Appreciation of gold. An essay

He did give a damn—but who had ever given a damn about him? His father? Yes, up to a point. A girl or two—but that was “a long story.” No one else except Willie-Jay himself. And only Willie-Jay had ever recognized his worth, his potentialities, had acknowledged that he was not just an under-sized, over muscled half-breed, had seen him, for all the moralizing, as he saw himself—“exceptional,” “rare,” “artistic.” In Willie-Jay his vanity had found support, his sensibility shelter, and the four-month exile from this high-carat appreciation had made it more alluring than any dream of buried gold. So when he received Dick’s invitation, and realized that the date Dick proposed for his coming to Kansas more or less coincided with the time of Willie-Jay’s release, he knew what he must do. He drove to Las Vegas, sold his junk-heap car, packed his collection of maps, old letters, manuscripts, and books, and bought a ticket for a Greyhound bus. The journey’s aftermath was up to fate; if (things didn’t “work out with Willie-Jay,” then he might “consider Dick’s proposition.” As it turned out, the choice was between Dick and nothing, for when Perry’s bus reached Kansas City, on the evening of November 12, Willie-Jay, whom he’d been unable to advise of his coming, had already left town—left, in fact, only five hours earlier, from the same terminal at which Perry arrived ...»