On the Road - Jack Kerouac [110]
At the travel bureau there was a tremendous offer for someone to drive a ‘47 Cadillac limousine to Chicago. The owner had been driving up from Mexico with his family and got tired and put them all on a train. All he wanted was identification and for the car to get there. My papers assured him everything would come off right. I told him not to worry. I told Dean, “And don’t scrounge with this car.” Dean was jumping up and down with excitement to see it. We had to wait an hour. We lay on the grass near the church where in 1947 I had passed some time with panhandling hobos after seeing Rita Bettencourt home, and there I fell asleep from sheer horror exhaustion with my face to the afternoon birds. In fact they were playing organ music somewhere. But Dean hustled around town. He talked up an acquaintance with a waitress in a luncheonette, made a date to take her driving in his Cadillac that afternoon, and came back to wake me with the news. Now I felt better. I rose to the new complications.
When the Cadillac arrived, Dean instantly drove off with it “to get gas,” and the travel-bureau man looked at me and said, “When’s he coming back? The passengers are all ready to go.” He showed me two Irish boys from an Eastern Jesuit school waiting with their suitcases on the benches.
“He just went for gas. He’ll be right back.” I cut down to the corner and watched Dean as he kept the motor running for the waitress, who had been changing in her hotel room; in fact I could see her from where I stood, in front of her mirror; primping and fixing her silk stockings, and I wished I could go along with them. She came running out and jumped in the Cadillac. I wandered back to reassure the travel-bureau boss and the passengers. From where I stood in the door I saw a faint flash of the Cadillac crossing Cleveland Place with Dean, T-shirted and joyous, fluttering his hands and talking to the girl and hunching over the wheel to go as she sat sadly and proudly beside him. They went to a parking lot in broad daylight, parked near the brick wall at the back (a lot Dean had worked in once), and there, he claims, he made it with her, in nothing flat; not only that but persuaded her to follow us east as soon as she had her pay on Friday, come by bus, and meet us at Ian MacArthur’s pad on Lexington Avenue in New York. She agreed to come; her name was Beverly. Thirty minutes and Dean roared back, deposited the girl at her hotel, with kisses, farewells, promises, and zoomed right up to the travel bureau to pick up the crew.
“Well, it’s about time!” said the Broadway Sam travel-bureau boss. “I thought you’d gone off with that Cadillac.”
“It’s my responsibility,” I said; “don’t worry”—and said that because Dean was in such obvious frenzy everybody could guess his madness. Dean became businesslike and assisted the Jesuit boys with their baggage. They were hardly seated, and I had hardly waved good-by to Denver, before he was off, the big motor thrumming with immense birdlike power. Not two miles out of Denver the speedometer broke because Dean was pushing well over 110 miles an hour.
“Well, no speedometer, I won’t know how fast I’m going. I’ll just ball that jack to Chicago and tell by time.” It didn’t seem we were even going seventy but all the cars fell from us like dead flies on the straightaway highway leading up to Greeley. “Reason why we’re going northeast is because, Sal, we must absolutely visit Ed Wall’s ranch in Sterling, you’ve got to meet him and see his ranch and this boat‘cuts so fast we can make it without any time trouble and get to Chicago long before that man’s train.” Okay, I was for it. It began to rain but Dean never slackened. It was a beautiful big car, the last of the old-style limousines, black, with a big elongated body and whitewall tires and probably bulletproof windows. The