The man got tired near Pennsylvania and Dean took the wheel and drove clear the rest of the way to New York, and we began to hear the Symphony Sid show on the radio with all the latest bop, and now we were entering the great and final city of America.
We got there in early morning.
Times Square was being torn up, for New York never rests.
We looked for Hassel automatically as we passed.
In an hour Dean and I were out at my aunt's new flat in Long Island, and she herself was busily engaged with painters who were friends of the family, and arguing with them about the price as we stumbled up the stairs from San Francisco.
"Sal," said my aunt, "Dean can stay here a few days and after that he has to get out, do you understand me?"
The trip was over.
Dean and I took a walk that night among the gas tanks and railroad bridges and fog lamps of Long Island.
I remember him standing under a streetlamp.
"Just as we passed that other lamp I was going to tell you a further thing, Sal, but now I am parenthetically continuing with a new thought and by the time we reach the next I'll return to the original subject, agreed?"
I certainly agreed.
We were so used to traveling we had to walk all over Long Island, but there was no more land, just the Atlantic Ocean, and we could only go so far.
We clasped hands and agreed to be friends forever.
Not five nights later we went to a party in New York and I saw a girl called Inez and told her I had a friend with me that she ought to meet sometime.
I was drunk and told her he was a cowboy.
"Oh, I've always wanted to meet a cowboy."
"Dean?"
I yelled across the party – which included Angel Luz Garcia, the poet; Walter Evans; Victor Villanueva, the Venezuelan poet; Jinny Jones, a former love of mine; Carlo Marx; Gene Dexter; and innumerable others –
"Come over here, man."
Dean came bashfully over.
An hour later, in the drunkenness and chichiness of the party ("It's in honor of the end of the summer, of course"), he was kneeling on the floor with his chin on her belly and telling her and promising her everything and sweating.
She was a big, sexy brunette – as Garcia said,
"Something straight out of Degas," and generally like a beautiful Parisian coquette.
In a matter of days they were dickering with Camille in San Francisco by long distance telephone for the necessary divorce papers so they could get married.
Not only that, but a few months later Camille gave birth to Dean's second baby, the result of a few nights' rapport early in the year.
And another matter of months and Inez had a baby.
With one illegitimate child in the West somewhere, Dean then had four little ones and not a cent, and was all troubles and ecstasy and speed as ever.
So we didn't go to Italy.
PART FOUR
1
I came into some money from selling my book. I straightened out my aunt with rent for the rest of the year.
Whenever spring comes to New York I can't stand the suggestions of the land that come blowing over the river from New Jersey and I've got to go.
So I went.
For the first time in our lives I said good-by to Dean in New York and left him there.
He worked in a parking lot on Madison and 40th,, As ever he rushed around in his ragged shoes and T-shirt and belly-hanging pants all by himself, straightening out immense noontime rushes of cars.
When usually I came to visit him at dusk there was nothing to do.
He stood in the shack, counting tickets and rubbing his belly.
The radio was always on.
"Man, have you dug that mad Marty Glickman announcing basketball games – up-to-midcourt-bounce-fake-set-shot, swish, two points.
Absolutely the greatest announcer I ever heard."
He was reduced to simple pleasures like these.
He lived with Inez in a cold water flat in the East Eighties.
When he came home at night he took off all his clothes and put on a hip-length Chinese silk jacket and sat in his easy chair to smoke a water pipe loaded with tea.
These were his coming-home pleasures, together with a deck of dirty cards.
"Lately I've been concentrating on this deuce of diamonds.
Have you noticed where her other hand is?
I'll bet you can't tell.
Look long and try to see."
He wanted to lend me the deuce of diamonds, which depicted a tall, mournful fellow and a lascivious, sad whore on a bed trying a position.
"Go ahead, man, I've used it many times!"