05 February 2009

bunch of Mexican boys. They pulled up fearfully, they thought it was the law. “Aren’t your headlights working? “Yes sir, yes sir.” they said. “Well” called Brierly “Happy New Year” and because he’d held up traffic for this ridiculous conversation horns were tooting behind. “Oh shut up!” yealled Brierly and shot the car ahead. He pointed his spotlight flush on the richest home in Dnever at four o’clock in the morning and explained every room to me as the beams illuminated the interior. People were sleeping in there,---he didn’t care. In his study he suddenly fished out an old full-face portrait of Neal when he was sixteen yrs. old. You never saw a chaster face. “See what Neal used to look like? That’s why I had faith in him then. Don’t worry I saw his possibilities---he just wouldn’t learn so I washed my hands of him.” “It’s too bad---Neal could have become a big man in the world. On the other hand I like him better the way he is. Big men in the world are unhappy.” “You wouldn’t say that Neal is happy would you?” “He’s ecstatic---if that’s more or less than happy.” “I should think it’s less. Getting all involved with three wives and kids all over the country---it’s absurd.” “Go find his mother for him.” “Anyway Jack it’s been a lot of fun.” Brierly grew serious. “Yes I’ve had a lot of fun and I’d live this life all over again. I’m getting more and more wrapped up in discovering and developing these kids---why I’ve left my law practice practically go to pot, I’ve abandoned real estate altogether and next year I think I’ll give up my Central City secretaryship. I’m back where I started teaching hi school English.” On Brierly’s blackboard in High School I saw the names of Carl Sandburg and Walt Whitman scribbled in chalk. A little Negro boy came to him with a problem. He had no time to deliver papers and do his homework all at the same time. Brierly called up his bosses and changed the hours and set everything straight. Boys coming in from vacation from Eastern Universities came to him for summer jobs. He merely picked up the phone and called the Mayor. “Do you happen to remember Bruce Rockwell at Columbia? He’s assistant to the mayor now you know---doing very well indeed. He was in your class wasn’t he” He’d been after me. I

04 February 2009

scraggled off to sleep in George’s hotel room on Glenarm. “I can’t even come home late---my father starts fighting with me then he turns on my mother. I tell you Jack I got to get out of Dnever quick or I’ll go crazy.” Well, and I stayed at Ed White’s and then later Beverly Burford fixed up a neat little basement room for me and we all ended up there with parties everynight for a week. George vanished off to his brother’s at Climax, Col. and we never saw him again and never will know if anybody’s signified with him since and if they’ve put him away in an iron hall or if he busts his gaskets in the night free. Ed White, Frank, Bev and I spent an entire week of afternoons in lovely Denver bars where the waitresses wear slacks and cut around with bashful loving eyes, not hardened waitresses but waitresses that fall in love with the clientele and have explosive affairs and huff and sweat and suffer from one bar to another; and we spent the same week in nights at Five Points listening to jazz, drinking booze in crazy colored saloons and gabbing till five o’clock in the morn in my basement. Noon usually found us reclined in Bev’s backyard among the little Denver kids who played cowboys and Indians and dropped on us from cherry trees in bloom. I was having a wonderful time and the whole world opened up before me because I had no dreams. Frank and I plotted to make Ed White come with us but he was stuck to his Denver life. I spent evenings chatting to with Justin W. Brierly in his study. Here he put on his Chinese dressinggown and pulled out salted nuts and straight Scotch. “Sit down Jack, and tell me everything about New York. How’s Neal? How’s Allen? How’s Lucien? Do you know where Hal Chase is?- -in Trinidad Colorado on a dig. Have you seen Mr. Hinkle anywhere in the country? What’s the latest on yr. friend Burroughs? Burford is still in Paris. Have you been having long talks with Ed? How do you like Jeffries? Is Beverly in good spirits these days?” Justin loved to talk about all of us. “It all describes a wonderful big circle, doesn’t it?” he said. “Don’t you think it’s fun?” He took me out for a ride in his Olds with the big spotlight. We were going down West Colfax when he saw a rickety Mexican jalopy with headlights off. He turned on his spotlight and put it flush on them, a

