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.
Jack Kerouac sharing bottle of Tokay and reading poetry from breast pocket notebook with painter William Morris, San Francisco railyards, 1960. (Photo by James Oliver Mitchell.)
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 c
ame 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.
Years later, when we were both a lot older, we discussed this—discussed what had happened to his dreams. He said, “Well, you know, I had a responsibility then.” Although Neal and responsibility didn’t always go hand in hand, Neal felt it greatly. Regardless of what other people have thought, or anything else people have said or written about him, Neal did feel a big sense of responsibility! A lot of those things they say about him make me angry. Being raised the way Neal was, Neal hadn’t been given a big sense of security—he didn’t have a lot to work from. He didn’t really know how to handle responsibility because no one had ever been responsible for him. And the only one he’d ever had to be responsible for was himself. But he still tried to be responsible, when he could. Even with me, he did the best he could. He was always very gentle with me and tried to make everything nice for me, because he felt I had been shortchanged by being on my own so young. He knew I wasn’t prepared for life on my own, the way I had been raised—which was always a proper and protected environment. So he felt a sense of responsibility toward me, but at the same time he felt sure I could learn to take care of myself—that I could make it on my own if he gave me a little help in that direction.
Neal had a large sense of responsibility, or he would never have married Carolyn. He would never have married Diana either. He would never have gone through the whole bullshit of annulments and divorces just so he could keep getting remarried and taking care of his different families. And he would never have even tried to get Carolyn alimony at various times when she told him that she and the kids were desperate for money. He was always really worried about her and the kids. He really tried to help them out. I know that, especially in the earlier years, Carolyn thought that Neal could have cared less whether they were eating or had a roof over their heads. The truth is, he really was concerned. Unfortunately, he just didn’t know what to do about it, but he felt it greatly.
In a way, he was just like Jack with his emotional dependency thing with the women. Look at what happened with Joan.25 When Jack was with a woman he cared about, I think he would love to have been in the traditional role of husband and father; he would love to have been able to take over the reins and do the things that he knew might have to be done, or should be done, to take care of his family. But since all these things had been done for him all his life—and done by a woman, his mother—he really had no way of knowing how to do it. Jack’s mother had made him dependent on her, and it made him helpless in a lot of ways. It was the same with Neal in that respect. He didn’t have a mother making him dependent, but he had nobody giving him a responsible model either. Neal really wanted desperately to take care of his responsibilities, and live up to them, and he just really didn’t know how to go about it.
Jack used to talk about how “the place for a woman is handling the money.” He really felt that way—that the woman should take care of the practical things in life. With Neal, because of his upbringing on skid row, where you had to fight to protect whatever belongings you had—with Neal, it was always a “This is yours, and this is mine!” type of thing. It was hard for him to feel a togetherness thing with anyone—to really open up and share with anyone. I mean, we had a tremendous togetherness; but from a material standpoint, Neal didn’t even begin to understand what it might mean to say the word ours. If he had five bucks in his pocket, it was his five bucks! And he needed it. If Jack had five bucks, of course, it was his mother’s five bucks.
The funny thing is, they were both nearly broke when they died. In their last years, they were barely able to take care of even themselves. Jack couldn’t pay his bills, and Neal was simply living off of others. From all the conversations that Neal and I had through the years, I think Neal was a little resentful as he grew older—not resentful of people, but just of circumstances, the circumstances that placed him where he landed. He ended up being kind of half-assed famous, but for nothing he had done—at least nothing he was proud of having done. It was not like he had a profession he could be proud of, or any way to earn a living. They even took away his job on the railroad.26 Especially toward the end of his life, like when he was with Kesey, he began to grow very bitter.27
He sometimes drove over to my house with the bus, and one time we spent a couple of weeks together down the Peninsula, close to Los Gatos. A friend of Neal’s, John Gourley, had a cabin down there. When Neal used to get tired, those were usually the times he’d come and see me and we’d go away together. And he would just kind of let down with me. One of those times, he was telling me about his “throwing the hammer” bit.28 It’s strange, because he had never done it in front of me—almost as if he was ashamed to actually let me see it. A lot of people had told me about it. They said it was frightening to watch him, because it seemed like he would never stop. But now Neal was telling me about it himself. He talked about it like he was a performing monkey. He said something like, “I put on my act at six o’clock and eight o’clock.”
