Inez cooked in the kitchen and looked in with a wry smile.
Everything was all right with her.
"Dig her?
Dig her, man? That's Inez.
See, that's all she does, she pokes her head in the door and smiles.
Oh, I've talked with her and we've got everything straightened out most beautifully.
We're going to go and live on a farm in Pennsylvania this summer – station wagon for me to cut back to New York for kicks, nice big house, and have a lot of kids in the next few years.
Ahem!
Harrumph!
Egad!"
He leaped out of the chair and put on a Willie Jackson record,
"Gator Tail."
He stood before it, socking his palms and rocking and pumping his knees to the beat.
"Whoo!
That sonumbitch!
First time I heard him I thought he'd die the next night, but he's still alive."
This was exactly what he had been doing with Camille in Frisco on the other side of the continent.
The same battered trunk stuck out from under the bed, ready to fly.
Inez called up Camille on the phone repeatedly and had long talks with her; they even talked about his joint, or so Dean claimed.
They exchanged letters about Dean's eccentricities.
Of course he had to send Camille part of his pay every month for support or he'd wind up in the workhouse for six months.
To make up lost money he pulled tricks in the lot, a change artist of the first order.
I saw him wish a well-to-do man Merry Christmas so volubly a five-spot in change for twenty was never missed.
We went out and spent it in Birdland, the bop joint.
Lester Young was on the stand, eternity on his huge eyelids.
One night we talked on the corner of 47th Street and Madison at three in the morning.
"Well, Sal, damn, I wish you weren't going, I really do, it'll be my first time in New York without my old buddy."
And he said, "New York, I stop over in it, Frisco's my hometown.
All the time I've been here I haven't had any girl but Inez – this only happens to me in New York!
Damn!
But the mere thought of crossing that awful continent again – Sal, we haven't talked straight in a long time."
In New York we were always jumping around frantically with crowds of friends at drunken parties.
It somehow didn't seem to fit Dean.
He looked more like himself huddling in the cold, misty spray of the rain on empty Madison Avenue at night.
"Inez loves me; she's told me and promised me I can do anything I want and there'll be a minimum of trouble.
You see, man, you get older and troubles pile up.
Someday you and me'll be coming down an alley together at sundown and looking in the cans to see."
"You mean we'll end up old bums?"
"Why not, man?
Of course we will if we want to, and all that.
There's no harm ending that way.
You spend a whole life of non-interference with the wishes of others, including politicians and the rich, and nobody bothers you and you cut along and make it your own way."
I agreed with him.
He was reaching his Tao decisions in the simplest direct way.
"What's your road, man? – holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road.
It's an anywhere road for anybody anyhow.
Where body how?"
We nodded in the rain.
"Sheeit, and you've got to look out for your boy.
He ain't a man 'less he's a jumpin man – do what the doctor say.