"Yes!
Yes!
Yes!" breathed Dean ecstatically.
"Only difference with me was, I myself ran, I had no horse.
You were a Eastern kid and dreamed of horses; of course we won't assume such things as we both know they are really dross and literary ideas, but merely that I in my perhaps wilder schizophrenia actually ran on foot along the car and at incredible speeds sometimes ninety, making it over every bush and fence and farmhouse and sometimes taking quick dashes to the hills and back without losing a moment's ground… "
We were telling these things and both sweating.
We had completely forgotten the people up front who had begun to wonder what was going on in the back seat.
At one point the driver said,
"For God's sakes, you're rocking the boat back there."
Actually we were; the car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our souls all our lives.
"Oh, man! man! man!" moaned Dean.
"And it's not even the beginning of it – and now here we are at last going east together, we've never gone east together, Sal, think of it, we'll dig Denver together and see what everybody's doing although that matters little to us, the point being that we know what IT is and we know TIME and we know that everything is really FINE."
Then he whispered, clutching my sleeve, sweating, "Now you just dig them in front.
They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there – and all the time they'll get there anyway, you see.
But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end.
Listen!
Listen!
Well now,' he mimicked, "I don't know – maybe we shouldn't get gas in that station.
I read recently in National Petroffious Petroleum News that this kind of gas has a great deal of O-Octane gook in it and someone once told me it even had semi-official high-frequency cock in it, and I don't know, well I just don't feel like it anyway… ' Man, you dig all this."
He was poking me furiously in the ribs to understand.
I tried my wildest best.
Bing, bang, it was all Yes!
Yes!
Yes! in the back seat and the people up front were mopping their brows with fright and wishing they'd never picked us up at the travel bureau.
It was only the beginning, too.
In Sacramento the fag slyly bought a room in a hotel and invited Dean and me to come up for a drink, while the couple went to sleep at relatives', and in the hotel room Dean tried everything in the book to get money from the fag.
It was insane.
The fag began by saying he was very glad we had come along because he liked young men like us, and would we believe it, but he really didn't like girls and had recently concluded an affair with a man in Frisco in which he had taken the male role and the man the female role.
Dean plied him with businesslike questions and nodded eagerly.
The fag said he would like nothing better than to know what Dean thought about all this.
Warning him first that he had once been a hustler in his youth, Dean asked him how much money he had.
I was in the bathroom.
The fag became extremely sullen and I think suspicious of Dean's final motives, turned over no money, and made vague promises for Denver.
He kept counting his money and checking on his wallet.
Dean threw up his hands and gave up.
"You see, man, it's better not to bother.
Offer them what they secretly want and they of course immediately become panic-stricken."
But he had sufficiently conquered the owner of the Plymouth to take over the wheel without remonstrance, and now we really traveled.
We left Sacramento at dawn and were crossing the Nevada desert by noon, after a hurling passage of the Sierras that made the fag and the tourists cling to each other in the back seat.
We were in front, we took over.
Dean was happy again.
All he needed was a wheel in his hand and four on the road.
He talked about how bad a driver Old Bull Lee was and to demonstrate –
"Whenever a huge big truck like that one coming loomed into sight it would take Bull infinite time to spot it, 'cause he couldn't see, man, he can't see."
He rubbed his eyes furiously to show.
"And I'd say,
'Whoop, look out, Bull, a truck,' and he'd say,
'Eh? what's that you say, Dean?'
'Truck! truck!' and at the very last moment he would go right up to the truck like this – " And Dean hurled the Plymouth head-on at the truck roaring our way, wobbled and hovered in front of it a moment, the truckdriver's face growing gray before our eyes, the people in the back seat subsiding in gasps of horror, and swung away at the last moment.
"Like that, you see, exactly like that, how bad he was."