Before the Road

Around the poolhalls of Denver during World War II a strange looking boy began to be noticeable to the characters who frequented the places afternoon and night and even to the casual visitors who dropped in for a game of snookers after supper when all the tables were busy in an atmosphere of smoke and great excitement and a continual parade passed in the alley from the backdoor of one poolroom on Glenarm Street to the backdoor of another — a boy called Dean Moriarty, the son of a Larimer Street wino. Where he came from nobody knew or at first cared. Older heroes of other generations had darkened the walls of the poolhalls long before Dean got there; memorable eccentrics, great poolsharks, even killers, jazz musicians, traveling salesmen, anonymous frozen bums who came in on winter nights to sit an hour by the heat never to be seen again, among whom (and not to be remembered by anyone because there was no one there to keep a love check on the majority of the boys as they swarmed among themselves year by year with only casual but sometimes haunted recognition of faces, unless strictly local characters from around the corner) was Dean Moriarty Sr. who in his hobo life that was usually spent stumbling around other parts of town had somehow stumbled in here and sat in the same old bench which was later to be occupied by his son in desperate meditations on life.

Have you ever seen anyone like Dean Moriarty? — say on a streetcorner on a winter night in Chicago, or better, Fargo, any mighty cold town, a young guy with a bony face that looks like it's been pressed against iron bars to get that dogged rocky look of suffering, perseverance, finally when you look closest happy, prim self-belief, with Western sideburns and big flirtatious eyes of an old maid fluttering lashes; the small and muscular kind of fellow wearing usually a leather jacket and if it's a suit it's with a vest so he can prop his thick busy thumbs in place and smile the smile of his grandfathers; who walks as fast as he can go on the balls of his feet, talking excitedly and gesticulating; poor pitiful kid actually just out of reform school with no money, no mother, and if you saw him dead on the sidewalk with a cop standing over him you'd walk on in a hurry, in silence. Oh life, who is that? There are some young men you look at who seem completely safe, maybe just because of a Scandinavian ski sweater, angelic, saved; on a Dean Moriarty it immediately becomes a dirty stolen sweater worn in wild sweats. Something about his tigerish out-jutted raw facebone could be given a woe-down melancholy if only he wore a drooping mustache (a famous bop drummer who looked just like Dean at this time wore such a mustache and probably for those reasons). It is a face that's so suspicious, so energetically upward-looking like people in passport or police lineup photos, so rigidly itself, looking like it's about to do anything unspeakably enthusiastic, in fact so much the opposite of the rosy Coke-drinking boy in the Scandinavian ski sweater ad that in front of a brick wall where it says "Post No Bills" and it's too dirty for a rosy boy ad you can imagine Dean standing there in the raw gray flesh manacled between sheriffs and Assistant D.A.s and you wouldn't have to ask yourself who is the culprit and who is the law, he looked like that. And God bless him he looked like that Hollywood stunt man who is fist-fighting in place of the hero and has such a remote, furious, anonymous viciousness (one of the loneliest things in the world to see and we've all seen it a thousand times in a thousand B movies) that everybody begins to be suspicious because they know the hero wouldn't act like that in real unreality. If you've been a boy and played on dumps you've seen Dean, all crazy, excited and full of glee-mad powers, giggling with the pimply girls in back of fenders and weeds till some vocational school swallows his ragged blisses and that strange American iron which later is used to mold the suffering man-face is now employed to straighten and quell the long wavering disorderliness of the boy. Nevertheless the face of a great hero — a face to remind you that the infant springs from the great Assyrian bush of a man, not from an eye, an ear or a forehead — the face of a Simon Bolivar, Robert E. Lee, young Whitman, young Melville, a statue in the park, rough and free.

The appearance of Dean Moriarty on the poolroom scene in Denver at a very early age was the lonely appearance of a boy on a stage which had been trampled smooth in a number of crowded decades, Curtis Street and also uptown; a scene that had been graced by the presence of champions, the Pensacola Kid, Willie Hoppe, Bat Masterson re-passing through town when he was a referee, Babe Ruth bending to a side-pocket shot on an October night in 1927, Old Bull Baloon who always tore greens and paid up, great newspapermen traveling from New York to San Francisco, even Jelly Roll Morton was known to have played pool in the Denver parlors for a living; and Theodore Dreiser for all we know upending an elbow in the cigarsmoke, but whether it was restaurateur kings in private billiard rooms of clubs or roustabouts with brown arms just in from the fall Dakota harvest shooting rotation for a nickel in Little Pete's, it was in any case the great serious American poolhall night and Dean arrived on the scene bearing his original and sepulchral mind with him to make the poolhall the headquarters of the vast excitement of the early Denver days of his life becoming, after a while, a permanent musing figure before the green felt of table number one where the intricate and almost metaphysical click and play of billiard balls became the background for his thoughts; till later the sight of a beautifully reverse-englished cueball leaping back in the air, after a cannonading shot at another ball belted straight in, bam, when it takes three soft bounces and settles back on the green, became more than just the background for daylong daydreams, plans and schemes but the unutterable realization of the great interior joyful knowledge of the world that he was beginning to discover in his soul. And at night, late, when poolhalls turn white and garish and eight tables are going fullblast with all the boys and businessmen milling with cues, Dean knew, he knew everything like mad, sitting as though he wasn't noticing anything and not thinking anything on the hard onlooker's bench and yet noticing the special excellence of any good shot within the aura of his eyeball and not only that the peculiarities and pitiful typehood of every player whether some over-flamboyant kid with his fourth or fifth cigarette dangling from his mouth or some old potbellied rotation wizard who's left his lonely wife in a varnished studio room above a "Rooms" sign in the dark of Pearl Street, he knew it all.

