Long bus journeys, and we mean them in this article, have some nuances, the neglect of which leads to very negative consequences. Unfortunate travelers arrive at the place tired, sleepy, with stiff legs and crooked necks. They remember the night on the bus as their worst nightmare and vow never to use that mode of transport again. And it’s completely in vain, because it’s not at all difficult to ensure your comfort and safety on a trip.
Safety
1. Rate the route
Try to find out in any way about the route that you have to go. If during this period the buses crash into the abyss at regular intervals, there are robberies or other accidents, then maybe you should change the route to a safer one, or at least choose a daytime flight.
2. Choose first class
In many countries, several transport companies operate on the same route, the prices of which can vary significantly. What is the cost savings? Maybe due to the flat tires, no air conditioning and only one driver who will drive you all night without a shift? Or maybe your bus will stop in every village and pick up everyone who wants to, so that some people will constantly push around? In any case, you need to consider whether saving a few dollars is worth your peace of mind and security.
3. Luggage
Before boarding the bus, put all your valuables in a small bag or backpack and do not part with it for a minute. Take it with you to stops. During the movement, it is better to keep it on your lap or, if it interferes, put it on the floor and step on the belt with your foot. In this case, even during your sleep, nothing will happen to her.
4. At the bus stop
If you want to get out and stretch, be sure to check with the driver for the duration of the stop. Remember the bus number and the place where it stops. It is better not to stray too far from the bus station or bus stop, unless you want to get acquainted with the criminal life of this locality, which, as a rule, is especially lively in such places.
Comfort
1. Choice of location
Not all seats on the bus are the same. From a safety point of view, it is always better to choose seats in the middle part, since, according to statistics from insurance companies, most accidents occur in frontal or rear-end collisions.
In terms of comfort, there are many more factors to consider.
- Near a window or aisle? Many choose a place near the window for the sake of beautiful scenery. In addition, the surface of the window gives you the opportunity to lay your head on it and sleep. However, at night, you still can’t see any beauties, and the curved neck begins to numb after half an hour, so all the advantages of a window seat may turn out to be insignificant. But near the aisle you will have more space and even be able to stretch your legs.
- Front or back? Remember that in the rear seats you cannot recline the back and shake more strongly there. If you are located in front, you will have to squint all the way from the headlights of oncoming cars and contemplate all the bends of the roadway. Also a pleasure for an amateur.
- Near a man or a woman? If there is no seat numbering on the bus and you yourself can choose where to sit, then first of all evaluate the overall adequacy of the fellow traveler, and then its size. Sitting all night next to a body that has spread out over a seat and a half can only be wished upon an enemy. And gender is a matter of taste. :)
2. Light and sound insulation
The first time you ride a bus, you look at all these people who took ear plugs and a sleep mask with them with surprise: “Here's another, sissies!” But then you quickly begin to envy them and reproach yourself for hindsight. Don't repeat this mistake. It is difficult to sleep on the bus at night, and without these penny devices, it is almost impossible in general.
3. Blanket and pillow
Yes, of course, we are not talking about those familiar items that we use at home. As a pillow, it is better to take a special inflatable bagel that supports the head and neck in the optimal position. This is an ingenious invention of mankind, which your crumpled jacket or bag will never compare with.
As for the blanket, you should take a light blanket or a long jacket on the bus that you can throw over yourself. Sometimes the temperature difference along the route can reach several tens of degrees (especially if the bus passes through mountainous areas), so if you don’t want to be shaking half the night from the cold, then this circumstance should be taken into account.
4. Drinking and toilet
What kind of comfort on a trip can we talk about if you are thirsty? Even more painful moments come when you realize that you want to go to the toilet, and go and go to the nearest stop. Dealing with these two types of discomfort is very simple.
- First, always take a bottle of water with you on the bus. Even if it's supposed to be there, take it anyway.
- And second, think about going to the toilet at every stop. Do not pay attention to your laziness and all these “does not seem to want” and “so far tolerable”. At the same time and warm up.
What to bring
Traveling in a bus is not a space flight, but you need to prepare for it no less carefully. While driving you will be sealed in pretty small space your seat, so you should take care in advance that everything you need is at your fingertips. Here is a short list to guide you.
- A small handbag or body purse with the most valuable things. Documents, money, tickets, cards, smartphone and so on.
- A backpack or bag with things you might need.
- Items for sleep: earplugs, light-protective mask, blanket or jacket, air pillow.
- Entertainment: smartphone, book, player, tablet.
- Medicines that can help you with motion sickness, poisoning, or that are prescribed to you by your doctor.
- Water and, if necessary, a small snack: nuts, energy bars, sweets.
- Toilet paper!
I have known this sign since childhood. I remember when the guests were leaving, my grandmother, having crossed them goodbye, sat down on a stool and quietly listened to herself. It was as if she saw their entire path, calculated all the probabilities and chose the best one for them.
Only a few hours later she took a broom and began to restore order. At our attempts to do this before, she severely shook her head: "You can't."
So why can't you clean up immediately after the departure of dear guests?
The history of this sign is very interesting.
As our ancestors believed, every person leaves behind an emotional trace. He, of course, slowly leaves for his master, but much more slowly than the person himself does. And if we immediately begin to clean up after the departure of the guests, by this action of ours we simply drive out the spirit of the guest that has not yet left. And we drive out rudely, simply, as the people say, in three necks.
Well, if you don't want to see this person anymore, then this cleaning of yours is very welcome. But if on the contrary, the guest is dear to you and always welcome. Then this cannot be done.
What is this omen connected with?
Why can't you clean the house after the guests leave?
And this sign is connected with a very sad action - with a funeral. Even in ancient times, there was such a belief: be sure to wash the floors well after taking the dead person out of the house. This was due to the fear that if the deceased turns into a ghoul, he would not find his way home.
If you wash the floors, he will not learn his spirit and will not understand where to go.
In the same way, it was necessary to wash the floors after the daughter was married. It was believed that then she would take root in a new house and be happy there. But, if you are too lazy, then there is a possibility that your daughter will return back after some time. And that's a disgrace to the family.
Be that as it may, but the sign exists. It may, of course, not come true, but given that our ancestors lived in greater harmony with nature and with themselves, then I would listen.
It may be that you are just the embodiment of purity and do not believe in any signs. Then, of course, do as your mind tells you.
And for some reason I still believe my late grandmother. And if suddenly, involuntarily, after the departure of the guests, my hand reaches for the vacuum cleaner, I will surely feel how she frowns and shakes her head: “It’s impossible.”
| CLOTH | MAKEUP | DETAILS | |
| AIRPLANE | Short skirts and shorts are not suitable - unhygienic. Lightweight things too. Forget about uncomfortable shoes (pressure drops) and a lot of jewelry (you have to take it off at every metal detector). | Limit yourself to mascara that does not crumble for a long time. Apply a nourishing balm to your lips. The main enemy in the sky is dryness. During the flight, do not forget to moisturize the skin and drink plenty of water - non-carbonated. | Bring cute socks from home. Take off your shoes and let your feet rest. And think about what you put on yourself if the air conditioners turn on at full capacity. |
| AUTOMOBILE | Basically no restrictions. Well, except that in tight underwear or tight jeans it will be uncomfortable. Shoes will suit any, but appropriate to the season and situation. | Makeup is up to you, minimal is best. But the hairstyle is worth thinking about. Lush styling will quickly crumble at the back of the head. Loose hair is tangled due to contact with the headrest. Better make a tail, a bun or braid braids. | Stock up on wet wipes - they will definitely come in handy. Also keep mints, a thimble toothbrush, deodorant, pads, moisturizer, dry shampoo, and a nail file in the salon. |
| TRAIN | During the summer, trains tend to be hot and stuffy. Therefore, take a change of T-shirt and at least one set of underwear. Shoes should be easy and quick to take off. This is especially true if your place in the compartment is on the top shelf. | For facial care, you will need a facial cleanser or special wipes and cream, preferably with SPF protection - window glass on the train does not have it. As for the make-up: the train is rocking - are you sure you can make up neatly? | Get a travel set of small bottles, pour your favorite lotions and creams into them. They take up minimal space in the bag and do not weigh down luggage. |
MAKE A LIST OF THINGS YOU MIGHT NEED ON THE TRAVEL AND PUT THEM IN A BAG THAT YOU WILL NOT CHECK IN.
Popular
Wake up!
You have to spend the night on the road, and in the morning to appear before your loved one. What to do? First: no salty and no fizzy drinks at night. Second: before going to bed, gently remove makeup with cotton pads, then apply eye cream and moisturizer to the face. In the morning, brush your teeth, wash your face (alternatively: mint gum and wet wipes) and lightly make up your eyelashes. Of course, you are embarrassed by the lack of a soul. Wipe your body with wet wipes and put on a clean T-shirt.
PHOTO CAMERA PRESS/FOTOBANK.RU. PHOTOXPRESS
This summer, many of us will go on road trips - to a concert in a neighboring city, to visit relatives in the village, for beauty in one of the picturesque republics of Russia. And of course, sooner or later, any traveler faces the question - what to do so that boredom does not overtake on the road and spoil the impression of the trip. When topics for conversation with fellow travelers gradually dry up, it's time for games! And the inclusion of a driver in the game, especially at night, will help your friend cope with fatigue and drowsiness.
So, known to all of us since childhood "Game of the City"
You can split into teams or play every man for himself. You name the cities one by one. The name of each next city must begin with the letter that ends with the name of the previous one. If the name of the city ends in "й", "ь" or "ы", you can use the penultimate letter (if, for example, "y" - penultimate). Names already used cannot be repeated.
Example: Tomsk-Krakow-Venice-Yaroslavl-London…etc.
But if you are not doing very well with geography, or small children are driving in a car, play "Word Game"
The principle of the game is the same as in Cities, but now you name nouns (singular, im. case).
Example: Pumpkin - orange - rhinoceros - harmony ... etc.
Especially cunning players can choose their words in such a way that they always end in “a” (after all, there are a lot of such words in Russian - lamp, shark, stop, etc.), which will lead to bewilderment, and then to the fury of the one who says the word after it. The next one will have to remember words that begin with the letter “a” over and over again.
One of the most popular games on the road - "There is a contact!"
The minimum number of participants is three, but the more people, the more fun. One driver is selected, he makes up a word, says the first letter aloud. The goal of the rest of the players is to guess the word.
Example: The word “rocket” is guessed, the first letter “r” is called aloud.
Now all players take this letter as a basis and begin to invent their own words starting with this letter. They try to explain the words that came to their mind, without naming them, to each other. The partner must understand what word his friend describes and, having understood, say “There is a contact!”. After that, both players count aloud “one-two-three” and call the word in chorus. The driver also carefully listens to the guesses of the players and while the words “one-two-three” are heard, he must get ahead of them, saying “No, this is not (word)! »
Example: The player remembered the word "hand" and explains to his partner "This is a limb of the human body, they write with it." The partner understands that we are talking about a hand, says “There is contact!”. Together they count out loud “One-two-three”, at which point the driver manages to say “No, this is not a hand!”.
If the driver did not have time to answer or did not guess the intended word, he must inform the players of the second letter of his intended word. In this case, the players' attempts continue, but the players guess the words already for the first two (three, etc. letters).
Example: The driver did not guess / did not have time to say “No, this is not a hand!”. He calls the second letter of the hidden word - "a". Players come up with words starting with “ra” (pack, frame, intelligence, etc.), and also try to explain them to each other.
Naturally, as the letters are guessed, the circle options words narrows and in the end the word is still unraveled. The game continues until the players guess the word conceived by the driver or until they spell it out. Then the player who called the word becomes the leader and the next round of the game begins.
Another road game "Three-liter jar".
This game develops imagination and teaches to correlate objects. All players in their imagination imagine a three-liter jar (its size, shape, neck diameter) and take turns naming objects that can fit in it (scissors, frog, cube, sock, etc.).
When everyone in the company learns to play it, we complicate the rules:
- name all objects that begin with the same letter of the alphabet (for example, "M": mole-soap-"milky-wei", etc.);
- name objects that begin with the last letter of the previous word (mol-bulb-orange, etc.).
Thanks to the great and powerful Russian language, even a large object can become small - if we add diminutive suffixes (-ik-, -ek-, -ok-, -in + k-, -ich + k-, -echk- and etc.)
For example, we all understand that a “car” will not fit into a jar, but a “car” or even a “car” can already.
Creative companies can sing along the way endless songs, which have no end, thanks to a looping plot. At first, this idea seems stupid, but for the fifth time it is repeated to everyone for an inexplicable reason, it becomes very funny and fun, a slight madness begins.
The most famous song without end is "The priest had a dog, he loved her ...". We prefer such a song with a happy denouement "10 little pigs":
10 piglets went to swim in the sea,
10 piglets frolic in the open,
And here is the result - 9 piglets!
9 piglets went to swim in the sea,
9 piglets frolic in the open,
One of them drowned, they cut down his coffin,
And here is the result - 8 piglets!
8 piglets went swimming in the sea...
Two little pigs went swimming in the sea
Two piglets frolic in the open,
One of them drowned, they cut down his coffin,
And here is the result - 1 piglet!
1 pig went to swim in the sea,
1 pig frolic in the open,
Then he went to the bottom, found himself a wife,
And here is the result - 10 pigs!
And we start again: 10 piglets went swimming in the sea...
And finally, let's talk about the game "Yes, no."
"Yes-no" is a complicated riddle. The host very briefly tells a story - a plot and an incredible end, and the players must guess what could have happened in this situation. From the name it is clear that the task of the players is to ask questions about the plot of the story, to which the host can only answer “yes” and “no”. Of course, you need to start with the easiest one, but the more difficult the guessed “yes-no”, the more excitement the process of guessing it causes. You can come up with “yes-no” on your own, or you can search in advance on the Internet. Here are some examples:
1. Question: The woman did not know how to get rid of the overstayed guests, but a phone call saved her. How?
Answer: The woman pretended that the caller told her about a fire in the house of one of the guests, but she did not hear whose house they were talking about.
2. Question: People with metal detectors walk around the central streets of the city all day long, what are they looking for?
Answer: Before the arrival of an important person, the city authorities ordered that the roads in the center be urgently asphalted. Everything was done in such a hurry that they rolled it under the asphalt manholes and even tram tracks.
3. Question: One person went on vacation and asked a friend to look after the cat. A week later, 8 adult cats were running in the apartment. Where did they come from?
Answer: The next day the cat ran away and the man had to give a missing person's notice. Since he himself did not yet know the cat very well, he had to keep all the similar cats that were brought to him. And wait for the arrival of a friend who was supposed to identify his pet.
In this article, we have presented to your attention games that can be played in a car without using additional props, which means that a driver can (and sometimes should) take part in them. If even games can’t overcome sleep, then it’s best to stop by the side of the road and take a nap for a couple of hours, often this is enough to rest. Bon Voyage!
