Friday, December 20, 2013
eyes many a time. His ghost haunted us. We’d never find him on Times
Square again. We thought maybe by accident Old Neal Cassady was here
too---but he was not. For 35¢ each we went into the beat-up old movie and
sat down in the balcony, till morning when we were shooed downstairs.
The people who were in that all night movie were the end. Beat Negroes
who’d come up from Alabama to work in car factories on a rumor; old
white bums; young long-haired hipsters who’d reached the end of the road
and were drinking wine; whores, ordinary couples and housewives with
nothing to do, nowhere to go, nobody to believe in. If you sifted all
Detroit in a wire basket the beater solid core of dregs couldn’t be
better gathered. The picture was singing cowboy Roy Dean and his gallant
white Horse Bloop, that was number one; number two double feature film
was George Raft, Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre in a picture about
Istanbul. We saw both of these things six times each during the night.
We saw them waking, we heard them sleeping, we sensed them dreaming, we
were permeated completely with the strange gray Myth of the West and the
weird dark Myth of the East when morning came. All my actions since
then have been dictated automatically to my subconscious by this
horrible osmotic experience. I heard big Greenstreet sneer a hundred
times; I heard Peter Lorre make his sinister come-on, I was with George
Raft in his paranoiac fears; I rode and sang with Roy Dean and shot up
the rustlers innumerable times. People slugged out of bottles and turned
around and looked everywhere in the dark theater for something to do,
somebody to talk to. In the head everybody was guiltily quiet, nobody
talked. In the gray dawn that puffed ghostlike about the windows of the
theater and hugged its eaves I was sleeping with my head on the wooden
arm of a seat as six attendants of the theater converged with their
nights’ total of swept-up rubbish and created a huge dusty pile that
reached to my nose as I snored head down---till they almost swept me
away too. This was reported to me by Neal who was watching from ten
seats behind. All the cigarette butts, the bottles, the matchbooks, the
come and the gone was swept up in this pile. Had they taken me with it
Neal would have never seen me again. He
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