The first to notice him was Tom Snark. Tom was a hunchbacked pool-shark with the great moon blue eyes of a saint, an extremely sad character, one of the smartest wellknown shots of the younger generation in the locality. Dean couldn't have been more than 15 years old when he wandered in from the street. It was only that many years before, in 1927, that Dean was born, in Salt Lake City; at a time when for some Godforsaken reason, some forgotten, pitiably American, restless reason his father and mother were driving in a jaloppy from Iowa to L.A. in search of something, maybe they figured to start an orange grove or find a rich uncle, Dean himself never found out, a reason long buried in the sad heap of the night, a reason that nevertheless in 1927 caused them to fix their eyes anxiously and with throat-choking hope over the sad swath of brokendown headlamps shining brown on the road ... the road that sorrowed into the darkness and huge unbelievable American nightland like an arrow. Dean was born in a charity hospital. A few weeks later the Model A clanked right on; so that now there were three pairs of eyes watching the unspeakable road roll in on Paw's radiator cap as it steadfastly penetrated the night like the poor shield of themselves, the little Moriarty family, lost, the gaunt crazy father with the floppy slouched hat that made him look like a brokendown Okie Shadow, the dreaming mother in a cotton dress purchased on a happier afternoon in some excited Saturday five-and-ten, the frightened infant. Poor mother of Dean Moriarty, what were your thoughts in 1927? They came back to Denver over the same raw road; somehow or other nothing worked out right the way they wanted; without a doubt they had a thousand unspecified troubles and knotted their fists in despair somewhere outside a house and under a tree where something went wrong, grievously and eternally wrong, enough to kill people; all the loneliness, remorse and chagrin in the world piled on their heads like indignities from heaven. Oh mother of Dean Moriarty, but was there secretly in you a lovely memory of a Sunday afternoon back home when you were famous and beloved among friends and family, and young? — when maybe you saw your father standing among the men, laughing, and you crossed the celebrated human floor of the then-particular beloved stage to him. Was it from lack of life, lack of haunted pain and memories, lack of sons and trouble, and humiliated rage, that you died, or was it from excess of death? She died in Denver before Dean was old enough to talk to her. Dean grew up with a childhood vision of her standing in the strange antique light of 1929 (which is no different from the light of today or the light when Xerxes' fleets confused the waves, or Agamemnon wailed) in some kind of livingroora with beads hanging from the door, apparently at a period in the life of old Moriarty when he was making good money at his barber trade and they had a good home. But after she died he became one of the most tottering bums of Larimer Street, making futile attempts to work and periodically leaving Dean with his wife's people to go to Texas to escape the Colorado winters, beginning a lifetime swirl of hoboing into which little Dean himself was sucked later on, when at intervals, childlike, he preferred leaving the security of his Ma's relatives, which included sharing a bedroom with his stepbrother, going to school, and altar-boying at a local Catholic church, for going off to live with his father in flophouses. Nights long ago on the brawling sidewalks of Larimer Street when the Depression hobos were there by the thousands, sometimes in great sad lines black with soot in the rainy dark of Thirties newsreels, men with sober downturned mouths huddled in old coats waiting in line for misery, Dean used to stand in front of alleys begging for nickels while his father, red-eyed, in baggy pants, hid in the back with some old bum crony called Rex who was no king but just an American who had never outgrown the boyish desire to lie down on the sidewalk which he did the year round from coast to coast; the two of them hiding and sometimes having long excited conversations until the kid had enough nickels to make up a bottle of muscatel, when it was time to hit the liquor store and go down under ramps and railroad embankments and light a small fire with cardboard boxes and naily boards and sit on overturned buckets or oily old treestumps, the boy on the outer edges of the fire, the men in its momentous and legendary glow, and drink the wine. "Wheeool Hand me that damn bottle 'fore I knock somebody's head in!"

And this of course was just the chagrin of bums suddenly becoming wild joy, the switchover from all the poor lonely woe of the likes of Moriarty having to count pennies on streetcorners with the wind blowing his dirty hair over his snarling, puffy, disgruntled face, the revulsion of bums burping and scratching lonely crotches at flophouse sinks, this agony waking up on strange floors (if floors at all) with their mad minds reeling in a million disorderly images of damnation and strangulation in a world too unbearably disgusting to stand and yet so full of useless sweet and nameless moments that made them cry that they couldn't say no to it completely without committing some terrified sin, attacked repeatedly by every kind of horrible joy making them twitch and marvel and gasp as before visions of heart-wrenching hell penetrating up through life from unnumberable hullabalooing voices screaming in insanity below, with piteous memories, the sweet and nameless ones, (continued on page 56)Before the Road(continued from page 50) that readied back to fleecy cradle days to make them sob, finally bound to sink to the floor of brokendown toilets to wrap around the bowl and maybe die — this misery with a bottle of wine was twisted around like a nerve in old man Moriarty's brain and the tremendous joy of the really powerful drunk filled the night with shouts and wild bulging power-mad eyes. On Larimer Street Dean's father was known as the Barber, occasionally working near the Greeley Hotel in a really terrible barbershop that was notable for its great unswept floor of bums' hair, and a shelf sagging under so many bottles of bay rum that you'd think the shop was an ocean-going vessel and the boys had it stocked for a six months' siege. In this drunken tonsorial crappery called a barbershop because hair was cut off your head from the top of the ears down, old Moriarty, with the same tender befuddlement with which he sometimes lifted garbage barrels to city disposal trucks during blizzards or passed wrenches in the most tragic, becluttered, greasedark autobody shop west of the Mississippi (Arapahoe Garage by name, where they even hired him), tiptoed around a barber chair with scissor and comb and razor and mug, to make sure not to stumble, and cut the hairs off blacknecked hobos who had such vast lugubrious personalities that they sometimes sat stiffly at attention for this big event for a whole hour. "Well now say, Dean, how've been things in the hotel this summer; anybody I know kick the bucket or which, or seen Dan up at Chilian Jack's?"

"Can't talk right now Jim till I get the side of Bob's head done — hold on just a second whilst I raise up that shade."

And a great huge clock tocked these dim old hours away as young Dean sat in the stove corner (in cold weather) reading the comic pages, not only reading but examining for hours the face and paunch of Major Hoople, his fez, the poor funny easy chairs in his house, the sad sickening faces of his hecklers who always seemed to have just finished eating at the table, the whole pitiful and interesting world in back of it including maybe a faint cloud in the distance, or a bird dreamed-in in a single wavy line over the boardfence, and the eternal mystery of the dialog balloon taking up whole sections of the visible world for speech; that and Out Our Way, the rag-doll rueful cowboys and factory workers who always seemed to be chewing wads of lumpy food and wrapping themselves miserably around fenceposts beneath the great sorrowful burdens of a joke; yet most blazing of all the clouds, the clouds that in the cartoon sky had all the nostalgia of sweet and haunted distance that pictures give them and yet were the same lost clouds that always called Dean's attention to his immortal destiny when suddenly seen from a window or through houses on a June afternoon, lamby clouds of babyhood and eternity, sometimes in back of tremendous redbrick smokestacks that were made to look like they were traveling and toppling on the first and last day of the world and all its drowsy butterflies; making him think, "Poor world that has to have clouds for afternoons and the meadows I lost"; sometimes doing this, or looking at the sad brown or green tint pictures of troubled lovers in sensual living-rooms of True Confession Magazine, his foretaste of days when he would grow up and spend useless hours looking at nudist magazines at the corner newsstand; sometimes, though, only fixing his eyes on the mosaic of the tiles on the barbershop floor where he'd long imagined each little square could be peeled back endlessly, tiny leaf by tiny leaf, revealing in little microscopic encyclopedia the complete history of every person that ever lived as far back as the beginning, the whole thing a blinding sight when he raised his eyes from one tile and saw all the others like the swarming vast infinity of the world be-clizzying the void. In warm weather he sat on the sidewalk on a box between the barbershop and a movie that was so completely beat that it could only be called a C or a D movie; the Capricio, with motes of dusty sunshine swimming-down past the slats of the box office in drowsical midafternoon, the lady of the tickets dreaming with nothing to do as from the dank maw of the movie, cool, dark, perfumed with seats, where bums slept and Mexican children stared, there roared the gunshots and hoofbeats of the great myth of the American West represented by baggy-eyed riders who drank too much in La Cienega Boulevard bars galloping in the moonlight photographed from the back of a truck in California dirt roads, with a pathetic human plot you sometimes think is worked-in to make everybody overlook who the riders really are. What disappointment little Dean felt never having a dime, or 11 cents, to see the show; not even a penny sometimes to spend all the time he wanted selecting a chocolate candy from a lovely cluttered counter in a poor dim candy store run by an old Jewish woman in a shawl where also there were celluloid toys gathering dust as those same immortal clouds passed over the street outside; the same disappointment he felt on those nights when he sat amidst the haha-ing harsh yellings of those bums under the bridge with the bottle, when he knew that the men who were rich tonight were his brothers but they were brothers who had forgotten him; when he knew that all the excited actions of life which included even the pitiful getting of the night's wine by his father and Rex led to the grave; and when suddenly beyond the freightyards toward the mountain darkness inhabited by great stars, where nevertheless and amazingly in a last hung dusk a single flame of the sun now making long shadows in the Pacific lingered, high, on Berthoud's mighty wall as the world turned silently, he could hear the Denver & Rio Grande locomotives double-chugging at the base of a raw mountain gap to begin the train-order climb to the dews, jackpines and windy heights of the mountain night, pulling the sad brown boxcars of the world to distant junctions where lonely men in Mackinaws waited, to new towns of smoke and lunchcarts, for all he knew as he sat there with his ragged sneakers stuck in the oily yard and among the sooty irons of his fate, to the glittering San Franciscos of fogs and ships. Oh little Dean Moriarty if there had been some way to send a cry to you even when you were too little to know what utterances and cries are for in this dark sad earth, with your terrors in a world so malign and inhospitable, and all the insults from heaven ramming down to crown your head with anger, pain, disgrace, worst of all the crapulous poverty in and out of every splintered door of days, if someone could have said to you then, and made you perceive, "Fear life but don't die; you're alone, everybody's alone. Oh Dean Moriarty, you can't win, you can't lose, all is ephemeral, all is hurt."