Jack Kerouac
On road
PART ONE
I first met Dean shortly after my wife and I separated. I then barely got out of a serious illness, which I am reluctant to talk about now, it is enough to say that this miserable and tiresome split of ours played an important role, and I felt that everything was dead. With the advent of Dean Moriarty, that part of my life that can be called "life on the road" began. Before, I often dreamed of going to the West to see the country, but my plans always remained vague, and I did not budge. Dean, on the other hand, is exactly the kind of guy who perfectly matches the road, since he was even born on it: in 1926, his parents were driving their rattletrap to Los Angeles and got stuck in Salt Lake City to give birth to him. The first stories about him I heard from Chad King; Chad and showed me some of his letters from a penal colony in New Mexico. I was incredibly interested in these letters, because in them Dean so naively and so sweetly asked Chad to teach him everything that he himself knew about Nietzsche and about all the other wonderful intellectual things. One day Carlo and I were talking about these letters in the sense that we would someday meet this strange Dean Moriarty. All this was back then, long ago, when Dean wasn't the same as he is today, when he was still a kid fresh out of prison surrounded by mystery. Then it became known that he was released from the colony, and that for the first time in his life he was going to New York. There was also talk that he had just married a girl named Marylou.
One day, as I was wandering around campus, Chad and Tim Gray told me that Dean was staying in some bare-bones apartment in East Harlem—that is, in the Spanish Quarter. He arrived last night, in New York for the first time, with his sharp and pretty girlfriend Marylou. They got off the intercity Greyhound on 50th Street, turned the corner to find something to eat, and immediately went to Hector's, and since then, Hector's cafeteria has always been for Dean the main symbol of New York. They then spent all the money on huge wonderful cakes with icing and whipped cream.
All this time, Dean was hanging on Marylou's ears something like this:
“Well, honey, here we are in New York, and although I haven’t quite told you yet what I was thinking when we drove through Missouri, and especially in the place where we passed Boonville Colony, which reminded me of my own prison business, now it is absolutely necessary to discard everything that remains of our personal attachments, and immediately figure out concrete plans for a working life ... - And so on, as he usually talked in those very first days.
The guys and I went to his apartment, and Dean came out to open it for us in his shorts. Marylou was just jumping off the couch: Dean sent the occupant of the hut to the kitchen, perhaps to make coffee, and he himself solved his love problems, because for him sex remained the only sacred and important thing in life, no matter how much you had to sweat and swear in order to live at all , and so on. It was all written on it: in the way he stood, in the way he shook his head, all the while looking down somewhere, like a young boxer receiving instructions from a trainer, how he nodded to make it seem that he was absorbing every word, inserting countless “yes " and good". At first glance, he reminded me of a young Gene Autry - well-built, narrow-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent - in general, a kind of hero of the snowy West with small sideburns. He did indeed work on Ed Wall's ranch in Colorado before he married Marylou and went East. Marylou was a pretty blonde with huge rings of hair, a sea of golden curls. She was sitting on the edge of the couch, her hands hanging from her knees, and her lanky blue village eyes looked wide and motionless, because now she was stuck in the gray and evil New York, about which she had heard so much at home, in the West, she sat in the hut, like a long-bodied a scrawny, surreal Modigliani woman waiting in some important waiting room. But besides the fact that Marylou was just a cutie, she was terribly stupid and capable of terrible things. That night everyone drank beer, chatted and laughed until dawn, and the next morning, when we were already numbly sitting and smoking butts from ashtrays in the gray light of a dull day, Dean nervously got up, paced back and forth, thought and decided that the most necessary thing now - make Marylou cook breakfast and sweep the floor.
- In other words, let's move, dear, hear what I say, otherwise there will be one continuous confusion, and we will not achieve true knowledge or crystallization of our plans.
Here I left.
The following week, he admitted to Chad King that he absolutely needed to learn how to write from him. Chad told him that I was the writer here, and that you should turn to me for advice. Meanwhile, Dean got a job in a parking lot, got into an argument with Marylou at their new apartment in Hoboken—God only knows what got them there—and she got so pissed off that she plotted revenge and called the police with some absurd, hysterical, idiotic slander, and Dean had to leave Hoboken. He had nowhere to live. He went straight to Paterson, New Jersey, where I lived with my aunt, and one evening, when I was studying, there was a knock on the door, and already Dean bowed and bowed obsequiously in the half-light of the hallway, saying at the same time:
“Hello, do you remember me—am I Dean Moriarty?” I came to ask you to show me how to write.
- Where's Marylou? I asked, and Dean replied that she must have swindled a few dollars from someone and went back to Denver, "whore!" And if so, then we went with him to drink beer, because we could not talk the way we wanted in the presence of my aunt, who was sitting in the living room reading her newspaper. She gave Dean one single look and decided that he was naughty.
At the bar I told him:
- Listen, dude, I know very well that you came to me not only to become a writer, but, in the end, that I myself know about it, except that you need to stick to it with the same terrible force like amphetamines.
And he replied:
- Yes, of course, I know exactly what you mean, and all these problems, in fact, also occurred to me, but what I want is the implementation of such factors that in case you have to depend from Schopenhauer's dichotomy for any internally realizable... - And further down the text - things that I didn't understand one iota, and neither did he. In those days he really didn't know what he was talking about; that is, he was just a young convict who had just settled back, obsessed with marvelous opportunities to become a real intellectual, and he liked to talk in that tone and use those words that he heard from "real intellectuals", but somehow completely confused - although mind you, he does not he was so naive in everything else, and it took him only a few months to spend with Karlo Marx to fully master all sorts of special words and jargon. However, we understood each other perfectly on other levels of insanity, and I agreed that he would stay at my house until he found a job, and then we agreed to somehow go to the West. It was in the winter of 1947.
One night, when Dean was having dinner at my place—he was already working in a parking lot in New York—and I was drumming fast on my typewriter, he leaned on my shoulders and said,
- Well, come on, the girls won't wait, wrap it up.
I answered:
Wait a minute, I'll just finish the chapter. “And that was one of the best chapters in the whole book. Then I got dressed, and we rushed to New York to the arrow with some girls. As the bus drove through the eerie, phosphorescent void of the Lincoln Tunnel, we held on to each other, excitedly chatting, yelling, and waving our arms, and I began to dig into this psycho Dean. The guy was simply excited to the extreme by life, but if he was a rogue, it was only because he too wanted to live and communicate with people who otherwise would not pay any attention to him. He teased me too, and I knew it (housing, food, and "how to write"), and he knew I knew it (that was the basis of our relationship), but I didn't care, and we got along great. - without getting each other and especially without ceremony; we walked after each other on tiptoe, as if we had just touchingly made friends. I began to learn from him in the same way that he apparently learned from me. Regarding my work, he said:
- Go ahead, everything you do is cool. - He looked over my shoulder when I wrote my stories, and yelled: - Yes! So be it! Well, you give, dude! - Or said: - F-fu! and wiped his face with a handkerchief. - Listen, fir-trees, there is so much more to do, so much to write! At least start writing it all down, without any superficial constraints and not resting on any literary prohibitions and grammatical fears ...
- That's right, dude, you spoke correctly. “And I saw some kind of sacred lightning flashing in his arousal and in his visions, which poured out of him in such a stream that people on buses turned to look at this “crazy derangement”. In the West, he spent a third of his life in a billiard room, a third in prison, and a third in a public library. He was seen purposefully rushing bareheaded through the winter streets towards the billiard room, carrying books under his arm, or climbing trees to get into the attic of some of his friends, where he usually sat for days on end, reading or hiding from representatives of the law.
We went to New York - I forgot what it was about, some two colored girls - and of course there were no girls at the place: they were supposed to meet Dean in a cafe and did not come. We then went to his parking lot, where he had to do something - change in a booth in the back, preen in front of a cracked mirror, something like that - and then we moved on. Just that evening, Dean met with Carlo Marx. A great thing happened when they met. Two sharp minds like them took a liking to each other right away. Two penetrating eyes crossed - a holy rogue with a radiant mind and a sad poetic rogue with a dark mind, that is, Karlo Marx. Since that very minute, I've only seen Dean occasionally, and I've been a little offended. Their energies clashed foreheads, and in comparison, I was just a sucker and could not keep up with them. It was then that all this crazy mess began, which then turned all my friends and everything that was left of my family into a big cloud of dust that covered the American Night. Carlo told him about Old Bull Lee, about Elmer Hassel and Jane: how Lee grew grass in Texas, how Hassel sat on Riker's Island, how Jane wandered around Times Square in benzedrine glitches, carrying her baby in her arms, and how she came in Bellevue. And Dean told Carlo about various unknown people from the West, such as Tommy Snark, the rickety pool shark, the gambler and the holy pederast. He also talked about Roy Johnson, about Big Ed Dunkel, his childhood buddies, his street buddies, his countless girls and sex booze, his pornographic pictures, his heroes, heroines, his adventures. Together they rushed through the streets, cutting into everything the way they had it from the very beginning, and which later began to be perceived with such sadness and emptiness. But then they danced around the streets like fools, and I followed them, as I have been trailing all my life for those people who interested me, because the only people for me are crazy, those who are crazy to live, crazy to talk, crazy to be saved. , greedy for everything at the same time, who never yawns, never says a banality, who only burns, burns, burns like fabulous yellow Roman candles, exploding among the stars with spiders of light, and in the middle you can see a blue flash, and everyone screams: “A-ayy !" What were the names of such young people in Goethe's Germany? Desiring with all his heart to learn to write like Carlo, Dean first attacked him with this loving soul, which only scoundrels have:
- Well, Carlo, let me say - this is what I want to say ... - I did not see them for about two weeks, and during this time they cemented their relationship to a brutal degree of continuous daily and nightly conversations.
Then came spring, a cool time to travel, and everyone in our scattered company was getting ready for one trip or another. I was busy with my romance, and when I reached the middle point, after my aunt and I went South to visit my brother Rocco, I was quite ready to go West for the first time in my life.
Dean has already left. Carlo and I saw him off the Greyhound station on 34th Street. They had a spot up there where you could take a picture for a quarter. Carlo took off his glasses and began to look sinister. Dean shot in profile, turning around shyly. I took a frontal photo - but in such a way that I looked like a thirty-year-old Italian, ready to kill anyone who even says a word against his mother. This photo Carlo and Dean carefully cut down the middle with a razor and hid the halves in their wallets. Dean was wearing a real western business suit, bought especially for the great return to Denver: the guy had finished his first spree in New York. I say spree, but Dean just plowed through his camps like an ox. He was the most fantastic parking attendant in the whole world: he could back up a car into a narrow gap and brake against the wall at forty miles an hour, jump out of the cab, run back to back between the bumpers, jump into another car, turn around at fifty miles an hour. an hour in a tiny patch, quickly back into a tight alley, boom - slam the door with such haste that you can see the car vibrate as he flies out of it, then rush to the checkout booth like a star of cinder lanes, issue a receipt, jump into a car that has just arrived, the owner will not have time to get out of it, literally slip under his feet, start up with the door still open and with a roar - to the next free patch; turn, slap on the spot, brake, flew out, go: work like this without a break for eight hours a night, just in the evening rush hours and after theatrical tours, in greasy pants from some drunk, in a frayed jacket trimmed with fur, and in broken shoes that fall off your feet. Now he had bought himself a new suit, pinstriped blue, a waistcoat, and everything else for his return home—eleven dollars on Third Avenue, with a watch and a chain, and a portable typewriter on which he was going to start writing in some Denver furnished rooms as soon as he finds a job there. We had a farewell dinner of sausages and beans at the Ricker's on Seventh Avenue, and then Dean got on the bus and roared off into the night. So our screamer left. I promised myself that I would go there when the spring really blossomed and the earth opened up.
This is how, in fact, my road life began, and what was destined to happen later is pure fantasy, and it’s impossible not to tell about it.
Yes, and I wanted to get to know Dean better, not just because I was a writer and needed fresh impressions, and not just because my whole life, revolving around the campus, reached some kind of completion of the cycle and came to an end, but because in an incomprehensible way, despite the dissimilarity of our characters, he reminded me of some long-lost brother: at the sight of suffering on his bony face with long sideburns and drops of sweat on his tense muscular neck, I involuntarily recalled my boyhood years in the dye dumps, in pits filled with water, and on the river banks of Paterson and Passaic. His dirty robes clung to him so gracefully, as if it was impossible to order a better suit from a tailor, but could only earn it from Natural Tailoring Nature And Joy, as Dean had done with his sweat. And in his excited way of speaking, I again heard the voices of old comrades and brothers - under the bridge, among motorcycles, in neighbors' yards lined with clotheslines, and on drowsy midday porches where boys strum guitars while their older brothers work hard in factories. All my other friends today were "intellectuals": the Nietzschean anthropologist Chad, Carlo Marx with his puffy surreal conversations in his quiet voice with a serious look, Old Bull Lee with such a critical drawl in his voice, accepting absolutely nothing; or they were secret wrongdoers, like Elmer Hassell with that hip sneer of his, or like Jane Lee, especially when she sprawled on her oriental couch cover, snorting at The New Yorker. But Dean's intelligence was disciplined to the last grain, radiant and complete, without this boring intellectuality. And his “lawlessness” was not the kind of snort or anger: it was a wild outburst of American joy, saying “yes” to absolutely everything, it belonged to the West, it was the west wind, an ode that wafted from the Plains, something new, predicted long ago, already approaching (he stole cars just to ride for pleasure). And besides this, all my New York friends were in that nightmarish position of denial, when society is overthrown and they give their exhausted reasons read in books for this - political or psychoanalytic; Dean just ran around society, greedy for bread and love - he, in general, always didn’t give a damn about this or that, “as long as I can still get myself this girl with this little it over there between the legs, kid”, and “as long as you can still eat, do you hear, son? I'm hungry, I want to eat, let's go eat something right now! - and now we are already rushing to eat, about which Ecclesiastes said: "This is your share under the sun."
Western cousin of the sun, Dean. Although my aunt warned that he would not bring me to good, I already heard a new call and saw new distances - and believed in them, being young; and glimpses of what really didn't work out, and even the fact that Dean subsequently rejected me as his sidekick, and then generally wiped his feet on me on hungry bridges and hospital beds - did it all matter at all? I was a young writer and I wanted to get moving.
I knew that somewhere along the way there would be girls, there would be visions - everything would be; somewhere along the way the pearl will fall into my hands.
In July 1947, having saved about fifty dollars from old veterans' benefits, I was ready to go to the West Coast. My friend Remy Boncoeur wrote me a letter from San Francisco saying that I should come and sail with him on a round-the-world liner. He swore he would drag me through engine room. In response, I wrote that any old cargo ship and a few long Pacific voyages would be enough for me so that I could return with enough money to support myself in my aunt's house until I finished the book. He wrote that he had a shack in Mill City, and I would have a lot of time to write there while he did all the red tape with getting on the ship. He lived with a girl named Leigh Ann; she cooks superbly, and everything will be nishtyak. Rémi was an old school friend of mine, a Frenchman who had been raised in Paris, and a real lunatic; at the time, I just didn't know how mad I was. And so, it means that he was waiting for me to come to him in ten days. My aunt was not at all opposed to my going to the West: she said that it would only benefit me, because all winter I worked so hard and hardly went out; she didn't even mind when it turned out that I would have to hitchhike part of the way. My aunt only wished me to return home safe and sound. And so, leaving desk the bulky half of my manuscript, and having folded cozy home-made sheets one morning for the last time in the closet, I left the house with a linen bag in which my few basic accessories fit, and headed to Pacific Ocean with fifty dollars in his pocket.
