unnamed and bedraggled, years ago.
“Sal, Sal, look, this is where I was born, think of it! People change, they eat meals year after year and change with every meal. EE! Look!” He was so excited it made me cry. Where would it all lead? The tourists insisted on driving the car the rest of the way to Denver. Okay, we didn’t care. We sat in the back and talked. But they got too tired in the morning and Dean took the wheel in the eastern Colorado desert at Craig. We had spent almost the entire night crawling cautiously over Strawberry Pass in Utah and lost a lot of time. They went to sleep. Dean headed pellmell for the mighty wall of Berthoud Pass that stood a hundred miles ahead on the roof of the world, a tremendous Gibraltarian door shrouded in clouds. He took Berthoud Pass like a June bug—same as at Tehachapi, cutting off the motor and floating it, passing everybody and never halting the rhythmic advance that the mountains themselves intended, till we overlooked the great hot plain of Denver again—and Dean was home.
It was with a great deal of silly relief that these people let us off the car at the corner of 27th and Federal. Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.
6
Now we had a number of circumstances to deal with in Denver, and they were of an entirely different order from those of 1947. We could either get another travel-bureau car at once or stay a few days for kicks and look for his father.
We were both exhausted and dirty. In the john of a restaurant I was at a urinal blocking Dean’s way to the sink and I stepped out before I was finished and resumed at another 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 forever. I didn’t care, I was so mad—I had flipped momentarily and turned it down 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