Remembrances of Dean Moriarty (Or Whatever His Real Name Was) In the Days of Cowboy Angel Adonis Dreams

By Josh Breslin

Savvy Sam Lowell was not the only Eastern boy taken in by one vision of the cowboy angel Adonis Dean Moriarty, not by a long shot.* I first met Dean when I was staying at Jasper James’ the well-known crime detection novelist’s house, cabin really in Todo el Modo out  south of Big Sur in California in maybe late 1967, early 1968. Sam had driven with Dean from Denver to put together some dope deal that Dean had working, working to put him on easy street for a while (all his schemes centered on “easy street” existences or getting dough for his various girlfriends and his/their kids). Sam had met Dean while he was hitchhiking through Denver at the Cattleman’s Hotel which was then essentially a Skid Row dump where Dean was staying and where he had hoped to stay since one of his goals that trip west was to find what he called (what we would call) a cowboy angel Adonis, a working modern-day cowboy.

*(For the record to keep pace with Sam I will use the Moriarty name here also as pointed out by Sam in his film review introduction How The West Was Won-Again-The Film Adaptation Of Cormac McCarthy’s “All The Pretty Horses” (2000)-A Review Dean used a number of names although I heard later after he passed on down in Mexico under mysterious circumstances his real name was Neal either Cassady or Cassidy. Even Jack Kerouac, the famed writer, had used the Moriarty name in writing about his own earlier adventures with the guy of which we had been somewhat clueless before we read On The Road and a couple of other novels where Jack did his shamanic visions of Cody version of the angel.   Depending on the situation, usually illegal or chancy, he was Jack Deck, Sol Devine, Larry Kelly, Smith Larson, Roone Lance, Jimmy Jack Jones and I don’t know how many other names. Nobody thought anything of those things in those days since we were always “reinventing” ourselves as reflected in our monikers one of mine which was the Prince of Love although I took that one without larceny in my heart.)

That idea, that cowboy angel Adonis idea, hey, maybe I had better tell how I met Sam and then some of this might be clearer, give an idea of how we got so tangled up with this son of a bitch (and loved the bastard so much right until the end). I had graduated from high school in the French-Canadian bailiwick of Olde Saco up in Maine in 1967. That summer was if anybody was too young or forgets was the magical (to us) Summer of Love, based mainly on the West Coast. Rather than take a summer job (which pissed my parents off since they expected me to help defray the cost of my tuition to State U which they were struggling to do on one father’s salary mill-worker’s pay) I decided to head to the West Coast and see what there was to see. I hitched all the way which is something you could do in those days without too much fear of winding up in jail or dead by some crazy (although I told me parents I was taking the cheapjack bus out).

I had a series of pretty good adventures heading out including a long ride through the center of the country with a long-haul truck driver looking for somebody to talk to, actually looking for his son whom he no longer understood since he had turned “hippie”, as he sped up the highways filled with bennies and bad diner food. When I got to Frisco, the town I wanted to start out in and work my way down from if that was the play I asked somebody, some young guy in Golden Gate Park who looked the epitome of what would become the standard hippie model that long-haul truck driver hated about his son, where I could find a place to sleep cheap or free. He directed me to Russian Hill where there were what he called communes, groups of unaffiliated people who intentionally joined together to create a “family of a new kind” where you could stay for little money or in-kind work. Half the way up the hill I spotted a big yellow school bus all decked out in crazy colors sitting at the edge of a small park, seemingly camping there. For fun really I saw another guy who looked like the guy in Golden Gate Park and asked him if he had a “joint,” a marijuana cigarette. In reply, without saying anything, he produced this long homemade cigarette and said “don’t Bogart that joint” (meaning don’t treat it like a regular cigarette and sniff it out and throw it away but keep it to start another homemade treat).         

That was the day that I would first meet the late Peter Paul Markin, then going under the moniker, the Be-Bop Kid. We passed the joint back and forth for a while, me coughing like crazy meaning I was a novice at the power of the smoke irritating the throat and talked about our common New England roots, he was from North Adamsville south of Boston, our common growing up poor backgrounds and our desire to breakout of whatever direction had been preordained for us. I had asked him if he owned the bus and he replied no. A guy, an older guy, who went under the name Captain Crunch and who knew Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters (who I didn’t know anything about then except they were wild boys and girls) did and had let him and a few of his what he called “corner boys,” guys he hung out with in high school travel with him for a while.

