On the Road_ The Original Scroll - Jack Kerouac [68]
sorry and I hoped Hal still felt the same about me. I don’t think he did but he never showed it, the thing about Hal being, he was always as clever as a woman. Hal is a slim blond boy with a strange witchdoctor face that goes with his interest in anthropology and pre-history Indians. His nose beaks softly and almost creamily under a golden flair of hair; he has the grace of a western hotshot who’s danced in roadhouses and played a little football. A quavering twang comes out when he speaks---“The thing I always like, Jack, about the plains indians was the way they always got s’danged embarrassed after they boasted the number of scalps they got…in Ruxton’s Life in the Far West there’s an Indian who gets red all over blushing because he got so many scalps and runs like hell into the plains to glory over his deeds in hiding. Damn, that tickled me!” Hal’s mother located him, in the drowsy Denver afternoon, working over his Indian basketmaking in the local museum. I called him there; he came and picked me up in his old Ford coupe that he used to take trips in the mountains to “dig” for Indian objects. He came into the bus station wearing jeans and a big smile. I was sitting on my bag on the floor talking to the very same sailor who’d been in the Cheyenne bus station with me, asking him what happened to the blonde. He was so bored he didn’t answer. Hal and I got into his little coupe and the first thing he had to do was get maps at the State building. Then the next thing he had to see an old schoolteacher, and so on, and all I wanted to do was drink beer. And in the back of my mind was the wild, wild thought- -“Where is Neal and what is he doing right now?” Hal had decided not to be Neal’s friend anymore, for some odd reason, since the winter, and he didn’t even know where he lived. “Is Allen Ginsberg in town?” “Yes---” but he wasn’t talking to him any more either. This was the beginning of Hal Chase’s withdrawal from our general gang---and he was going to stop talking to me too in a short while. But I didn’t know this, and the plans were for me to take a nap in his house that afternoon at least. The word was that Ed White had an apartment waiting for me up Colfax avenue, that Allan Temko was already living in it and was waiting for me to join him. I sensed some kind of conspiracy in the air and this conspiracy lined up two groups in the gang: it was Hal Chase and Ed White and Allan Temko, together with the Burfords, generally agreeing to ignore Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg. I was smack in the middle of this interesting war. There were social overtones too that I’ll explain. First I must set the stage about Neal: he was the son of a wino, one of the most tottering bums of Larimer street and had in fact been brought up generally on Larimer street and thereabouts. Neal used to plead in court at the age of six to have his father let free. He used to beg in front of Larimer alleys and sneak the money back to his father who waited among the broken bottles with an old bum buddy. Then when Neal grew up he began hanging around the Welton poolhalls and set a Denver record for stealing cars and went to the reformatory. From the age of eleven to seventeen he was usually in reform school. His specialty was stealing cars, gunning for girls coming out of high school in the afternoon, driving them out to the mountains, screwing them, and coming back to sleep in any available hotel bath tub in town. Meanwhile his father, once a very respectable and hardworking barber, had become a complete winoa wine alcoholic which is worse than whisky alcoholic---and was reduced to riding freights to the South in the winter, to Texas, and back to Denver in the summer. Neal had brothers on his dead mother’s side---she died when he was small---but they also disliked him. Neal’s only buddies were the poolhall boys- -a bunch I came to meet a few days later. Then Justin W. Brierly, a tremendous local character who all his life had specialized in developing the potentialities of young people, had in fact been tutor to Shirley Temple for MGM in the thirties, and