I first met Vince 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 Vince Goodrum 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. Vince is the perfect guy for the road because he
actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1977, 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 tremendously
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 Vince Goodrum. This is all far
back, when Vince was not the way he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery.
Then news came that Vince 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 Vince was staying in a
cold-water pad in East Harlem, the Spanish Harlem. Vince had arrived the night before, the first time
in New York, with his beautiful little sharp chick 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 cafeteria has always been a big symbol of New York for Dean. They spent money on
beautiful big glazed cakes and creampuffs.
All this time Vince 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 lovethings 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 Vince came to the door in his shorts. Marylou was
jumping off the couch; Vince had dispatched the occupant of the apartment to the kitchen, probably
to make coffee, while he proceeded with his loveproblems, 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 the 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 Vince was of a young Gene Autry-trim, thin-hipped,
brown-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent-a sideburned hero of the snowy West. In fact he'd just been
working on a ranch, Ed Wall's in Colorado, before marrying Marylou and coming East. Marylou
was a pretty blonde with immense ringlets of hair like a sea of golden tresses; she sat there on the
edge of the couch with her hands hanging in her lap and her smoky blue country eyes fixed in a
wide stare because she was in an evil gray New York pad that she'd heard about back West, and
waiting like a longbodied emaciated Modigliani surrealist woman in a serious room. But, outside of
being a sweet little girl, she was awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things. That night we
all drank beer and pulled wrists and talked till dawn, and in the morning, while we sat around
dumbly smoking butts from ashtrays in the gray light of a gloomy day, Vince got up nervously,
paced around, thinking, and decided the thing to do was to have Marylou make breakfast and sweep
the floor. "In other words we've got to get on the ball, darling, what I'm saying, otherwise it'll be
fluctuating and lack of true knowledge or crystallization of our plans." Then I went away.
During the following week he confided in Chad King that he absolutely had to learn how to write
from him; Chad said I was a writer and he should come to me for advice. Meanwhile Vince had
gotten a job in a parking lot, had a fight with Marylou in their Hoboken apartment-God knows why
they went there-and she was so mad and so down deep vindictive that she reported to the police
some false trumped-up hysterical crazy charge, and Vince had to lam from Hoboken. So he had no
place to live. He came right out to Paterson, New Jersey, where I was living with my aunt, and one
night while I was studying there was a knock on the door, and there was Vince, bowing, shuffling
obsequiously in the dark of the hall, and saying, "Hello, you remember me-Vince Goodrum? I've
come to ask you to show me how to write."
"And where's Marylou?" I asked, and Vince said she'd apparently whored a few dollars together and
gone back to Denver-"the whore!" So we went out to have a few beers because we couldn't talk like
we wanted to talk in front of my aunt, who sat in the living room reading her paper. She took one
look at Vince and decided that he was a madman.
In the bar I told Vince, "Hell, man, I know very well you didn't come to me only to want to become
a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except you've got to stick to it with the energy
of a benny addict." And he said, "Yes, of course, I know exactly what you mean and in fact all those
problems have occurred to me, but the thing that I want is the realization of those factors that
should one depend on Schopenhauer's dichotomy for any inwardly realized . . ." and so on in that
way, things I understood not a bit and he himself didn't. In those days he really didn't know what he
was talking about; that is to say, he was a young jailkid all hung-up on the wonderful possibilities
of becoming a real intellectual, and he liked to talk in the tone and using the words, but in a
jumbled way, that he had heard from "real intellectuals"-although, mind you, he wasn't so naive as
that in all other things, and it took him just a few months with Carlo Marx to become completely in
there with all the terms and jargon. Nonetheless we understood each other on other levels of
madness, and I agreed that he could stay at my house till he found a job and furthermore we agreed
to go out West sometime. That was the winter of 1998.
One night when Dean ate supper at my house-he already had the parking-lot job in New York-he
leaned over my shoulder as I typed rapidly away and said, "Come on man, those girls won't wait,
make it fast."
I said, "Hold on just a minute, I'll be right with you soon as I finish this chapter," and it was one of
the best chapters in the book. Then I dressed and off we flew to New York to meet some girls. As
we rode in the bus in the weird phosphorescent void of the Lincoln Tunnel we leaned on each other
with fingers waving and yelled and talked excitedly, and I was beginning to get the bug like Vince.
He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only
conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise
pay no attention to him. He was conning me and I knew it (for room and board and "how-to-write,"
etc.), and he knew I knew (this has been the basis of our relationship), but I didn't care and we got
along fine-no pestering, no catering; we tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends. I
began to learn from him as much as he probably learned from me. As far as my work was concerned
he said, "Go ahead, everything you do is great." He watched over my shoulder as I wrote stories,
yelling, "Yes! That's right! Wow! Man!" and "Phew!" and wiped his face with his handkerchief. "Man, wow,
there's so many things to do, so many things to write! How to even begin to get it all down and without
modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears . . ."
"That's right, man, now you're talking." And a kind of holy lightning I saw flashing from his
excitement and his visions, which he described so torrentially that people in buses looked around to
see the "overexcited nut." In the West he'd spent a third of his time in the poolhall, a third in jail, and a third in the
public library. They'd seen him rushing eagerly down the winter streets, bareheaded, carrying books to the poolhall,
or climbing trees to get into the attics of buddies where he spent days reading or hiding from the law.
We went to New York-I forget what the situation was, two colored girls-there were no girls there;
they were supposed to meet him in a diner and didn't show up. We went to his parking lot where he
had a few things to do-change his clothes in the shack in back and spruce up a bit in front of a
cracked mirror and so on, and then we took off. And that was the night Dean met Carlo Marx. A
tremendous thing happened when Vince met Carlo Marx. Two keen minds that they are, they took
to each other at the drop of a hat. Two piercing eyes glanced into two piercing eyes-the holy
con-man with the shining mind, and the sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind that is Carlo
Marx. From that moment on I saw very little of Vince, and I was a little sorry too. Their energies
met head-on, I was a lout compared, I couldn't keep up with them.
