One and Only (19 page)

 

The change definitely occurred as he was drinking. I think part of it at least had to be the alcohol. I wasn't around him that much, where I could say, Oh, well, maybe it was just the association of us being together again. I really can't be that good of a judge. But to me it seemed like the alcohol was doing something to his brain. As he continued drinking, he just was dropping all the things that used to make Jack up. And yet something else was going on too. I know
that, being there with me, feelings were being dredged up again, and memories of happier times.

In the beginning, in the early afternoon, it was almost like going back in time with him. Like when we were down in Algiers visiting Burroughs, we went over to New Orleans together. I don't know what happened to Neal. But Jack and I had been smoking some pot, and it was also early afternoon. Jack and I were laying on some grass, and we were looking up at the clouds. You know how, when you were a kid, you would see things in the clouds? We must've laid there for three hours, telling each other all of the things we saw in the clouds. We had like three hours of fantastic conversation, just sharing our imaginations with one another. “Do you see this over there?” I'd say, and then he'd say, “Do you see that?” And I would see something over there that related to what he saw. It just went on and on like that. But later on, when we went to Golden Gate Park in San Francisco that afternoon and we both laid down—we were sitting down together, but we both finally laid back—and Jack was holding my hand, we started talking and remembering, just kind of being together. Then, for some reason, he brought up that afternoon in New Orleans, and he talked about seeing things in the clouds.
And he said, “I don't see anything in the clouds anymore.”

He wasn't just talking about the sky in Golden Gate Park that day. He made it very plain that he was telling me about a big change in his life. He said, “I have seen nothing in the clouds anymore—absolutely nothing.” He had been through so many years when nobody was publishing his books, when he had no money and his mother had to continue to support him. He was continually being rejected; the publishers were telling him his writings were no good. He'd gone through so many years of scraping and struggling. Under those circumstances, it's hard to keep up your belief in yourself. Because he did have a lot of belief in himself—he really did. But there was a
big change in Jack in those years, and the struggles must have taken a hell of a lot out of him. I wanted to just put my arms around him and tell him, “You know, it's all going to be okay now.” But he made it such a way that I couldn't have done that. I mean, maybe he was letting me know: “Don't.” Maybe he couldn't have handled that kind of thing at that time. I don't know. Because I sure wanted to—I wanted to get close and talk to him.

It was really kind of obvious that Jack wanted somebody to love him and to comfort him. And yet on the other hand, he didn't. He was holding you off with one arm and kind of reaching out with the other, so to speak. It's difficult to really try to analyze someone's feelings when you haven't seen them in a long time, and you don't know all the things that have been happening to them and you don't know exactly where they're coming from. You try to guess what they mean by certain little remarks. But like I said, with Neal I never had to do that. No matter how much he changed, we were always able to talk. But with Jack, it wasn't that way. Maybe he just didn't want the feelings dredged up—and the memories.

In a way, Jack's long slide down, his loss of happiness, started with Neal's rejection in San Francisco in 1949. And then the thing with us fell apart, and all his publishing hopes fell apart too. It was like a snowball.
He had such fantastic expectations!
And then it seemed like everything good that he was anticipating was just kind of being dumped by the way. He was probably starting to think back on things in his life, and it seemed like every time he turned around someone was handing him some kind of rejection slip. By the time
On the Road
became a success, he was already broken inside, and he couldn't handle it. In my view, the fact that he was falling apart emotionally had a great deal to do with his mother. Jack became emotionally dependent on other people, just as he was emotionally dependent on her; and when all those disappointments came, they
were chipping away at his self-confidence, and really taking such a toll that he didn't realize it himself.

I think he must have felt that he handled all those disappointments all right at the time. But the dependency on his mother shows that he was relying on somebody else to give him strength. He needed her to take care of him. When publication, success, and fame all came, everything he'd anticipated and waited for, all the emotional letdown that he'd already gone through had worn him down and he couldn't accept it. That was it. He didn't have that much left, I don't think, to really go on with his career. Because it is an emotional thing, the fame and people adoring you and hanging on you and complimenting you—this takes an emotional drain on a person also. And I don't think Jack really had that much left to give. It takes strength to survive that kind of success. He had virtually no emotional strength left.

It's strange, I see such a line between Neal and Jack—a line tying them together. I really believe there was something of an umbilical cord between the two of them, because their lives were so entwined, and they really both ran the same gamut, and wound up at the same place. Maybe they were not on exactly the same track, but Neal ran through a lot of the same experiences that Jack did—the emotional drain of being the center of attention, the person everyone looked at. Just like Jack, Neal gave to other people all the time—especially after he was given this thing, the identity of “Dean Moriarty,” that he felt he had to keep up. Jack gave through his writing, and Neal gave through being the person Jack wrote about. To me, it was like they were both on the same damn train, and they both gave up at about the same time. I don't think Jack ever felt like the performer, although in the end he became a performer. I think it started in the late 1950s, when they put him on all those TV shows after
On the Road
came out. But it's strange how closely their lives ran.

