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Chapter twelve

Goodbyes

The wonderful white city of San Francisco was in front of us - there on its eleven hills, with the blue Pacific Ocean and its moving wall of fog beyond.

“There she is!” shouted Dean. “We got here! Just enough gas! We can’t go any further because there’s no more land! Now Marylou, you and Sal go immediately to a hotel and wait for me to contact you in the morning, as soon as I’ve made definite arrangements with Camille.”

And he drove on to the Oakland Bay Bridge and it carried us in. The downtown office buildings were just putting on their lights. We got out of the car on O’Farrell Street, and the smell of Chinese cooking floated in the air. We took all our things out of the car.

Suddenly Dean was saying goodbye. He wanted to see Camille and find out what had happened. Marylou and I watched him drive away. “You see what a pig he is?” said Marylou. “Dean will leave you whenever it suits him!”

We eventually got a hotel room, then about midnight we warmed up a tin of pork and beans and ate them. I looked out of the hotel window at the lights.

Marylou and I lived together for two days in the hotel. She wasn’t really interested in me, and we argued a lot. We also spent whole nights in bed together. One night she disappeared with a nightclub owner. I had an appointment with her, and was waiting for her across the street from an expensive apartment house. Suddenly she came out with her girlfriend, the nightclub owner, and a rich old man. She had gone to see her girlfriend, but now I saw what a prostitute she was. She saw me but did not make any sign, and they all got into a Cadillac car and drove off.

I walked around, picking up cigarettes from the street, then went back to the hotel room. From the window of the room I smelled all the food of San Francisco. There were seafood places out there, where the bread was hot, and the baskets were good enough to eat too. There were places where they cooked thick red roast beef, or chicken. There were places where they cooked hamburgers, and where the coffee was cheap. Oh, and the smell of Chinese food cooking…

Dean finally found me when he decided that I was worth saving. He took me home to Camille’s house.

“Where’s Marylou?” he said.

“She ran away,” I said.

I rested for a few days in Camille’s house. You could see all of San Francisco’s green and red lights in the rainy night from her living-room window in Liberty Street. One morning Dean stood by that window without his clothes on, and watched the sunrise.

He got a job trying to sell stoves, but he didn’t sell any. At night we went to clubs and listened to wild jazz music. Then I received some money from my aunt, and I got ready to go back home.

Why did I come to San Francisco? I don’t know. Camille wanted me to leave; Dean just didn’t care. I bought some bread and made sandwiches to take with me on the road. The last night Dean went crazy and found Marylou somewhere downtown, and we got in the car and drove all over Richmond to jazz clubs and bars.

At dawn I got on my New York bus and said goodbye to Dean and Marylou. They wanted some of my sandwiches, but I said, “No.” It was a sad and gloomy moment. We were all thinking that we were not going to see one another again, and we didn’t care.