Saturday, December 21, 2013
Francisco alto man who waited with me while Neal made a phone call in a
saloon to have Bill Tomson pick us up. It wasn’t anything much, we were
just talking, except that suddenly we saw very strange and insane sight.
It was Neal. He wanted to give Bill Tomson the address of the bar so he
told him to hold the line for a minute and ran out to see, and to do
this he had to rush pell-mell through a long bar of brawling drinkers in
white shirts, go to the middle of the street and look at the post
signs. He did this, crouched low to the ground like Groucho Marx, his
feet carrying him with amazing swiftness and came out of the bar like an
apparition with his balloon thumb stuck up in the night and came to
whirling stop in the middle of the road looking everywhere above him
for the signs. They apparently were hard to see in the dark and he spun a
dozen times in the road, thumb upheld, in a wild anxious silence. So
anybody coming along the street would see this: a wild-haired person
with a ballooning thumb held up like a great goose of the sky spinning
and spinning in the dark, the other hand distractedly inside his pants.
Ed Saucier was saying “I blow a sweet tone wherever I go and if people
don’t like it ain’t nothing I can do it about it. Say man, that buddy of
yours is a crazy cat, looka him over there” ---and we looked. There was
a big silence everywhere as Neal saw the signs and rushed back in the
bar practically going under someone’s legs as they came out and gliding
so fast through the bar a second time that everybody had to make double
to see him. A moment later Bill Tomson showed up and with the same
amazing swiftness Neal glided across the street and into the car door
without a sound. We were off again. “Now Bill I know you’re all hung up
with your wife about this thing but we absolutely must make Thornton and
Gomez in the incredible time of three minutes or everything is lost.
Ahem! Yes! (cough cough) In the morning Jack and I are leaving for NY
and this is absolutely our last night of kicks and I know you won’t
mind.” No, Bill Tomson didn’t mind: he only drove through every red
light he could find and hurried us along in our foolishness. At dawn he
went back to bed. Neal and I ended up with a colored guy called Walter
who invited us to his home for a bottle of beer. He lived
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