One and Only (11 page)

We didn't get any money from the wino. That was the first and only time—except for myself—that I ever saw Neal use physical violence on anyone. Neal was not a violent person, and most of the time he didn't get mad enough to use physical violence—
except with me.
And when Neal would hit me, that was simply emotion. I mean,
that's the way it was with us.
It was either loving or fighting, one of the two, with us—especially at that age. But when the wino couldn't come up with any money, Neal was livid. That was the one time he was mad enough to hurt someone, and he hit the guy. I know it shocked Al and I so much, because we knew that under normal circumstances Neal would never think of hitting another person.

 

What a motley crew we were, my God, by the time we got to Jack's house in North Carolina! Jack's sister had a turkey on the table, which may be another reason I've got Thanksgiving in my head. I had on a pair of Neal's white gas-station coveralls—which he also had on a pair of. We'd been in the car all those days, and I didn't have many clothes to begin with.

Jack wasn't embarrassed at all. He was absolutely fantastic. It was one of the things that impressed me, because I hadn't seen him in so long. Neal had been back to New York on his own, because he had gone down to Texas to be with Allen and William Burroughs, and then he'd driven Burroughs's load of pot to New York.
¹⁰
In any case, Jack's welcome was the most welcome thing in the world—not one bit of embarrassment at all. “Come in! Come in! Come in!” he kept saying. “You're finally here!” And he was so happy, there wasn't a trace of “Gee, Mom, I'm sorry” in his voice. Just welcome, total welcome. Neal was usually kind of oblivious to the impression he might be making, but Al and I both felt a little embarrassed in front of Jack's mother and sister. There we were, so crummy and dirty, and we were hungry too, oh my God! When I think back to it, anything they offered us would have sounded fantastic. And when Jack said, “Come on in and eat!” we were so happy we couldn't believe it, but we were also a little afraid to take him up on it. But Neal immediately headed straight into the kitchen. There was never any embarrassment on his part in things like that, because when someone said, “Come on in and eat,” Neal took them at their word. That was one of the good things about Neal. He accepted what people said, until they showed him different. Neal just couldn't move fast enough getting to that food! Al and I sort of trailed hesitantly behind him,
looking over his shoulder at the turkey and all the trimmings. Oh my God, were we hungry!

This was the first time I'd met Jack's mother, and I was scared to death of her for what I'd heard. I hadn't met her previous to North Carolina. I had heard that she didn't welcome Jack's friends too readily—and especially people of Neal's type! Neal had told me that she and he had not gotten along too well in the past. It might not even have been anything that she voiced, but just something that Neal felt. But he at least thought he was not too welcome at her house. So naturally, if you're with someone you know isn't welcome, you don't feel too at ease; but she really and truly was very gracious to us. For total strangers to come walking into your home like that, she certainly didn't treat us as unwelcome. Al and I both mentioned later how comfortable she'd made us feel. I was prepared for her to tell us to “get the hell out!”—but that didn't happen at all.

The kindness I sensed was just in the way she acted toward us. I don't remember her talking to us very much. As for his sister, Nin, I only saw her just that one day when we were there; and as I remember, she just sort of reflected his mother, really. I don't remember feeling any particular out-of-the-way welcome from Nin, but I don't really have much of a recollection of her. She always seemed to blend in with his mother in my mind. I understand that Nin died fairly young, even before Jack. I think it must have been hard on Gabrielle when Nin died, especially since it took place in the sixties, when Jack was drinking so heavily. But Neal told me a secret—
he told me that Jack's mom used to drink with him!

Now at first I had some doubts whether this was true. Neal could sometimes be cruel, and at first I didn't believe him. I told Neal, “You're telling me a story!”—because in my memory she certainly was not the kind of woman who'd sit and hoist a few! But Neal said, “I'm telling you that she gets loaded with Jack!” The thing was that
she would rather sit and get loaded with Jack than have him go out to a bar and get drunk with someone else. Having known her the way she was, how close she felt to Jack, I could well understand that. But I still thought it was carrying things a bit far, for her to start drinking heavily at her age. Neal insisted, “It's the truth—she drinks right along with Jack.” It's hard for me to imagine her like that—drinking her Southern Comfort, which is ungodly sweet stuff, unless you drink it with soda and lemon. That was the first thing I ever tried to drink, by the way, which is why I remember it so much! When I was about fifteen, I got sick as a dog on it.