I asked Markin if the Captain might let me stay on the bus since we had kind of hit it off although he was a few years older and had already been to college and had dropped out to check out things just as I was trying to do. Markin said he would check. Meanwhile it was getting late, the sun going down over the fast hills, somebody starting a campfire and people started coming back to the bus. Plenty of people were staying there or sleeping near the bus for protection against the vagrancy coppers or jack-rollers. I thought that I would be rejected but when Markin came back he said the Captain said it was okay (it was only later that I found out the real story that the Captain’s free-wheeling girlfriend Mustang Sally had seen me, had seen me as a  young fresh-faced possible conquest and had begged, pretty please begged, the Captain to take me in. He was not happy from what I heard but Mustang had some kind of weird hold on him which he otherwise would have rebuked from others).

That same night I would meet (beside Mustang Sally) some of Markin’s corner boys, including Sam who I liked right away. Liked right away, and remember we were all full of train smoke, dope smoke and dreams, because he started talking about a big reason that he had headed west (after endless badgering from Markin and maybe Jack Callahan to go “follow the new breeze”) was to finally find the cowboy angel Adonis of his childhood. Today people would say WTF, would give damn about cowboys, cowboy angels even, given what we know about now these stone-cold bums back in the day when they stunk up barrooms, bordellos, and Native lands. But back then, back in the growing up 1950s when television brought the cowboys to our front door and to the local theaters they held our youthful imaginations. As real men, as guys we wanted to be like if we only knew a few to get the hang of drawing fast and asking questions later, heading cattle away from stampedes and listening to the lonesome whippoorwill out on star-filled nights.

I am not sure who started the whole madness, some say a guy named Zane Grey made a fortune off of fake stories about heroic cowboys saving whole towns from desperadoes. Others say it was a guy named Howard Hawks who was some kind of filmmaker and had a ranch he wanted to use to make movies (which is why all the scenes outside of town look the same). Still others say it was a bunch of guys from New York City who took a train ride out to Saint Louis and checked things out before being robbed by some foul-mouthed wranglers, never got over it and so the Western was a holy goof revenge on the whole fabric of the West when it counted. Finally, the last I heard when I still cared a whit about the subject somebody said John Wayne, or was Gary Cooper invented the cowboy angel to keep kids from out in the mean city streets. Who knows.            

But back then Sam and I still had the bug, still wanted to see what cowboy life was like, meet a real cowboy and so we talked occasionally about the subject. (The other corner boys from North Adamsville, particularly Markin, looked at us like we had three heads) I think we knew that the old time cowboys were gone, long gone but still believed that the legends of the West, legends of the fall still existed once you got pass the Mississippi (actually past Missouri). From the summer of 1967 we would hitch back and forth across the country (I had decided again pissing my parents off to wait on college, and did so until they were getting ready to draft me and I ducked into State U.) Or for a while travel up and down the West Coast in the Captain’s yellow school bus of a different kind. Both travel routes turned out to be important, I have already mentioned that I was down in Todo el Mundo working on some stuff in early 1968 and keeping company with a sweet lady whose real name today I can’t remember but who went by the name Lavender Lady back then. Sam had taken off back to Maine for some reason and on his return had made that fateful stop in Denver looking for some cowboy angel Adonis. And wound up with Dean. Brought Dean out to Todo el Mundo and that big dope deal which never actually got concluded that time.

Sam has already mentioned his initial meeting on the street in front of the threadbare (I know I have stayed there) Cattleman’s Hotel with Dean as so you have it. Dean would fall down early in some kind of hubris war within himself which afflicted a bunch of guys who had been too young to have fought in World War II but too old to really except the common drug connection with that fast breeze coming through Markin had projected. Then to top everything off and to show what fucking con artist bastard who was so crooked he needed a corkscrew to put his pants on, would sell out even close friends for a dollar and some Tokay or leave you hanging to face some red-mouthed coppers truncheon he was not even a cowboy, had never been on a horse, had no idea which end was front or back although he was God’s own space mechanic around cars. Christ.