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By Root 4413 0

in it and ate peanuts. He suggested we all write something on a penny postcard and mail it to Carlo Marx in New York. We wrote crazy things. The fiddle music whanged in the Larimer Street night. “Isn’t it fun?” yelled Doll. In the men’s room Dean and I punched the door and tried to break it but it was an inch thick. I cracked a bone in my middle finger and didn’t even realize it till the next day. We were fumingly drunk. Fifty glasses of beer sat on our tables at one time. All you had to do was rush around and sip from each one. Canyon City ex-cons reeled and gabbled with us. In the foyer outside the saloon old former prospectors sat dreaming over their canes under the locking old clock. This fury had been known by them in greater days. Everything swirled. There were scattered parties everywhere. There was even a party in a castle to which we all drove—except Dean, who ran off elsewhere—and in this castle we sat at a great table in the hall and shouted. There were a swimming pool and grottoes outside. I had finally found the castle where the great snake of the world was about to rise up.

Then in the late night it was just Dean and I and Stan Shephard and Tim Gray and Ed Dunkel and Tommy Snark in one car and everything ahead of us. We went to Mexican town, we went to Five Points, we reeled around. Stan Shephard was out of his mind with joy. He kept yelling, “Sonofabitch! Hot damn!” in a high squealing voice and slapping his knees. Dean was mad about him. He repeated everything Stan said and phewed and wiped the sweat off his face. “Are we gonna get our kicks, Sal, travelin down to Mexico with this cat Stan! Yes!” It was our last night in holy Denver, we made it big and wild. It all ended up with wine in the basement by candlelight, and Charity creeping around upstairs in her nightgown with a flashlight. We had a colored guy with us now, called himself Gomez. He floated around Five Points and didn’t give a damn. When we saw him, Tommy Snark called out. “Hey, is your name Johnny?”

Gomez just backed up and passed us once more and said, “Now will you repeat what you said?”

“I said are you the guy they call Johnny?”

Gomez floated back and tried again. “Does this look a little more like him? Because I’m tryin my best to be Johnny but I just can’t find the way.”

“Well, man, come on with us!” cried Dean, and Gomez jumped in and we were off. We whispered frantically in the basement so as not to create disturbance with the neighbors. At nine o‘clock in the morning everybody had left except Dean and Shephard, who were still yakking like maniacs. People got up to make breakfast and heard strange subterranean voices saying, “Yes! Yes!” Babe cooked a big breakfast. The time was coming to scat off to Mexico.

Dean took the car to the nearest station and had everything shipshape. It was a ‘37 Ford sedan with the right-side door unhinged and tied on the frame. The right-side front seat was also broken, and you sat there leaning back with your face to the tattered roof. “Just like Min ’n’ Bill,” said Dean. “We’ll go coughing and bouncing down to Mexico; it’ll take us days and days.” I looked over the map: a total of over a thousand miles, mostly Texas, to the border at Laredo, and then another 767 miles through all Mexico to the great city near the cracked Isthmus and Oaxacan heights. I couldn’t imagine this trip. It was the most fabulous of all. It was no longer east-west, but magic south. We saw a vision of the entire Western Hemisphere rockribbing clear down to Tierra del Fuego and us flying down the curve of the world into other tropics and other worlds. “Man, this will finally take us to IT!” said Dean with definite faith. He tapped my arm. “Just wait and see. Hoo! Whee!”

I went with Shephard to conclude the last of his Denver business, and met his poor grandfather, who stood in the door of the house, saying, “Stan—Stan—Stan.”

“What is it, Granpaw?”

“Don’t go.”

“Oh, it’s settled, I have to go now; why do you have to do that?” The old man had gray hair and large almond eyes and a tense, mad neck.

“Stan,” he simply said, “don