Old Bull Baloon (speaking of loneliness and the diaphanous ghost of days) a singularly lonely man, and most ephemeral, along about these years went broke and became so poor that he went into a ridiculous partnership with Moriarty. Old Bull Baloon who usually went around wearing a poker-wrinkled but respectable suit with a watch chain, straw hat, Racing Form, cigar and suppurated red nose (and of course the pint flask) and was now fallen so low, for you could never say that he could prosper while other men fell, that his usually supposititious half-clown appearance with the bulbous puff of beaten flesh for a face, and the twisted mouth, his utter lovelessness in the world alone among foolish people who didn't see a soul in a man, hounded old reprobate, clown and drunkard of eternity, was now deteriorated down to tragic realities and shab-biness in a bread line, all the rich history of his soul crunching underfoot among the forlorn pebbles. His and old Moriarty's scheme was well nigh absurd; little (continued on page 62)Before the Road(continued from page 56) Dean was taken along. They got together a handful of greasy quarters, bought wire, screen, cloth and sewing needles and made hundreds of fly-swatters; then in Old Bull's 1927 Graham-Paige they headed for Nebraska to sell door to door. Huge prairie clouds massed and marched above the indescribable anxiety of the earth's surface where men lived as their car belittled itself in immensity, crawled eastward like a potato bug over roads that led to nothing. One bottle of whiskey, just one bottle of whiskey was all they needed; whereas little Dean who sat in the rattly backseat counting the lonely pole-by-pole throb of telegraph lines spanning sad America only wanted bread that you buy in a grocery store all fresh in a happy red wrapper that reminded him speechlessly of happy Saturday mornings with his mother long dead-bread like that and butter, that's all. They sold their pathetic flyswatters at the backdoors of farms where farmers' wives with lone Nebraska writ in the wrinkles around their dull bleak eyes accepted fate and paid a nickel. Out on the road outside Hugo a great argument developed between Moriarty and Old Bull as to whether they were going to buy a little whiskey or a lot of wine, one being a wino, the other a whiskey alcoholic. Not having eaten for a long time, feverish, they leaped out of the car and started making brawling gestures at each other which were supposed to represent a fist-fight between two men, so absurd that little Dean gaped and didn't cry. And the next moment they were embracing each other, Old Moriarty tearfully, Old Bull raising his eyes with lonely sarcasm at the huge and indefatigable heavens above eastern Colorado with the remark, "Yass, wrangling around on the bottom of the hole." Because everybody was in a hole during the Depression, and felt it. They returned clonking up Larimer Street with about $18 which was promptly that night hurled downward flaming in the drain like the fallen angel — a vast drunk that lasted five days and was almost humorous as it described crazy circles around town from the car, which was parked on Larimer at 22nd, little Dean sleeping in it, to an old office over a garage in a leafy side street that Old Bull had once used as headquarters for a spot remover venture and where pinochle at a busted dusty rolltop desk consumed 36 hours of their fevered reprieve, to a farm outside town (now abandoned by some family and left to Old Bull) and where drinking was done in barns and ruined livingrooms or out in cold alfalfa rows, finally teetering back downtown, Moriarty migrating back to the railyards to collapse beneath Rex in a pool of urine beneath dripping ramps while Old Bull Baloon's huge pukey tortured bulk was finally reposed on a plank in the county jail, straw-hat over nose. So when little Dean woke up in the car on a cold clear October morning and didn't know what to do, Zaza the beggar without legs who clattered tragically on his rollerboard on Wazee Street, took him in, fed him, made him a bed on the floor like a bed of straw, and spent that night thundering around in bulge-eyed sweat trying to catch him in a foul hairy embrace that would have succeeded if he'd had legs or Dean hadn't lowered himself out the transom.

Years of hopping around with his father like this and on freight trains all over the West and so many futilities everywhere that he'd never remember them all, and then Dean had a dream that changed his life entirely. It was in reform school, after the theft of his first car and when he hadn't seen his Pa for a year; he dreamed he lived in an immense cosmic flophouse dormitory with the old man and Rex and other bums, but that it was somehow located in the East Denver High School Auditorium; that one night he was walking across the street in an exhilarated state, carrying a mattress under his arm; all up and down the street with its October night lights glittering clear swarmed the bums, with his father off somewhere doing something busy, excited, feverish. In the dream Dean was 30; he wore a T-shirt in the brisk weather; his beer belly bulged slightly over the belt. His arms were the muscular arms of an ex-boxer growing flabby. His hair was combed slick but it was thinning back from bony frowns and Mephistophelean hairlines. His face was his own but it was strangely puffed, beaten, the nose in fact was almost broken; a red-necked, battered, fired-from-the-railroad hobo in his inevitable final American Open Spaces Dempsey Whiskey-bottle Night; tragic, dirty, young-old. When he coughed it sounded harsh and hoarse and maniacally excited like his father. He was going somewhere to sell the mattress for wine money: his exhilaration owed to the fact that he was going to succeed and get the money. And suddenly his father wearing his old black baseball cap came stumbling up the street, howling hoarsely "Hey Dean, Dean, did you sell the mattress yet? Huh Dean did you?" — and ran clutching after him with imploration and fear — a dream that Dean woke from with a repugnance only he could understand. It was dawn; he lay in the hard reformatory bed and decided to start reading books in the library so he would never be a bum, no matter what he worked at to make a living, which was the decision of a great idealist.