In Paterson, I sat for months on maps of the United States, even reading some books about the pioneers and absorbing names like Platt, Cimarron and so on, and on these road maps there was one long red line, which was called "Route No. 6" and led from the tip of Cape Cod straight to Ely, Nevada, and from there dived to Los Angeles. I'm just not going to turn anywhere from the "six" to Eli, I said to myself and confidently set off on my way. To get on the track, I had to climb to Bear Mountain. Full of dreams about what I would do in Chicago, Denver, and finally San Fran, I took the subway from Seventh Avenue to the terminus at 242nd Street, and from there I took a tram to Yonkers; there, in the center, I changed to another tram and drove to the city's outskirts on the east bank of the Hudson. If you happen to drop a rose flower into the waters of the Hudson near its mysterious source in the Adirondacks, then think of the places where it will visit on the way to the sea, to eternity - think of this wonderful Hudson valley. I began to stopar to its headwaters. In five scattered hauls, I found myself at the desired bridge at Bear Mountain, where Route 6 turned off from New England. When I was dropped off there, it began to rain. Mountains. Highway 6 came from behind the river, passed the roundabout and got lost in the middle of nowhere. Not only was no one driving along it, but it also started to rain like a bucket, and I had nowhere to hide. In search of shelter, I had to run under some pine trees, but this did not help; I started crying, cursing and banging myself on the head for being such a fool. I was forty miles north of New York; while I was getting here, I was gnawed by the thought that on this momentous first day I was constantly moving north instead of the much-desired west. And now I'm still stuck here. I ran the quarter mile to a nice abandoned gas station in English style and stopped under the eaves from which flowed. Above my head, in the heights, the huge, woolly Bear Mountain threw down god-terrible peals of thunder, instilling fear in me. Only vague trees could be seen, and an oppressive desert, ascending to the very heavens. And what the hell do I need here? I cursed, cried and wanted to go to Chicago. Right now they are just cool there, yes, but I am here, and it is not known when I will get to them ... And so on. Finally, a car stopped at an empty gas station: a man and two women were sitting in it, they wanted to calmly study the map. I went out into the rain and waved my hand; they consulted: of course, I looked like some kind of maniac - with wet hair and squelching boots. My boots - well, what kind of a jerk am I, huh? - were such factory-made Mexican huaraches - a sieve, not shoes, are completely unsuitable either for night rains in America, or for rough night roads. But these people let me in and took me back to Newburgh, and I took it as the best option compared to the prospect of sitting in the middle of nowhere under Medvezhaya Gora all night.
“And besides,” the man said, “there’s no traffic here on Route 6.” If you want to get to Chicago, then it is better to drive in New York through the Holland Tunnel and move towards Pittsburgh. And I knew he was right. This was my sour dream: sitting at home by the fireplace, it is foolish to imagine how wonderful it would be to drive across America on a single red line instead of trying different roads and tracks.
The rain has stopped in Newburgh. I reached the river and was forced to return to New York by bus with a delegation of schoolteachers who were traveling from a picnic in the mountains: one endless la-la-la in tongues; and I kept swearing to myself - I felt sorry for the money spent, and I said to myself: now, I wanted to go west, but instead all day and half the night I rode up and down, from south to north and back, like a motor that can't start at all. And I swore to myself that I would be in Chicago tomorrow, and for this I took a ticket for the Chicago bus, having spent most of the money that I had, and I didn’t care if I ended up in Chicago tomorrow.
It was a perfectly ordinary bus, with screaming kids and hot sun, people getting on at every Pennsylvania place until we were out on the Ohio Plain and really moving forward, up to Ashtabula and straight across Indiana, late at night. I arrived in Chi early in the morning, checked into the youth hostel and fell asleep. There were very few dollars left in my pocket. I started digging into Chicago after a good day's sleep.
Wind on Lake Michigan, bop in the Loop, long walks in South Halsted and North Clark, and one especially long one at midnight into the jungle, where a patrol car followed me, mistaking me for some suspicious sub. At that time, in 1947, bop took over all of America like crazy. The men at The Loop were doing well, but somehow tired, because the bop fell right between Charlie Parker's Ornithology and the other period that started with Miles Davis. And as I sat there and listened to the sound of the night, which the bop has come to represent for each of us, I thought about all my friends from one end of the country to the other, and how they are all, in fact, in one huge backyard: doing something, twitching, fussing. And for the first time in my life the next day I went to the West. It was a warm and wonderful day for hitchhiking. To get out of the incredible complexities of Chicago traffic, I took a bus to Joliet, Illinois, passed the Joliet zone, after walking through the uneven green streets, went to the outskirts of the city, and there, finally, I waved my hand. Otherwise, you need to take a bus all the way from New York to Joliet and spend more than half the money.
I was first tossed thirty miles into green Illinois by a dynamite truck with a red flag dangling from it; the driver then turned off at the intersection of Route 6, which we were driving on, and Route 66, where they both ran off to the west for incredible distances. Then, about three o'clock in the afternoon, after I had eaten apple pie and ice cream at a roadside stall, a small car pulled up in front of me. There was a woman sitting inside, and a great joy surged through me as I ran to the car. But the woman turned out to be middle-aged, she herself had sons my age, and she just wanted someone to help her get to Iowa. I was all for. Iowa! Denver is within walking distance, and once I get to Denver, I can relax. For the first few hours she drove me and once even insisted that we, like real tourists, look around some old church, and then I drive this one, and although I am not a good driver, I drove cleanly through the rest of Illinois to Davenport, Iowa bypassing Rock Island. And here, for the first time in my life, I saw my beloved Mississippi River, dried up, in a summer haze, with low water, with this fetid smell of the naked body of America itself, which it washes over. Rock Island - railroad tracks, tiny downtown, and across the bridge - Davenport, just the same town, smelling of sawdust and warmed by the midwestern sun. Here the woman had to go to her home on a different road, and I got out.
The sun was setting; after drinking a cold beer, I walked to the outskirts, and it was a long walk. All the men were coming home from work, wearing railroad caps, baseball caps, whatever, just like in any other town anywhere after work. One drove me to the top of the hill and dropped me off at a deserted crossroads at the edge of the prairie. It was wonderful there. Only farmer's cars drove past: they looked at me suspiciously and rolled on with a clang; the cows returned home. Not a single truck. Several more cars passed by. Some dude with a fluttering scarf rushed by. The sun disappeared completely, and I was left in purple darkness. Now I got scared. There was not a single light in the vastness of Iowa - in a minute no one would be able to see me. Luckily, a man driving back to Davenport gave me a lift downtown. But I still stuck where I started.
I sat at the bus stop and thought. I ate another apple pie and ice cream: I practically didn’t eat anything else while driving around the country - I knew it was nutritious and, of course, delicious. Then I decided to play. After half an hour looking at the waitress in the cafe at the bus stop, I took the bus from the center to the outskirts again - but this time to where the gas stations were. Big trucks roared here, and after a couple of minutes - wow! One stopped next to me. As I ran to the cockpit, my soul screamed with joy. And what kind of driver was there - a healthy, tough driver with bulging eyes and a hoarse emery voice; he barely paid attention to me - only jerked and kicked the levers while he started his machine again. Therefore, I was able to rest my weary soul a little, for the most troublesome thing when driving in stopovers is the need to talk to countless people, as if convincing them that they did not make a mistake in picking you up, and even how to entertain them, and it all turns out to be a huge tension, if you only go all the way and are not going to spend the night in hotels. This guy did nothing but yell over the roar of the engine, and I also had to yell back - and we relaxed. He drove his thing all the way to Iowa City and yelled his jokes to me about how famously he twisted the law around his finger in every town that had unfair speed limits, and every time he repeated:
- My ass was rushing under the very noses of these damned cops, they didn’t even have time to click their beak! “Just before entering Iowa City, he saw another truck catching up with us, and since he had to turn in the city, he flashed the brake lights to the guy and slowed down so that I jumped out, which I did with my bag, and he, recognizing such an exchange, stopped to take me, and again in the twinkling of an eye I was sitting on the top in another hefty cabin, aiming to drive hundreds of miles through the night - how happy I was! The new carrier turned out to be just as crazy as the first one, he yelled just as much, and I just had to lean back and roll myself on. I had already seen Denver looming ahead, under the stars, beyond the Iowa prairies and the plains of Nebraska, in front of me the Promised Land, and behind it, a vision even more majestic - San Francisco: the cities shone with diamonds in the middle of the night. For a couple of hours, my driver pushed hard and baited bikes, and then, in the Iowa town, where a few years later Dean and I would be detained on suspicion of stealing a certain Cadillac, slept for several hours on the seat. I slept too, and then walked a little along the lonely brick walls, lit by a single lantern, where the prairie lurked at the end of every street, and the smell of corn hung like dew in the night.
At dawn the carrier shuddered and woke up. We rushed on, and an hour later, the smoke of Des Moines was already hanging over the green corn fields. Now it was time for him to have breakfast, he didn’t want to strain, so I drove myself to Des Moines, which started about four miles away, sat down with a couple of guys from the University of Iowa; it was strange to sit in their brand new comfortable car and listen to the exams as we drove smoothly into town. Now I wanted to sleep all day. So I went back to check into the hostel, but they didn't have any free rooms, and my instinct took me to the railroad - and there are plenty of them in Des Moines - and it all ended up in a hotel next to the locomotive depot that looked like an old and gloomy tavern somewhere. sometime in the Plains, where I slept for a long day in a big, clean, hard, white bed with obscene writing scrawled on the wall next to my pillow, and broken yellow blinds blocking out a smoky view of the depot. I woke up when the sun was already reddening, and it was the only distinct time in my life - the strangest moment when I did not know who I was: far from home, driven and tortured by travel, in a cheap hotel room that I had never seen before, the steam whistles outside the window, the old hotel wood crackles, the footsteps upstairs are such mournful sounds; and I stared up at the high, cracked ceiling, and for fifteen strange seconds I didn't really know who I was. I was not afraid: I was just someone else, some kind of stranger, and my whole life was illusory, was the life of a ghost. I was somewhere halfway across America, on the borderline separating the East of my youth from the West of my future, and maybe that's why this happened here and now - this strange red sunset of the day.
But I had to move and stop moaning, so I took the bag, said goodbye to the old manager, who was sitting near his spittoon, and went to eat. I ate apple pie and ice cream - as I got deeper into Iowa, it got better and better: pies - more, ice cream - thicker. That day in Des Moines, I saw flocks of the most beautiful girls walking home from school, but for the time being I pushed such thoughts away from myself, tempted by the fun in Denver. Carlo Marx was already in Denver; there was Dean; there was Chad King and Tim Gray, they come from there: Marylou was there; there was the coolest caudle I know from hearsay, including Ray Rawlins and his beautiful blonde sister Babe Rawlins; two waitresses familiar to Dean, the Bettencourt sisters; There was even Roland Major, my old college buddy who is also a writer. I looked forward to meeting them all with impatience and joy. And so he rushed past pretty girls, and the prettiest girls in the world live in Des Moines.
A guy on what looked like a mechanic on wheels - a truck full of tools that he operated standing up like a modernized milkman - threw me up a long, gentle hillside, and there I immediately sat down with a farmer and his son who were driving to Adele that somewhere in Iowa. In this town under a large elm at a gas station, I met another hitchhiker: such a typical New Yorker, Irishman, who drove a mail van for most of his working life, and now he was driving to Denver to his girl and towards a new life. I think he was running from something in New York, most likely the law. A real red-nosed young wino in his thirties, and under any normal circumstances I would quickly get bored with him, but now all my senses are sharpened to meet any human affection. He was wearing a beat sweater and baggy pants; in the sense of a bag, he had nothing but a toothbrush and handkerchiefs. He said that we should move on together. I would actually refuse, because on the road it looked pretty terrible. But we stayed together and with some taciturn peasant drove to Stuart, Iowa; then we ran aground for real. We stood in front of the railway ticket booth for a good five hours, until sunset, waiting for any transport to the west; we were wasting time completely incompetently - at first each one told about himself, then he poisoned indecent jokes, then we just kicked the gravel and made various stupid sounds. We're fed up. I made up my mind to spend a dollar on beer; we went into the old Stuart saloon and had a few drinks. Then he drank the way he usually drank in the evenings at home, on his Ninth Avenue, and began to joyfully yell into my ear all the disgusting dreams that he had in his life. I even liked him - not because he was a good dude, as it turned out later, but because he approached everything with enthusiasm. In the dark, we again went out onto the road, and, of course, no one stopped there, moreover, almost no one passed by at all. This went on until three in the morning. For some time we tried to fall asleep on the benches at the railway ticket office, but there the telegraph clicked all night long, keeping us awake, and outside, large freight trains rumbled every now and then. We didn't know how to jump on one, we never did; we didn't know if they were going west or east, we didn't know how to choose the right boxcars, flatcars or defrosted refrigerators, and so on. Therefore, just before sunrise, when the bus to Omaha was passing by, we got into it, moving the sleeping passengers, I paid for it and for myself. His name was Eddie. He reminded me of my brother-in-law from the Bronx. That is why I stayed with him. Like next - an old friend, a good-natured smiling Kent, with whom you can fool around.
We arrived at Council Bluffs at dawn; I looked outside. All winter long I read of the great caravans of wagons that met here to hold council before setting off on various trails towards Oregon and Santa Fe; now, of course, there are only nice little suburban cottages, built this way and that, spread out in the gloomy gray light of dawn. Then - Omaha; My God, I saw the first cowboy in my life, he walked along the faded wall of wholesale butchers in his ten-gallon hat and Texas boots and looked just like some kind of beatnik in the morning at brick wall in the east, if not for his uniform. We got off the bus and walked up to the gentle hill that had been built up over thousands of years by the deposits of the mighty Missouri - Omaha was built on its slopes - went out of town and stretched our thumbs forward. We were given a ride by a prosperous farmer in a huge hat, who said that the Platte Valley is as big as the Nile Valley in Egypt, and just as he said this, I saw huge trees in the distance, the strip of which curved along with the river channel, and endless green fields around - and almost agreed with him. Then, as we stood at another crossroads, the sky began to cloud over, and another cowboy, this time six feet tall and wearing a modest half-gallon hat, called us over and asked if anyone could drive. Of course Eddie could, he had a license and I didn't. The cowboy drove two of his cars back to Montana. His wife was waiting in Grand Island, and he wanted one of us to take one there, and she would sit there. From there he moved north, and there our journey with him would have to end. But we would have already climbed a good hundred miles to Nebraska, so his offer came in handy. Eddie rode alone, the cowboy and I followed, but before we were out of town, Eddie was running ninety miles an hour out of sheer excess of feeling.
“The devil would take me, what is this guy doing!” the cowboy yelled and rushed after him. It all started to feel like racing. For a moment I wondered if Eddie was just trying to get away with the car, and as far as I now know, that's exactly what he intended to do. But the cowboy stuck to him, caught up and blew. Eddie slowed down. The cowboy honked again for him to stop altogether.
“Damn it, kid, your tire could go flat at that speed. Can't you drive a little slower?
“Damn it, did I really do ninety?” Eddie asked. “I didn’t understand on such a smooth road.
“Don't take it too seriously, and then we'll all get to Grand Island safe and sound.
