Kinsey spent a lot of time in Ritzy's Bar, interviewing some of the boys; I was there the night his assistant came, in 1945.
Hassel and Carlo were interviewed.
Dean and I drove back to the pad and found Marylou in bed.
Dunkel was roaming his ghost around New York.
Dean told her what we had decided.
She said she was pleased.
I wasn't so sure myself.
I had to prove that I'd go through with it.
The-bed had been the deathbed of a big man and sagged in the middle.
Marylou lay there, with Dean and myself on each side of her, poised on the upjutting mattress-ends, not knowing what to say.
I said,
"Ah hell, I can't do this."
"Go on, man, you promised!" said Dean.
"What about Marylou?" I said.
"Come on, Marylou, what do you think?"
"Go ahead," she said.
She embraced me and I tried to forget old Dean was there.
Every time I realized he was there in the dark, listening for every sound, I couldn't do anything but laugh.
It was horrible.
"We must all relax," said Dean. "I'm afraid I can't make it.
Why don't you go in the kitchen a minute?"
Dean did so.
Marylou was so lovely, but I whispered,
"Wait until we be lovers in San Francisco; my heart isn't in it."
I was right, she could tell.
It was three children of the earth trying to decide something in the night and having all the weight of past centuries ballooning in the dark before them.
There was a strange quiet in the apartment.
I went and tapped Dean and told him to go to Marylou; and I retired to the couch.
I could hear Dean, blissful and blabbering and frantically rocking.
Only a guy who's spent five years in jail can go to such maniacal helpless extremes; beseeching at the portals of the soft source, mad with a completely physical realization of the origins of life-bliss; blindly seeking to return the way he came.
This is the result of years looking at sexy pictures behind bars; looking at the legs and breasts of women in popular magazines; evaluating the hardness of the steel halls and the softness of the woman who is not there.
Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live.
Dean had never seen his mother's face.
Every new girl, every new wife, every new child was an addition to his bleak impoverishment.
Where was his father? – old bum Dean Moriarty the Tinsmith, riding freights, working as a scullion in railroad cookshacks, stumbling, down-crashing in wino alley nights, expiring on coal piles, dropping his yellowed teeth one by one in the gutters of the West.
Dean had every right to die the sweet deaths of complete love of his Marylou-1 didn't want to interfere, I just wanted to follow.
Carlo came back at dawn and put on his bathrobe.
He wasn't sleeping any more those days.
"Eeh!" he screamed.
He was going out of his mind from the confusion of jam on the floor, pants, dresses thrown around, cigarette butts, dirty dishes, open books – it was a great forum we were having.
Every day the world groaned to turn and we were making our appalling studies of the night.
Marylou was black and blue from a fight with Dean about something; his face was scratched.
It was time to go.
We drove to my house, a whole gang of ten, to get my bag and call Old Bull Lee in New Orleans from the phone in the bar where Dean and I had our first talk years ago when he came to my door to learn to write.
We heard Bull's whining voice eighteen hundred miles away.
"Say, what do you boys expect me to do with this Galatea Dunkel?
She's been here two weeks now, hiding in her room and refusing to talk to either Jane or me.
Have you got this character Ed Dunkel with you?
For krissakes bring him down and get rid of her.
She's sleeping in our best bedroom and's run clear out of money.