At 15 this child had the regimen of his life worked out in a confused and still and all pathetically practical way. He rose at seven A.M. from Old Bull Baloon's rolltop desk (his current bed); if the office was filled with poker players he slept in the bathtub of the Greeley or other hotels. At 7:15 he rushed downtown, washed at barbershop sink, if it was not available he used the YMCA sink. Then he delivered his paper route. Around nine he went to the Smith residence, where he knew a near-idiot maid that he made love to on the cellar cot, after which she always fed him a big meal. If this friendship with idiot maid sometimes failed he ran to Big Cherry Lucy's at the Texas Lunch (ever since 13 Dean was able to handle any woman and in fact had pushed his drunk father off Cherry Lucy Halloween Night 1939 and taken over so much that they fist-fought like rivals and Dean ran away with the five-dollar stake). At 10 he rushed to the library, read Schopenhauer and magazines and unconsciously wide-eyed delved into the Lives of the Saints (sometimes when he wasn't reading funnies as a child, in the days with Father, he'd get a real book off the old Greeley Hotel shelf in the huge damp lobby downstairs and read down over the first words of every line Chinese style in childly thought in an antique rockingchair). At 11 o'clock he asked to wash cars and sometimes asked to park cars at the Rocky Mountain Garage (already he could drive better than any attendant in Denver and had in fact stolen several other cars to try his skill since his time in the "joint" and parked them back on the same block intact except for change of position); noon hour he used a paper route buddy's bike to ride five miles to friends' families for big meals, then helped with chores till two. Back to library for afternoon reading, history, encyclopedias and the mysteries of the dictionary, and to make use of the library toilet; four o'clock rest and meditation and connections in poolhall till closing time unless semi-pro twilight ballgame or other spectacles of interest spring around town. Eleven o'clock he stole nickels off newsstands for a bowery beefstew and found the place to sleep.

• • •

It was a Saturday afternoon in Denver, October 1942, when Tommy Snark first saw pure-souled Dean sitting on that bench with his lower lip jutted up habitually in unconscious power that Snark thought was a gesture of profile power, a pose for somebody, when actually Dean was only dreaming there, wearing Levi jeans, old shoes, no socks, a khaki Army shirt and a big black turtleneck sweater covered with car grease, and carrying a (continued on page 116)Before the Road(continued from page 62) brand-new toy accordion in a box he had just found by the side of the road; perched among the usual great number of Saturday onlookers half of whom were waiting for tables and talking about everything that had happened during the week, the kind of things that made Dean feel like a sheepish fool with no news of his own and marveled to see them all curling their mouths in the derisive telling of interesting tales, even while Snark said to himself "Must be some young new punk." Dean sat there, stunned with personal excitement as whole groups of them shouted across the smoke to other fellows in a tremendous general anticipation of the rapidly approaching almost unbearably important Saturday night in just a few hours, right after supper, when there would be long preparations before the mirror and then a sharped-up city-wide invasion of bars (which already at this moment had begun to roar from old afternoon drinkers who'd swallowed their bar egos long ago), thousands of young men of Denver hurrying from their homes with arrogant clack and tie-adjustments toward the brilliant center in an invasion haunted by sorrow because no guy whether he was a big drinker, big fighter or big lover could ever find the center of Saturday night in America, though the undone collar and the dumb stance on empty street-corners on Sunday dawn was easy to find and in fact 15-year-old Dean could have best told them about it; the premonition of this oncoming night together with the dense excitement of everything around the tables in the shadowy hall nevertheless failing to hide certain hints of heartbreaking loss that filtered in with chinks of daylight from the October street and penetrated all their souls with the stricken memory not only of wild wind blowing coalsmoke and leaves across town, and football games somewhere, but of their wives and women right now, with feminine purposes, with that ravenous womany glee trotting around town buying boxes of soap, Jello, floorwax, Dutch Cleanser and placing these on the bottom of their wagons, then working up to oranges at the fruitstand, quarts of milk, tissue paper, finally chops, steak, bacon pyramiding to eggs, cigarettes, the grocery slip on top with a little new toy and maybe new socks or a new housedress or light-bulb, eagering after every future need while their men-louts slammed around with balls and racks and sticks in the dimness of their own vice. And there in the middle of it stood melancholy Tom Snark, the habitué, the one always ready to take anybody on for a game, hunchbacked, meek, dreaming at his upright cue-stick as naturally as the sentry at his spear and looking like the hull-bump of a Naval destroyer that you see on the horizon with its spindly ghost of a foremast, a figure so familiar in the brown-ness of the room that after a while you didn't see him any more like certain drinkers disappear the moment they put their foot on the brass rail (Old Bull Baloon, Damion Love, others), just for the most part standing there chalking his cue in the gesture of poolhall nonchalance he and all the others used for quick look-sees, reassured. When he saw Dean he raised his eyebrow, interested in the wild-looking cat, but like an old woman rocking on a porch noting storm-clouds before supper, placidly, dumbly surprised. Tom Snark in this lonely earth was a crippled boy who lived in unostentatious pain with his grand-mother in a two-story house under great sidestreet trees, sat on the screened porch with her till poolhall time, which was usually midafternoon; en route made the rounds of downtown streets, mild, sincere, dropping a word in the shoeshine shanty, another into the chili joint where his boys worked, then a moment on the sidewalk with that watchful, spitting, proprietary air of all young men of American daytime sidewalks (there's more doubt in the night); and then into the poolroom like a man going to work, where you could best judge his soul, as Dean did, seeing him standing stooped at his cue-stick with that unfathomable patience of an old janitor awaiting a thousand more nights of the debris of rotation, snookers and pinochle in the same brown meeting hall, his huge round eyes once they were fixed on you persisting like a baby's who's terror-stricken by life watching a stranger go by his part of the sidewalk. Then again you saw that he prowled like a fox in his atmospheres, a weirdy, a secret wise man making his living at pool; if you looked closer you saw that he never missed a difficult shot once he finally got down to it; that when he did go down and propped his thin artistic hand with forefingertip and thumb joined in a lean architectural rest for the cue's smooth passage, unfolding his sculptured fingers below for ornament and balance on the green, a gesture so sophisticated in America that boys see it in their dreams as soon as they've seen it once, at these times he was even less noticeably at work than standing loafing in bunchy balled-up gloom at the rickety pylon of his cue-pole. Raggedy Dean sitting there watching this Tom Snark was the enactment of the drama of an American boy for the first time perceiving the existence of an American hero, nay an American poet — this Tom Snark so tragically interesting, so diseased, beautiful, potent, because he could beat anybody yet be so obscurely defeated as he slouched down in the press of the crowd, sometimes flashing a languid sad smile in answer to the shouts of dishwashers and dryclean pressers but usually just enduring eternity on the spot he occupied, his Pepsi Cola unattended on the ballrack, his eyes dreaming upon sorrows that must have been as deep as an Assyrian king's and notwithstanding that when Dean grew up he learned they were nothing but the pure dumb trances of a sweet crippled poolshark. At the moment when this strange love for Tom Snark and the great American image of beautiful sadness which he represented was leaping in Dean's imagination, and Snark himself understood from the corner of his eye that this boy wasn't only interested in learning pool from him but everything he knew and would use it for purposes of his own which were so much vaster than anything Snark had ever dreamed that he would have to plead for Dean's guidance in the end, Dean immediately jumped up, ran over and made the first great con man proposition of his life.