“During the Depression,” the cowboy told me, “I used to jump on a freight train once a month, at least. In those days, on a platform or in a freight car, you could see hundreds of peasants - not only vagabonds, there were different people- some without work, others moved from place to place, some just wandered. So it was all over the West. The conductor never bothered anyone. Now, I don't know. There is nothing to do in Nebraska. Just think: in the mid-thirties, as far as the eye could see, there was one cloud of dust and nothing more. There is nothing to breathe. The earth was all black. I then lived here. I don't care if they give Nebraska back to the Indians. I hate this place more than anything in the world. Now my home in Montana is Missoula. Come there somehow, you will see truly God's country. - Later, in the evening, when he was tired of talking, I fell asleep - and he was an interesting storyteller.
On the way we stopped for lunch. The cowboy went off to fix his spare tire, and Eddie and I sat down in a kind of home canteen. Then I heard laughter - no, just a neigh, and in the dining room came such a tanned old fart, a Nebraska farmer with a bunch of guys; the gnashing of his cries could be heard from the other side of the plains—generally across the entire gray plain of the universe. The others laughed along with him. The whole world was up to the light bulb for him, and at the same time he was thoroughly attentive to everyone. I said to myself: hey, just listen to how this dude laughs. Here is the West for you, here I am in this West. He burst into the dining room with a thunder, calling out the hostess by name; she made the sweetest cherry pies in Nebraska, and I got mine too, along with a scoop of ice cream piled on top.
“Mommy, build me something to chop quickly before I eat myself raw here - or somehow do something stupid. - And he threw his body on the stool, and it just began, "khya-khya-khya-khya." “And put some more beans in there.”
Next to me sat the very spirit of the West. It would be nice to know his whole unplanned life, what the hell he was doing all these years - besides laughing and yelling like this now. Wow, I said to my soul, but then our cowboy returned and we left for Grand Island.
We arrived without blinking an eye. The cowboy went to fetch his wife and meet the fate that awaited him, and Eddie and I were back on the road. First, we were dropped off by two young dudes - thrashers, boys, village shepherds in a jalopy assembled from junk - we were dropped off somewhere in open field under the beginning of the rain. Then the old man, who didn't say anything - in general God knows why he picked us up - drove us to Shelton. Here Eddie stood despondently and resignedly in the middle of the road in front of a group of short-legged, squat Omaha Indians that had hatched on him, with nowhere to go and nothing to do. There were railroad tracks across the road, and on the water pump was written: "Shelton."
“Damn it,” Eddie said in amazement, “I've been to this city before. It was a long time ago, back in the war, at night, it was late, and everyone was already asleep. I go out on the platform to smoke, and there is not a damn thing around, and we are in the very middle, dark as in the underworld, I look up, and there this name, “Shelton”, is written on the pump. We are going to Tikhoy, everyone is snoring, well, every bastard is sleeping, and we are only standing for a few minutes, they are shoveling in the firebox or something else - and now we have gone. Damn it, the same Shelton! Yes, I have hated this place ever since! We are stuck in Shelton. As in Davenport, Iowa, all the cars somehow turned out to be farm cars, and if from time to time there was a car with tourists, it was even worse: the old people behind the wheel, and the wives pointing fingers at the landscape, poring over the map or leaning back and smiling at everyone suspiciously.
It drizzled harder, and Eddie was cold: he was wearing very few clothes. I fished out a tartan woolen shirt from my bag and he put it on. He got better. I've got a cold. In a rickety shop, like for local Indians, I bought myself drops for a cold. I went to the post office, in such a chicken coop, and sent a postcard to my aunt for a penny. We are back on the gray road. Here it is, in front of the nose - "Shelton" on the pump. A Rock Island ambulance rumbled past. We saw blurred faces in soft carriages. The train howled and flew off into the distance, across the plains, in the direction of our desires. The rain came down harder.
A tall, thin old man in a gallon hat stopped his car on the wrong side of the road and walked towards us; he looked like a sheriff. We prepared our stories just in case. He was in no hurry to come.
Are you guys going somewhere or just going? We didn't understand the question, and it was a damn good question.
- And what? we asked.
“Well, I have my little carnival over there, a few miles down the road, and I need big guys who would like to work and earn extra money. I have concessions for a roulette wheel and a wooden wheel - you know, you scatter the pupae and tempt fate. Well, do you want to work with me - thirty percent of the revenue is yours?
What about housing and food?
- There will be a bed, but no food. You have to eat in the city. We drive a little. - We guessed. "Good opportunity," he said, patiently waiting for us to make up our minds. We felt stupid and didn't know what to say, and as for me, I didn't want to get involved with any carnival at all. I was hell-bent on getting to our crowd in Denver.
I said:
– Well, I don’t know… the sooner the better for me, I probably just won’t have that much time. Eddie said the same, and the old man waved his hand casually and padded back to his car and drove away. That's all. We laughed a little and imagined how it would have turned out in kind. I saw a dark, dusty night in the middle of the plains, the faces of Nebraska families roaming around, their pink children looking at everything in awe, and I know that I would feel like Satan myself, fooling them with all sorts of cheap carnival tricks. Moreover, the ferris wheel rotates in the darkness over the steppe, yes, my God, the sad music of a merry carousel, and I want to get to my goal - and I spend the night in some gilded wagon on a bed of jute bags.
Eddie turned out to be a rather absent-minded fellow traveler. A funny ancient carriage rolled past, driven by an old man; this thing was made out of some kind of aluminum, square as a box—a trailer, no doubt, but some weird, crazy, self-made Nebraska trailer. He drove very slowly and stopped not far away. We rushed to him; he said he could only take one; without a word, Eddie jumped in and rattled slowly away, taking my wool plaid away. What can you do, I mentally waved my shirt; in any case, she was dear to me only as a memory. I waited in our little personal nightmarish Shelton for a very, very long time, several hours, not forgetting that it would soon be night; in fact, it was still daylight, just very dark. Denver, Denver, how can I get to Denver? I was about to give up and was about to sit for a while and drink coffee, when a relatively new car stopped, a young guy was sitting in it. I ran towards him like crazy.
- Where are you going?
- To Denver.
“Well, I can take you a hundred miles that way.
“Wonderful, wonderful, you saved my life.
– I myself used to travel by stop, so now I always take someone.
- I would take it too, if I had a car. - So we chatted with him, he told me about his life - it was not very interesting, I began to slowly doze off and woke up near Gothenburg itself, where he dropped me off.
And then the coolest ride of my life began: a truck with an open top and no tailgate, six or seven guys stretched out in the back, and the drivers - two young blond-haired farmers from Minnesota - picked up every last one they found along the way; no one, except for a couple of these smiling, cheerful and pleasant village loafers, but I wanted to see; both are dressed in cotton shirts and work pants - that's all; both with big hands and open, wide and friendly smiles for anyone or anything that gets in the way. I ran up and asked:
- Is there another place?
“Of course, let’s jump in, there’s enough space for everyone.”
Before I had time to climb into the back, the truck roared on; I could not resist, someone in the back grabbed me, and I flopped down. Someone held out a bottle of fusel oil, it was left on the bottom. I took a sip in the wild, lyrical, drizzling Nebraska air.
- Wow, let's go! yelled the kid in the baseball cap, and they got the truck up to seventy and outrun everyone on the track like a cannon. “We drive this son of a bitch all the way from Des Moines. Guys never stop. They sometimes have to yell to get off to piss. And then you have to piss from the air and hold on tighter, brother - the tighter. All the better.
I looked around the whole company. There were two young boys there, North Dakota farmers in red baseball caps, which is the standard headdress of North Dakota farm boys, they were going to the harvests: their old man gave them a vacation for the summer, to ride. There were two city kids from Columbus, Ohio, football students; they chewed gum, winked, sang songs in the wind; they said that in the summer they generally drive around the States in a stop.
We're going to EL! they yelled.
– What will you do there?
- And the devil knows. Who cares?
Then there was another long, skinny Kent with a furtive look.
- Where are you from? I asked him. I was lying next to him in the back; it was impossible to sit there without jumping, and there were no handrails to hold on to. He slowly turned to me, opened his mouth and said:
- Mon-ta-na.
And finally, there was Gene from Mississippi and his ward. Gene from Mississippi was a little swarthy guy who rode across the country in freight trains, a hobo of about thirty, but he looked young, and it was difficult to say how old he really was. He sat cross-legged on the boards, looking out over the fields, not saying a word for hundreds of miles, and finally turned to me one day and asked:
– Where are you going?
I replied that in Denver.
“I have a sister there, but I haven’t seen her in years. His speech was melodious and slow. He was patient. His ward, a tall, fair-haired sixteen-year-old boy, was also dressed in rags, like a hobo: that is, they both wore old clothes, blackened from locomotive soot, the dirt of freight cars, and from sleeping on the ground. The bright kid also behaved quietly and seemed to be running away from something; and from the way he looked straight ahead and licked his lips, anxiously thinking about something, it turned out that he was running away from the police. Sometimes Kent from Montana spoke to them with a sarcastic and insulting smirk. They paid no attention to him. Kent was all of himself an insult. I was afraid of his long stupid grin, with which he looked straight into your face and half-foolishly did not want to come off.
– Do you have money? he asked me.
- Where the hell from? A pint of whiskey might be enough until I get to Denver. And you?
- I know where you can get it.
- Everywhere. You can always lure some big-eared guy into an alleyway, right?
- Yes, I think you can.
- I'm sick of it when, in fact, grandmothers are in need. I'm going to Montana now to see my father. I'll have to get off that cart in Cheyenne and move upstairs on something else. These psychos are going to Los Angeles.
– Straight?
- All the way: if you want to L-E, they will give you a lift.
I began to scatter my brains: the idea that you can see through the whole of Nebraska, Wyoming at night, the Utah desert in the morning, then, most likely, the Nevada desert in the afternoon, and actually arrive in Los Angeles in the foreseeable and not too distant future, almost made me change all plans. But I had to go to Denver. I would also have to disembark in Cheyenne and hitchhike ninety miles south to Denver.
I was glad when the Minnesota guys who owned the truck decided to stop in North Platte for food: I wanted to look at them. They got out of the cab and smiled at all of us.
- You can piss! one said.
- It's time to eat! another said.
But out of the entire company, they were the only ones who had money for food. We followed them into a restaurant run by a whole bunch of women and sat there with our hamburgers and coffee while they ate whole trays of food, just like Mommy's in the kitchen. They were brothers, they drove agricultural equipment from Los Angeles to Minnesota and made good money doing it. Therefore, on the way back to the Coast, empty, they picked up everyone on the road. They have already done this five times and got the abyss of pleasure. They liked everything. They didn't stop smiling. I tried to talk to them—a rather clumsy attempt on my part to befriend our ship's captains—and all I got in return were two sunny smiles and big white corn-fed teeth.
Everyone was with us at the restaurant, except for both hobos - Gene and his boyfriend. When we returned, they were still sitting in the back, abandoned and unhappy by everyone. Darkness fell. The drivers smoked; I took the opportunity to buy a bottle of whiskey to keep warm in the passing night air. They smiled when I told them about it:
- Come on, hurry up.
- Well, you will get a couple of sips! I assured them.
- No, no, we don’t drink, come on.
Kent from Montana and both students wandered the streets of North Platte with me until I found a whiskey shop. They chipped in little by little, Kent added too, and I bought a fifth. Tall, sullen men watched us go by, sitting in front of houses with false facades: the whole main street was built up with such square boxes. Where every dreary street ended, vast expanses of plains opened up. I sensed something else in the air of the North Platte—I didn't know what it was. Five minutes later I understood. We got back to the truck and drove on. It got dark quickly. We all shook a little, then I looked around and saw how the flowering fields of the Platte River began to disappear, and in their place, so much so that there was no end in sight, there were long flat wastelands - sand and sagebrush. I was amazed.
- What the hell? I called out to Kent.
“The steppes are starting, boy. Let me have another sip.
- Ur-r-ra! the students yelled. Columbus, bye! What would Sparky and the boys say if they were here. Y-yay!
The drivers in front switched places; fresh brother shied the truck to the limit. The road had changed too: a hump in the middle, sloping edges, and ditches four feet deep on both sides, and the truck bounced and rolled from one side of the road to the other - only by some miracle no one was driving towards me at that time - and I thought that we're all about to do somersaults. But the brothers were awesome drivers. How this truck dealt with the Nebraska bump - the bump that climbs all the way to Colorado! As soon as I realized that I really finally got to Colorado - although officially I did not get into it, but if you look to the southwest, Denver is only a few hundred miles away ... Well, then I screamed with delight. We've blown a bubble around. Hefty flaming stars poured out, sandy hills, merging with the distance, faded. I felt like an arrow that could reach the very target.
And suddenly Gene from the Mississippi turned to me, roused from his patient contemplation with crossed legs, opened his mouth, leaned closer and said:
“These plains remind me of Texas.
“Are you from Texas yourself?”
“No, sir, I'm from Greenwell, Maz-sipi. “That's how he said it.
- Where is this boy from?
“He got into some kind of trouble in Mississippi, and I offered to help him get out. The boy has never been anywhere. I take care of him as best I can, he is still a child. “Although Gene was white, there was something of a wise and tired old black man in him, and sometimes there was something very similar to Elmer Hassel, a New York drug addict, yes, he had it, but only he was such a railroad Hassel, Hassel is a wandering epic that crosses the country far and wide every year, south in winter, north in summer, and only because he has no place where he could linger and not get tired of him, and because to go he had nowhere else to go but somewhere, he continued to roll on under the stars, and these stars, for the most part, turned out to be the stars of the West.
“I've been to Ogden a couple of times. If you want to go to Ogden, then I have a couple of friends there, you can lie down with them.
“I'm going to Denver from Cheyenne.
- What the hell? Go straight on, it's not every day that you get a ride like this.
The offer, of course, was very tempting. What about in Ogden?
What is Ogden? I asked.
“It’s the kind of place that almost all the guys pass through and always meet there; You are most likely to see whoever you want.
Before, when I went to the seas, I knew a long, skinny guy from Louisiana named Dylda Hazard, William Holmes Hazard, who was a hobo because he wanted to be. As a little boy, he saw a hobo come up to his mother and ask for a piece of cake, and she gave it to him, and when the hobo went down the road, the boy asked:
- Ma, and who is this uncle?
- Ah, that's ho-bo.
“Ma, I want to be a ho-bo when I grow up.”
“Shut your mouth, this doesn’t suit the Hazards. “But he never forgot that day, and when he grew up, after a short passion for playing football for the University of Louisiana, he really became a hobo. Dylda and I spent many nights telling each other stories and spitting tobacco juice into paper cups. In all of Gene's Mississippi manner, something was so obviously reminiscent of Dylda Hazard that I couldn't help it:
“Have you by any chance met a dude named Lilda Hazard somewhere?”
And he answered:
“You mean this tall guy who laughs out loud?
- Yes, it looks like it. He is from Ruston, Louisiana.
- Exactly. It is also sometimes referred to as Long from Louisiana. Yes, sir, of course I've met Dylda.
“He used to work in the oil fields in East Texas.
That's right, in East Texas. And now he drives cattle.
And it was already quite accurate; but still, I couldn't believe that Jean really knew Dylda, whom I had been looking for - well, back and forth - for, in general, several years.
“Even before, he worked on tugboats in New York?”
“W-well, I don’t know about that.
“So you probably only knew him in the West?”
- Well, yes. I have never been to New York.
