I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was  dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that I'd often dreamed of going West  to  see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926, in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles. First reports of him came to me through Chad King, who'd shown me a few letters from him written in a New Mexico reform  school. I was tre- mendously interested in the letters because they so naively and sweetly asked Chad to teach him all about Nietzsche and all the  wonderful intellectual things that Chad knew. At one point Carlo and I  talked about the letters and wondered if we would ever meet the strange Dean Moriarty. This is all far back, when Dean was not the way he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery. Then news came that Dean was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first  time;  also there was talk that he had just married a girl called Marylou.
One day I was hanging around the campus and Chad and Tim Gray told me Dean was staying in a cold-water pad in East Harlem, the Spanish Harlem. Dean had arrived the night before, the first time in New  York, with his beautiful little sharp chick Marylou; they got off the Greyhound bus at 50th Street and cut around the corner looking for a place to eat and went right in Hector's, and since then Hector's cafete-ria has always been a big symbol of New York for Dean. They spent money on beautiful big glazed cakes and creampuffs.
All this time Dean was telling Marylou things like this: "Now, darling, here we are in New York and although I haven't quite told you everything that I was thinking about when we crossed Missouri and especially  at  the point  when  we passed the Booneville  reformatory which reminded me of my jail problem, it is absolutely necessary now to postpone  all those leftover things concerning our personal loveth- ings and at once begin thinking of specific worklife plans ... " and so on in the way that he had in those early days.
I went to the cold-water flat with the boys, and Dean came to the door in his shorts. Marylou was jumping off the couch; Dean had dispatched the occupant of the apartment to the kitchen, probably to make coffee, while he proceeded with his love-problems, for to him sex was the one and only holy and important thing in life, although he had to sweat and curse to make a living and so on. You saw that in the way he  stood  bobbing  his  head,  always  looking  down,  nodding,  like  a young boxer to instructions, to  make you think he was listening to every word, throwing in a thousand  "Yeses" and "That's rights." My first  impression  of  Dean  was  of  a  young  Gene  Autry--trim,  thin- hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent--a sideburned hero of the snowy West. In fact he'd just been working on a ranch, Ed Wall's in Colorado, before marrying Marylou and coming East. Marylou was a pretty blonde with immense ringlets of hair like a sea of golden tresses; she sat there on the edge of the couch with her hands hanging in her lap and her smoky blue country eyes fixed in a wide stare because she was in an evil gray New York pad that she'd heard about back West, and waiting like a longbodied emaciated Modigliani surrealist woman in a serious room. But, outside of being a sweet little girl, she was aw- fully dumb and capable of  doing horrible things. That night we all drank beer and pulled wrists and talked till dawn, and in the morning, while we sat around dumbly smoking butts from ashtrays in the gray light of a gloomy day, Dean got up nervously, paced around, thinking, and decided the thing to do was to have Marylou make breakfast and sweep the floor. "In other words we've got to get on the ball, darling, what I'm saying,  otherwise it'll be fluctuating and lack of true know- ledge or crystallization of our plans." Then I went away.
During the following week he confided in Chad King that he absolutely had to learn how to write from him; Chad said I was a writ- er and he should come to me for advice. Meanwhile Dean had gotten a job in a parking lot, had a fight with Marylou in their Hoboken apart- ment--God knows why they went there--and she was so mad and so down  deep  vindictive  that  she  reported  to  the  police  some  false trumped-up hysterical crazy charge, and Dean had to lam from Hobo- ken. So he had no place to live. He came right out to Paterson, New Jersey, where I was living  with my aunt, and one night while I was studying there was a knock on the door, and there was Dean, bowing, shuffling obsequiously in the dark of the hall, and saying, "Hello, you remember me--Dean Moriarty? I've come to ask you to show me how to write."
"And where's Marylou?" I asked, and Dean said she'd apparent- ly  whored  a  few  dollars  together  and  gone  back  to  Denver--"the whore!" So we went out to have a few beers because we couldn't talk like we wanted to talk in front of my aunt, who sat in the living room reading her paper. She took one look at Dean and decided that he was a madman.
