I couldn't get it out of my mind, also, that a famous bop clarinetist had died in an Illinois car-crash recently, probably on a day like this.
I went to the back seat again.
The boys stayed in the back too now. Dean was bent on Chicago before nightfall.
At a road-rail junction we picked up two hobos who rounded up a half-buck between them for gas.
A moment before sitting around piles of railroad ties, polishing off the last of some wine, now they found themselves in a muddy but unbowed and splendid Cadillac limousine headed for Chicago in precipitous haste.
In fact the old boy up front who sat next to Dean never took his eyes off the road and prayed his poor bum prayers, I tell you.
"Well," they said, "we never knew we'd get to Chicaga sa fast."
As we passed drowsy Illinois towns where the people are so conscious of Chicago gangs that pass like this in limousines every day, we were a strange sight: all of us unshaven, the driver barechested, two bums, myself in the back seat, holding on to a strap and my head leaned back on the cushion looking at the countryside with an imperious eye – just like a new California gang come to contest the spoils of Chicago, a band of desperados escaped from the prisons of the Utah moon.
When we stopped for Cokes and gas at a small-town station people came out to stare at us but they never said a word and I think made mental notes of our descriptions and heights in case of future need.
To transact business with the girl who ran the gas-pump Dean merely threw on his T-shirt like a scarf and was curt and abrupt as usual and got back in the car and off we roared again.
Pretty soon the redness turned purple, the last of the enchanted rivers flashed by, and we saw distant smokes of Chicago beyond the drive.
We had come from Denver to Chicago via Ed Wall's ranch, 1180 miles, in exactly seventeen hours, not counting the two hours in the ditch and three at the ranch and two with the police in Newton, Iowa, for a mean average of seventy miles per hour across the land, with one driver.
Which is a kind of crazy record.
10
Great Chicago glowed red before our eyes.
We were suddenly on Madison Street among hordes of hobos, some of them sprawled out on the street with their feet on the curb, hundreds of others milling in the doorways of saloons and alleys.
"Wup! wup! look sharp for old Dean Moriarty there, he may be in Chicago by accident this year."
We let out the hobos on this street and proceeded to downtown Chicago.
Screeching trolleys, newsboys, gals cutting by, the smell of fried food and beer in the air, neons winking –
"We're in the big town, Sal! Whooee!"
First thing to do was park the Cadillac in a good dark spot and wash up and dress for the night.
Across the street from the YMCA we found a redbrick alley between buildings, where we stashed the Cadillac with her snout pointed to the street and ready to go, then followed the college boys up to the Y, where they got a room and allowed us to use their facilities for an hour.
Dean and I shaved and showered, I dropped my wallet in the hall, Dean found it and was about to sneak it in his shirt when he realized it was ours and was right disappointed.
Then we said good-by to those boys, who were glad they'd made it in one piece, and took off to eat in a cafeteria.
Old brown Chicago with the strange semi-Eastern, semi-Western types going to work and spitting.
Dean stood in the cafeteria rubbing his belly and taking it all in.
He wanted to talk to a strange middle-aged colored woman who had come into the cafeteria with a story about how she had no money but she had buns with her and would they give her butter.
She came in napping her hips, was turned down, and went out flipping her butt.
"Whoo!" said Dean.
"Let's follow her down the street, let's take her to the ole Cadillac in the alley.
We'll have a ball."
But we forgot that and headed straight for North Clark Street, after a spin in the Loop, to see the hootchy-kootchy joints and hear the bop.
And what a night it was.
"Oh, man," said Dean to me as we stood in front of a bar, "dig the street of life, the Chinamen that cut by in Chicago.
What a weird town – wow, and that woman in that window up there, just looking down with her big breasts hanging from her nightgown, big wide eyes.
Whee.
Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there."
"Where we going, man?"
"I don't know but we gotta go."
Then here came a gang of young bop musicians carrying their instruments out of cars.
They piled right into a saloon and we followed them.
They set themselves up and started blowing. There we were!
The leader was a slender, drooping, curly-haired, pursy-mouthed tenorman, thin of shoulder, draped loose in a sports shirt, cool in the warm night, self-indulgence written in his eyes, who picked up his horn and frowned in it and blew cool and complex and was dainty stamping his foot to catch ideas, and ducked to miss others – and said, "Blow," very quietly when the other boys took solos.
Then there was Prez, a husky, handsome blond like a freckled boxer, meticulously wrapped inside his sharkskin plaid suit with the long drape and the collar falling back and the tie undone for exact sharpness and casualness, sweating and hitching up his horn and writhing into it, and a tone just like Lester Young himself.
"You see, man, Prez has the technical anxieties of a money-making musician, he's the only one who's well dressed, see him grow worried when he blows a clinker, but the leader, that cool cat, tells him not to worry and just blow and blow – the mere sound and serious exuberance of the music is all he cares about.
He's an artist.
He's teaching young Prez the boxer.
Now the others dig!!"
The third sax was an alto, eighteen-year-old cool, contemplative young Charlie-Parker-type Negro from high school, with a broadgash mouth, taller than the rest, grave.
He raised his horn and blew into it quietly and thoughtfully and elicited birdlike phrases and architectural Miles Davis logics.