03 February 2009

open up in Denver will you Jack?- -mebbe I can get to my brother’s safe.” I certainly agreed. When we arrived in Denver I took him by the arm to Larimer street to pawn the penitentiary suit. The old Jew immediately sensed what it was before it was half unwrapped. “I don’t want that damn thing here, I get them every day from the Canon City boys.” All of Larimer street was overrun with ex-cons trying to sell their prison-spun suits. George ended up with the thing under his arm in a paper bag and walked around in brand new levis and sports shirt. We went to Neal’s old Glenarm bar---on the way George threw the suit in an ashcan---and called up Ed White. It was evening now. “Yo” chuckled Ed White. “Be right over.” In ten minutes he came loping into the bar with Frank Jeffries. They were both returned from France and tremendously disappointed with their Denver lives. They loved George and bought him beers. He began spending all his penitentiary money left and right. Again I was back in the soft dark Denver night with its holy alleys and crazy houses. We started hitting all the bars in town, roadhouses out on West Colfax, Five Points Negro bars, the works. Frank Jeffries had been waiting to meet me for years and now for the first time we were suspended together in front of a venture. “Jack, ever since I came back from France I ain’t had any idea what to do with myself. Is it true you’re going to Mexico? Hot-damn, could I go with you? I can get a hundred bucks and once I get there sign up for the GI Bill in Mexico City College.” Okay, it was agreed, Frank was coming with me. He was a rangy bashful shock-haired Denver boy with a big conman smile and slow easy-going Gary Cooper movements. “Hot-damn!” he said and stuck his thumbs on his belt and ambled down the street, swaying from side to side but slowly. His father was having it out with him. He had been opposed to France and now he was opposed to the idea of going to Mexico. Frank was wandering around Denver like a bum because of his fight with his father. That night after we’d done all our drinking and restrained George from getting his nose opened up in Hot Shoppe on Colfax---a fellow came in with two girls and we addressed him as “Hat” and wanted to meet the girls and George leaped for him---Frank

02 February 2009

bible, I used to sit on it on the stone floor, when they seed I was doing that they took the bible away and brought back a leetle pocket size one so big. Couldn’t sit on it so I read the whole bible and testament. Hey hey” he poked me, munching his candy, he was always eating candy because his stomach had been ruined in the pen and couldn’t stand anything else---“you know they’s some real hot things in that ba-ble.” He told me what it was to signify. “Anybody that’s leaving jail soon and starts talking about his release date is signifying to the other fellas that have to stay. We take him by the neck and say ‘Don’t signify with me!’ Bad thing to signify- -y’hear me?” “I won’t signify, George.” “Anybody signify with me my nose opens up, I get mad enough to kill. You know why I have been in jail all my life? Because I lost my temper when I was thirteen years old. I was in a movie with a boy and he made a crack about my mother---you know that dirty word----and I took out my jack-knife and cut up his throat and woulda killed him if they hadn’t drug me off. Judge said, Did you know what you were doing when you attacked your friend. Yessir your honor I did, I wanted to kill the sonofabitch and still do. So I didn’t get no parole and went straight to reform school. I got piles too from sitting in solitary. Don’t ever go to a Federal pen, they’re the worsest. Sheet, I could talk all night it’s been so long since I talked to somebody. You don’t know how GOOD I feel coming out. You just sitting in that bus when I got on---riding through Terre Haute---what was you thinking?” “I was just sitting there riding.” “Me, I was singing. I sat down next to you cause I was afraid to set down next to any gals for fear I go crazy and reach under their dress. I gotta wait a while.” “Another hitch in jail and you’ll be put away for life---you better take it easy from now.” “That’s what I intend to do, only trouble is m’nose opens up and I can’t tell what I’m doing.” He was on his way to live with his brother and sister-in-law; they had a job for him in Colorado. His ticket was bought by the Feds, his destination on the parole. Here was a young kid like Neal had been; his blood boiled too much for him to bear; his nose opened up; but no native saintliness to save him from the iron fate. “Be a buddy and watch m’nose don’t

01 February 2009

thinking their parents had lived smooth well-ordered lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot, of our actual lives, our actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. Juices inform the world, children never know. “Goodbye, goodbye.” Neal walked off in the long red dusk. Locomotive smokes reeled above him, just like in Tracy, just like in New Orleans. His shadow followed him, it aped his walk and thoughts and very being. He turned and waved coyly, bashfully. He gave me the brakeman’s hiball sign, he jumped up and down, he yelled something I couldn’t catch. He ran around in a circle. All the time he came closer to the concrete corner of the overpass. He made one last signal. I waved back. Suddenly he bent to his life and walked quickly out of site. I gaped into the bleakness of my own days; I had an awful long way to go too. The following midnight I took the Washington bus; wasted some time there wandering around; went out of my way to see the Blue Ridge; heard the bird of Shenandoah and visited Stonewall Jackson’s grave; at dusk stood expectorating in the Kanawha and walked the hillbilly night of Charleston West Virginia; at midnight Ashland Kentucky and a lonely girl under the marquee of a closed up show. The dark and myserious Ohio, and Cincinnati at dawn. 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. By night Missouri, Kansas fields, Kansas night-cows in the secret wides, crackerbox towns with a sea for the end of every street; dawn in Abilene. East Kansas grasses become West Kansas rangelands that climb up the hill of the western night. George Glass was riding the bus with me. He had got on at Terre Haute Indiana and now he said to me “I’ve told you why I hate this suit I’m wearing, it’s lousey---but that ain’t all.” He showed me papers. He had just been released from Terre Haute Federal pen, stealing and selling cars in Cincinnati. A young curly headed kid of 20. “Soon as I get to Denver I’m selling this suit in a pawnshop and getting me Levis. Do you know what they did to me in that prison?---solitary confinement with a

