Sunday, December 22, 2013
over us and said “Yes!” and then he staggered out to the street to hit
another saloon. Then there’s Connie Jordan, a madman who sings and flips
his arms and ends up splashing sweat on everybody and kicking over the
mike and screaming like a woman, and you see him late at night,
exhausted, listening to wild jazz sessions at Jackson’s Hole with big
round eyes and limp shoulders, a big gooky stare into space and a drink
in front of him. I never saw such crazy musicians. Everybody in Frisco
blew. It was the end of the continent, they didn’t give a damn. That
summer I was to see much more of it until the very walls shuddered and
cracked. Neal and I goofed around San Francisco in this manner until I
got my next GI check and got ready to go back home. What I accomplished
by coming to Frisco I don’t know. Carolyn wanted me to leave. Neal
didn’t care one way or the other. I bought a loaf of bread and meats and
made myself ten sandwiches to cross the country with again; they were
all going to go rotten on me by the time I got to Dakota. The last night
Neal went mad and found Louanne somewhere downtown and we got in the
car and drove all over Richmond across the bay hitting Negro jazz shacks
in the oil flats. Louanne went to sit down and a colored guy pulled the
chair out from under her. The gals approached in the john with
propositions. I was approached too. Neal was sweating around. It was the
end; I wanted to get out. At dawn I got on my New York bus and said
goodbye to Neal and Louanne. They wanted some of my sandwiches. I told
them no. It was a sullen moment. We were all thinking we’d never see
each again and we didn’t care. That was that. I started back all the way
across this groaning continent with my ten sandwiches and a couple of
dollars and got back to New York just in time to see Ed White, Bob
Burford and Frank Jeffries off on the Queen Mary for France, never
dreaming that the following year I would be with Neal and Jeffries both
on the craziest trip of all. Moreover you would think a bus trip such as
I took from Frisco to New York would be uneventful and I’d get home in
one piece and could relax. Not so; in North Dakota the bus got stuck in a
tremendous badlands blizzard that piled up the road ten feet high; the
back machinery blew up and burned as
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