She didn't know.
She yawned.
She was sleepy.
It was too much.
Nobody could tell.
Nobody would ever tell.
It was all over.
She was eighteen and most lovely, and lost.
And Dean and I, ragged and dirty as if we had lived off locust, stumbled out of the bus in Detroit.
We decided to stay up in all-night movies on Skid Row.
It was too cold for parks.
Hassel had been here on Detroit Skid Row, he had dug every shooting gallery and all-night movie and every brawling bar with his dark eyes many a time.
His ghost haunted us.
We'd never find him on Times Square again.
We thought maybe by accident Old Dean Moriarty was here too – but he was not.
For thirty-five cents each we went into the beat-up old movie and sat down in the balcony till morning, when we were shooed downstairs.
The people who were in that all-night movie were the end.
Beat Negroes who'd come up from Alabama to work in car factories on a rumor; old white bums; young longhaired hipsters who'd reached the end of the road and were drinking wine; whores, ordinary couples, and housewives with nothing to do, nowhere to go, nobody to believe in.
If you sifted all Detroit in a wire basket the beater solid core of dregs couldn't be better gathered.
The picture was Singing Cowboy Eddie Dean and his gallant white horse Bloop, that was number one; number two double-feature film was George Raft, Sidney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre in a picture about Istanbul.
We saw both of these things six times each during the night.
We saw them waking, we heard them sleeping, we sensed them dreaming, we were permeated completely with the strange Gray Myth of the West and the weird dark Myth of the East when morning came.
All my actions since then have been dictated automatically to my subconscious by this horrible osmotic experience.
I heard big Greenstreet sneer a hundred times; I heard Peter Lorre make his sinister come-on; I was with George Raft in his paranoiac fears; I rode and sang with Eddie Dean and shot up the rustlers innumerable times.
People slugged out of bottles and turned around and looked everywhere in the dark theater for something to do, somebody to talk to.
In the head everybody was guiltily quiet, nobody talked.
In the gray dawn that puffed ghostlike about the windows of the theater and hugged its eaves I was sleeping with my head on the wooden arm of a seat as six attendants of the theater converged with their night's total of swept-up rubbish and created a huge dusty pile that reached to my nose as I snored head down – till they almost swept me away too.
This was reported to me by Dean, who was watching from ten seats behind.
All the cigarette butts, the bottles, the matchbooks, the come and the gone were swept up in this pile.
Had they taken me with it, Dean would never have seen me again.
He would have had to roam the entire United States and look in every garbage pail from coast to coast before he found me embryonically convoluted among the rubbishes of my life, his life, and the life of everybody concerned and not concerned.
What would I have said to him from my rubbish womb?
"Don't bother me, man, I'm happy where I am.
You lost me one night in Detroit in August nineteen forty-nine.
What right have you to come and disturb my reverie in this pukish can?"
In 1942 I was the star in one of the filthiest dramas of all time.
I was a seaman, and went to the Imperial Cafe on Scollay Square in Boston to drink; I drank sixty glasses of beer and retired to the toilet, where I wrapped myself around the toilet bowl and went to sleep.
During the night at least a hundred seamen and assorted civilians came in and cast their sentient debouchments on me till I was unrecognizably caked.
What difference does it make after all? – anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what's heaven? what's earth?
All in the mind.
Gibberishly Dean and I stumbled out of this horror-hole at dawn and went to find our travel-bureau car.
After spending a good part of the morning in Negro bars and chasing gals and listening to jazz records on jukeboxes, we struggled five miles in local buses with all our crazy gear and got to the home of a man who was going to charge us four dollars apiece for the ride to New York.
He was a middle-aged blond fellow with glasses, with a wife and kid and a good home. We waited in the yard while he got ready.
His lovely wife in cotton kitchen dress offered us coffee but we were too busy talking.
By this time Dean was so exhausted and out of his mind that everything he saw delighted him.
He was reaching another pious frenzy.
He sweated and sweated.
The moment we were in the new Chrysler and off to New York the poor man realized he had contracted a ride with two maniacs, but he made the best of it and in fact got used to us just as we passed Briggs Stadium and talked about next year's Detroit Tigers.
In the misty night we crossed Toledo and went onward across old Ohio.
I realized I was beginning to cross and re-cross towns in America as though I were a traveling salesman – raggedy travelings, bad stock, rotten beans in the bottom of my bag of tricks, nobody buying.