“Well, damn it, it's amazing that you know him. Such a healthy country. And yet I was sure that you knew him.
“Yes, sir, I know Dylda quite well. Never presses if the money starts. Angry, tough dude, and I saw him take down a cop in Cheyenne with one punch. - It was also like Dylda: he constantly practiced his "one blow"; he himself looked like Jack Dempsey, only young and drunk to boot.
- Crap! I yelled into the wind, took another sip, and already felt pretty good. Each sip was carried away by the air of the open body flying towards him, its bitterness was erased, and the sweetness settled in the stomach. “Cheyenne, here I go!” I sang. Denver, watch out, I'm yours!
Kent from Montana turned to me, pointed to my shoes and joked, of course, not even smiling:
“Do you think if you bury these things in the ground, something will grow?” And the rest of the guys heard him laughing. I had the stupidest shoes in all of America; I took them on purpose to keep my feet from sweating on a hot road, and, except for the rain near Bear Mountain, these shoes really turned out to be the most suitable for my trip. So I laughed along with them. The shoes were already very frayed, pieces of multi-colored leather stuck out cubes of fresh pineapple, and fingers looked through the holes. In general, we croaked more and neighed to ourselves further. As if in a dream, the truck flew through tiny towns at intersections that clapped towards us from the darkness, past long lines of seasonal workers and cowboys, lounging all night. They only had time to turn their heads after us, and already from the overflowing darkness at the other end of the town we noticed how they slapped their thighs: we were a pretty cool company.
At this time of the year, however, the village was full of people - it was harvest time. The guys from Dakota fussed:
“We’ll probably get off the next time they stop to piss: there seems to be a lot of work here.”
“When it’s over here, you just have to move north,” advised Kent from Montana, “and follow the harvest until you get to Canada. - The guys nodded languidly in response: they did not place much value on his advice.
Meanwhile the young fair-haired fugitive sat still; Jin kept peeking out of his Buddhist trance at the dark plains flying by and softly whispering something in the guy's ear. He nodded. Jin cared about him - about his mood and about his fears. I thought: well, where the hell are they going to go and what will they do? They didn't even have cigarettes. I spent my whole pack on them - I loved them so much. They were grateful and gracious: they did not ask for anything, but I offered and offered everything. Montana Kent also had a pack, but he did not treat anyone. We raced through another town at a crossroads, past another line of rogues in jeans huddled under the dim streetlights like butterflies on the surface of a desert, and back to total darkness, and the stars above were clear and bright as the air thinned thinner and thinner. as we climbed the highlands in the western part of the plateau, little by little—a foot by a mile, they said—and no trees around us blocked the low stars. And once, when we flew by, in the sagebrush near the road, I noticed a sad white-faced cow. As you go by rail - just as smoothly and just as straight.
Soon we re-entered the town, slowed down, and Kent from Montana said:
- Well, finally, you can piss! “But the Minnesota guys didn’t stop and drove on. "Damn, I can't take it anymore," Kent said.
“Come on overboard,” someone said.
“Well, ladies,” he said, and slowly, while we were all looking at him, inch by inch began to sit down to the edge of the platform, holding on to everything he could, until he dangled his legs over the open side. Someone knocked on the cockpit glass to get the brothers' attention. They turned around and smiled as only they could. And just as Kent began to do his business, already too carefully, they began to zigzag the truck at seventy miles an hour. Kent immediately fell over on his back; we saw a fountain of whales in the air; he tried to get up and sit down again. The brothers again shook the truck to the side. Bang - he fell on his side and wet himself all over. In the roar of the wind we could hear him swearing weakly, as if a man was whining somewhere beyond the hills:
“Damn… damn…” He never realized that we were doing it on purpose: he was just fighting—sternly, like Job. When he finished - how he did it, I don’t know - he was all wet, even squeeze it out; now it was necessary to squirm back on his ass, which he did with the most mournful look, and everyone else was neighing, except for the sad blond guy and the Minnesotans in the cockpit - they just roared with laughter. I handed him the bottle to make up for it.
- What the devil? - he said. Did they do it on purpose?
- Of course, on purpose.
“Damn, I didn't know. I did this before in Nebraska - it was twice as easy there.
We suddenly arrived in the town of Ogallala, and here the dudes in the cockpit shouted out, and with considerable pleasure:
– Stop peeing! Kent dismounted sullenly from the truck, regretting the lost opportunity. Two guys from Dakota said goodbye to everyone, figuring that they would start working on the crops from here. We followed them with our eyes until they disappeared into the darkness, heading somewhere on the outskirts, to the shacks, where the lights were on and where, as the night watchman in jeans said, some employers should live. I needed to buy cigarettes. Jin and a young blond guy went with me to stretch their legs. I went to the most incredible place in the world - a kind of lonely glass cafe for local teenagers in the Plains. A few—not many—boys and girls danced there to the jukebox. When we entered, it was just a break. Gene and Blond just stood at the door, not looking at anyone: they only wanted cigarettes. There were also some pretty girls. One began to make eyes at the Blondie, but he did not notice; and even if he noticed, he would not give a damn - he was so depressed.
I bought them a pack each; they said thank you. The truck was ready to move on. The time was getting closer to midnight, it was getting colder. Jin, who had traveled the length and breadth of the country more times than he could count on his fingers and toes, said that it was best for all of us now to huddle together under a tarpaulin, otherwise we would die. In this way - and with the rest of the bottle - we warmed up, and the frost grew stronger and already pinched our ears. The stars seemed even brighter the higher we climbed the Highlands. We were now in Wyoming. Lying on my back, I looked straight ahead into the magnificent firmament, reveling in the distance that I covered, how far, in the end, I climbed from this dreary Bear Mountain; I was trembling with anticipation of what awaits me in Denver - yes, whatever awaits me there! And Gene from Mississippi sang a song. He sang in a soft young voice with a river accent, and the song was so simple, just "I had a girl, she is sixteen years old, and there is no other girl like that in the whole world" - it was all repeated over and over again, other lines were inserted there, all about the fact that he drove to the end of the world and wants to return to her, but he has already lost her.
I said:
– Jin, this is a very good song.
"It's the most glorious song I know," he replied with a smile.
I hope you get where you're going and be happy.
Montana Kent was asleep. Then he woke up and said to me:
“Hey, Blackhead, how about you and me exploring Cheyenne together tonight before you go to your place in Denver?”
- Noticed. I was drunk enough to do anything.
As the truck rolled into the Cheyenne suburbs, we saw the red lights of the local radio station high above and suddenly wedged into a huge crowd of people that were streaming down both sidewalks.
"Dammit, it's Wild West Week," Kent said. Herds of fat businessmen in boots and ten-gallon hats, with their hefty wives dressed like shepherds, whooped along the wooden sidewalks of the old Cheyenne; farther on, the long sinewy lights of the boulevards of the new center began, but the festivities were wholly concentrated in the Old City. Cannons fired blanks. The saloons were packed to the very pavement. I was amazed, but at the same time I felt how ridiculous it was: I broke out to the West for the first time and I see what ridiculous tricks he has sunk into to maintain his proud tradition. We had to jump off the truck and say goodbye: Minnesotans weren't interested in hanging out here. It was sad to see them leave, and I realized that I would never see any of them again, but that's the way it was.
“You will freeze your asses tonight,” I warned them, “and set them on fire in the desert tomorrow afternoon.”
“Nothing, just right, just to get out of this chill at night,” said Jin. The truck drove away, steered carefully through the crowd, and no one paid any attention to what kind of strange boys looked out from under the tarpaulin at the city, like babies from a stroller. I watched the car disappear into the night.
We stayed with Kent from Montana and hit the bars. I had about seven dollars in my pocket, five of which I foolishly squandered that night. At first, we bumped into all sorts of pontoon-cowboy tourists, oilmen, and ranchers in bars, doorways, and sidewalks; then I briefly left Kent, who shied away through the streets, a little dazed from all the whiskey and beer he had drunk: that's how he got drunk - his eyes glazed over, and in a minute he was already talking complete nonsense to the first passerby. I went to a chili place and the waitress was a Mexican - very pretty. I ate, and then on the back of the check I wrote her a little love note. There was no one else in the diner, everyone was drinking somewhere. I told her to flip the check. She read it and laughed. There was a little poem about how I want her to go watch the night with me.
“It would be nice, chiquito, but I have a date with my boyfriend.
- Can't you send it?
“No, no, I can’t,” she said sadly, and I really liked the way she said it.
“I’ll stop by here some other time,” I said, and she answered:
“Any time, boy. “I hung around a little longer anyway, just to look at her, and had another cup of coffee. Her boyfriend came in gloomily and asked when she would finish her work. She fussed to quickly close the point. I had to get out. As I left, I smiled at her. Outside, the whole mess continued as before, only the fat farts were getting drunker and hooting louder. It was funny. In the crowd wandered the Indian chiefs in their large feathers - they looked very solemn in nature among the purple drunken faces. Kent staggered along the street, and I walked beside him.
He said:
“I just wrote a postcard to my dad in Montana. Can't you find the crate here and drop it? – Strange request; he gave me the card and hobbled through the open doors of the saloon. I picked it up, went to the crate, and glanced at it on the way. “Dear Pa, I will be at home on Wednesday. I'm fine, I hope you are too. Richard." I saw him in a completely different way: how gentle and polite he is with his father. I went to a bar and sat down next to him. We shot two girls: a pretty young blonde and a fat brunette. They were blunt and puckered, but we still wanted to make them. We took them to a shabby night club, which was already closing, and there I spent all but two dollars on scotch for them and beer for us. I got drunk, and do not care: everything was hurt. All my being and all my thoughts aspired to the little blonde. I wanted to penetrate her with all my might. I hugged her and wanted to tell her about it. The club closed, and everyone wandered along the shabby dusty streets. I looked up at the sky: pure wonderful stars were still shining there, the girls wanted to go to the bus station, so we all went there together, but they obviously just had to meet some sailor who was waiting for them there - he turned out to be a cousin fat, and also with friends. I told the blonde
- What the heck? “She said she wanted to go home to Colorado, right across the border, south of Cheyenne.
“I'll take you on the bus,” I said.
“No, the bus stops on the highway and I have to trudge across this damn prairie all by myself. And so you stare at it all day, and then walk along it at night?
- Well, listen, we'll have a good walk among the flowers of the prairie.
“There are no flowers there,” she replied. - I want to go to New York. I'm fed up here. There is nowhere to go but Cheyenne, and there is nothing to do in Cheyenne.
There is nothing to do in New York either.
"There's nothing to hell with," she said, curling her lips.
The bus station was packed with people right up to the door. All sorts of people were waiting for the buses or simply crowding around; there were many Indians looking at everything with their petrified eyes. The girl stopped talking to me and stuck to the sailor and the others. Kent was dozing on the bench. I sat down too. The floors of the bus stations are the same all over the country, they are always steered, spat on and therefore catching up with the melancholy inherent only in bus stations. For a moment it was no different from Newark, except for that great immensity outside, which I loved so much. I lamented the fact that I had to ruin the purity of my whole trip, that I did not save every cent, pulled something and did not move forward at all, played the fool with this pout girl and spent all my money on her. I felt disgusted. I hadn’t slept under the roof for so long that I couldn’t even swear and blame myself, and so I fell asleep: I curled up on the seat, putting my canvas bag instead of a pillow, and slept until eight in the morning to the sleepy muttering and noise of the station through which they pass hundreds of people.
I woke up with a deafening headache. Kent was not around - he must have bled into his Montana. I went outside. And there, in the blue air, for the first time I saw in the distance the huge snowy peaks of the Rocky Mountains. I took a deep breath. We need to get to Denver just now. First, I had breakfast - moderately like this: toast, coffee and one egg - and then I set off from the city towards the highway. The Wild West Festival was still going on: the rodeo was in progress, and the whoop-jumping was about to begin anew. I left it all behind my back. I wanted to see my gang in Denver. I crossed the viaduct through railway and went to a bunch of shacks at a fork in the highway: both roads led to Denver. I chose the one that is closer to the mountains - so that you can look at them. I was immediately picked up by a young guy from Connecticut who was traveling around the country in his chauffeur and painting; he was the son of an editor from somewhere in the East. His mouth did not close; I was lousy both from the drunk and from the height. Once I almost had to lean right out of the window. But by the time he dropped me off at Longmont, Colorado, I felt normal again and even started telling him about driving all over the country myself. He wished me good luck.
Longmont was great. Under a huge old tree there was a patch of green grass that belonged to a gas station. I asked the attendant if I could sleep here, and he replied that of course I could; so I spread out my woolen shirt, lay face down in it, put my elbow out and, aiming one eye at the snow-capped peaks, lay like this in the hot sun for just a moment, and then fell asleep for a couple of delicious hours, and the only inconvenience to me was being lost Colorado ant. Well, here I am in Colorado! I thought triumphantly. Crap! crap! crap! It turns out! And after a refreshing sleep filled with pieces of my web former life in the East, I got up, washed up in the men's room at the gas station, and walked on, sharp as a kettle again, buying myself a thick milkshake at a roadside diner to lightly freeze my red-hot, weary stomach.
Quite by chance, a very beautiful Colorado girl whipped a cocktail for me: she was all one continuous smile; I was grateful to her - it paid off the previous night entirely. I said to myself: wow! What will it be like in Denver then? I got out on the hot road again - and now I'm rolling on in a brand new car, behind the wheel - a Denver businessman in his thirties. He hit seventy. Everything was itching for me - I counted the minutes and subtracted the miles. Directly ahead, across rolling wheat fields golden from the distant snows of the Estes, I would soon see old Denver at last. I pictured myself tonight in a Denver bar with all of our crowd and in their eyes I'll be foreign and strange, ragged like a Prophet who went across the earth to bring them the dark Word and the only Word I have for them was, is “Whoo!” The man and I were having a long heart-to-heart talk about our respective plans for life, and before I knew it, we were driving past wholesale fruit markets in suburban Denver; there were chimneys, smoke, railroad depots, red brick buildings, and in the distance, the gray stone of the inner city; And here I am in Denver. He dropped me off at Latimer Street. I trudged on, grinning rather playfully and joyfully, mingling with the local crowd of old tramps and beaten cowboys.
I didn't know Dean as well then as I do now, and the first thing I wanted to do was find Chad King, which I did. I called him at home and spoke to his mother, she said:
Sal, is that you? What are you doing in Denver?
Chad is such a skinny blond guy with a weird shamanic face that fits in well with his interest in anthropology and prehistoric Indians. His nose curves softly and almost creamy under a golden halo of hair; he is handsome and graceful, like some fraer from the West who goes to dances in a roadside tavern and plays football. When he speaks, this slight metallic tremor of pronunciation becomes audible:
“What I've always liked about the Plains Indians, Sal, is how discouraged they get when they brag about how many scalps they've got. Ruxton in "Life in the Far West" has an Indian who blushes all over because he has so many scalps and runs like crazy in the steppe to enjoy the glory of his deeds away from prying eyes. This is what really got me going!