It had to be a fantastic proposition; the moment Snark looked amazed and dropped his superior pose out of sheer perplexity, in fact embarrassed pain because what was he expected to do with a kid rushing up to him and saying "Do you want to learn philosophy from me?" with a wag of the finger, sly eyes, neck popping with muscles like a jackinthe-box straining at the void of the world for the first time with a vigorous evil spring, Dean, his position established, leaped in. "No further than that yet, and of course omitting to discuss the fact because already almost understood, i.e., you teach me how to beat pool" (pointing at himself) "and I teach you" (socking Snark in the chest with his forefinger and really hurting him). "I teach you further into psychology and mesta-fit-sics" (Dean mispronounced "metaphysics" at this time because he still didn't know how and it caused him tremendous private grief to remember this) "and further beyond all that and in order to cement our relationship and in fact — of course if you agree, and only if you agree, as I do — in fact to establish a blood brother loyally of our souls, if you wish to use clitchay expressions at this time or any other, and again just as you agree, always as you agree" (jabbing the iron finger again but this time careful not to touch, just holding it quivering powerfully within the tiniest fraction of an inch from Snark's chest) "I propose now and without any further shillyshallying, though" — (rubbing his hands busily, locking back and forth with one foot in front of the other, his head down but watching Snark with an undertook that was very arrogant, cocky, suddenly sarcastically suggestive, the rocking deliberate not only like a boxer getting ready arranging his skip rope or a pitcher on the mound rubbing up the ball with a half-sarcastic expression on the catcher's preliminary sign but almost hypnotic in the way it attracted Snark who watched entranced and just barely seemed to be wonderingly rocking with him) — "though I can whip a car into a going condition even if it's awful old ugh and 1 know buddies for free greasejobs plus where to steal cans of oil and even one tankful during the ballroom dance at eleven tonight on Broadway when I go around the cars parked in my boy's lot with my siphon and mouthsuck up into cans on the average half a gallon per car which is unnoticeable but awful hard work, et cetera on, I still have to find the car, you see, huge troubles natcherly as I consider energy and every and all contingency but listen carefully to me (and I will, no fear, to compensate, find, or steal a car, anytime you agree, or say, whatever) if you want to go to the Notre Dame game this Saturday in South Bend Indiana and really want to see it and not just loafing the idea — stop a moment to understand!" he commanded Snark who'd started to speak. "All week I heard you and the other fellows bettin', sayin' 'Well now I sure would like to see that thar Notre Dame game by gawd and talkin' like people often do whose wish-plans never do crystallize see because of lazy blocks that multiply on the back road of old delays yet I'm offering you a real genuine chance and I repeat if you really want to see it I'll get my Uncle Bull's old rattletytrap clonkclonk hoophoop Graham-Paige see look if necessary wow" (this was such a tremendous concession Dean showed a stagger back) "See? — which, won't he miss it, not only because it doesn't run hor hor, but right now he's freezing his assets in Montany hee hee hee" (staggering back, bent in half, lofting from his somehow non-laughing sad face a fantastic long highpitched sillygiggle for what he thought in those days in spite of his erudition with words was a terrific joke and in fact bumping against others one of them a gloomy CBQ switchman who was just then bending clown for an easy straight shot and missed completely on account of Dean in his foolish kid stupid excitement to be noticed, a sentiment that the switchman, chewing his gum as fast as he could go while aiming now expressed by not removing his cue from where it finger-rested but just turned to look at Dean with jaws chewing slowly) "and positively I can take you to the game and back in record time through chill winters and U.S. mails and all things and really blow the road wide open so long as you provide your ticket of course, after all, whoo!" (wiping himself in a parody of adroitness with a dirty handkerchief) "see? whereas you watch the game but I'll wait outside either in the car or in a diner listening on the radio or better try to see panoramic touchdowns from a roof or tree, or even better I'll hustle around town while you're enjoying and see if I can find some g-u-r-1-s, money we borrow with the promise we're cousings say from Oopla Indiana next door and come in every Saturday to attend the fair you see and tell them we usually have a lot of money but not this time on account Paw's pumpkins didn't sell er somethin' et cetera and then we come back possibly the girls coming with us far as Nebraska or someplace where maybe they get money from their aunt or cousings, anybody, so that, see — but what I'm sayin', omigosh a ticket, a ticket to the Notre Dame football game one thousand miles away, six million feet deep with telephones and luminaries I can't begin to even imagine, pity poor me and so I leave it to you ... you ... and also type of car, also anybody you want bring, I be your chauffeur, you teach me pool, snookers, anything you say, be my big brother, I be your helper. So it be! So it be! What say?"

It was too completely mad for flabbergasted dumb old Tom Snark, one of the kindest fellows in the world, who in any case could never be expected to have the energy and health to face a thousand miles of deliberately absurd travel in an old car, no, Snark's first, real and genuinely kind impulse was to quiet Dean down.

"My land," he said to himself, "he must be crazy from being hungry I guess."

He took him home that afternoon to his grandmother's house. They had a big snack from the icebox, Dean drinking two and a half quarts of milk in fear that he'd never see that much for several more years, and making sure not to tear the bread when he folded it over the butter, clutching his chest, actually clutching his chest when he realized Snark's grandmother was only standing over them to refill their glasses from a fresh bottle of milk, not pleased or displeased but just a nice old woman with a rosy moon face, glasses, white hair, wearing cotton stockings over her piano legs that supported her so firmly and immovably in the halos of her bright linoleum and a housedress that in the course of tender chores around the house which was as comfortable as an old pillow, had taken on the kindly, almost dear shapelessness of herself, the simplicity and sadness of her stolid mother-like repose at the poor hunchbacked boy's side as he bent to his supper, her grandson whom she served and honored, enough to make Dean feel like crying for his own mother who he was positive now would have been something like Snark's grandmother (though in reality she had been an ascetic gaunt with tears), just as calm, plain, humble, like old mas who run rickety grocery stores in the backfence neighborhoods of home in Ohio or home in Truckee. In Snark's bedroom upstairs the boys spent a quiet hour facing each other at a folding card table set near the window where the lace curtains puffed in with the breeze and played over the flowery wallpaper and knickknacks of windowshelf, the mere sight of this graceful drowsy phenomenon making Dean marvel and joy (always high at 15) to be in a real home that had lace curtains and little feminine lonely frills in it to beat harsh nature, as Snark, not realizing that Dean was thinking these things, proceeded in a thorough explanation of the various first steps in cheating at cards.

