We were turning off the Oregon road at Madera, and there we made our farewell with little Alfred.
We wished him luck and Godspeed to Oregon.
He said it was the best ride he ever had.
It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.
"There she blows!" yelled Dean.
"Wow!
Made it!
Just enough gas!
Give me water!
No more land!
We can't go any further 'cause there ain't no more land!
Now Marylou, darling, you and Sal go immediately to a hotel and wait for me to contact you in the morning as soon as I have definite arrangements made with Camille and call up Frenchman about my railroad watch and you and Sal buy the first thing hit town a paper for the want ads and workplans."
And he drove into the Oakland Bay Bridge and it carried us in.
The downtown office buildings were just sparkling on their lights; it made you think of Sam Spade.
When we staggered out of the car on O'Farrell Street and sniffed and stretched, it was like getting on shore after a long voyage at sea; the slopy street reeled under our feet; secret chop sueys from Frisco Chinatown floated in the air.
We took all our things out of the car and piled them on the sidewalk.
Suddenly Dean was saying good-by.
He was bursting to see Camille and find out what had happened.
Marylou and I stood dumbly in the street and watched him drive away.
"You see what a bastard he is?" said Marylou.
"Dean will leave you out in the cold any time it's in his interest."
"I know," I said, and I looked back east and sighed.
We had no money.
Dean hadn't mentioned money.
"Where are we going to stay?"
We wandered around, carrying our bundles of rags in the narrow romantic streets.
Everybody looked like a broken-down movie extra, a withered starlet; disenchanted stunt-men, midget auto-racers, poignant California characters with their end-of-the-continent sadness, handsome, decadent, Casanovaish men, puffy-eyed motel blondes, hustlers, pimps, whores, masseurs, bellhops – a lemon lot, and how's a man going to make a living with a gang like that?
10
Nevertheless Marylou had been around these people – not far from the Tenderloin – and a gray-faced hotel clerk let us have a room on credit.
That was the first step.
Then we had to eat, and didn't do so till midnight, when we found a nightclub singer in her hotel room who turned an iron upside down on a coathanger in the wastebasket and warmed up a can of pork and beans.
I looked out the window at the winking neons and said to myself, Where is Dean and why isn't he concerned about our welfare?
I lost faith in him that year.
I stayed in San Francisco a week and had the beatest time of my life.
Marylou and I walked around for miles, looking for food-money.
We even visited some drunken seamen in a flophouse on Mission Street that she knew; they offered us whisky.
In the hotel we lived together two days.
I realized that, now Dean was out of the picture, Marylou had no real interest in me; she was trying to reach Dean through me, his buddy.
We had arguments in the room.
We also spent entire nights in bed and I told her my dreams.
I told her about the big snake of the world that was coiled in the earth like a worm in an apple and would someday nudge up a hill to be thereafter known as Snake Hill and fold out upon the plain, a hundred miles long and devouring as it went along.
I told her this snake was Satan.
"What's going to happen?" she squealed; meanwhile she held me tight.
"A saint called Doctor Sax will destroy it with secret herbs which he is at this very moment cooking up in his underground shack somewhere in America.
It may also be disclosed that the snake is just a husk of doves; when the snake dies great clouds of seminal-gray doves will flutter out and bring tidings of peace around the world."
I was out of my mind with hunger and bitterness.
One night Marylou disappeared with a nightclub owner.
I was waiting for her by appointment in a doorway across the street, at Larkin and Geary, hungry, when she suddenly stepped out of the foyer of the fancy apartment house with her girl friend, the nightclub owner, and a greasy old man with a roll. Originally she'd just gone in to see her girl friend.
I saw what a whore she was.
She was afraid to give me the sign, though she saw me in that doorway.