27 October 2008

Hunkey! I look for him everywhere I go and I never find him. He used to get us so hungup in Texas here. We’d drive in with Bill for groceries and Hunkey’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 niggertown 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 Joan because her food was rotting. It took us two days to find Hunkey. I got hungup myself---I 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. I took her back to the room. Bill was drunk. Allen was writing poetry. Hunkey didn’t show up till midnight, at the jeep. We found him sleeping in the backseat; he said he took about five sleeping pills. Man if my memory could only work 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 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-haaa!” They pinpointed out of sight. “Wow! Dig that gone gal on his belt! Yes!” Neal 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 hassels…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 Neal said “You drive and drive and you’re still in Texas tomorrow night.” The rain lashed down. I drove through a rickety little cow-town with a muddy mainstreet and found myself in a dead end. “Hey, what do