On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [160]
tenement proudly. We stumbled off. The big night was over. A cruising car followed us suspiciously for a few blocks. We bought fresh buns in a bakery and ate them in the gray ragged street. A tall bespectacled well-dressed fellow came stumbling down the street with a Negro in a truckdriving cap. They were a strange pair. A big truck rolled by and the Negro pointed at it excitedly and tried to express his feeling. The tall white man furtively looked over his shoulder and counted his money. “It’s Bill Burroughs!” giggled Neal. “Counting his money and worried about everything, and all that other boy wants to do is talk about trucks and things he knows.” We followed them awhile. We had to sleep: Helen Hinkle was out of the question. Neal knew a railroad brakeman called Henry Funderburk who lived with his father in a hotel room on 3rd Street. Originally he’d been on good terms with them but lately not so, and the idea was for me to try persuading them to let us sleep on their floor. It was horrible. I had to call from a morning diner. The old man answered the phone suspiciously. He remembered me from what his son had told him. To our surprise he came down to the lobby and let us in. It was just a sad old brown Frisco hotel. We went upstairs and the old man was kind enough to give us the entire bed. “I have to get up anyway” he said and retired to the little kitchenette to brew coffee. He began telling stories about his railroading days. He reminded me of my father. I stayed up and listened to the stories. Neal, not listening, was washing his teeth and bustling around and saying “Yes that’s right,” to everything he said. Finally we slept; and in the morning Henry came back from the Bakersfield run and took the bed as Neal and I got up. Now old Mr. Funderburk dolled himself up for a date with his middleaged sweetheart. He put on a green tweed suit, a cloth cap same material, and stuck a flower in his lapel. “These romantic old brokendown Frisco brakemen live sad but eager lives of their own” I told Neal in the toilet. “It was very kind of him to let us sleep here.” “Yass, yeass” said Neal not listening. He rushed out to get a Travel Bureau car. My job was to hurry to Helen Hinkle’s for our bags. She was sitting on the floor with her fortunetelling cards. “Well goodbye Helen and I hope everything works out fine.” “When Al gets back I’m going to take him to Jackson’s Hole every night and let him get his fill of madness. Do you think that’ll work Jack? I don’t know what to do.” “What do the cards say?” “The ace of spades is far away from him. The heart cards always surround him- -the queen of hearts is never far. See this jack of spades?- -that’s Neal, he’s always around.” “Well we’re leaving for New York in an hour.” “Someday Neal’s going to go on one of these trips and never come back.” She let me take a shower and shave and then I said goodbye and took the bags downstairs and hailed a Frisco taxi-bus, which is an ordinary taxi that runs a regular route and you can hail it from any corner and ride to any corner you want for about fifteen cents, cramped in with other passengers like on a bus but talking and telling jokes like in a private car. Mission street that last day in Frisco was a great riot of construction work, children playing, whooping Negroes coming home from work, dust, excitement, the great buzzing and vibrating hum of what is really America’s most excited city---and overhead the pure blue sky and the joy of the foggy sea that always rolls in at night to make everybody hungry for food and further excitement. I hated to leave; my stay lasted sixty odd hours. With frantic Neal I was rushing through the world without a chance to see it. In the afternoon we were buzzing towards Sacramento and eastward again. The car belonged to a tall thin fag who was on his way home to Kansas and wore dark glasses and drove with extreme care; the car was what Neal called a “fag Plymouth,” it had no pickup and no real power. “Effeminate car!” whispered Neal in my ear. There were two other passengers, a couple, typical halfway tourists who