Sunday, December 22, 2013
They try to make headline arrests, they think every car going by is some big Chicago gang. They ain’t got nothing else to do.” We drove on to Tucson. Tucson
is situated in beautiful mesquite riverbed country overlooked by the
snowy Catalina range. The city is one big construction job; the people
transient, wild, ambitious, busy, gay; wash lines, trailers; bustling
downtown streets with banners; altogether very Californian. Fort Lowell Road,
out where H. lived, wound along lovely riverbed trees in the flat
desert. We passed innumerable Mexican shacks in the shady sand till a
few adobe houses appeared and the rural PO box with Alan Harrington’s
name shining like the promised land on it. We saw Harrington himself
brooding in the yard. The poor fellow never dreamed what was bowling
down on him. He was a writer, he had come to Arizona
to work on his book in peace. He was a tall gangly shy satirist who
mumbled to you with his head turned away and always said funny things.
His wife and baby were with him in the adobe house, a small one that his
Indian stepfather had built. His mother lived across the yard in her
own house. She was an excited American woman who loved pottery, beads
and books. Harrington had heard of Neal through letters from New York.
We came down on him like a cloud, everyone of us hungry, even Alfred
the crippled hitchhiker. Harrington was wearing an old Harvard sweater
and smoking a pipe in the keen desert air. His mother came out and
invited us into her kitchen to eat. We cooked noodles in a great pot. I
wanted to meet Harrington’s wild Indian stepfather; he was nowhere
around; he got drunk for days on end and howled in the desert like a
coyote till the cops threw him in jail. Harrington’s six Indian cousins
were also in jail at the time. Neal kept saying “Oh do I dig her!” about
H.’s mother. She showed us her favorite rugs and chattered with us like
a child. The Harringtons were from Boston. “Who is that fellow with the embryonic hand?” asked H. looking away. “Is that Al Dinkle?” “No, no, we left him in New Orleans.”
“Why are you all going to the coast?” “I don’t know.” To add to the
confusion John Holmes’ mother suddenly appeared in the yard: she was
driving East with friends and had stopped by to see Mrs. H. Neal
shuffled and
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