lyfan

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 seven jeans 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 ch diesel jeans for saleick 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 levi straussthe 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-