Then everybody began planning a tremendous trek to the mountains. This  started in the morning, together with a phone call that compli- cated matters--my old road friend Eddie, who took a blind chance and called; he remembered some of the names I had mentioned. Now I had the opportunity to get my shirt back. Eddie was with his girl in a house off Colfax. He wanted to know if I knew where to find work, and I told him to come over, figuring Dean would know. Dean arrived, hurrying, while Major and I were having a hasty breakfast. Dean wouldn't even sit down. "I have a thousand things to do, in fact hardly any time to take you down Camargo, but let's go, man."
"Wait for my road buddy Eddie."
Major  found  our  hurrying  troubles  amusing.  He'd  come  to Denver to write leisurely. He treated Dean with extreme deference. Dean  paid  no  attention.  Major  talked  to  Dean  like  this:  "Moriarty, what's this I hear about you sleeping with three girls at the same time?" And Dean shuffled on the rug and said, "Oh yes, oh yes, that's the way it goes," and looked at his watch, and Major snuffed down his nose. I felt sheepish rushing off with  Dean--Major insisted he was a moron and a fool. Of course he wasn't, and I wanted to prove it to everybody somehow.
We met Eddie. Dean paid no attention to him either, and off we went in a trolley across the hot Denver noon to find the jobs. I hated the thought of it. Eddie talked and talked the way he always did. We found  a  man  in  the  markets  who agreed  to  hire both  of us;  work started at four o'clock in the morning and went till six P.M. The man said, "I like boys who like to work."
"You've got your man," said Eddie, but I wasn't so sure about myself. "I just won't sleep," I decided. There were so many other inter- esting things to do.
Eddie showed up the next morning; I didn't. I had a bed, and Major bought food for the icebox, and in exchange for that I cooked and washed the dishes. Meantime I got all involved in everything. A big party took place at the Rawlinses' one night. The Rawlins mother was gone on a trip. Ray Rawlins called everybody he knew and told them to bring whisky; then he went through his address book for girls. He made me do most of the  talking. A whole bunch of girls showed up. I phoned Carlo to find out what Dean was doing now. Dean was coming to Carlo's at three in the morning. I went there after the party.
Carlo's basement apartment was on Grant Street in an old red- brick  rooming house near a church. You went down an alley, down some stone steps, opened an old raw door, and went through a kind of cellar till you came to his board door. It was like the room of a Russian saint: one bed, a candle burning, stone walls that oozed moisture, and a crazy makeshift ikon of some kind that he had made. He read me his poetry. It was called "Denver Doldrums." Carlo woke up in the morn- ing and heard  the "vulgar pigeons" yakking in the street outside his cell; he saw the "sad  nightingales" nodding on the branches and they reminded him of his  mother. A gray shroud fell over the city. The mountains, the magnificent Rockies that you can see to the west from any part of town, were "papier-maché." The whole universe was crazy and cockeyed and extremely strange. He wrote of Dean as a "child of the rainbow" who bore his torment  in his agonized priapus. He re- ferred to him as "Oedipus Eddie" who had to "scrape bubble gum off windowpanes." He brooded in his basement over  a huge journal in which he was keeping track of everything that happened every day-- everything Dean did and said.
Dean came on schedule. "Everything's straight," he announced. "I'm going to divorce Marylou and marry Camille and go live with her in San Francisco. But this is only after you and I, dear Carlo, go to Tex- as, dig Old Bull Lee, that gone cat I've never met and both of you've told me so much about, and then I'll go to San Fran."
Then they  got  down  to  business.  They sat  on the  bed crosslegged and looked straight at each other. I slouched in a nearby chair and  saw all of it. They began with an abstract thought, discussed it; reminded each other of another abstract point f............