Thursday, December 26, 2013
called each other Yo. “Yep,” I said. I wandered around Denver. It seemed
to me every bum on Larimer Street maybe was Neal Cassady’s father, Old
Neal Cassady they called him, the Barber. I went in the Windsor Hotel
where father and son had lived and where one night Neal was frightfully
waked up by the legless man on the rollerboard who shared the room with
them who came thundering across the floor on his terrible wheels to
touch the boy. I saw the little midget newspaperselling woman with the
short legs, on the corner of Curtis and Fifteenth. “Man,” Neal told me,
“think of lifting her in the air and fucking her!” I walked around the
sad honkeytonks of Curtis Street: young kids in jeans and red shirts,
peanut shells, movie marquees, shooting parlors. Beyond the glittering
street was darkness, and beyond the darkness the West. I had to go. At
dawn I found Allen. I read some of his enormous journal, slept there,
and in the morning, drizzly and gray, tall sixfoot Al Hinkle came in
with Bill Tomson- -a handsome kid---and Jim Holmes the hunchback
poolshark. Jim Holmes had saintly big blue eyes but he was a mumbling
bore. He wore a beard; he lived with his grandmother. Big Al was the son
and brother of a cop family. Bill Tomson claimed he could run faster
than Neal. They sat around and listened with abashed smiles as Allen
Ginsberg read them his apocalyptic mad poetry. I slumped in my chair,
finished. “Oh ye Denver birds!” cried Allen. We all filed out and went
up a typical cobbled Denver alley between incinerators smoking slowly.
“I used to roll my hoop up this alley” Hal Chase had told me. I wanted
to see him do it; I wanted to see Denver ten years ago when they were
all children and in the sunny cherryblossom morning of Springtime in the
Rockies they rolled their hoops up the joyous alleys full of
promise…the whole gang. And Neal, ragged and dirty, prowling by himself
with a preoccupied frenzy. Bill Tomson and I walked in the drizzle; I
went to Eddie’s girls house and got my wool plaid shirt back---the shirt
of Preston, Nebraska. It was all there, all tied up, the whole enormous
sadness of a shirt. Bill Tomson said he’d meet me in Frisco. Everybody
was going to Frisco. I went and found my money had arrived. The sun came
out, and Ed White rode a trolley with me
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