The Further Inquiry
continued...

CHEST
(smiling, charmed)
Chloe, with your permission, you seem uncommonly - ah

CHLOE
Uncommon? I suppose it is my English upbringing.

CHEST
How then - could you tell us - did you become involved with these -

CHLOE
Commoners? Well, I met them at Stanford in 1958.

CHEST
You were associated with the university?

CHLOE
Working in the dean's office. Secretary of fraternities. Ken and most of the others were students or grad students. Stanfordites. Very educated.

A party appears on the KEM; black and white; rhythm and blues; Cassady, shirtless and shameless, racketing and rapping.

CHEST
And Mr. Cassady?

CHLOE
An eighth-grade education . . . in a rat grade school, he used to claim. But not illiterate, not a bit of it. He could quote pages of Proust verbatim.

CHEST
I'm sure he could. But I meant when did you first make his acquaintance?

CHLOE
I can't actually remember the first time I saw him. Probably a party and Neal just came . . .

CHEST
Some time before the excursion in question?

CHLOE
Oh yes. Months. Maybe years. In the wine and bongo time.

CHEST
Can you tell us something of your impressions of Mr. Cassady by the time this colorful expedition was mounted?

CHLOE
Well, by the time of this colorful expedition, and well before that too, I hadn't really gotten along very well with Mr. Cassady.

CHEST
Why was that?

On one of the partying KEM screens, Cassady is standing, jerking dementedly, atop a barstool.

CHLOE
He sort of frightened me. He seemed to be coming from someplace so different from where I think I - and most people - come from. It made it difficult to communicate with him, to talk. A difficulty amplified terrifically by the additional fact that HE never shut up.

CHEST
Never?

CHLOE
Never. But I will say this: sometimes the things he was talking, well it was amazing.

Two images of Cassady have begun to jabber all at once. Chloe's voice has to rise to speak over the cacophony.

It was as if he were actually talking to everybody in the room at the same time, referring to something they were doing, or thinking, or had been doing or thinking an instant before, or in a past life, or in a life to come. And then, with all the dope stuff going on, and him taking everything, and about ten times as much of it as anybody else . . .

Two images on the KEM stop jabbering as the third topples from a barstool.

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