In the bar I told Dean, "Hell, man, I know very well you didn't come  to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except you've got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict." And he said, "Yes, of course, I know exactly what you mean and in fact all those problems have occurred to me, but the thing that I want is the realization of those factors that should one depend on Schopenhauer's dichotomy for any inwardly realized ... " and so on in that way, things I understood not a bit and he himself didn't. In those days he really didn't know what he was talking about; that is to say, he was a young jailkid all hung-up on the wonderful possibilities of be- coming a real intellectual, and he liked to talk in the tone and using the words, but in a  jumbled way, that he had heard from "real intellec- tuals"--although,  mind  you,  he  wasn't so  naive as  that  in  all other things, and it took him just a few months with Carlo Marx to become completely iin therei with all the terms and jargon. Nonetheless we understood each other on other levels of madness, and I agreed that he could stay at my house till he found a job and furthermore we agreed to go out West sometime. That was the winter of 1947.
One night when Dean ate supper at my house--he already had the  parking-lot  job in New York--he  leaned over my  shoulder as I typed  rapidly away and said, "Come on man, those girls won't wait, make it fast."I said, "Hold on just a minute, I'll be right with you soon as I finish  this chapter," and it was one of the best chapters in the book. Then I dressed and off we flew to New York to meet some girls. As we rode in the bus in the weird phosphorescent void of the Lincoln Tunnel we leaned on  each other with fingers waving and yelled and talked excitedly, and I was beginning to get the bug like Dean. He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get in- volved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him. He was conning me and I knew it (for room and board and "how-to-write," etc.), and he knew I knew (this has been the basis of our relationship), but I didn't care and we got along fine--no pestering, no catering; we tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new  friends. I began to learn from him as much as he probably learned from me. As far as my work was concerned he said, "Go ahead, everything you do is great." He watched over my shoulder as I wrote stories, yelling, "Yes! That's right! Wow! Man!" and "Phew!" and wiped his face with his handker- chief.  "Man, wow, there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even ibegini to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears ... "
"That's right, man, now you're talking." And a kind of holy lightning I saw flashing from his excitement and his visions, which he described so torrentially that people in buses looked around to see the "overexcited nut." In the West he'd spent a third of his time in the poolhall, a third in jail, and a third in the public library. They'd seen him  rushing  eagerly  down  the  winter streets, bareheaded,  carrying books to the poolhall, or climbing trees to get into the attics of buddies where he spent days reading or hiding from the law.
We went to New York--I forget what the situation was, two colored girls--there were no girls there; they were supposed to meet him in a diner and didn't show up. We went to his parking lot where he had a few things to do--change his clothes in the shack in back and spruce up a bit in front of a cracked mirror and so on, and then we took off. And that was the night Dean met Carlo Marx. A tremendous thing happened when Dean met Carlo Marx. Two keen minds that they are, they took to each other at the drop of a hat. Two piercing eyes glanced into two piercing eyes--the holy con-man with the shining mind, and the sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind that is Carlo Marx. From that moment on I saw very little of Dean, and I was a little sorry too. Their energies met head-on, I was a lout compared, I couldn't keep up with them.
The whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then; it would mix up all my friends and all I had left of my family in a big  dust-cloud over the American Night. Carlo told him of Old Bull Lee, Elmer Hassel, Jane: Lee in Texas growing weed, Hassel on Riker's Island, Jane wandering on Times Square in a benzedrine hallucination, with her baby girl in her arms and ending up in Bellevue. And Dean told Carlo of unknown people in the West like Tommy Snark, the club- footed poolhall rotation shark and cardplayer and queer saint. He told him of Roy Johnson, Big Ed Dunkel, his boyhood buddies, his street buddies, his innumerable girls and sex-parties and pornographic pic- tures,  his heroes, heroines, adventures. They rushed down the street together,  digging everything in the early way they had, which later became  so  much  sadder  and  perceptive  and  blank.  But  then  they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a  commonplace  thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman  candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!" What did they call such young people in Goethe's Ger- many? Wanting dearly to learn how to write like Carlo, the first thing you know, Dean was attacking him with a great amorous soul such as only a con-man can have. "Now, Carlo, let imei speak--here's whatiI'mi saying ... " I didn't see them for about two weeks, during which time  they cemented their relationship to fiendish allday-allnight-talk roportions.