When we were in North Carolina, Jack asked us to move some furniture to New York for his mother. It was his sister's furniture; she was moving and giving the furniture to her mom. So Neal, Al, and I agreed to take the furniture to New York, to Jack's mom's apartment, and of course Jack had to come with us, to show us where to put the stuff. That was probably why his mother acted a little more kindly toward us, because Neal was doing her a service at least. On the first trip, we could only take part of the load. Then Jack and Neal turned around and went right back to North Carolina and loaded up the rest of it. I'm pretty sure they put it in a little trailer, because the Hudson certainly couldn't have carried all the furniture. They brought his mother back to New York on that second trip too.

While Jack and Neal made that trip back to North Carolina, Al Hinkle and I went down to the local pawn shop, and this time I pawned my diamond engagement ring and my watch too. Al and I were staying up at his mother's apartment, and I remember leaving the apartment that day and walking it seemed like miles before we found the pawn shop. It wasn't an easy thing for me to do, and I never did get either one of them back. But at least we had a few bucks now to live on, and we wouldn't be broke when his mother got back. But I ended up being terribly embarrassed anyway, because the day they got back I had clothes hanging all over his mother's apartment. I was trying to wash all my and Neal's and Al's clothes out, so that at least we would have some clean clothes, and I had them hanging through the kitchen and the bathroom and everywhere! Here we were in someone else's apartment, and it was like we were taking over the place. But again, his mom was really very nice about it. She didn't get mad at all.

 

During that period, while we stayed with Jack and his mom, Jack was writing a great deal. I always remember him sitting at his typewriter there in the apartment. If I'm not mistaken, he was still working on
The Town and the City
then.
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I also remember him working on a story about Neal, but he had turned Neal into the son of a rancher from California. Neal told me about it. He said Jack had given him an Ed Uhl type of history. Jack was using Ed Uhl's life on a Colorado ranch for background about the character based on Neal.
¹²

Of course we couldn't stay at Jack's apartment forever. It was way out in Queens. After we'd been there a while, we went on down into Manhattan and moved into Allen Ginsberg's apartment. When
we first got there, Allen wasn't working; he was with us a great deal. But then he got a job working nights at a newspaper. All that he had was a living room with a couch and a Japanese table, and then a little tiny bedroom about as big as a bathroom, with just a single cot in it. We were sleeping in shifts, so to speak.

 

Allen would come home from work at maybe six or seven in the morning, and climb in with Neal and I. God only knows how the
three of us managed on that little cot, but Neal was trying to be generous with his attention. So Allen would have his head on one shoulder, and I would have my head on the other. But there was no place for Al Hinkle except the couch; and Al being as tall as he was, he had his problems on that damn couch! But we managed. And by the time Allen got his job, we were getting ready to leave anyway.

I remember cooking spaghetti for us in the dishpan several times. I had to go down the hall to borrow any kind of cleaning implements, brooms and such as that, to keep the apartment clean. But we had some good times that trip.
Jack was there constantly.
You might as well say that he was living with us. He must have gone home once in a while, but he was sleeping here and there, making whatever arrangements he needed to, so that he could spend ninety-nine percent of his time with us.

I got a job working downtown, at the drugstore next to Radio City Music Hall, but it didn't last very long. We had a party one night, and I got loaded. Of course there was always some booze, but that night there was some pot too. There weren't many drugs around—nobody was really into drugs, unless you want to consider pot a drug. Of course they were all doing pot pretty heavily in those days. I remember talking to Lucien Carr that night, and Al Hinkle was there with some little girl that he had been trying to make all that evening at the party. Hal Chase might have been there too. They knew I had to go to work the next morning, so they gave me one of those Benzedrine inhalers to perk me up. I was supposed to be at work at seven o'clock in the morning, and Hal and some of the others took me down. I was in absolutely no condition to go to work. They got me down there, and we went to a restaurant across the street, and they all came to the conclusion that I wasn't quite ready to go to work! So they took me over to John Clellon Holmes's apartment on Lexington Avenue.

Al Hinkle came along with that pretty little girl he was with—she was a blonde, about nineteen or twenty. But anyway, they were going to straighten me up by giving me a bath. The blonde came into the bathroom supposedly to help me, but it came out that she was gay! She admitted to me that she lived with a couple of other girls. When I told Al, he got very upset, and he was so disappointed, because he couldn't believe it! She told him herself after that; but she had been with him the whole night, just talking and partying, and she had never mentioned it. I suppose it's possible she didn't think Al had any romantic intentions toward her. But in those days, I would have called it kind of “leading him on.” I can still remember Al's reaction when I told him that I didn't think it was going to work out between the two of them! It blew his mind.