 

I felt Jack wanted to be like Neal in a lot of ways, but let me make this clear: I never, never found Jack trying to imitate Neal in any way. I used to get a little irritated with Jack because he would always follow Neal—he would do whatever Neal told him to.

No matter what Neal decided, Jack was ready to go—Jack wouldn't ever object to anything Neal wanted to do. Even when I knew or I sensed Jack would feel something wasn't for him, or wasn't what he wanted, he would always allow Neal to take the initiative. That was the only thing that bothered me about their relationship. I never felt that Jack emulated Neal in any way, or tried to, or even wanted to. I mean, he might have wanted to be like Neal, but he would never set himself the goal of trying to make that happen. In the first place, I don't think Jack had enough self-confidence to feel that he could do that, to be very honest with you. But I did hear stories about Jack later in his life, when he was drinking so heavily, that he would be talking nonstop with everybody he met. When Jack was young, when I knew him, he was extremely quiet—he'd sit and listen to others and not talk much himself. But when he became a performer, he had to start talking. And of course—and I'm saying this without having seen him in those years—it wouldn't surprise me if he had started emulating Neal through his alcoholism, with the courage he got from being drunk.

I saw Jack a couple of times on TV, performing, which blew my mind. It was so unlike him—unlike the Jack I knew—that it wasn't real. I couldn't believe that was Jack. I mean, to me it
wasn't
Jack, that's all. I saw him on the Buckley show,
Firing Line
, in 1968—the one where Allen Ginsberg was in the audience. He acted like he didn't recognize Allen as his friend. It was just not Jack—that's all there was to it. I mean, it could have been somebody from Mars, as far as I was concerned. That was no more Jack there than it was anybody else I would have called my friend. I often wondered,
after I stopped seeing him, and people were telling me things, or I'd read articles about him, how Jack had become this kind of right-wing bigot, this terrible, angry redneck.
Was he really like that?
I wondered. I would like very much to have talked with him then. I wonder if he was like that when he was sober. But then I've heard he was never sober anymore for the last three or four years of his life—that it was constant drinking.

You see, both of them were desperately trying to get out of it, one way or another—get out of the roles they'd been forced to play. And eventually just to get out of life itself. I felt from Neal, and the things I read about Jack, and the things I saw, that both of them were just hell-bent to destroy themselves. They just were miserable—they were. They wanted to let go, and they both took their own way of doing it, but they were trying to rush it. They were trying like hell just to get out of the whole situation. They just wanted out.

But I hadn't sensed any of that, in Jack at least, until I saw him in California in 1957. Before that, as far as self-destructiveness, I had sensed absolutely none. On the contrary, I always sensed an eagerness in Jack, almost a little-boy quality of “What's around the next corner?” He was always eager to see the things that his friends were going to do, to see what would happen next. There was absolutely nothing of that kind of darkness in him then. He seemed like the least likely guy to destroy himself. I could never have imagined it. If anyone had told me, in the forties and even in the early fifties, that Jack would become the way he was in the sixties, I would have fought to the death insisting that they were insane. I would have been sure that they didn't know him—that they were just making up nonsense about him. It would have been obvious to me: they could not know him, or they wouldn't say such a thing.

There might have been other people around that were playing death games, like that guy Bill Cannastra who killed himself in
the subway, but Jack was always looking for life, always looking for something. He was always eager for what was new. And something turned that around. I think that Neal's death escalated it.
²⁴
He couldn't accept that Neal was dead. He would tell people that Neal was hiding out from Carolyn—that he didn't want to pay alimony. If he had accepted Neal's death, he would have had to confront what he was doing to himself. They went on a hell-bent mission together, but it's strange how they both took the same road in the end. I mean, there might have been various byways and everything, but they still were on the same damn road. And who could ever have predicted that in the forties, when both of them were so full of hope and anticipation and promise—and their futures, both of them, were bright?

Even for Neal—Neal's success in life wasn't as sure as Jack's. His star might not have been shining as brightly as Jack's, but it was there. Neal would have had absolutely no trouble handling the work at Columbia, if he had ever managed to get admitted. Neal had a fantastic mind, he really did. And his mind was going in the right direction too; his life wasn't wasteful then. But once Neal came to San Francisco and settled down with Carolyn, I never heard him talk anymore about making something of himself. After we came back to California from Denver, I never heard Neal talk any more about his writing or his future or getting an education. I never heard any more of that at all. And that was all he talked about for the four years that I knew him before that. When I first came to San Francisco, in November of 1947, Neal was working at a filling station. He used to make me come out there and sit with him for his eight-hour shift, and he was still talking then about going to school and becoming a
writer. He was still full of anticipation and plans. But then Carolyn got pregnant, and we had to make that trip to Denver just before my eighteenth birthday to get an annulment, so that he could come back and marry her. After we came back from Denver, I never once heard him talk about his old dreams.