"First off you see Deanie you mark 'em best with your thumbnail like this, usin' your own code if you like, to designate face cards, acies and deucies."

"Yes!" cried Dean. "Yes indeed!" From a closet next to a dark wood dresser with carved iron grips that swung on little hinges in rich significant clicks, and next to the right front bedpost of Snark's fourpost manorial boxspring bed in which Dean imagined Snark slept like the little boys in fleecy nightgowns in mattress advertisements of The Saturday Evening Post, which he realized now he was confusing with a rubber tire ad that shows a little boy wandering out of bed with a candle on New Year's Eve but expresses the same tender comfort of angels and vision of American children (ah poor Dean, who'd seen this vision in those soaked magazines that have been dried by the sun and stand on tattered edges among weeds and cundrums of backlots), from that closet that seemed so rich because it was next to these things and inside had the luxuriant darkness of suits all flashing dim from starry moth crystals (and their starry odor) and the faint gold of shoe trees, Snark pulled out a fairly good brown tweed suit and, with a slight bow like a Viennese nobleman, like the Bela Lugosi vampire bowing to the young hero at the door of the Rainy Castle, he presented it to Dean to keep, Dean in turn offering his toy accordion as collateral anyway, with a smile and still bowing Snark saying he'd keep it for him. It was Dean's first suit; he bulged out of the new clean underwear; bulged out of the starched white shirt that was handed to him with a laundry cardboard brace in the collar that made him wonder if he had to fiddle with it like irascible millionaire husbands tugging before last minute mirrors in B movies; he bulged out of the necktie that wound foursquare round the pillars of his neck, but out of the suit he exploded, the buttons were in danger of popping, the trouser creases were stretched fiat out of sight on his thighs, the back seams of the coat showed connective spinal threads, the sleeves took the shape of his forearms that suddenly looked almost as big as Popeye's.

"Damn! Do I look sharp?"

He looked all right but strange. So awed by these new clothes that he could hardly turn his head when Snark talked to him, but only nodded up and down, his long hair bushy and uncombable, his thoughts all pompous sweaty astonishment like the cartoon characters they draw with bewildered perspirations raining from their heads, just as ludicrous as that, and yet as that bright afternoon that had shed its radiance unasked for so long now showed itself to be turned into old red afternoon when they stepped forth from the house, and piteous remorse among men, birds and trees that had transpired while they were dressing still haunted the air with that hung silence that makes people ask themselves sadly "Oh what happened to the afternoon?" and later when the general autumn dying quietly like a brave soldier overwhelms them, "Oh what happened to the year?" Dean, very like an Episcopalian farmer boy going to church the Sunday morning before his wedding day and with the same absentminded ignorance of the wide surroundant brooding over him that characterizes all mortal persecuted breath beneath this hugeness, literally had to be led stupidly and stiffly down the street by Snark as they hurried back to the pool parlor to meet the entire gang.

• • •

It was going to be a big night, suit and all. It didn't take long for Dean to quicken his steps with Snark's and soon they had pinpointed downstreet and were swinging around the corner to a big trolley line thoroughfare, hurrying for the big-traffic, ever-more-exciting, all-of-it-pouring-into-town Saturday night both of them with the same bright fresh gleam in their eyes that you see on the shiny fender of a new automobile when it turns in from the darkness and outskirts of town and immediately reflects Saturday night Main Street neons where before it just sat black in a dark garage or else in the driveway collecting dim dressing lights from the upstairs of the house, vanishing like a comedy team rightwards in a vision of ankles twinkling in the dusk with regardant bending figures pointed downtown plunging through the same pocket of excitement which was not only their point of sober discussion but raised little fogs from their mouths as they yakked along (with lone envy Dean used to watch other guys cutting along like this, sometimes from mission reading-room windows on nights when it was so cold he thought he could read what the buddies said before their intense voluminous talking-fogs whipped back to dissolve in wintry emptiness): Dean finally forgetting he was wearing a suit, forgetting the high entrapment of the collar and the woolly stifling around his armpits and the unfamiliar scuffling cuffs out of which he soon in fact resumed telling Snark further things and all things about himself, gesturing out of the shiny round starch his big grimy cracked hands that were not at all the hands of an absorbed banker in the street but more like a dirt farmer's at a funeral and worse like horny toads in a basket of wash. "Now in Gaga's barbershop in back and settin' way up high behind the water heater I have a bag of clothes, barkening to clothes, but to go and pick it up involves terrible divisions with Gaga over money my old man owed him even though it's just old pants and belts and polkadot shirts, but further 1 have an extra pair of fairly good work shoes settin' way up high so nobody can notice on top of a locker in the Y and my plan, actually and no lie, was getting down to Colorado Springs or Raton or some such to freeze m'fingers off in construction camps or whichever——" and so on as Snark assured him he had plenty of clothes for him and not to worry. Excitement of hurrying downtown on foot for the big night reached a supreme peak when suddenly as they rushed arm-in-arm and came to cross Broadway the light instantly changed for them and they didn't have to wait but just hustled right straight on across the street for the poolhall, that light that wouldn't allow lulls in the rhythm of their joy holding up whole avenues of traffic exactly for them to sweep along, profound, bowed, bumping heads together; Dean so singing in his soul now that he had to talk on several levels to express himself to Snark: "Even though as you say there's just as much work around here and why even go to Fort Collins where it's so c-o-l-d (whee! zoom! look at that new Caddy!) and I didn't further finish about earlier speaking of Gaga and all the things 1 want you to know ——"; his arm around Snark, cramped armpits or no cramped armpits, Dean the only one who'd ever put his arm around the hump of Snark's sorrow: similarly in the moment, seeing, just as they reached the other curb, in the exciting shadows of a five-and-ten awning and to his deeper and simultaneously running amazement, a beautiful girl fixing on him from her casual one-leg-forward hand-on-hip position a cold arrogant look of sensuality done with misty eyes and something suggestive, impatient, almost too personal to understand (she's waiting for the bus), astonishing him in the realization that he was wearing a suit for the first time in his life and this was the first official sex-appeal look from a regular high-heeled downtown socialite honey (still finding room to yell "Snarky watch that new Caddy beat the light now!") and reflecting: "So this is what these damn dames and big guys been doin', givin' each other tur-ble personal glances of angry snakes' love that I didn't know about in my previous boy-days beatin' around the sidewalk with my eyes on the gutter lookin' for nickels and dimes wearin' goldang old pants. Damn! Lessgo!"