Chad's mother determined that on this sleepy Denver afternoon, he should weave Indian baskets at the local museum. I called him there; he came for me in an old two-seater Ford, which he used to go to the mountains to dig his Indian exhibits. He entered the bus station in jeans and with a wide smile. I was sitting on the floor with my bag tucked in and talking to the same sailor that was with me at the bus station in Cheyenne; I asked him what happened to the blonde. He was so fed up with everything that he did not answer. Chad and I climbed into the car, and the first thing he had to do was pick up some cards from City Hall. Then - to meet with the old school teacher, then something else, and I just wanted to drink beer. And somewhere in the back of my head, an uncontrollable thought moved: where is Dean and what is he doing now. Chad, for some strange reason, decided to no longer be Dean's friend and now didn't even know where he lived.
– Is Karlo Marx in the city?
- Yes. But he didn't talk to that one either. This was the beginning of Chad King's departure from our entire crowd. Then, that same day, I had to take a nap at his house. I was told that Tim Gray had prepared an apartment for me somewhere on Colfax Avenue, and that Roland Major had already settled there and was waiting for me. I sensed some kind of conspiracy in the air, and this conspiracy divided the two groups in our company: Chad King, Tim Grey, Roland Major, along with the Rawlinses, in general, conspired to ignore Dean Moriarty and Carlo Marx. I got stuck just in the middle of this interesting war.
This war was not without social overtones. Dean was the son of a wino, one of the most drunken vagrants on Latimer Street, and was actually brought up on that street and its environs. When he was six years old, he pleaded in court to let his dad go. He begged for money in the lanes around Latimer and carried it to his father, who was waiting for him, sitting with an old friend among the broken bottles. Then, when he grew up, he began to hang around the Glenarm billiard room; set a Denver record for auto theft and was sent to a penitentiary. From eleven to seventeen years he spent in a colony. His specialty was to steal a car, hunt high school girls during the day, take them for a ride in the mountains, make them there and go back to sleep in any city hotel with baths in the rooms. His father, once a respected and hard-working tinker, drank himself on wine, worse than whiskey, and became so degraded that he took freight trains to Texas in the winter and returned to Denver in the summer. Dean had brothers on his mother - she died when he was very young - but they did not like him, his only friends were the guys from the pool room. That season in Denver, Dean, who had tremendous energy—such a new kind of American saint—and Carlo were the monsters of the underground, along with the billiard room gang, and the most beautiful symbol of this was that Carlo lived in the basement on Grant Street, and we everyone spent many nights there until dawn—Carlo, Dean, myself, Tom Snark, Ed Dunkel, and Roy Johnson. More on those others later.
On my first day in Denver, I slept in Chad King's room while his mother took care of housekeeping downstairs and Chad himself worked in the library. It was a hot, high-altitude July day. I would never have been able to fall asleep if not for Father Chad King's invention. He was a fine, kind man in his seventies, old and decrepit, shrunken and haggard, and he told stories with slow, slow relish—good stories of his childhood on the plains of North Dakota in the eighties, when for fun he rode ponies bareback and chasing coyotes with a club. Then he became a teacher in the village on the "Oklahoma handle" and, finally, a businessman of all trades in Denver. His office was still down the street, above the garage, where the Swedish bureau was still standing and dusty piles of papers, traces of past financial fevers, were lying around. He invented a special air conditioner. Pasted in window frame an ordinary fan and somehow missed cold water along the coil in front of the rumbling blades. The result was perfect—within a four-foot radius of the fan—and then the water apparently turned to steam on a hot day, and the bottom of the house was as hot as usual. But I slept on Chad's bed right under the fan, with a big bust of Goethe staring at me, and I fell into a very comfortable sleep - only to wake up twenty minutes later, freezing to death. I pulled the blanket over me, but it was still cold. Finally, I was so cold that I could no longer sleep, and went downstairs. The old man asked how his invention worked. I replied that it works devilishly well, and did not prevaricate - within certain limits. I liked this person. He was simply bent over at the memory.
- I once made a stain remover, and since then many big companies in the East have copied it. I've been trying to get something for him for several years now. If only there was enough money for a decent lawyer ... - But it was too late to hire a decent lawyer, and he sat dejectedly in his house. In the evening we had a wonderful dinner prepared by Chad's mother - a venison steak that Chad's uncle got in the mountains. But where is Dean?
The next ten days were, as W.C. Fields would say, "fraught with sublime misfortune" - and insane. I fit in with Roland Major in a posh apartment that belonged to Tim Gray's ancestors. We each had our own bedroom, there was also a kitchenette with food in the glacier, and a huge living room where Major sat in a silk dressing gown and composed his latest Hemingway-style story - a red-faced plump choleric who hated everything in the world; but he could light up the most charming and sweetest smile in the world when real life at night some good-natured man presented him. He was sitting at the table like that, and I was jumping around on a thick soft carpet in my pants. He had just finished a story about a guy coming to Denver for the first time in his life. His name is Phil. His companion is a mysterious and calm dude named Sam. Phil goes to cut into Denver, and some bohemia really annoys him. Then he returns to the hotel room and says in a funeral tone:
Sam, they're here too.
And he just looks sadly out the window.
“Yes,” he replies. - I know.
And the funny thing is that Sam doesn't have to go and see for himself. Bohemia is everywhere in America, sucking her blood everywhere. Major and I are big homies; he thinks that I am very far from bohemia. Major, like Hemingway, likes good wines. He recalled his recent trip to France:
“Ah, Sal, if you could only sit next to me, high up in the Basque country, with a cold bottle of Poinon Dizneuve, you would then understand that there is something else besides boxcars.
- Yes, I know. I just love boxcars and I love reading names on them like Missouri Pacific, Big North, Rock Island Line. By God, Major, if I could tell you about everything that happened to me while I was getting here.
The Rawlins lived a few blocks from here. They had the most excellent family - a young mother, co-owner of a wrecked hotel in the city's slums, five sons and two daughters. The wildest son was Ray Rawlins, Tim Gray's sidekick since childhood. He roared in to pick me up, and we hit it off right away. We've been drinking in the bars on Colfax. One of Ray's sisters was a beautiful blonde named Babe - such a western doll, played tennis and swam on the surf. She was a Tim Gray girl. And Major, who actually happened to be passing through Denver, but this was a solid drive, with an apartment, went with Tim Gray's sister Betty. I didn't have a girlfriend. I asked everyone:
- Where's Dean? Everyone smiled and shook their heads.
And so, in the end, it happened. The phone rang, Carlo Marx was there. He gave me the address of his basement. I asked:
What are you doing in Denver? I mean what are you really doing here? What is it all about?
- Oh, wait a bit, and I'll tell you.
I rushed to him on the arrow. He worked evenings at Maze's department store; crazy Ray Rawlins called him there from the bar and had the cleaners running around looking for him, telling them someone had died. Carlo immediately decided that I was dead. And Rawlins told him on the phone:
Sal is in Denver. And he gave me my address and number.
"Where's Dean?"
Dean is here too. Come on, I'll tell you. - It turned out that Dean was courting two girls at once: one is Marylou, his first wife, who is sitting and waiting for him at the hotel; the second is Camille, a new girl who is also sitting and waiting for him at the hotel. Dean rushes between the two of them, and in between runs to me to finish our own business with him.
“And what are these things?”
“Dean and I opened the biggest season together. We try to communicate absolutely honestly and completely completely - and tell each other everything that we think, to the very end. I had to sit down on benzedrine. We sit on the bed opposite each other, legs crossed. I finally taught Dean that he can do whatever he wants: become mayor of Denver, marry a millionaire, or become the greatest poet since Rimbaud. But he still runs around to watch those miniature car races of his. I go with him. There he gets excited, jumps and yells. Sal, you know, he's really into this kind of stuff. Marx chuckled in his heart and thought.
"Well, what's the routine now?" I asked. There is always a routine in Dean's life.
- That's the order. I've been home from work for half an hour now. Meanwhile, Dean is at the hotel entertaining Marylou and giving me time to wash and change. At one o'clock sharp he moves from Marylou to Camille - of course, neither of them knows what's going on - and fucks her once, giving me time to arrive at one thirty sharp. Then he leaves with me - at first he had to ask Camille off, and she had already begun to hate me - and we come here and talk until six in the morning. In general, we usually spend more on it, but now everything is getting terribly complicated, and he does not have enough time. Then at six he returns to Maryle's - and tomorrow he will be running all day for papers for their divorce. Marylou does not mind, but insists that he fuck her while the court and the case. She says she loves him... Camille too.
Then he told me how Dean met Camille. Roy Johnson, the billiard boy, found her somewhere in a bar and took her to a hotel; pride in him prevailed over common sense, and he called the whole gang to admire her. Everyone sat and talked with Camille. Dean didn't do anything, just stared out the window. Then, when everyone fell down, he just looked at Camille, showed himself on the wrist and straightened four fingers (in the sense that he would return at four) - and left. At three, the door was locked in front of Roy Johnson. At four in front of Dean opened. I wanted to go and see this madman right now. Besides, he promised to settle my affairs: he knew all the girls in the city.
Carlo and I walked through the bumpy streets of Denver at night. The air was soft, the stars beautiful, and every cobbled alley was so inviting that I felt as if I were in a dream. We went to those furnished rooms where Dean was bobbing to Camilla. That was an old house red brick, surrounded wooden garages and dry trees sticking out from behind fences. We climbed the carpeted stairs. Carlo knocked and immediately jumped back: he did not want Camilla to see him. I stayed in front of the door. Dean opened it, completely naked. On the bed I saw a brunette, one creamy thigh covered with black lace; she looked up at me with slight bewilderment.
- Sa-a-al? Dean drawled. “W-well, that’s… uh… ahem… yes, of course, you’ve arrived… well, old man, you son of a bitch, you finally hit the road, so… Well, that means… we’re here… yes, yes, now ... we must, we simply must! .. Listen, Camille ... - He turned to her. “Sal is here, my old friend from New York, this is his first night in Denver, and I absolutely need to show him everything here and find him a girlfriend.
"But when are you coming back?"
- So, now ... (glancing at the clock) ... exactly one fourteen. I'll be back at exactly three-fourteen to take an hour's nap with you, daydream, my dear, and then, as you know, I told you, and we agreed, I'll have to go to a one-legged lawyer about those pieces of paper - in the middle of the night, like this strangely enough, but I explained everything to you in a better way ... (It was a disguise for his rendezvous with Carlo, who was still hiding somewhere.) Therefore, right now, right now, I have to get dressed, put on my pants , to return to life, that is, to external life, to the streets and what else happens there, we agreed, it’s already fifteen o’clock, and time is running out, running out ...
“Okay, Dean, but please be back by three.”
- Well, I told you, dear, and remember - not by three, but by three fourteen. You and I have plunged straight into the deepest and most wonderful depths of our souls, haven't we, my dear? And he came up and kissed her several times. On the wall was a picture of a naked Dean with a huge scrotum and everything, the work of Camille. I was amazed. Just crazy.
We rushed out into the street, into the night; Carlo caught up with us in the alley. And we proceeded down the narrowest, strangest, most winding city street that I have ever seen, somewhere in the depths of Denver Mexican City. We were talking loud voices in sleeping silence.
"Sal," Dean said. “I have a girl here waiting for you at this very minute—if she’s not at work. (Glancing at watch) The waitress, Rita Bettencourt, is a cool chick, she's a little bit wedged over a couple of sexual difficulties I've been trying to straighten out, I think you can do it too, I know you're flaky, old man. That's why we'll go there right away - we need to bring beer there, no, they themselves have it, damn it! .. - He hit his palm with his fist. “I still have to get into her little sister Mary today.
- What? Carlo said. - I thought we'd talk.
- Yes, yes, after.
“Oh, that Denver blues! Carlo yelled at the sky.
- Well, isn't he the most beautiful, isn't he the cutest dude in the whole world? Dean asked, poking my ribs with his fist. - Look at it. Just look at him! - Here Carlo began his monkey dance in the streets of life; I've seen him do it so many times in New York.
All I could say was:
“So what the hell are we doing in Denver?”
"Tomorrow, Sal, I'll know where to get you a job," Dean said, switching back to business. “So I’m going to visit you tomorrow, as soon as I have a break with Marylou, right there to your house, see Major, take you by tram (damn, there’s no car) to the Camargo markets, you can start working there right away.” and you'll get it on Friday. We are all sitting on the rocks here. I haven't had time to work for several weeks now. And on Friday night, without a doubt, the three of us - the old trinity of Carlo, Dean and Sal - should go to a midget car race, and a guy from the center will drop us there, I know him and I will agree ... - And so on and on into the night.
We got to the house where the waitress sisters lived. The one for me was still at work; the one Dean wanted was at home. We sat down on her couch. I was scheduled to call Ray Rawlins at this time. I called. He arrived immediately. As soon as he entered the door, he took off his shirt and T-shirt and began to hug a completely unfamiliar Mary Bettencourt. Bottles rolled across the floor. It's three o'clock. Dean pulled away from his seat to daydream with Camille for an hour. He returned on time. A second sister appeared. Now we all needed a car and we made too much noise. Ray Rawlins called his buddy with the car. He arrived. Everyone huddled inside; Carlo was in the back seat trying to have a planned conversation with Dean, but there was too much commotion around.
- Let's all go to my apartment! I shouted. And so they did; the second the car stopped, I jumped out and stood on my head, on the lawn. All my keys fell out; I didn't find them after that. Screaming, we ran into the house. Roland Major, in his silk robe, blocked our way:
“I will not tolerate such gatherings in Tim Gray's apartment!”
– What-oh? we shouted. There was confusion. Rawlins was rolling on the lawn with one of the waitresses. Major didn't let us in. We vowed to call Tim Gray to confirm the party, as well as invite him himself. Instead, everyone again rushed to the dens in downtown Denver. I suddenly found myself in the middle of the street alone and without money. My last dollar is gone.
I walked about five miles down Colfax to my comfortable bed. Major had to let me in. I wondered if Dean and Carlo had had their heart-to-heart talk. Nothing, I'll find out later. The nights in Denver are cool and I fell asleep like a log.
Then everyone began to plan a grand hike in the mountains. It started in the morning, along with a phone call that only made things more complicated - my road buddy Eddie called, just like that, at random: he remembered some of the names that I mentioned. Now I had a chance to get my shirt back. Eddie lived with a girlfriend in a house near Colfax. He asked if I knew where I could find a job, and I told him to come here, figuring that Dean would know about the job. Dean rushed in as Major and I were having a hurried breakfast. He didn't even want to sit down.
“I have a thousand things to do, in fact there is no time even to take you to Camargo, but oh well, let's go.
“Let's wait for my road buddy Eddie.
Major amused himself by watching our haste. He came to Denver to write for his pleasure. He treated Dean with the utmost respect. Dean didn't pay attention. Major talked to Dean like this:
- Moriarty, what am I hearing - you sleep with three girls at the same time? - And Dean shuffled his feet on the carpet and answered:
“Oh yes, oh yes, it is. - And looked at the clock, and Major snorted snobbishly. Running away with Dean, I felt like a sheep - Major was convinced that he was a half-wit and, in general, a fool. Dean, of course, was not, and I wanted to somehow prove it to everyone.
We met with Eddie. Dean didn't pay any attention to him either, and we rode the streetcar through the hot Denver afternoon to look for work. It made me cringe just thinking about it. Eddie chattered non-stop, just like before. We found a man in the market who agreed to hire both of us; work began at four in the morning and ended at six in the evening. The man said:
I like guys who like to work.
