"All the time I thought I met a nice boy.
I was so glad, I hugged myself and said, Hmm, a real nice boy instead of a pimp."
"Terry," I pleaded with all my soul.
"Please listen to me and understand, I'm not a pimp."
An hour ago I'd thought she was a hustler.
How sad it was.
Our minds, with their store of madness, had diverged.
O gruesome life, how I moaned and pleaded, and then I got mad and realized I was pleading with a dumb little Mexican wench and I told her so; and before I knew it I picked up her red pumps and hurled them at the bathroom door and told her to get out.
"Go on, beat it!"
I'd sleep and forget it; I had my own life, my own sad and ragged life forever.
There was a dead silence in the bathroom.
I took my clothes off and went to bed.
Terry came out with tears of sorriness in her eyes.
In her simple and funny little mind had been decided the fact that a pimp does not throw a woman's shoes against the door and does not tell her to get out.
In reverent and sweet little silence she took all her clothes off and slipped her tiny body into the sheets with me.
It was brown as grapes.
I saw her poor belly where there was a Caesarian scar; her hips were so narrow she couldn't bear a child without getting gashed open.
Her legs were like little sticks.
She was only four foot ten.
I made love to her in the sweetness of the weary morning.
Then, two tired angels of some kind, hung-up forlornly in an LA shelf, having found the closest and most delicious thing in life together, we fell asleep and slept till late afternoon.
13
For the next fifteen days we were together for better or for worse.
When we woke up we decided to hitchhike to New York together; she was going to be my girl in town.
I envisioned wild complexities with Dean and Marylou and everybody – a season, a new season.
First we had to work to earn enough money for the trip.
Terry was all for starting at once with the twenty dollars I had left.
I didn't like it.
And, like a damn fool, I considered the problem for two days, as we read the want ads of wild LA papers I'd never seen before in my life, in cafeterias and bars, until my twenty dwindled to just over ten.
We were very happy in our little hotel room.
In the middle of the night I got up because I couldn't sleep, pulled the cover over baby's bare brown shoulder, and examined the LA night.
What brutal, hot, siren-whining nights they are!
Right across the street there was trouble.
An old rickety rundown rooming house was the scene of some kind of tragedy.
The cruiser was pulled up below and the cops were questioning an old man with gray hair.
Sobbings came from within.
I could hear everything, together with the hum of my hotel neon.
I never felt sadder in my life. LA is the loneliest and most brutal of American cities; New York gets god-awful cold in the winter but there's a feeling of wacky comradeship somewhere in some streets. LA is a jungle.
South Main Street, where Terry and I took strolls with hot dogs, was a fantastic carnival of lights and wildness.
Booted cops frisked people on practically every corner. The beatest characters in the country swarmed on the sidewalks – all of it under those soft Southern California stars that are lost in the brown halo of the huge desert encampment LA really is.
You could smell tea, weed, I mean marijuana, floating in the air, together with the chili beans and beer.
That grand wild sound of bop floated from beer parlors; it mixed medleys with every kind of cowboy and boogie-woogie in the American night.
Everybody looked like Hassel.
Wild Negroes with bop caps and goatees came laughing by; then long-haired brokendown hipsters straight off Route 66 from New York; then old desert rats, carrying packs and heading for a park bench at the Plaza; then Methodist ministers with raveled sleeves, and an occasional Nature Boy saint in beard and sandals.
I wanted to meet them all, talk to everybody, but Terry and I were too busy trying to get a buck together.
We went to Hollywood to try to work in the drugstore at Sunset and Vine.
Now there was a corner!
Great families off jalopies from the hinterlands stood around the sidewalk gaping for sight of some movie star, and the movie star never showed up.
When a limousine passed they rushed eagerly to the curb and ducked to look: some character in dark glasses sat inside with a bejeweled blonde.
"Don Ameche!