In the poolhall the hour was roaring. It was so crowded that spectators were standing obscuring everything from the street and somebody had the backdoor open simultaneously with the alley door of the Welton Street parlor so that you could see a solid city block of poolhall from the north side of Glenarm to the south side of Welton interrupted only by a little tragic alley of shadows with a garbage can, like looking down a hall of mirrors over a sea of angrily personalized heads and islands of green felt, all in smoke. To Dean it was a vision, the moment of his arrival that everybody was waiting for, yet even though he stood in the door at the side of great cool Tom Snark the Virgil of this big Inferno, wearing not only his clothes but the same gorgeously sophisticated robe of their afternoon's adventure which was already undergoing a rich change to evening and the lazy explorations that were to come, a decadent refinement that all the dumb rats in this dimness would have to struggle to understand to know anything hereafter even about pool, nobody made a move to notice or even really cared and Dean would have immediately felt drowned again except suddenly for the saving memory of a hunch he used to have in boyhood which was that whenever he turned his back on the people who were involved with him and even others who happened to be standing nearby, perfect strangers sometimes, they immediately gathered with the speed of light at the nape of his neck to discuss him voicelessly, dancing, pointing, until, jerking his head around for a quick look or just slowly to check, it turned out they'd always twanged back in place with all-to-be-expected fiendish perfect hypocrisy and in exactly the same position blandly as before. Remembering anyhow his father when in his cocky way of bums he used to stagger happily into some place howling "Hallelujah I'm a bum," Dean as he came in, very carefully digging everything through shrewd half-closed eyes so he could size up and savor the scene for everything it had, jazzing on the balls of his feet in that thing Americans do instead of pinching themselves, now repeated the song to himself, "Hallelujah I'm a bum," in a secret, sly, interested whisper of his own he always used to refer back to sad factors of the past.

While Snark was busy looking around, Dean directed his attention to a spot on the floor near table number one where, after he had tired of looking at people on those long watchful nights, he used to spend stranger further hours on the onlooker's bench absentmindedly studying the reality and vying with the existence of cigarette butts and spit by estimating exactly how it got there on the floor, wondering why for instance a particular calm spit gleamed like it did even though it had been rejected like a person's rejected and spat out exactly (the clock) two and a half minutes earlier by a blue-jowled conductor who had thought to spit and wouldn't have spat otherwise but came apparently to think of something completely different at the button wire counting the score and scratching his chin (all as voices of the room reverberated around the walls and moaned in his absent not-listening ear), so that as far as the spot of this conductor's own spit was concerned it no longer existed for him, only for Dean: Dean then estimating exactly how he himself got there, not only the world but the bench, not only the bench but the part of the bench he filled out, not only that but how he got there to be aware of the saliva and the part of the bench his butt filled out, and so on in the way the mind has: at all of which now because it wasn't his best idea of what to do in a poolhall, in Snark's company he made his ceremonial sneer and official revenge, even in the roaring noise and even though among all these Saturday feet he couldn't quite see the exact spot he had studied, though he knew there were new cigarette butts and spit on that spot now, like little brothers and sisters following in the stead of others long ago studied and swept away, in any case doing all this so that the first full-fledged moment of his poolhall characterhood would not be spoiled in fevers and forgetful excitement like running up to people to talk, but instead he would take advantage of his big chance to keep his attention disciplined on those sources of strength that had brought about this good luck, and so do so in the roots of previous well-considered sorrow of October in the poolhall.

"What are you doing Deanie?" asked Snark when he noticed how pensive he was.

Oh ragged sailing heart! — it was far from time for Dean to be able to even want to explain his craziest secrets. "Actually and no lie, Tom, I was thinking to myself what a wonderful guy this Tom Snark fellow is really truly indeed."

Ed Dunkel, Roy Johnson and Bob Evans were the nucleus of Tom Snark's gang at the time. They were grouped around a rear table in the usual ritual get-together game of rotation that they had every Saturday evening as a kind of preliminary tactical conference on the night's action and for starting and a Coke. The program tonight featured two girls who were babysitting for the weekend in a house up near the Wyoming line. But this night without knowing it they were grouped around with hotheaded dumbness the purpose of which is always to be ignorant of what's about to happen, the only sure thing you can remember when you look back to see what people were doing during an important historical moment, sore, sullen, sighing from the drag of time, inattentive as always, impatient not only with life but always exactly the life unfolding in the immediate vicinity, the miserable here, the lousy now, as though all the blame was on that, and yet the poor souls actually sitting in that mysterious Godlike stuff that later makes them say, "Listen, I was there the night Tom Snark came in with Dean the day he found him, 1942, autumn, they had the Army-Columbia game that day, I bet on it and heard it on the radio too, we were all playing pool me and Ed Dunkel who just got haircuts and Roy Johnson and Jackoff and I dunno who the hell else, krise we all drove to Wyoming that night, sure, it was a great, mad night!"

Dean was introduced around. "Here comes Tom Snark: who's that kid with him? What's that, your cousin? What happened to you and Jackoff Friday night? Dean is it? Hiya boy." And Dean with that strange little feeling of pleased-ncss that shivers deep in your chest and makes you want to hug yourself and explain everything to the man next to you, found himself standing at one table among all the others roaring with what he could now almost call his own gang as exciting shadows outdoors fell and they played eightball — Dean and Snark versus Dunkel and Johnson with good natured Evans kibitzing. And everything they said and everything they did — one reaching up to slap over the score and another reaching down to set his Coke and another looking horizontally along his cue to see if it was too curved — was all part of one great three-dimensional moil that was all around him now instead of just flat in front of his face like a canvas prop, he was up on the stage with the show now.

