Thursday, December 19, 2013
wonderful little joys and delights. Hmm, it’s sweet, so sweet. My. My!”
And he stood swaying in the middle of the room eating his cake and
looking at everyone with awe. He turned and looked around behind him.
Everything amazed him, everything he saw. A picture on the wall made him
stiffen to attention. He went up and looked closer, he backed up, he
stooped, he jumped up, he wanted to see from all possible levels and
angles. He had no idea the impression he was making and cared less.
People were now beginning to look at Neal with maternal and paternal
affection glowing in their faces. He was finally an Angel, like I always
knew he would become, but like any Angel he still had angelic rages and
furies and that night when we all left the party and repaired to the
Windsor bar in one vast brawling gang Neal became frantically and
seraphically drunk. Remember that the Windsor, once Denver’s great
gold rush hotel and now a bum’s flophouse in many respects and a point of
interest in the big saloon downstairs where bullet holes were still
preserved in the walls, had once been Neal’s home. He’d lived here with
his father with other bums in one of the rooms upstairs. He was no
tourist. He drank in this saloon like the ghost of his father; he
slopped down wine, beer and whiskey like water. His face got red and
sweaty and he bellowed and hollered at the bar and staggered across the
dance floor where wild western characters danced with floosies and tried
to play the piano and threw his arms around ex-cons and shouted with
them in the uproar. Meanwhile everybody in our party sat around two
immense tables stuck together. There were Justin W. Brierly, Helena and
Bill Tomson, a girl from Buffalo Wyoming who was Helena’s friend, Frank,
Ed White, Beverly, me Al Hinkle, Jim Holmes and several others,
thirteen in all. Brierly was having a great time: he took a peanut
machine and set it on the table before him and poured pennies in it and
ate peanuts. He suggested we all write something on a penny postcard and
mail it to Allen Ginsberg in New York. This we did. There were crazy
things written. The fiddle music roared in the Larimer Street night.
“Isn’t it fun?” yelled Brierly. In the men’s room Neal and I punched the
door and tried to break in but it was an inch
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