"Then I'm just right for you," Eddie said, but I wasn't sure about myself at all. I just won't sleep, I decided. So many other interesting things to do.
Eddie showed up there the next morning; me not. I had a bed, and Major bought food for the glacier, and for that I cooked and washed dishes for him. And in the meantime, he completely got into everything. One evening the Rawlinses had a big drinking party. Mom Rawlins went to travel. Ray called everyone he knew and told them to bring whiskey; then he went over the girls in his notebook. With them, he forced to talk, mostly me. A whole bunch of girls showed up. I called Carlo to see what Dean was up to now. He was supposed to come to Carlo at three in the morning. After drinking, I went there.
Carlo's apartment was in the basement of an old brick furnished house on Grant Street near the church. I had to go into an alleyway, go down some stairs, open a dried-up door and go through something like a cellar in order to find myself at its plywood partition. The room looked like a cell of a Russian hermit: a bed, a candle is burning, moisture is oozing from the stone walls, and some crazy home-made icon, his work, hangs. He read his poems to me. They were called the Denver Blues. Carlo woke up in the morning and heard “vulgar pigeons” blaring in the street near his cell; he saw "sad nightingales" swaying on the branches, and they reminded him of his mother. A gray veil fell over the city. The mountains, the majestic Rocky Mountains, which are visible to the west from any part of the city, were made of papier-mâché. The entire universe has gone mad, numb, and extremely strange. He wrote that Dean is a "child of the rainbow", he carries the source of his torment in an agony priapus. He called him "Oedipal Eddie" who had to "scrape Chewings off the windowpanes." He sat in his basement and pondered over a huge notebook in which he wrote down everything that happened every day, everything that Dean did and said.
Dean arrived on schedule.
“All right,” he announced. “I'm divorcing Marylou and marrying Camille, and she and I are going to live in San Francisco. But only after you and I, dear Carlo, go to Texas and get into Old Bull Lee, that cool bastard that I've never seen, and you two buzzed my ears about him, and only then I'll go to San -Fran.
Then they got down to business. Cross-legged, they sat on the bed and stared at each other. I crouched in the nearest chair and saw them doing it. They started with some kind of abstract thought, discussed it, reminded each other of something else abstract, forgotten in the hustle and bustle of events; Dean apologized, but promised that he would be able to return to this conversation and handle it well, adding examples.
Carlo said:
“Just when we were crossing the Vasee, I wanted to tell you about how I feel about your obsession with dwarfs, and just then, remember, you pointed to that old tramp in baggy pants and said that he was the spitting image of your father?
- Yes, yes, of course, I remember; and not only that, my own flow began there, something so wild that I had to tell you, I completely forgot, and now you reminded me ... - And two more new topics were born. They beat them too. Then Carlo asked Dean if he was honest, and especially if he was honest with him in the depths of his soul.
Why are you talking about this again?
I want to know one last thing...
- But, dear Sal, you are listening, you are sitting there - let's ask Sal. What will he say?
And I said
“That last thing is something you won't get, Carlo. Nobody can achieve this last thing. We continue to live in hopes of capturing her once and for all.
- No, no, no, you're talking complete nonsense, this is Wolfe's chic romance! Carlo said.
Dean said:
“I didn’t mean it at all, but let Sal have his own opinion, and really, what do you think, Carlo, because there is some dignity in it - how he sits there and cuts into us, this crazy came across the country - old Sal will not say, he will not say for anything.
“It's not that I won't tell,” I protested. “I just don't know what you're both getting at or striving for. I know it's too much for anyone.
Everything you say is negative.
“Then what do you want?”
- Tell him.
- No, you tell me.
“Nothing to say,” I said and laughed. I was wearing Carlo's hat. I pulled it over my eyes. - I want to sleep.
“Poor Sal wants to sleep all the time. - I sat quietly. They started again: - When you borrowed a nickel to pay for fried chicken…
- No, dude, for chili! Remember in Texas Star?
- I confused it with Tuesday. When you occupied that spot, you also said, look, you said: "Carlo, this is the last time I'm stressing you," - as if you really meant that I agreed that you would give me more didn't stress.
“No, no, no, not at all ... Now, if you like, pay attention to the night when Marylou cried in her room and when, turning to you and pointing out with her still more intense sincerity of tone, which, we both they knew it, it was deliberate, but it had its own intention, that is, with my acting game I showed that ... But wait, that's not the point!
“Of course not! Because you forgot that... But I won't blame you anymore. Yes - that's what I said ... - They kept talking and talking like this until dawn. At dawn I looked at them. They linked the last morning's affairs: - When I told you that I had to sleep because of Marylou, that is, because I had to see her at ten in the morning, then my peremptory tone appeared not at all because what did you say before about the optional sleep, but only - mind you, only! - just because I absolutely, simply, cleanly and without any of anything, need to go to bed, in the sense that my eyes are glued together, reddened, aching, tired, beaten ...
“Ah, child…” Carlo sighed.
“We just need to go to sleep now. Let's stop the car.
- Don't stop the car! shouted Carlo at the top of his voice. The first birds sang.
“Now, when I raise my hand,” Dean said, “we finish talking, we both understand, cleanly and without any showdown, that you just need to stop talking and just go to bed.
You can't stop the car like that.
- Stop the car! - I said. They looked in my direction.
“He didn’t sleep all this time and listened. What were you thinking, Sal? “I told them what I thought: that they were both amazing maniacs, and that I listened to them all night, as if I were looking at a clock mechanism that was as high as the Berto Pass, which, however, consisted of the smallest details, which are in the most fragile watches in the world. They smiled. I pointed my finger at them and said:
I left them, got on a tram and went to my apartment, and the papier-mâché mountains of Carlo Marx turned red as the great sun rose over the eastern plains.
In the evening I was taken on a hike in the mountains, and I did not see Dean and Carlo for five days. Babe Rawlins borrowed her boss's car for the weekend, we grabbed our suits, hung them over the car windows, and headed towards Central City, Ray Rawlins driving, Tim Gray lounging in the back, and Babe sitting in the front. I saw the Rocky Mountains from the inside for the first time. Central City - an ancient mining village, once nicknamed "The Richest Square Mile in the World"; old hawks roaming the mountains found significant deposits of silver there. They got rich overnight and built themselves a beautiful opera house on a steep slope in the middle of their huts. Lillian Russell and the stars of European opera came there. Then Central City became a ghost town, until the energetic types from the New West Chamber of Commerce decided to revive this place. They polished the little theatre, and stars from the Met began touring there every summer. It was a wonderful vacation for everyone. Tourists came from everywhere - even from Hollywood. We climbed up the hill and found that the narrow streets were packed to capacity with an overdressed public. I remembered Major's Sam: Major was right. He himself was here - he turned his broad secular smile to everyone, most sincerely oohing and ahhing about absolutely everything.
“Sal,” he shouted, grabbing my arm, “just look at this old town. Just think about how it was here a hundred - but what the hell, only eighty, sixty - years ago: they had an opera!
“Yeah,” I said, imitating one of his characters, “but they are here.
“Bastards,” he cursed. And went to rest further arm in arm with Betty Gray.
Babe Rawlins turned out to be quite an enterprising blonde. She knew one old mining house on the outskirts where the boys could sleep this weekend: we just had to clean it out. In addition, it was possible to throw big parties in it. It was an old wreck; there was an inch of dust all over everything inside, there was also a porch, and in the back there was a well. Tim Gray and Ray Rawlins rolled up their sleeves and started cleaning, and this huge job took them all day and part of the night. But they got a crate of beer and everything was great.
As for me, I was assigned to accompany Babe to the opera that day. I put on Tim's suit. Just a few days ago I arrived in Denver as a vagrant; now I was wearing a crisp suit, a dazzling, well-dressed blonde under my arm, and I bowed to various people under the chandeliers in the foyer. What would Jin say from Mississippi if he saw me!
They gave Fidelio.
- What a dick! sobbed the baritone, rising from the dungeon under the groaning stone. I sobbed along with him. This is how I see life too. I was so captivated by the opera that I briefly forgot the circumstances of my own crazy life and got lost in the great mournful sounds of Beethoven and the rich Rembrandt tones of the narration.
- Well, Sal, how do you like this year's production? - Denver D. Doll proudly asked me later on the street. He was somehow connected with the Opera Association.
“What a mess, what a mess,” I replied. “Absolutely great.
“Now you absolutely have to meet the artists,” he continued in his official tone, but, fortunately, he forgot about it in the heat of other things and disappeared.
Babe and I went back to the miner's hut. I undressed and also took up cleaning. It was a gigantic job. Roland Major sat in the middle big room and refused to help. On small table in front of him stood a bottle of beer and a glass. As we raced around with buckets of water and mops, he reminisced:
“Ah, if you could only come with me, drink cinzano, listen to musicians from Bandoglia, then you would really live. And then - to live in Normandy in the summer: clogs, old thin Calvados ... Come on, Sam, - he turned to his invisible interlocutor. “Get the wine out of the water, let's see if it has cooled well while we were fishing. - Well, straight from Hemingway, in kind.
They called the girls passing by:
“Come on, help us clean everything up here.” Everyone is invited to join us today. - They helped. A hefty team worked for us. At the end, singers from the opera choir came, mostly young boys, and also got involved in the work. The sun has set.
When the day's work was done, Tim, Rawlins, and I decided to make ourselves look divine for the great night to come. We went to the other end of the city, to the hostel where the opera stars were placed. I could hear the evening performance beginning.
“Just right,” Rawlins said. - Cling razors, towels, and we will shine here. “We also took hairbrushes, colognes, shaving lotions and, loaded in this way, went to the bathroom. We bathed and sang.
- Well, isn't it cool? Tim Gray kept repeating. - Bathe in the bath of opera stars, take their towels, lotions and electric shavers ...
It was a wonderful night. Central City is located at an altitude of two miles: first you get drunk from the height, then you get tired, and a fever ignites in your soul. We approached the lanterns that circled the opera house along a narrow dark street, then turned sharply to the right and walked through several old saloons with constantly slamming doors. Most of the tourists were at the opera. We started with a few extra-large beers. There was also a pianist. The rear doors overlooked the mountain slopes in the moonlight. I let out a scream. The night has begun.
We hurried to our wreck. There everything was already prepared for the big party. The girls - Babe and Betty - prepared a snack: beans with sausages; then we danced and honestly started with beer. The opera ended, and a whole crowd of young girls crowded to us. Rawlins, Tim and I just licked our lips. We grabbed them and danced. There was no music, only dancing. The hut filled with people. They started bringing bottles. We rushed to the bars, and then - back. The night became more and more violent. I regretted that Dean and Carlo were not here - and then I realized that they would feel out of place and would be unhappy. Like that man in the dungeon under the rock, with the filth rising from that dungeon of his, they were America's despicable hipsters, they were the broken new generation that I myself was slowly entering.
The boys from the choir appeared. They sang "Dear Adeline". They also sang phrases like “Pass me a beer” and “Why are you staring at me with your eyes?” And they also made long howls of “Fi de lio!” With their baritones.
- Alas, what a mess! I sang. The girls were awesome. They came out to hug us in the backyard. There were beds in other rooms, unwashed and covered with dust, and one girl and I were just sitting on such a bed and talking when a whole gang of young ushers from the opera suddenly burst in - they just grabbed the girls and kissed them without proper ceremony. These boys - very young, drunk, disheveled, excited - ruined our whole evening. Five minutes later, every single girl disappeared, and a wonderful male booze began with a roar and banging beer bottles.
Ray, Tim and I decided to hit the bars. Major was gone, Babe and Betty were gone too. We took off into the night air. All the bars from the counters to the walls were packed with opera crowds. Major towered over their heads and yelled. Persistent bespectacled Denver D. Doll shook hands with everyone and said:
- Good afternoon, how are you? - And when midnight struck, he began to say: - Good afternoon, but how are you? - Once I noticed how he leaves with one of the people. Then he returned with a middle-aged woman; a minute later I was talking to a couple of young ushers on the street. A minute later he shook my hand, not recognizing me, and said: - Happy New Year, my boy. - He was not drunk, he was just drunk with what he loved: hanging out crowds of people. Everyone knew him. - Happy New Year! he shouted, and sometimes he said: “Merry Christmas.” - And so all the time. At Christmas, he congratulated everyone on All Saints' Day.
There was a tenor in the bar, whom everyone respected very much; Denver Doll had insisted on making my acquaintance, and I was now trying to avoid it; his name was D "Annunzio, or something like that. His wife was with him. They sat sourly at the table. Some Argentine tourist was sticking out at the counter. Rawlins shoved him to make room for himself; he turned around and growled, Rawlins gave and knocked the tourist down on the brass railings with one blow. We went to other bars. Major staggered along the dark street:
"What the hell is there?" Fights? Call me ... - Neighing rushed from all sides. I wonder what the Spirit of Mountains is thinking about; I looked up and saw pine trees under the moon, the ghosts of old miners - yes, interesting ... Over the entire dark eastern wall of the Great Pass that night there was only silence and a whisper of the wind, only in a single gorge we roared; and on the other side of the Pass lay the great Western Slope, a great plateau that reached as far as Steamboat Springs, dropped steeply into the deserts of Eastern Colorado and Utah; there was darkness everywhere, and we were raging and yelling in our little corner of the mountains - crazy drunk Americans in the middle of a mighty land. We were on the roof of America and, probably, all we could do was scream - through the night, east across the Plains, to where the old man with gray hair probably wanders towards us with his Word, he can come at any moment and calm down us.
Rawlins insisted on going back to the bar where he got into the fight. Tim and I didn't like it, but we didn't leave him. He approached D'Annunzio, this tenor, and threw a cocktail glass in his face. We dragged him away. A baritone from the choir approached us, and we went to a bar for the locals. a group of gloomy men who hated tourists, one said:
- Guys, it's better if you're not here and the count is ten. Once ... - We are gone. We hobbled to our wreck and lay down to sleep.
In the morning I woke up and turned over on the other side; a cloud of dust rose from the mattress. I pulled the window sash: boarded up. Tim Gray was also in bed. We coughed and sneezed. Our breakfast consisted of exhausted beer. Babe came from her hotel, and we began to prepare for departure.
Everything seemed to be falling apart. Already leaving for the car, Babe slipped and fell prone. The poor girl is tired. Her brother, Tim and I helped her up. We climbed into the car; Major and Betty joined us. A sad return to Denver began.
Suddenly we descended from the mountain, and before us opened a view of a wide plain where the city stood: from there, as from a stove, the heat rose. We started singing songs. I was just itching to move to San Francisco.
I found Carlo that evening and, to my surprise, he said that he and Dean had gone to Central City.
– What were you doing there?
“Oh, we were running around the bars, and then Dean stole a car and we rolled down the mountain turns at ninety miles an hour.
- I didn't see you.
We didn't know you were there too.
- Well, what ... I'm going to San Francisco.
“Dean prepared Rita for you tonight.
“Okay, then I’ll postpone my departure. - I didn't have any money. I sent my aunt a letter by airmail, asking her to send fifty dollars and promising that this was the last money I would forgive from her: from now on she would only receive it from me - as soon as I got on that ship.
Then I went to meet Rita Bettencourt and took her to my apartment. After a long conversation in the dark living room, I laid her down in my bedroom. She was a nice little girl, simple and truthful, and terribly afraid of sex. I told her that sex is great. I wanted to prove it to her. She allowed me, but I was too impatient and did not prove anything. She sighed in the darkness.