Then came spring, the great time of traveling, and everybody in the scattered gang was getting ready to take one trip or another. I was busily at work on my novel and when I came to the halfway mark, af- ter a trip  down South with my aunt to visit my brother Rocco, I got ready to travel West for the very first time.
Dean had already left. Carlo and I saw him off at the 34th Street Greyhound station. Upstairs they had a place where you could make pictures for a quarter. Carlo took off his glasses and looked sinister. Dean  made a profile shot and looked coyly around. I took a straight picture that made me look like a thirty-year-old Italian who'd kill any- body who said  anything against his mother. This picture Carlo and Dean neatly cut down the middle with a razor and saved a half each in their wallets. Dean was wearing a real Western business suit for his big trip back to Denver; he'd finished his first fling in New York. I say fling, but he only worked like a dog in parking lots. The most fantastic parking-lot  attendant in the world, he can back a car forty miles an hour into a tight squeeze and stop at the wall, jump out, race among fenders, leap into another car, circle it fifty miles an hour in a narrow space, back swiftly into  tight spot, ihumpi, snap the car with the emergency so that you see it bounce as he flies out; then clear to the ticket shack, sprinting like a track star, hand a ticket, leap into a newly arrived car before the owner's half out, leap literally under him as he steps out, start the car with the door flapping, and roar off to the next available spot, arc, pop in, brake, out, run; working  like that without pause eight hours a night, evening rush hours and  after-theater rush hours, in greasy wino pants with a frayed fur-lined  jacket  and beat shoes that flap. Now he'd bought a new suit to go back in; blue with pencil stripes, vest and all--eleven dollars on Third Avenue,  with a watch and watch chain, and a portable typewriter with which he was going to start writing in a Denver rooming house as soon as he got a job  there. We had a farewell meal of franks and beans in a Seventh Avenue Riker's, and then Dean got on the bus that said Chicago and roared off into the night. There went our wrangler. I promised myself to go the same way  when spring really bloomed and opened up the land.
And this was really the way that my whole road experience began, and the things that were to come are too fantastic not to tell.Yes, and it wasn't only because I was a writer and needed new experiences that I wanted to know Dean more, and because my life hanging around the campus had reached the completion of its cycle and was stultified, but because, somehow, in spite of our difference in character,  he reminded me of some long-lost brother; the sight of his suffering bony face with the long sideburns and his straining muscular sweating neck made  me remember my boyhood in those dye-dumps and swim-holes and riversides of Paterson and the Passaic. His dirty workclothes clung to him so gracefully, as though you couldn't buy a better fit from a custom tailor but only earn it from the Natural Tailor of Natural Joy, as Dean had, in his stresses. And in his excited way of speaking I heard again the voices of old companions and brothers un- der the bridge, among  the motorcycles, along the wash-lined neigh- borhood and drowsy doorsteps of afternoon where boys played guitars while their older brothers worked in  the mills. All my other current friends were "intellectuals"--Chad the Nietzschean anthropologist, Car- lo Marx and his nutty surrealist low-voiced  serious staring talk, Old Bull Lee and his critical anti-every-thing drawl--or else they were slink- ing criminals like Elmer Hassel, with that hip sneer; Jane Lee the same, sprawled on the Oriental cover of her couch, sniffing at the  iNew Yorkeri. But Dean's intelligence was every bit as formal and shining and complete, without the tedious intellectualness. And his "criminali- ty"  was  not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea- saying  overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the  Plains, something new, long prophesied, long a-coming (he only stole cars for joy rides). Besides, all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or  psychoanalytical reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love; he didn't care one way or the other, "so long's I can get that lil ole gal  with that lil sumpin down there tween her legs, boy," and "so long's we  can ieati, son, y'ear me? I'm ihungryi, I'm istarvingi, let's ieat right  nowi!"-- and off we'd rush to eat, whereof, as saith Ecclesiastes, "It is your portion under the sun."
A  western  kinsman  of  the  sun,  Dean.  Although  my  aunt warned me that he would get me in trouble, I could hear a new call and see a new horizon, and believe it at my young age; and a little bit of trouble or even Dean's eventual rejection of me as a buddy, putting me down, as he would later, on starving sidewalks and sickbeds--what did it matter? I was a young writer and I wanted to take off.
Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, eve- rything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.