So he stood there with his weather-beaten face growing more excited and redder by the hour, his big raw hands gripped around a cue, looking bashfully at his new friends and planning deep in his mind from everything they said and did the positively best, in fact only way to begin completely, helplessly impressing everyone and winning over their favor so conclusively and including their souls that eventually of course they would all turn to him for love and advice; mad Dean, who eventually did run the gang, who was now just being merely coy quiet knowing instinctively the best way to start despite the fact that he never knew a gang before and the only thing he'd done was grab some poor kid by the arm in the junkyard or a newsboy in the street or some of the bicyclists on the paper route and make long strange speeches to them like the great speech he made to Snark that afternoon but they were too young to understand and frightened. So he stood stiffly at attention at the table, sweaty in his suit, or made stupid hilarious shots laying out his big hand flat and flaccid for a cue-rest as if a baby was trying to shoot pool, and the boys laughed but only because Dean was so seriously absentminded in his hilarious dumbness (trying to learn, they thought) and not because he was inconsequential. Right away the biggest fellow in the gang took a liking to Dean, six-foot-four Ed Dunkel all shiny handsome in his Saturday night suit, who was always looming over everybody with a long grave calm that was half comical because it seemed to come from the loneliness of his great height which prevented him from being on a level with other faces so that he dreamed up there his own special juvenile dreams all the less realistic because they were so far from his feet where the ground was, the others had to stare dumbly at his vest most of the time, a fate that he accepted with immense and tender satisfaction. This goodnatured long tall drink of water took a liking to Dean that soon became hero worship and later led to their rambling around the country, buddies — a thing that Roy Johnson noticed and resented from the start. Johnson had a pinsharp handsome face with long black hair falling down sides that he kept shoving back with both hands as if the brains were tormenting his forehead. He was almost instantly jealous and immediately proclaimed next day in Snark's ear (when it was too late) Dean wasn't everything he seemed to be. So when the gang gave up the precious table and let their empty Cokes plop in a floorbox with a "So long fellas" and left the hall to jump in the car a '37 Ford belonging to Evans, for the ride north to Wyoming about 80 miles, the sun just then going down in vast unobserved event above the maddening souls of people, and Dean above the objections of everyone else insisted on driving to show his skill, but then really fantastically wheeled the car out of town with beautiful spot-shot neatness and speed, the boys who were prepared to criticize his driving and give pointers or stage false hysterical scenes forgot they were in a car and fell to gabbing happily. And suddenly out on East Colfax Boulevard bound for Fort Collins Dean saw a football game going on among kids in a field, stopped hard at the curb, said "I was quarterback at Mesa Grande!" (reform school), ran out leaping madly among kids (with noble seriousness they were wearing those tragic lumps like the muscles of improvised strongmen in comedies), got the ball, told one boy to run like hell, clear to the goalpost, which the kid (wakened from a revery with helmet tucked underarm) did, but Dean said "Further, further," and the kid halfway doubting to get the ball that far edged on back and now he was 70 yards and Dean unleashed a tremendous soaring wobbling pass that dropped beyond the kid's most radical estimate, the pass being so high and powerful the boy completely lost it in eyrieal spaces of heaven and dusk and circled foolishly but screaming with glee — when this happened everyone was amazed except jealous Johnson, who rushed out of the car in his sharp blue suit, leapt around frantically in a mixup of kids, got the ball (at one point fell flat on both knees because of his new shinybottom shoes that had only a half-hour's poolroom dust on 'em) and commanded the same uncomplaining noble boy to run across the field and enragedly unfurled a long pass but Dean appeared out of nowhere in the mad lowering dusk and intercepted it with the sudden frantic action of a wildfaced maniac jumping into a roomful of old ladies; spun, heaving a prodigious sky pass back over Johnson's head that Johnson sneered at as he raced back, he'd never been outdone by anybody ("Hey wheel" they yelled in the car); such a tremendous pass it was bound to be carried by the wind, fall in the road out on East Colfax, yet Johnson ran out there dodging traffic as mad red clouds fired the horizon of the mountains, to the west, and somewhere across the field littler tiny children were burning meaningless fires and screaming and playing football with socks some just meaninglessly tackling one another all over in a great riot of October joy. Circling in the road, almost being murdered by a car driven 80 miles per by Denver's hotshot (Ray Rawlins, who tooted), Johnson made a sensational fingertip sprawling-on-knees catch instantly and breathtakingly overshadowed by the fact that dramatic fantastic Dean had actually gone chasing his own pass and was now in the road screaming with outstretched hands from the agony that he was barely going to miss, himself sprawling as terrorstricken motorists swerved and screeched on all sides. This insane scene was being beheld not only by Ray Rawlins laughing like hell as it receded 80 miles an hour out of his rearview window, but across the wild field with its spastic fires and purple skies (actually an empty lot sitting between the zoom-swish of Colfax traffic and some old homes, the goalposts just sticks the kids put up) was propped all by itself there an old haunted house with dry gardens of autumn planted round it by 19th Century lady ghouls long dead, from the weatherbeaten green latticed steps of which now descended Mr. behatted beheaded Denver D. Doll the mad schoolteacher with the little brush mustache, within months fated to be teaching Dean how to wash his ears, how to be impressive with high school principals — Doll now stopped, utterly amazed, halfway down, by the sight of Dean and Roy Johnson furying in the road (almost getting killed too), saying out loud "My goodness gracious what is this?"; same who in fact that afternoon, at the exact moment Dean was approaching Snark, sat in a grave of his own in his overcoat in an empty unheated Saturday classroom of West Denver High not a mile across town, his brow in his hand as blackboard dust swam across October fires in the corner where the window-opening pole was leaned, where it was still written in chalk from yesterday's class (in American Lit) When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd, sat there in a pretense of thinking for the benefit of any teachers and even kids passing in the hall with some of whom just before he'd in fact been joking (threw a feeble lopsided pass across the afternoon lawn as he hustled from Studebaker to business), had sat moveless in a pretense of remembering, with severe precision, the exact date of something that was bottle-necking his entire day, left wrist raised for a quick look at how much time was left, frown of accompaniment already formed, drawer pulled with letterheaded memo paper ready to fly the instant he smacked the desk deciding, but actually choking over loss, choking over loss, thinking of the love, the love, the love he missed when his face was thin and fresh, hopes were pure, O growing old! O haggard ugly ghoul is life's decay! Started life a sweet child believing everything beneath his lather's roof; went from that, immersed and fooled, to that mask of disgusted flesh called a face but not the face that love had hoped and to that soul of a gruesome grieving ghost that now goes shuddering through nightmare life cluttering up the earth as it dies. Ah but Roy Johnson wanted to throw a pass to Dean and Dean challenged him and said "Run with the ball and let's see if I tackle you before you reach that Stude-baker where the man's standing": and Johnson laughed because he had been (absolutely) the outstanding runner everywhere (schools, camps, picnics), at 15 could do the hundred in 10:6, track star speed; so took off not quite realizing what he'd done here giving Dean these psychological opportunities and looking back at him with taunts "Well come on, come on, what's the matter, can't you run?" And so that Dean furiously, as if running for his life, not only caught up with him but (even when Johnson spurted up his speed in wholehearted frightened realizing race) caught up with him easily, in his sheer excitement, with his tremendous unprecedented raw athletic power he could run the hundred in almost 10 flat (actually and no lie) and a sad, remote tackle took place in the field, for a moment everybody saw Dean flyingtackling horizontally in the dark air with his neck bulled on to prove, his head down almost the way a dead man bows his head self-satisfied and life-accomplished but also as if he was chuckling up his coatsleeve at Johnson-about-to-be-smeared, both arms outstretched, in a tackling clamp that, as he hung suspended in that instantaneous fix of the eye, were outstretched with a particular kind of unspeakable viciousness that's always so surprising when you see it leaping out of the decent suits of men in sudden sidewalk fights, the cosmopolitan horror of it, like movie magnates fighting, this savagery explosively leaping now out of Dean's new suit with the same rage of shoulderpads and puffy anus, yet arms that also were outstretched with an unspeakable mute prophesied and profound humility like that of a head-down Christ shot out of a cannon on a cross for nothing, agonized. Crash, Johnson was tackled; Denver D. Doll called out "Why didn't you try that in the road I have a shovel in the car," nobody noticing, even as he drove off; and Dean, like Johnson with his knees all bruised and pants torn, had established his first great position of leadership in Tom Snark's famous gang.

Long ago in the red sun ... that wow-mad Dean who went on the road with me.