- What do you want from life? - I asked - and I always asked the girls.
“I don't know,” she replied. - Serve tables and pull yourself further. She yawned. I covered her mouth with my hand and told her not to yawn. I tried to tell her how life excites me, how much we can do together; however, I was going to leave Denver in a couple of days. She turned away from me wearily. We both lay staring at the ceiling and wondered what the Lord had done when He made life so sad. We made vague plans to meet in Frisco.
My moments in Denver were running out - I felt it as I walked her home; on the way back I stretched out on the grass in the courtyard of the old church with a bunch of vagabonds, and their conversation made me want to get back on the road again. From time to time one of them got up and scanned the passers-by for change. They talked about the fact that the harvest was moving north. It was warm and soft. I wanted to go back and take Rita and tell her about many other things and really make love to her and dispel her fears about men. Boys and girls in America are so dreary with each other: the fashion for steepness and complexity requires that they indulge in sex immediately, without any preliminary conversations. No, secular courtship is not needed - a real direct conversation about souls, for life is sacred, and every moment of it is precious. I heard the Denver and Rio Grande locomotives howl in the mountains. I wanted to go further for my star.
Major and I passed the hours of the night in sad conversation.
Have you read The Green Hills of Africa? This is Hemingway's best. We wished each other good luck. See you in Frisco. Under dark wood I spotted Rawlins on the street.
- Goodbye, Ray. When will we meet again? “I went looking for Carlo and Dean; they were nowhere to be found. Tim Gray raised his hand in the air and said:
- So you're going, Yo. We called each other "Yo".
- Yeah. “The next few days I wandered around Denver. It seemed to me that every bum on Latimer Street might be Dean Moriarty's father—Old Dean Moriarty, the Tin Man, as they called him. I went to the Windsor Hotel, where father and son used to live, and where one night Dean was terribly woken up by a legless invalid sleeping in the same room as he rolled across the floor on his nightmarish wheels to touch the boy. I saw a short-legged dwarf woman selling newspapers at the corner of Curtis and Fifteenth. I wandered through the dull cheap dens on Curtis Street: young boys in jeans and red shirts, peanut shells, movies, shooting ranges. Further, behind the sparkling street, darkness began, and beyond the darkness - the West. I had to go.
At dawn I found Carlo. I read his huge diary a little, slept, and in the morning - dank and gray - a tall, six-foot tall Ed Dunkel tumbled inside with a handsome boy Roy Johnson and a rickety billiards shark Tom Snark. They sat around and listened with embarrassed smiles as Karlo Marx read them his apocalyptic, crazy poems. Finished, I collapsed into a chair.
“Oh, you Denver birds! shouted Carlo. We climbed out of there one at a time and walked along this typical Denver cobbled alley between slowly smoking incinerators.
“I used to run a hoop down this street,” Chad King told me. I would like to see how he did it; I actually wanted to see Denver ten years ago, when they were all kids: sunny morning, cherry blossoms, spring in the Rocky Mountains, and they are chasing hoops through joyful lanes leading to a brighter future - all of their company. And Dean, ragged and dirty, prowls on his own in his perpetual fever.
Roy Johnson and I trudged through the drizzle; I was on my way to Eddie's girlfriend's house to pick up my tartan, a wool shirt from Shelton, Nebraska. All the unimaginably great sadness was tied up in it - in this shirt. Roy Johnson said he'd see me in Frisco. Everyone went to Frisco. I went to the post office and found that the money had already arrived. The sun came out and Tim Gray rode the tram with me to the bus station. I bought myself a ticket to San Fran, spending half that fifty, and took the two-hour bus. Tim Gray waved to me. The bus rolled out of the legendary, vibrant streets of Denver.
I swear to God, I must come back here and see what else happens! I promised myself. At the last minute Dean called me and said that he and Carlo might be on the Coast too; I thought about it and realized that in all this time I had not spoken to Dean for five minutes.
I was two weeks late for my meeting with Remy Boncoeur. The bus trip from Denver to Frisco was uneventful except for the fact that the closer we got, the more my soul rushed to get there. Cheyenne again, this time during the day, then west over the ridge; crossed the Great Pass at midnight at Creston, arrived in Salt Lake City at dawn, a city of standpipes, the least likely place in which Dean could have been born; then on to Nevada, under a scorching sun, toward evening, Reno with its shimmering Chinese streets; up to the Sierra Nevada, pines, stars, mountain houses, symbols of San Francisco romances, a little girl whimpers in the back seat:
“Mom, when are we coming home to Truckee?” “And here is Truckee himself, home of Truckee, and down into the Sacramento Plain. I suddenly realized that I was in California. Warm, palm-like air—air that can be kissed—and palm trees. Along the famous Sacramento River on the freeway; again deep into the hills; up down; suddenly - a huge expanse of the bay (and it was just before dawn) with garlands of sleepy Frisco lights on the other side. On the Oakland Bridge I fell deeply asleep, the first time since Denver; so I was rudely pushed aside at the bus station on the corner of Market and Fourth, and my memory came back that I was three thousand two hundred miles from my aunt's house in Paterson, New Jersey. I wandered to the exit like a shabby ghost - and here it is in front of me, Frisco: long, dim streets with tram wires, completely wrapped in fog and whiteness. I hobbled a few blocks. An eerie-looking scourge (corner of Mission and Third) at dawn asked me for change. Music was playing somewhere.
But I, in fact, later have to understand all this! But first, we need to find Rémy Boncoeur.
Mill City, where Remy lived, turned out to be a collection of shacks in the valley: the shacks were built to house the workers of the Navy Yard during the war; he was in a canyon, quite deep, abundantly overgrown with trees along the slopes. There were shops, hairdressers and ateliers. It was said to be the only community in America where whites and blacks lived together voluntarily; and this turned out to be true, and since then I have never seen a wilder and more cheerful place. On the door of Remy's hut was a note he'd pinned three weeks ago:
Sal Paradise! (In huge block letters.)
If no one is at home, climb in the window.
Rémi Boncoure's signature
The note was already tattered and faded.
I climbed in and the owner was at home - sleeping with his girl, Leigh Ann, on a berth he stole from a merchant ship, as he later told me: imagine a deck mechanic on a merchant ship, who stealthily climbs over the side with a cot and, sweating , leaning on the oars, striving for the shore. And this is hardly able to show what Rémy Bonker is.
I'm going into all that happened in San Fran in such detail because it ties in with everything else that happened along the way, so to speak. Rémi Boncoeur and I met many years ago in high school; but what really connected us to each other was my ex-wife. Remy found her first. One day, in the late afternoon, he came to my dorm room and said:
“Paradise, get up, the old maestro has come to visit you.” - I got up and, while pulling on my pants, scattered change. It was four o'clock in the afternoon: in college I used to sleep all the time. “Okay, okay, don’t scatter your gold all over the room. I found the coolest girl in the world and I'm taking her straight to the Lion's Den tonight. And he dragged me to meet her. A week later she was walking with me. Remy was a tall, dark, handsome Frenchman (he looked like some kind of Marseilles blacksmith in his early twenties); since he was French, he spoke in such a jazz American language; his English was perfect, his French too. He liked to dress chic, with a slight business twist, go around with fancy blondes and overspend. Not that he ever reproached me for stealing his girlfriend; it just always attached us to each other; this guy was loyal to me and really sympathized with me - God knows why.
When I found him that morning in Mill City, he was in the midst of those broken and bad days that usually come after twenty to young guys. He hung out on the shore, waiting for the ship, and earned a piece of bread guarding the barracks on the other side of the canyon. His girl, Lee Ann, didn't have a tongue, but a razor, and she gave him a thrashing every day. All week they saved on every penny, and on Saturday they went out and lowered fifty in three hours. Remi walked around the house in shorts and a stupid army cap. Leigh Ann wore curlers. In this form, they yelled at each other all week. I have never seen so much strife in my life. But on Saturday evening, smiling sweetly at each other, they, like a couple of successful Hollywood characters, took off and drove to the city.
Remi woke up and saw me climbing out the window. His laughter, the most wonderful laughter in the world, rang in my ears:
- Aaaahaha, Paradise - climbs through the window, he follows the instructions to the point. Where have you been, are you two weeks late? He slapped me on the back, punched Lee Ann in the ribs, leaned against the wall in exhaustion, laughed and cried, he pounded the table so that it could be heard all over Mill City, and this loud long “Aaahaha” echoed through throughout the canyon. - Paradise! he yelled. – The one and only Paradise!
On my way here, I passed through the nice little fishing village of Sausalito, and the first thing I said to him was:
“There must be a lot of Italians in Sausalito.
“There must be a lot of Italians in Sausalito!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. – Aaahaha! - He drummed his fists on himself, he fell on the bunk and almost rolled to the floor. “Did you hear what Paradise said? There must be a lot of Italians in Sausalito. Aaaaha-haaaa! Whoo! Wow! Whoa! He turned as red as a beetroot from laughter. - Oh, Paradise, you're killing me, you're the biggest comedian in the world, here you are, got there, finally, he climbed through the window, you saw, Lee Ann, he followed the instructions and climbed through the window. Aaahaha! Oooohoo!
The strangest thing was that next door to Remy lived a Negro named Mr. Snow, whose laugh, I can swear on the Bible, was positively and definitively the most outstanding laugh on earth. This Mr. Snow once began to laugh at dinner, when his old wife noticed something in passing: he got up from the table, apparently choking, leaned against the wall, raised his head to heaven and began; he fell out of the door, clinging to the neighboring walls; drunk with laughter, he staggered all over Mill City in the shadows of the houses, raising his hooting cry higher and higher in praise of that demonic deity that must have tickled and teased him. I still don't know if he finished his dinner or not. It is likely that Remy, without realizing it, adopted the laughter from this wonderful man, Mr. Snow. And although Remy had difficulties with work and a failed family life with a big-tongued woman, at least he learned to laugh almost better than anyone in the world, and I immediately saw all the fun that awaited us in Frisco.
The arrangement was as follows: Remi and Leigh Ann slept on a bunk at the far end of the room, and I slept on a cot under the window. I was forbidden to touch Lee Ann. Remy immediately made a speech about it:
“I don't want to find you two here messing around when you think I can't see. You can't teach an old maestro a new song. This is my own saying. I looked at Lee Ann. A tidbit, a kind of honey-colored creature, but hatred for both of us burned in her eyes. Her ambition in life was to marry a rich man. She was born in some Oregon town. She cursed the day she contacted Remy. On one of his showy weekends, he spent a hundred dollars on her, and she thought she had found an heir. However, instead she got stuck in his hut, and for lack of something better, she was forced to stay. She had a job in Frisco: every day she had to go there, taking a Greyhound bus at the intersection. She never forgave Remy for that.
I had to sit in a cabin and write a brilliant original story for a Hollywood studio. Remy was going to fly down from heaven in a stratospheric airliner with a harp under his arm and make us all rich; Leigh Ann was supposed to fly with him; he was going to introduce her to the father of a friend of his, a famous director who was on close terms with W.C. Fields. So for the first week I sat at home in Mill City and furiously wrote some dark New York tale that I thought would satisfy a Hollywood director, and the only problem was that the story came out too dreary. Remy could barely read it, so a few weeks later he simply took it to Hollywood. Leigh Ann was already too fed up and hated us too much to bother with reading at all. For countless rainy hours I did nothing but drink coffee and scribble paper. In the end, I told Remi that this was not going to work: I wanted to get a job; I can't even buy cigarettes without them and Lee Ann. A shadow of disappointment darkened Remi's forehead - he was always disappointed by the most ridiculous things. His heart was just golden.
He got me in the same place where he worked himself - as a guard in the barracks: I went through all the necessary procedures, and, to my surprise, these scoundrels hired me. The local chief of police took an oath from me, they gave me a badge, a baton, and now I have become a "special policeman." What would Dean or Carlo or Old Bull Lee say if they knew about it? I should have worn dark blue trousers, a black jacket and a police cap; for the first two weeks I had to wear Remi's trousers, and since he was tall and had a solid paunch, because he ate a lot and greedily out of boredom, I went on my first night watch, holding up my trousers, like Charlie Chaplin. Remy gave me a flashlight and his .32 automatic pistol.
- Where did you get it? I asked.
“Last summer, when I was driving to the Coast, I jumped off a train in North Platte, Nebraska, to stretch my legs, I look - and in the window this unique pistol, I quickly acquired it and almost missed the train.
I also tried to tell him what the North Platte meant to me, when the guys and I were buying whiskey there, and he slapped me on the back and said that I was the biggest comedian in the world.
Lighting my way with a flashlight, I climbed the steep slopes of the southern canyon, climbed out onto the highway along which cars were rushing towards the city at night, on the other side I went down the side of the road, almost fell and went to the bottom of a ravine, where there was a small farm by the stream, and where every single night the same dog barked at me. From there it was easier and faster to walk, down a silvery dusty road under the inky black trees of California, like in the movie "The Sign of Zorro" or like in all these westerns. I used to pull out a gun and play cowboys in the dark. Then he climbed another hill, and there were already barracks. They were intended for temporary accommodation of foreign construction workers. They stopped those who were passing through here and waiting for their ship. Most went to Okinawa. Most were running from something, usually jail. There were cool companies from Alabama, dodgers from New York - in general, every creature in pairs. And imagining in its entirety how terrible it would be to work hard for a whole year in Okinawa, they drank. The job of the special guards was to make sure they didn't smash those barracks to hell. Our headquarters was in the main building, a wooden structure with a waiting room, the walls of which were lined with panels. This is where we sat around the desk with guns off our hips and yawning while the old cops told stories.
Nightmare team - people with pharaonic souls, everyone except Remy and me. Remy was just trying to make a living out of it, and so was I, but they really wanted to make arrests and get commendations from the city police chief. They even claimed that if you didn't make at least one arrest a month, you would be fired. I already sat down from such a prospect - someone to arrest. In fact, it turned out that on the night when all this pandemonium broke out, I was as drunk as all the bawdy in the barracks.
Just for that night, the schedule was drawn up so that for six whole hours I was completely alone - the only cop in the entire station; and in the barracks everyone seemed to get drunk. The fact is that their ship departed in the morning - so they sour, like sailors, who will weigh anchor the next morning. I was sitting in the office, with my feet up on the table, and reading The Blue Book, with adventures in Oregon and the Northern Territories, when I suddenly realized that there was a buzz of some kind of activity on a normally calm night. I went outside. Literally in every damn barracks on the site, a matchmaker was burning. People were screaming, bottles were breaking. For me the question was: do or die. I pulled out my flashlight, went to the noisiest door, and knocked. Someone opened it up a little.
- What do you want?
I answered:
“I'm guarding these barracks tonight, and you guys have to be as quiet as possible. - Or blurted out some similar nonsense. The door was slammed in my face. It was all like in a Western: it was time to assert myself. I knocked again. This time the door was opened wider. “Listen,” I said. "I don't want to bother you guys, but I'm going to lose my job if you make that much noise."
- Who are you?
- I'm a guard here.
“I haven't seen you before.
Well, here's the badge.
“And why do you need that cracker on your ass?”
“It's not mine,” I apologized. - I took it for a while to vilify.
End of free trial.