Then everybody began planning a tremendous trek to the mountains. This started in the morning, together with a phone call that compli- cated matters--my old road friend Eddie, who took a blind chance and called; he remembered some of the names I had mentioned. Now I had the opportunity to get my shirt back. Eddie was with his girl in a house off Colfax. He wanted to know if I knew where to find work, and I told him to come over, figuring Dean would know. Dean arrived, hurrying, while Major and I were having a hasty breakfast. Dean wouldn't even sit down. "I have a thousand things to do, in fact hardly any time to take you down Camargo, but let's go, man."
"Wait for my road buddy Eddie."
Major found our hurrying troubles amusing. He'd come to Denver to write leisurely. He treated Dean with extreme deference. Dean paid no attention. Major talked to Dean like this: "Moriarty, what's this I hear about you sleeping with three girls at the same time?" And Dean shuffled on the rug and said, "Oh yes, oh yes, that's the way it goes," and looked at his watch, and Major snuffed down his nose. I felt sheepish rushing off with Dean--Major insisted he was a moron and a fool. Of course he wasn't, and I wanted to prove it to everybody somehow.
We met Eddie. Dean paid no attention to him either, and off we went in a trolley across the hot Denver noon to find the jobs. I hated the thought of it. Eddie talked and talked the way he always did. We found a man in the markets who agreed to hire both of us; work started at four o'clock in the morning and went till six P.M. The man said, "I like boys who like to work."
"You've got your man," said Eddie, but I wasn't so sure about myself. "I just won't sleep," I decided. There were so many other inter- esting things to do.
Eddie showed up the next morning; I didn't. I had a bed, and Major bought food for the icebox, and in exchange for that I cooked and washed the dishes. Meantime I got all involved in everything. A big party took place at the Rawlinses' one night. The Rawlins mother was gone on a trip. Ray Rawlins called everybody he knew and told them to bring whisky; then he went through his address book for girls. He made me do most of the talking. A whole bunch of girls showed up. I phoned Carlo to find out what Dean was doing now. Dean was coming to Carlo's at three in the morning. I went there after the party.
Carlo's basement apartment was on Grant Street in an old red- brick rooming house near a church. You went down an alley, down some stone steps, opened an old raw door, and went through a kind of cellar till you came to his board door. It was like the room of a Russian saint: one bed, a candle burning, stone walls that oozed moisture, and a crazy makeshift ikon of some kind that he had made. He read me his poetry. It was called "Denver Doldrums." Carlo woke up in the morn- ing and heard the "vulgar pigeons" yakking in the street outside his cell; he saw the "sad nightingales" nodding on the branches and they reminded him of his mother. A gray shroud fell over the city. The mountains, the magnificent Rockies that you can see to the west from any part of town, were "papier-maché." The whole universe was crazy and cockeyed and extremely strange. He wrote of Dean as a "child of the rainbow" who bore his torment in his agonized priapus. He re- ferred to him as "Oedipus Eddie" who had to "scrape bubble gum off windowpanes." He brooded in his basement over a huge journal in which he was keeping track of everything that happened every day-- everything Dean did and said.
Dean came on schedule. "Everything's straight," he announced. "I'm going to divorce Marylou and marry Camille and go live with her in San Francisco. But this is only after you and I, dear Carlo, go to Tex- as, dig Old Bull Lee, that gone cat I've never met and both of you've told me so much about, and then I'll go to San Fran."
Then they got down to business. They sat on the bed crosslegged and looked straight at each other. I slouched in a nearby chair and saw all of it. They began with an abstract thought, discussed it; reminded each other of another abstract point forgotten in the rush of events; Dean apologized but promised he could get back to it and manage it fine, bringing up illustrations.
Carlo said, "And just as we were crossing Wazee I wanted to tell you about how I felt of your frenzy with the midgets and it was just then, remember, you pointed out that old bum with the baggy pants and said he looked just like your father?"
"Yes, yes, of course I remember; and not only that, but it started
a train of my own, something real wild that I had to tell you, I'd forgot- ten it, now you just reminded me of it ... " and two new points were born. They hashed these over. Then Carlo asked Dean if he was honest and specifically if he was being honest with him in the bottom of his soul.
"Why do you bring that up again?" "There's one last thing I want to know--"
"But, dear Sal, you're listening, you're sitting there, we'll ask Sal.What would he say?"
And I said, "That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once for all."
"No, no, no, you're talking absolute bullshit and Wolfean ro- mantic posh!" said Carlo.
And Dean said, "I didn't mean that at all, but we'll let Sal have his own mind, and in fact, don't you think, Carlo, there's a kind of a dignity in the way he's sitting there and digging us, crazy cat came all the way across the country--old Sal won't tell, old Sal won't tell."
"It isn't that I won't tell," I protested. "I just don't know what you're both driving at or trying to get at. I know it's too much for anybody."
"Everything you say is negative." "Then what is it you're trying to do?" "Tell him."
"No, you tell him."
"There's nothing to tell," I said and laughed. I had on Carlo's hat. I pulled it down over my eyes. "I want to sleep," I said.
"Poor Sal always wants to sleep." I kept quiet. They started in
again. "When you borrowed that nickel to make up the check for the chicken-fried steaks--"
"No, man, the chili! Remember, the Texas Star?"
"I was mixing it with Tuesday. When you borrowed that nickel you said, now listen, you said; 'Carlo, this is the last time I'll impose on you,' as if, and really, you meant that I had agreed with you about no more imposing."
"No, no, no, I didn't mean that--you harken back now if you will, my dear fellow, to the night Marylou was crying in the room, and when, turning to you and indicating by my extra added sincerity of tone which we both knew was contrived but had its intention, that is, by my play-acting I showed that--But wait, that isn't it."
"Of course that isn't it! Because you forget that--But I'll stop accusing you. Yes is what I said ... " And on, on into the night they talked like this. At dawn I looked up. They were tying up the last of the morn- ing's matters. "When I said to you that I had to sleep ibecausei of Marylou, that is, seeing her this morning at ten, I didn't bring my pe- remptory tone to bear in regard to what you'd just said about the un- necessariness of sleep but only, ionly,i mind you, because of the fact that I absolutely, simply, purely and without any whatevers have to sleep now, I mean, man, my eyes are closing, they're redhot, sore, tired, beat ... "
"Ah, child," said Carlo.
"We'll just have to sleep now. Let's stop the machine."
"You can't stop the machine!" yelled Carlo at the top of his voice. The first birds sang.
"Now, when I raise my hand," said Dean, "we'll stop talking,
we'll both understand purely and without any hassle that we are simp- ly stopping talking, and we'll just sleep."
"You can't stop the machine like that."
"Stop the machine," I said. They looked at me.
"He's been awake all this time, listening. What were you think- ing, Sal?" I told them that I was thinking they were very amazing ma- niacs and that I had spent the whole night listening to them like a man watching the mechanism of a watch that reached clear to the top of Berthoud Pass and yet was made with the smallest works of the most delicate watch in the world. They smiled. I pointed my finger at them and said, "If you keep this up you'll both go crazy, but let me know what happens as you go along."
I walked out and took a trolley to my apartment, and Carlo Marx's papier-maché mountains grew red as the great sun rose from the eastward plains.