📔 On the Road

My shoes, damn fool that I am, were Mexican huaraches, plantlike sieves not fit for the rainy night of America and the raw road night.

She was a big, sexy brunette—as Garcia said, «Something straight out of Degas,» and generally like a beautiful Parisian coquette.

He wore a revolver down low, with ammunition belt, and carried a small quirt of some kind, and pieces of leather hanging everywhere, like a walking torture chamber: shiny shoes, low-hanging jacket, cocky hat, everything but boots.

Now they saw that Terry was Mexican, a Pachuco wildcat; and that her boy was worse than that.

Little children were playing in the drowsy river sunset; girls were going by with bandannas and cotton blouses and bare legs.

He talked up an acquaintance with a waitress in a luncheonette, made a date to take her driving in his Cadillac that afternoon, and came back to wake me with the news.

Just as we passed that other lamp I was going to tell you a further thing, Sal, but now I am parenthetically continuing with a new thought and by the time we reach the next I’ll return to the original subject, agreed?

I took a deep breath; a locomotive howled across-the darkness, Mobile-bound. So were we. I took off my shirt and exulted.

The orgone accumulator is an ordinary box big enough for a man to sit inside on a chair: a layer of wood, a layer of metal, and another layer of wood gather in orgones from the atmosphere and hold them captive long enough for the human body to absorb more than a usual share.

He had a set of chains in his room that he said he used with his psychoanalyst; they were experimenting with narcoanalysis and found that Old Bull had seven separate personalities, each growing worse and worse on the way down, till finally he was a raving idiot and had to be restrained with chains.