"You've got your man," said Eddie, but I wasn't so sure about myself.
"I just won't sleep," I decided.
There were so many other interesting things to do.
Eddie showed up the next morning; I didn't.
I had a bed, and Major bought food for the icebox, and in exchange for that I cooked and washed the dishes.
Meantime I got all involved in everything.
A big party took place at the Rawlinses' one night.
The Rawlins mother was gone on a trip.
Ray Rawlins called everybody he knew and told them to bring whisky; then he went through his address book for girls.
He made me do most of the talking.
A whole bunch of girls showed up.
I phoned Carlo to find out what Dean was doing now.
Dean was coming to Carlo's at three in the morning.
I went there after the party.
Carlo's basement apartment was on Grant Street in an old red-brick rooming house near a church.
You went down an alley, down some stone steps, opened an old raw door, and went through a kind of cellar till you came to his board door.
It was like the room of a Russian saint: one bed, a candle burning, stone walls that oozed moisture, and a crazy makeshift ikon of some kind that he had made.
He read me his poetry.
It was called
"Denver Doldrums."
Carlo woke up in the morning and heard the "vulgar pigeons" yakking in the street outside his cell; he saw the "sad nightingales" nodding on the branches and they reminded him of his mother.
A gray shroud fell over the city.
The mountains, the magnificent Rockies that you can see to the west from any part of town, were "papier-mâché."
The whole universe was crazy and cockeyed and extremely strange.
He wrote of Dean as a "child of the rainbow" who bore his torment in his agonized priapus.
He referred to him as
"Oedipus Eddie" who had to "scrape bubble gum off windowpanes."
He brooded in his basement over a huge journal in which he was keeping track of everything that happened every day – everything Dean did and said.
Dean came on schedule.
"Everything's straight," he announced. "I'm going to divorce Marylou and marry Camille and go live with her in San Francisco.
But this is only after you and I, dear Carlo, go to Texas, dig Old Bull Lee, that gone cat I've never met and both of you've told me so much about, and then I'll go to San Fran."
Then they got down to business.
They sat on the bed crosslegged and looked straight at each other.
I slouched in a nearby chair and saw all of it.
They began with an abstract thought, discussed it; reminded each other of another abstract point forgotten in the rush of events; Dean apologized but promised he could get back to it and manage it fine, bringing up illustrations.
Carlo said,
"And just as we were crossing Wazee I wanted to tell you about how I felt of your frenzy with the midgets and it was just then, remember, you pointed out that old bum with the baggy pants and said he looked just like your father?"
"Yes, yes, of course I remember; and not only that, but it started a train of my own, something real wild that I had to tell you, I'd forgotten it, now you just reminded me of it… " and two new points were born.
They hashed these over.
Then Carlo asked Dean if he was honest and specifically if he was being honest with him in the bottom of his soul.
"Why do you bring that up again?"
"There's one last thing I want to know – "
"But, dear Sal, you're listening, you're sitting there, we'll ask Sal. What would he say?"
And I said,
"That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo.
Nobody can get to that last thing.
We keep on living in hopes of catching it once for all."
"No, no, no, you're talking absolute bullshit and Wolfean romantic posh!" said Carlo.
And Dean said,
"I didn't mean that at all, but we'll let Sal have his own mind, and in fact, don't you think, Carlo, there's a kind of a dignity in the way he's sitting there and digging us, crazy cat came all the way across the country – old Sal won't tell, old Sal won't tell."