07 December 2008

didn’t care. He smiled joyously into space and kept the beat, tho softly, and with bop subtleties, a giggling rippling background for big solid foghorn blues the boys were blowing unawares of him. The big Negro bullneck drummer sat waiting for his turn. “What that man doing?” he said. “Play the music!” he said. “What in hell!” he said. “Shh-ee-eet!” and looked away disgusted. Freddy’s boy showed up: he was a taut little Negro with a great big Cadillac. We all jumped in. He hunched over the wheel and blew the car clear across Frisco without stopping once, seventy miles per, right through traffic and nobody even noticed him he was so good. Neal was in ecstasies. “Dig this guy, man! dig the way he sits there and don’t move a bone and just balls that jack and can talk all night while he’s doing it, only thing is he doesn’t bother with talking, he lets freddy do that, and Freddy’s his boy and tells him about life, listen to them, O man the things, the things I could---I wish---O yes…let’s go, let’s not stop, Go now! Yes!” And Freddy’s boy wound around a corner and bowled us right in front of Jackson’s Hole and was parked. A cab pulled up: out of it jumped a skinny withered little Negro preacherman who threw a dollar at the cabby and yelled “Blow!” and ran into the club pulling on his coat (just come out of work) and dashed right through the downstairs bar yelling “Go, go, go!” and stumbled upstairs almost falling on his face and blew the door open and fell into the jazzsession room with his hands out to support him against anything he might fall on, and he fell right on Lampshade who was reduced to working as a waiter in Jackson’s Hole this season, and the music was there blasting and blasting and he stood transfixed in the open door screaming “Go man go!” And the man was a little short Negro with an alto horn that Neal said obviously lived with his grandmother just like Jim Holmes, slept all day and blew all night and blew a hundred choruses before he was he was ready to jump for fair, and that’s what he was doing. “It’s Allen Ginsberg!” screamed Neal 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 and kept his eyes transfixed on the