On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [169]
lurked in the background with a big shotgun across her arm. “That damn friend of yours been annoying us long enough---I’m not the kind to call the law---if he comes back here once more I’m gonna shoot and shoot to kill.” The hischool boys were clustered with their fists knotted. I was so drunk I didn’t care either but I soothed everybody some. I said “He won’t do it again, I’ll watch him, he’s my brother and listens to me. Please put your gun away and don’t bother about anything.” “Just one more time!” she said firmly and grimly across the dark. “When my husband gets home I’m sending him after you.” “You don’t have to do that, he won’t bother you any more, understand, now be calm and it’s okay.” Behind me Neal was cursing under his breath. The girl was peeking from her bedroom window. I knew these people from before and they trusted me enough to quiet down a bit. I took Neal by the arm and back we went over the moony corn-rows. “Woo-hee!” he yelled. “I’m gonna git drunk tonight.” We went back to Johnny and the kids. Suddenly Neal got mad at a record little Nancy was playing and broke it over his knee: it was a hillbilly record. There was an early Dizzy Gillespie there that he valued- -I’d given it to Nancy before- -and I told her as she wept to take it and break it over Neal’s head. She went over and did so. Neal gaped dumbly. We all laughed. Everything was all right. Then Johnny wanted to go out and drink beer in the roadhouse saloons. “Lessgo!” yelled Neal. “Now dammit if you’d bought that car I showed you Tuesday we wouldn’t have to walk.” “I didn’t like that damn car!” yelled Johnny. Little Billy was frightened: I put him to sleep on the couch and trussed the dogs on him. Johnny drunkenly called a cab and suddenly while we were waiting for it a phonecall came for me from Clementine. Clementine had a middleaged boyfriend who hated my guts, naturally, and earlier that afternoon I had written a letter to Bill Burroughs who was now in Mexico City relating the adventures of Neal and I and under what circumstances we were staying in Denver. I wrote: “I’m staying with a woman and having a right good time.” I foolishly gave this letter to the middleaged boyfriend to mail, right after the fried chicken supper. He surreptitiously opened it, read it, and took it at once to Clementine to prove to her that I was a conman. Now she was calling me tearfully and saying she’d never want to see me again. Then the triumphant middleaged boyfriend got on the phone and began calling me a bastard. As the cab honked outside and the kids cried and the dogs barked and Neal danced with Johnny I yelled every conceivable curse I could think over that phone and added all kinds of new ones and in my drunken frenzy I told everybody over the phone to go to hell and slammed it down and went out to get drunk. We stumbled over each other to get out of the cab at the roadhouse---a hillbilly roadhouse near the hills---and went on and ordered beers. Everything was collapsing, and to make things inconceivably more frantic there was an ecstatic spastic fellow in the bar who threw his arms around Neal and moaned in his face and Neal went mad again with sweats and insanity, and to further the unbearable confusion Neal rushed out the next moment and stole a car right from the driveway and took a dash to downtown Denver and came back with a newer better one. Suddenly in the bar I looked up and saw cops and people were milling around the driveway in the headlights of cruisers talking about the stolen car. “Somebody’s been stealing cars left and right here!” the cop was saying. Neal stood right in back of him listening and saying “Ah yass, ah yass.” The cops went off to check. Neal came in the bar and rocked back and forth with the poor spastic kid who had just gotten married that day and was having a tremendous drunk while his bride waited somewhere. “Oh man, this guy is the greatest in the world!” yelled Neal. “Jack, Johnny, I’m going out and get a real good car this time and we’ll all go and with Albert too” (the spastic saint) “and have a big drive in the mountains.