On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [191]
swaying from side to side but slowly. His father was having it out with him. He had been opposed to France and now he was opposed to the idea of going to Mexico. Frank was wandering around Denver like a bum because of his fight with his father. That night after we’d done all our drinking and restrained George from getting his nose opened up in Hot Shoppe on Colfax---a fellow came in with two girls and we addressed him as “Hat” and wanted to meet the girls and George leaped for him---Frank scraggled off to sleep in George’s hotel room on Glenarm. “I can’t even come home late---my father starts fighting with me then he turns on my mother. I tell you Jack I got to get out of Denver quick or I’ll go crazy.” Well, and I stayed at Ed White’s and then later Beverly Burford fixed up a neat little basement room for me and we all ended up there with parties everynight for a week. George vanished off to his brother’s at Climax, Colo. and we never saw him again and never will know if anybody’s signified with him since and if they’ve put him away in an iron hall or if he busts his gaskets in the night free. Ed White, Frank, Bev and I spent an entire week of afternoons in lovely Denver bars where the waitresses wear slacks and cut around with bashful loving eyes, not hardened waitresses but waitresses that fall in love with the clientele and have explosive affairs and huff and sweat and suffer from one bar to another; and we spent the same week in nights at Five Points listening to jazz, drinking booze in crazy colored saloons and gabbing till five o’clock in the morn in my basement. Noon usually found us reclined in Bev’s backyard among the little Denver kids who played cowboys and Indians and dropped on us from cherry trees in bloom. I was having a wonderful time and the whole world opened up before me because I had no dreams. Frank and I plotted to make Ed White come with us but he was stuck to his Denver life. I spent evenings chatting with Justin W. Brierly in his study. Here he put on his Chinese dressingown and pulled out salted nuts and straight Scotch. “Sit down Jack, and tell me everything about New York. How’s Neal? How’s Allen? How’s Lucien? Do you know where Hal Chase is?- -in Trinidad Colorado on a dig. Have you seen Mr. Hinkle anywhere in the country? What’s the latest on yr. friend Burroughs? Burford is still in Paris. Have you been having long talks with Ed? How do you like Jeffries? Is Beverly in good spirits these days?” Justin loved to talk about all of us. “It all describes a wonderful big circle, doesn’t it?” he said. “Don’t you think it’s fun?” He took me out for a ride in his Olds with the big spotlight. We were going down West Colfax when he saw a rickety Mexican jaloppy with headlights off. He turned on his spotlight and put it flush on them, a bunch of Mexican boys. They pulled up fearfully, they thought it was the law. “Aren’t your headlights working? Is anything wrong?” called this mad Denver dignitary. “Yes sir, yes sir.” they said. “Well” called Brierly “Happy New Year” and because he’d held up traffic for this ridiculous conversation horns were tooting behind. “Oh shut up!” yelled Brierly and shot the car ahead. He pointed his spotlight flush on the richest home in Denver at four o’clock in the morning and explained every room to me as the beams illuminated the interior. People were sleeping in there,---he didn’t care. In his study he suddenly fished out an old full-face portrait of Neal when he was sixteen yrs. old. You never saw a chaster face. “See what Neal used to look like? That’s why I had faith in him then. Don’t worry I saw his possibilities---he just wouldn’t learn and so I washed my hands of him.” “It’s too bad---Neal could have become a big man in the world. On the other hand I like him better the way he is. Big men in the world are unhappy.” “You wouldn’t say that Neal is happy would you?” “He’s ecstatic---if that’s more or less than happy.” “I should think it’s less. Getting all involved with three wives and kids all over the country--- it’s absurd.” “Go find his mother for him.” “Anyway Jack