PARTISAN REVIEW
201
ordered all dining room staff to dance, after dinner, with female
guests who appeared in the casino without escorts, and, as much as
possible, fuck them. A professional "toomler" walked the
grounds. Wherever he saw a group of people merely chatting he
thrust in quickly and created a tumult.
I heard the Budapest String Quartet, Dylan Thomas, Lester
Young and Billy Holliday together, and I saw Pearl Primus dance,
in a Village nightclub, in a space two yards square, accompanied
by an African drummer about seventy years old. His hands moved
in spasms of mathematical complexity at invisible speed. People
left their tables to press close to Primus and see the expression on
her face, the sweat, the muscles, the way her naked feet seized and
released the floor.
Eventually I had friends in New York, Ann Arbor, Chicago,
Berkeley, and Los Angeles.
I did the cha-cha, wearing a tux, at a new year's party in
Hollywood, and sat at a table with Steve McQueen. He'd become
famous in a TV series about a cowboy with a rifle. He said he
didn't know which he liked best--acting or driving a racing car. I
thought he was a silly person and then realized he thought I was. I
met a few othel' famous people who said something. One night, in
a yellow Porsche, I circled Manhattan with Jack Kerouac. He re–
cited passages, perfectly remembered from his book reviews, to
the sky. His manner was ironical, sweet, and depressing.
I had a friend named Chicky who drove his chopped,
blocked, stripped, dual-exhaust Ford convertible, while vomiting
out the fly window, into a telephone pole. He survived, lit a match
to see if the engine were all right, and it blew up in his face.
Through his bandages he said that he'd been trying to kill himself
since high school. Because his girl friend wasn't good-looking
enough. He was crying and laughing while he pleaded with me to
believe that he really had been trying to kill himself because his
girl friend wasn't good-looking enough. I told him that I was going
out with a certain girl and he told me that he had fucked her once
but that it didn't matter because I could take her away and live
somewhere else. He was a Sicilian kid with a face like Caravaggio's
angels of debauch. He'd been educated by priests and nuns. When
his hair grew back and his face healed, his mind healed. He broke