One day I happened to be down at the warehouse where the bus and everyone was staying. Neal and I were having one of our heart-to-heart talks, when he got a call from Kesey. Some show on KPIX was doing an interview with Kesey, and Ken wanted Neal to come down to KPIX and be part of the show.29 Neal asked me to come with him—maybe for moral support. It was like being with someone who was a professional performer. Our conversation completely stopped when Kesey called him. On went the pink satin shirt, and he just completely went into an act. It was as though he instantly became someone else. It was like there were two Neals. I was talking to one person one minute—to Neal—and the next minute he was a different person, a stranger in a pink satin shirt with a sledgehammer in his hand.
There were periods in the late sixties when I didn’t see Neal for a long time. The last time I saw him was in the fall of 1967. This was just before he went down to Mexico, on that trip he wouldn’t come back from. The period before that visit, he had been gone from the Bay Area for quite a while. I think it had been a year probably since I had last seen him. He was getting very tired at that point. He met me at the restaurant right down at the corner near my house in Daly City. He had that small minibus that the Pranksters used to get around in when they weren’t driving the big bus. He told me he had been down to see his daughter Cathy’s first child—I think they were living in Texas—and it was as though he were relieved that he had gotten this accomplished. I mean, he talked totally unlike Neal. Even at periods like when Natalie had committed suicide, and even when he was really down, Neal had never talked the way he talked that day. It was as though—and I later told Allen Ginsberg this—it was as though he was just tired of his whole life. And he asked me, “Where do we go from here, Babe?”
He couldn’t connect with me the way he had in the past. I can’t quite describe the way he was, because Neal had never been like that before. He was extremely quiet, for one thing. He wasn’t talking. He was so down that he really didn’t have anything to say. Then he told me he was going to Mexico, but he had to go up north first, to Oregon—or he had been to Oregon, I can’t remember now. But it was as though he was saying, “I’m tired of the whole fucking mess—it just isn’t worth it anymore.” I told Al Hinkle about this too. This was long before I heard about Neal dying in Mexico. I was in the hospital when he passed away. It was as though he was through. He just didn’t want any part of life anymore. He didn’t want anything anymore. The only thing he was relieved about was seeing his grandson, his first grandchild. He said, “I at least did that. I at least got down there to see her baby.” Cat
hy was kind of special to him. Well, she was his first kid—at least the first one that he raised, that he acted as a father toward. He’d heard that she was about to have a baby, and he raced down there—got down there while she was still in the hospital. It was something that meant a great deal to him, that he felt he had to do. He was very relieved that he had done it—as if this was one thing that he had finally done right with his life.
The fact that Neal had become a performer at the end—it was so unlike him, so completely, totally unlike him. It was even unlike the Neal that all these writers had written about in their books. Even though Neal was a mover, a doer, he was always doing things for himself—doing things he had chosen to do. I mean, his thought was the thing about him that got us all so excited. What was remarkable was the fact that he was interested in so many things. Like Al and I were talking about recently, when we were kids, Neal could be reading a book and shooting pool and necking with me at the same time—and giving his attention to all three. But those were things that he wanted to do. He wasn’t putting on a show; he wasn’t trying to impress anyone. He could’ve cared less if anyone even noticed. That wasn’t the case in later years.
It was that change that bothered him. When we would be together, we would talk about the things that might have been, the things that had happened and changed everything. He felt, I think, cheated. I mean, he didn’t blame anyone. He blamed himself more than anyone else. Neal was his own worst critic in that respect. He was angry at himself that he hadn’t gone ahead and pursued his dreams. Because even when we were first married, Neal would type and write on into the night—whether he would have turned into a great writer, who knows? In those days, of course, he wasn’t into whether anyone was ever going to read his work or not. But he wanted to write, and he wanted to go to school. He wanted the education so that he would be able to do it and do it right. Whether or not he had the talent is something we’ll probably never know. A few years ago, City Lights published The First Third. He wrote that, my God, a hundred years ago—but he never finished it. It was unfinished, like his whole life.
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