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By Root 9694 0

down an alley, down some stone steps, opened an old raw door, and went through a kind of cellar till you came to his board door. It was like the room of a Russian saint: one bed, a candle burning, stone walls that oozed moisture, and a crazy makeshift ikon of some kind that he had made. He read me his poetry. It was called “Denver Doldrums.” Carlo woke up in the morning and heard the “vulgar pigeons” yakking in the street outside his cell; he saw the “sad nightingales” nodding on the branches and they reminded him of his mother. A gray shroud fell over the city. The mountains, the magnificent Rockies that you can see to the west from any part of town, were “papier-mâché.” The whole universe was crazy and cock-eyed and extremely strange. He wrote of Dean as a “child of the rainbow” who bore his torment in his agonized pria- pus. He referred to him as “Oedipus Eddie” who had to “scrape bubble gum off windowpanes.” He brooded in his basement over a huge journal in which he was keeping track of everything that happened every day—everything Dean did and said.

Dean came on schedule. “Everything’s straight,” he announced. “I’m going to divorce Marylou and marry Camille and go live with her in San Francisco. But this is only after you and I, dear Carlo, go to Texas, dig Old Bull Lee, that gone cat I’ve never met and both of you’ve told me so much about, and then I’ll go to San Fran.”

Then they got down to business. They sat on the bed crosslegged and looked straight at each other. I slouched in a nearby chair and saw all of it. They began with an abstract thought, discussed it; reminded each other of another abstract point forgotten in the rush of events; Dean apologized but promised he could get back to it and manage it fine, bringing up illustrations.

Carlo said, “And just as we were crossing Wazee I wanted to tell you about how I felt of your frenzy with the midgets and it was just then, remember, you pointed out that old bum with the baggy pants and said he looked just like your father?”

“Yes, yes, of course I remember; and not only that, but it started a train of my own, something real wild that I had to tell you, I’d forgotten it, now you just reminded me of it ...” and two new points were born. They hashed these over. Then Carlo asked Dean if he was honest and specifically if he was being honest with him in the bottom of his soul.

“Why do you bring that up again?”

“There’s one last thing I want to know—”

“But, dear Sal, you’re listening, you’re sitting there, we’ll ask Sal. What would he say?”

And I said, “That last thing is what you can’t get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once for all.”

“No, no, no, you’re talking absolute bullshit and Wolfean romantic posh!” said Carlo.

And Dean said, “I didn’t mean that at all, but we’ll let Sal have his own mind, and in fact, don’t you think, Carlo, there’s a kind of a dignity in the way he’s sitting there and digging us, crazy cat came all the way across the country—old Sal won’t tell, old Sal won’t tell.”

“It isn’t that I won’t tell,” I protested. “I just don’t know what you’re both driving at or trying to get at. I know it’s too much for anybody.”

“Everything you say is negative.”

“Then what is it you’re trying to do?”

“Tell him.”

“No, you tell him.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” I said and laughed. I had on Carlo’s hat. I pulled it down over my eyes. “I want to sleep,” I said.

“Poor Sal always wants to sleep.” I kept quiet. They started in again. “When you borrowed that nickel to make up the check for the chicken-fried steaks—”

“No, man, the chili! Remember, the Texas Star?”

“I was mixing it with Tuesday. When you borrowed that nickel you said, now listen, you said, ‘Carlo, this is the last time I’ll impose on you,’ as if, and really, you meant that I had agreed with you about no more imposing.”

“No, no, no, I didn’t mean that—you harken back now if you will, my dear fellow, to the night Marylou was crying in the room, and when, turning to you and indicating by my extra added sincerity of tone which we both knew