What you tell me about your life I understand well, I've always dug your feelings, and now in fact you're ready to hook up with a real great girl if you can only find her and cultivate her and make her mind your soul as I have tried so hard with these damned women of mine.
Shit! shit! shit!" he yelled.
And in the morning Camille threw both of us out, baggage and all.
It began when we called Roy Johnson, old Denver Roy, and had him come over for beer, while Dean minded the baby and did the dishes and the wash in the backyard but did a sloppy job of it in his excitement.
Johnson agreed to drive us to Mill City to look for Remi Boncœur.
Camille came in from work at the doctor's office and gave us all the sad look of a harassed woman's life.
I tried to show this haunted woman that I had no mean intentions concerning her home life by saying hello to her and talking as warmly as I could, but she knew it was a con and maybe one I'd learned from Dean, and only gave a brief smile.
In the morning there was a terrible scene: she lay on the bed sobbing, and in the midst of this I suddenly had the need to go to the bathroom, and the only way I could get there was through her room.
"Dean, Dean," I cried, "where's the nearest bar?"
"Bar?" he said, surprised; he was washing his hands in the kitchen sink downstairs.
He thought I wanted to get drunk.
I told him my dilemma and he said,
"Go right ahead, she does that all the time."
No, I couldn't do that.
I rushed out to look for a bar; I walked uphill and downhill in a vicinity of four blocks on Russian Hill and found nothing but laundromats, cleaners, soda fountains, beauty parlors.
I came back to the crooked little house.
They were yelling at each other as I slipped through with a feeble smile and locked myself in the bathroom.
A few moments later Camille was throwing Dean's things on the living-room floor and telling him to pack.
To my amazement I saw a full-length oil painting of Galatea Dunkel over the sofa.
I suddenly realized that all these women were spending months of loneliness and womanliness together, chatting about the madness of the men.
I heard Dean's maniacal giggle across the house, together with the wails of his baby.
The next thing I knew he was gliding around the house like Groucho Marx, with his broken thumb wrapped in a huge white bandage sticking up like a beacon that stands motionless above the frenzy of the waves.
Once again I saw his pitiful huge battered trunk with socks and dirty underwear sticking out; he bent over it, throwing in everything he could find.
Then he got his suitcase, the beatest suitcase in the USA.
It was made of paper with designs on it to make it look like leather, and hinges of some kind pasted on.
A great rip ran down the top; Dean lashed on a rope.
Then he grabbed his seabag and threw things into that.
I got my bag, stuffed it, and as Camille lay in bed saying,
"Liar!
Liar!
Liar!" we leaped out of the house and struggled down the street to the nearest cable car – a mass of men and suitcases with that enormous bandaged thumb sticking up in the air.
That thumb became the symbol of Dean's final development.
He no longer cared about anything (as before) but now he also cared about everything in principle; that is to say, it was all the same to him and he belonged to the world and there was nothing he could do about it.
He stopped me in the middle of the street.
"Now, man, I know you're probably real bugged; you just got to town and we get thrown out the first day and you're wondering what I've done to deserve this and so on – together with all horrible appurtenances – hee-hee-hee! – but look at me.
Please, Sal, look at me."
I looked at him.
He was wearing a T-shirt, torn pants hanging down his belly, tattered shoes; he had not shaved, his hair was wild and bushy, his eyes bloodshot, and that tremendous bandaged thumb stood supported in midair at heart-level (he had to hold it up that way), and on his face was the goofiest grin I ever saw.
He stumbled around in a circle and looked everywhere.
"What do my eyeballs see?
Ah – the blue sky.
Long-fellow!"
He swayed and blinked. He rubbed his eyes.
"Together with windows – have you ever dug windows?
Now let's talk about windows.
I have seen some really crazy windows that made faces at me, and some of them had shades drawn and so they winked."
Out of his seabag he fished a copy of Eugene Sue's Mysteries of Paris and, adjusting the front of his T-shirt, began reading on the street corner with a pedantic air.
"Now really, Sal, let's dig everything as we go along… " He forgot about that in an instant and looked around blankly.
I was glad I had come, he needed me now.
"Why did Camille throw you out?