Ed Dunkel said he was an old pearldiver from way back and pitched his long arms into the dishes.
Dean stood googing around with a towel, so did Marylou.
Finally they started necking among the pots and pans; they withdrew to a dark corner in the pantry.
The counterman was satisfied as long as Ed and I did the dishes.
We finished them in fifteen minutes.
When daybreak came we were zooming through New Jersey with the great cloud of Metropolitan New York rising before us in the snowy distance.
Dean had a sweater wrapped around his ears to keep warm.
He said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York.
We swished through the Lincoln Tunnel and cut over to Times Square; Marylou wanted to see it.
"Oh damn, I wish I could find Hassel.
Everybody look sharp, see if they can find him." We all scoured the sidewalks.
"Good old gone Hassel.
Oh you should have seen him in Texas."
So now Dean had come about four thousand miles from Frisco, via Arizona and up to Denver, inside four days, with innumerable adventures sandwiched in, and it was only the beginning.
3
We went to my house in Paterson and slept.
I was the first to wake up, late in the afternoon.
Dean and Marylou were sleeping on my bed, Ed and I on my aunt's bed.
Dean's battered unhinged trunk lay sprawled on the floor with socks sticking out.
A phone call came for me in the drugstore downstairs.
I ran down; it was from New Orleans.
It was Old Bull Lee, who'd moved to New Orleans.
Old Bull Lee in his high, whining voice was making a complaint.
It seemed a girl called Galatea Dunkel had just arrived at his house for a guy Ed Dunkel; Bull had no idea who these people were.
Galatea Dunkel was a tenacious loser.
I told Bull to reassure her that Dunkel was with Dean and me and that most likely we'd be picking her up in New Orleans on the way to the Coast.
Then the girl herself talked on the phone.
She wanted to know how Ed was.
She was all concerned about his happiness.
"How did you get from Tucson to New Orleans?" I asked.
She said she wired home for money and took a bus.
She was determined to catch up with Ed because she loved him.
I went upstairs and told Big Ed.
He sat in the chair with a worried look, an angel of a man, actually.
"All right, now," said Dean, suddenly waking up and leaping out of bed, "what we must do is eat, at once.
Marylou, rustle around the kitchen see what there is.
Sal, you and I go downstairs and call Carlo.
Ed, you see what you can do straightening out the house."
I followed Dean, bustling downstairs.
The guy who ran the drugstore said,
"You just got another call – this one from San Francisco – for a guy called Dean Moriarty.
I said there wasn't anybody by that name."
It was sweetest Camille, calling Dean. The drugstore man, Sam, a tall, calm friend of mine, looked at me and scratched his head.
"Geez, what are you running, an international whorehouse?"
Dean tittered maniacally.
"I dig you, man!"
He leaped into the phone booth and called San Francisco collect.
Then we called Carlo at his home in Long Island and told him to come over.
Carlo arrived two hours later.
Meanwhile Dean and I got ready for our return trip alone to Virginia to pick up the rest of the furniture and bring my aunt back.