Baltimore for traffic practice; that was allright except he and Louanne insisted on steering while they kissed and fooled around. It was crazy; the radio was on fullblast. Neal beat drums on the dashboard till a great sag developed in it. The poor Hudson---the slowboat to China---was receiving her beating. “Oh man what kicks!” yelled Neal. “Now Louanne, listen really honey, you know that I’m capable of doing 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 SP day run, San Luis Obispo, I’ll be home every night…I’ll be back at Carolyn’s every morning…We can work it, we’ve done it before.” It was alright with Louanne, she was really out for Carolyn’s scalp. The understanding had been that Louanne 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 ass at the other end of the continent. But why think about that when all the golden land’s ahead of you and all kind 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 in the presidency. Great displays of war might were lined along Pennsylvania Avenue as we rolled by in our battered boat. There were B-29s, PT boats, artillery, all kinds of war materiel laid out in the snowy grass; the last thing was a regular small ordinary lifeboat that looked pitiful and foolish. Neal slowed down to look at it. He kept shaking his head in awe. “What are these people up to? Our holy American slopjaws…Harry’s sleeping somewhere in this town…Good old Harry…Man from Missouri, as I am…That must be his own boat.” We suddenly found ourselves trapped in a circular drive from which there was no exit. We had to go to the end of it. We huzzahed; there was a restaurant and we were hungry. But the restaurant was closed. We had to run back over the same no-exit circular drive till we found the human hiway again. I’ve never seen that strange thing since; it’s in Virginia just off a Washington bridge; there’s no way out but to patronize the