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BIG SUR59

incredible leap of six foot nine over the bar! and shows his highjump ability too by the way he dances around on light feet—A strange athlete who's suddenly decided instead to become some sort of beat Jesus and in fact you see perfect purity and sincerity in his young blue eyes—In fact his eyes are so pure you dont notice the crazy hair and beard, and also he’s wearing ragged but strangely elegant clothing (“One of the first of the new Beat Dandies,” McLear told me a few days later, “did you hear about that? there’s a new strange underground group of beatniks or whatever who wear special smooth dandy clothes even tho it may just be a jean jacket with shino slacks they'll always have strange beautiful shoes or shirts, or turn around and wear fancy pants unpressed acourse but with torn sneakers”)—Joey is wearing something like brown soft garments like a tunic or something and his shoes look like Las Vegas sports shoes—The moment he sees my battered blue little sneakers that I'd used at Big Sur when my feet go sore, that is in case my feet got sore on a rocky hike, he wants them for himself, he wants to swap the snazzy Las Vegas sports shoes (pale leather, untooled) for my silly little tight-fitting tho perfect sneakers that in fact I was wearing because the Monterey hike blisters were still hurting me—So we swap—And I ask Dave Wain about him: Dave says: “He’s one of the really strangest sweetest guys I've ever known, showed up about a week ago I hear tell, they asked him what he wanted to do and never answers, just smiles—He just sorta wants to dig everything and just watch and enjoy and say nothing particular about it—If someone’s to ask him ‘Let's drive to New York’ he’d jump right for it without a word—On a sort of a pilgrimage, see, with all that youth, us old fucks oughta take a lesson from him, in faith too, he has faith, I can see it in his eyes, he has faith in any direction he may take with anyone just like Christ I guess.”

It's strange that in a later revery I imagined myself walking across a field to find the strange gang of pilgrims in Arkansas and Dave Wain was sitting there say-