On the Road: The Original Scroll: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

“We’re all in this together!” yelled Ponzo. I saw that was so- -everywhere I went everybody was in it together.

Her brother was a wildbuck Mexican hotcat with a hunger for booze, a great good kid.

“You gotta, you gotta or you’ll die! Damn fool talk to her! What’s wrong with you? Aren’t you tired of yourself by now?”

A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world of ours.

Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.

“See that toe?” he said as he gunned the heap to eighty and passed everybody on the road. “Look at it.” It was swathed in bandages. “I just had it amputated this morning. The bastards wanted me to stay in the hospital. I packed my bag and left. What’s a toe.”

There were plenty of queers however. Several times I went to Sanfran with my gun and when a queer approached me in a barjohn I took out the gun and said “Eh? Eh? What’s that you say?” They bolted. I’ve never understood why I did that, I knew queers all over the country.

This is the story of America. Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to do. So what if a bunch of men talk in loud voices and drink in the night.

And I went to all the doors in this manner and pretty soon I was as drunk as anybody else. Come dawn, it was my duty to put up the American flag on a sixty foot pole, and this morning I put it up upsidedown and went home to bed.