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urinal, and said to Dean,  Dig this trick.
 Yes, man, he said, washing his hands at the sink,  it s a very good trick
but awful on
your kidneys and because you re getting a little older now every time you do
this
eventually years of misery in your old age, awful kidney miseries for the
days when you
sit in parks.
It made me mad.  Who s old? I m not much older than you are!
 I wasn t saying that, man!
 Ah, I said,  you re always making cracks about my age. I m no old fag like
that fag,
you don t have to warn me about! my kidneys. We went back to the booth and
just as
the waitress set down the hot-roast-beef sandwiches and ordinarily Dean would
have
leaped to wolf the food at once I said to cap my anger,  And I don t want to
hear any
more of it. " And suddenly Dean s eyes grew tearful and he got up and left
his food
steaming there and walked out of the restaurant. I wondered if he was just
wandering off
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forever. I didn t care, = I was so mad I had nipped momentarily and turned it
down i on
Dean. But the sight of his uneaten food made me sadder than anything in
years. I
shouldn t have said that ... he likes to eat so much . . . He s never left
his food like this . .
. What the hell. That s showing him, anyway.
Dean stood outside the restaurant for exactly five minutes and then came back
and sat
down.  Well, I said,  what were you doing out there, knotting up your fists?
Cursing
me, thinking up new gags about my kidneys?
Dean mutely shook his head.  No, man, no, man, you re all completely wrong.
If you
want to know, well 
 Go ahead, tell me. I said all this and never looked up from my food. I felt
like a beast.
 I was crying, said Dean.
 Ah hell, you never cry.
 You say that? Why do you think I don t cry?
 You don t die enough to cry. Every one of these things I said was a knife
at myself.
Everything I had ever secretly held against my brother was coming out: how
ugly I was
and what filth I was discovering in the depths of my own impure psychologies.
Dean was shaking his head.  No, man, I was crying.
 Go on, I bet you were so mad you had to leave.
 Believe me, Sal, really do believe me if you ve ever believed anything about
me. I
knew he was telling the truth and yet I didn t want to bother with the truth
and when I
looked up at him I think I was cockeyed from cracked intestinal twistings in
my awful
belly. Then I knew I was wrong.
 Ah, man, Dean, I m sorry, I never acted this way before with you. Well, now
you know
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me. You know I don t have close relationships with anybody any more I don t
know
what to do with these things. I hold things in my hand like pieces of crap
and don t know
where to put it down. Let s forget it. The holy con- man began to eat.  It s
not my fault!
it s not my fault! I told him.  Nothing in this lousy world is my fault,
don t you see that?
I don t want it to be and it can t be and it won t be.
 Yes, man, yes, man. But please harken back and believe me.
 I do believe you, I do. This was the sad story of that afternoon. All kinds
of tremendous
complications arose that night when Dean and I went to stay with the Okie
family. These
had been neighbors of mine in my Denver solitude of two weeks before. The
mother was
a wonderful woman in jeans who drove coal trucks in winter mountains to
support her
kids, four in all, her husband having left her years before when they were
traveling
around the country in a trailer. They had rolled all the way from Indiana to
LA in that
trailer. After many a good time and a big Sunday-afternoon drunk in
crossroads bars and
laughter and guitar-playing in the night, the big lout had suddenly walked
off across the
dark field and never returned. Her children were wonderful. The eldest was a
boy, who
wasn t around that summer but in a camp in the mountains; next was a lovely
thirteenyear-
old daughter who wrote poetry and picked flowers in the fields and wanted to
grow
up and be an actress in Hollywood, Janet by name; then came the little ones,
little Jimmy
who sat around the campfire at night and cried for his  pee-tater before it
was half
roasted, and little Lucy who made pets of worms, horny toads, beetles, and
anything that
crawled, and gave them names and places to live. They had four dogs. They
lived their
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ragged and joyous lives on the little new-settlement street and were the butt
of the
neighbors semi-respectable sense of propriety only because the poor woman s
husband
had left her and because they littered up the yard. At night all the lights
of Denver lay like
a great wheel on the plain below, for the house was in that part of the West
where the
mountains roll down foothilling to the plain and where in primeval times soft
waves must
have washed from sea- like Mississippi to make such round and perfect stools
for the
island-peaks like Evans and Pike and Longs. Dean went there and of course he
was all
sweats and joy at the sight of them, especially Janet, but I warned him not
to touch her,
and probably didn t have to. The woman was a great man s woman and took to
Dean
right away but she was bashful and he was bashful. She said Dean reminded her
of the
husband gone.  Just like him oh, he was a crazy one, I tell ya!
The result was uproarious beer-drinking in the littered living room, shouting
suppers, and
booming Lone Ranger radio.
The complications rose like clouds of butterflies: the woman  Frankie,
everyone called
her was finally about to buy a jalopy as she had been threatening to do for
years, and
had recently come into a few bucks toward one. Dean immediately took over the
responsibility of selecting and naming the price of the car, because of
course he wanted to
use it himself so as of yore he could pick up girls coming out of high school
in the
afternoons and drive them up to the mountains. Poor innocent Frankie was
always
agreeable to anything. But she was afraid to part with her money when they
got to the car
lot and stood before the salesman. Dean sat right down in the dust of Alameda
Boulevard
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and beat his fists on his head.  For a hunnerd you carft get anything
better! He swore
he d never talk to her again, he cursed till his face was purple, he was
about to jump in
the car and drive k away anyway.  Oh these dumb dumb dumb Okies, they ll
never
change, how completely and how unbelievably dumb, the moment it comes time to
act,
this paralysis, scared, hysterical, nothing frightens em more than what they
want it s my
father my father my father all over again!
Dean was very excited that night because his cousin Sam Brady was meeting us
at a bar.
He was wearing a clean T-shirt and beaming all over.  Now listen, Sal, I must
tell you
about Sam he s my cousin.  By the way, have you looked for your father?
 This
afternoon, man, I went down to Jiggs Buffet where he used to pour draft beer
in tender
befuddlement and get hell from the boss and go staggering out no and I went
to the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]