Been walkin this country for years.
I'm headed for Canady."
"But this ain't the road to Canada, this is the road to Pittsburgh and Chicago."
The little man got disgusted with us and walked off.
The last I saw of him was his bobbing little white bag dissolving in the darkness of the mournful Alleghenies.
I thought all the wilderness of America was in the West till the Ghost of the Susquehanna showed me different.
No, there is a wilderness in the East; it's the same wilderness Ben Franklin plodded in the oxcart days when he was postmaster, the same as it was when George Washington was a wild-buck Indian-fighter, when Daniel Boone told stories by Pennsylvania lamps and promised to find the Gap, when Bradford built his road and men whooped her up in log cabins.
There were not great Arizona spaces for the little man, just the bushy wilderness of eastern Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, the backroads, the black-tar roads that curve among the mournful rivers like Susquehanna, Monongahela, old Potomac and Monocacy.
That night in Harrisburg I had to sleep in the railroad station on a bench; at dawn the station masters threw me out.
Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof?
Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life.
I stumbled haggardly out of the station; I had no more control.
All I could see of the morning was a whiteness like the whiteness of the tomb.
I was starving to death.
All I had left in the form of calories were the last of the cough drops I'd bought in Shelton, Nebraska, months ago; these I sucked for their sugar.
I didn't know how to panhandle.
I stumbled out of town with barely enough strength to reach the city limits.
I knew I'd be arrested if I spent another night in Harrisburg.
Cursed city!
The ride I proceeded to get was with a skinny, haggard man who believed in controlled starvation for the sake of health.
When I told him I was starving to death as we rolled east he said,
"Fine, fine, there's nothing better for you.
I myself haven't eaten for three days.
I'm going to live to be a hundred and fifty years old."
He was a bag of bones, a floppy doll, a broken stick, a maniac.
I might have gotten a ride with an affluent fat man who'd say,
"Let's stop at this restaurant and have some pork chops and beans."
No, I had to get a ride that morning with a maniac who believed in controlled starvation for the sake of health.
After a hundred miles he grew lenient and took out bread-and-butter sandwiches from the back of the car. They were hidden among his salesman samples.
He was selling plumbing fixtures around Pennsylvania.
I devoured the bread and butter.
Suddenly I began to laugh.
I was all alone in the car, waiting for him as he made business calls in Allentown, and I laughed and laughed.
Gad, I was sick and tired of life.
But the madman drove me home to New York.
Suddenly I found myself on Times Square.
I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream – grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City.
The high towers of the land – the other end of the land, the place where Paper America is born.
I stood in a subway doorway, trying to get enough nerve to pick up a beautiful long butt, and every time I stooped great crowds rushed by and obliterated it from my sight, and finally it was crushed.
I had no money to go home in the bus.
Paterson is quite a few miles from Times Square.
Can you picture me walking those last miles through the Lincoln Tunnel or over the Washington Bridge and into New Jersey?
It was dusk.
Where was Hassel?
I dug the square for Hassel; he wasn't there, he was in Riker's Island, behind bars.
Where Dean?
Where everybody?
Where life?
I had my home to go to, my place to lay my head down and figure the losses and figure the gain that I knew was in there somewhere too.
I had to panhandle two bits for the bus.