There was this strange sense of maternal satisfaction in the air, for the girls were really looking at Dean the way a mother looks at the dearest and most errant child, and he with his sad thumb and all his revelations knew it well, and that was why he was able, in tick-tocking silence, to walk out of the apartment without a word, to wait for us downstairs as soon as we'd made up out minds about time. This was what we sensed about the chost on the sidewalk. I looked out the window. He was alone in the doorway, digging the street. Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness - everything was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and estatic joy of pure being.
'Come on, Galatea, Marie, Let's go hit the jazz joints and forget it. Dean will be dead someday. Then what can you say to him?'
'The sooner he's dead the better,' said Galatea, and she spoke officially for almost everyone in the room.
'Very well, then,' I said, 'but now he's alive and I'll bet you want to know what he does next and thats because he's got the secret that we're all busting to find and its splitting his head wide open and if he does mad don't worry, it wont be your fault but the fault of God."
They objected to this; they said I really didn't know Dean; they said he was the worst scoundrel that ever lived and I'd find out someday to my regret. Roy Johnson rose to the defence of the ladies and said he knew Dean better than anybody, and all Dean was, was just a very interesting and even amusing con-man. I went out to find Dean and we had a breif talk about it.
"Ah, man, don't worry, everything is perfect and fine." He was rubbing his belly and licking his lips.
'On the road'
Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