31 January 2009

away. Others darted in and smoothly shot over our heads. We jumped at the basket like maniacs and the younger boys just reached up and grabbed the ball from our sweating hands and dribbled away. They thought we were crazy. Neal and I went back home playing catch from each sidewalk of the street. We tried extra special catches diving over bushes and barely missing posts. When a car came by I ran alongside and flipped the ball to Neal just barely behind the vanishing bumper. He darted and caught in and rolled in the grass, and flipped it back for me to catch on the other side of a parked bread truck. I just made it with my meat hand and threw it back so Neal had to whirl and back up and fall on his back across the hedges. This went on. Back in the house Neal took out his wallet, harrumphed, and handed my mother the fifteen dollars he owed her from the time we got a speeding ticket in Washington. She was completely surprised and pleased. We had a big supper. “Well Neal” said my mother “I hope you’ll be able to take care of your new baby that’s coming and stay married this time.” “Yes, yass, yes.” “You can’t go all over the country having babies like that. Those poor little things’ll grow up helpless. You’ve got to offer them a chance to live.” He looked at his feet and nodded. In the raw red dusk we said goodbye, on a bridge, over a superhiway. “I hope you’ll be in NY when I get back” I told him. “All I hope, Neal, is someday we’ll be able to live on the same street with our families and get to be a couple of oldtimers together.” “That’s right man---you know that I pray for it completely mindful of the troubles we both had and the troubles coming, as your mother knows and reminds me. I didn’t want the new baby, Diane insisted and wasn’t careful and we had a fight. Did you know Louanne got married to a sailor in Frisco and’s having a baby?” “Yes. We’re all getting in there now.” He took out a snapshot of Carolyn in Frisco with the new baby girl. The shadow of a man crossed the child on the sunny pavement, two long trouser legs in the sadness. “Who’s that?” “That’s only Al Hinkle. He came back to Helen, they’re gone to Denver now. They spent a day taking pictures.” He took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder,

30 January 2009

son Valley that night. The great world piers of the sea-wide river were drenched in it, old steamboat landings at Poughkeepsie were drenched in it, old split rock pond of sources was drenched in it, Vanderwhacker Mount was drenched in it, all earth and land and city street was drenched in it. “So” said Neal “I’m cutting along in my life as it leads me. You know I recently wrote to my old man in Denver county jail---I got the first letter in years from him the other day.” “Did you?” “Yass, yass...he said he wants to see the babby spelt with two b’s when he can get to Frisco. I found a $13 a month coldwater pad on East 40th, if I can send him the money he’ll come and live in New York---if he gets here. I never told you much about my sister but you know I have a sweet littlekid sister. I’d like her to come and live with me too.” “Where is she?” “Well that’s just it, I don’t know---he’s going to try and find her, the old man, but you know what he’ll really do.” “So he got back to Denver?” “And straight to jail.” “Where was he?” “Texas, Texas…so you see man, my soul, the state of things, my position---you notice I get quieter.” “Yes that’s true.” Neal had grown quiet in New York. He wanted to talk. We were freezing to death in the cold rain. We made a date to meet at my mother’s house before I left. He came the following Sunday afternoon. I had a television set. We played one ballgame on the TV, another on the radio, and switched to a third and kept track of all that was happening every moment. “Remember Jack, Hodges is on second in Brooklyn, so while the relief pitcher is coming in for the Phillies we’ll switch to Giants-Boston and at the same time notice there Di Maggio has a three ball count and the pitcher is fiddling with the resin bag so we quickly find out what happened to Bob Thomson when we left him thirty seconds ago with a man on third. Yes!” Later in the afternoon we went out and played baseball with the kids in the sooty field by the Long Island railyard. We also played basketball so frantically the younger boys said “Take it easy, you don’t have to kill yourself.” They bounced smoothly all around us and beat us with ease. Neal and I were sweating. At one point Neal fell flush on his face on the concrete court. We huffed and puffed to get the ball away from the boys: they turned and flipped it