One and Only (7 page)

We ran off without anyone even knowing, just took off hitchhiking, and we wound up in Sidney, Nebraska, where I had an aunt and uncle living. In Sidney, Neal got a job as a dishwasher, and I got a job as a maid—making twelve dollars a month! When I think back, my God! What child slavery they practiced in those days! They really did. One day off a month—that's all I got. I had to be up at five in the morning and have the whole bottom part of the house cleaned by the time the family got up at seven, and I finished at seven in the evening. But it all came to an abrupt end very soon.

It was just getting into winter, and we were having our second snow already. The woman, Mrs. Moore, had me out on this veranda scrubbing everything—the railings, even the side of the house. Neal happened to come home that day and saw me scrubbing this idiot thing—he saw that my hands were turning blue. He said, “That's it!” So that's when he took my uncle's car. He just told me he was gonna get a car—he didn't tell me where he was gonna get it or anything. I almost died when he drove up in front, thinking what I would have to face with the family. But, in any case, we took off at midnight.

I only had one trunk, and we loaded it into the car. It was a wild ride, let me tell you, because the whole windshield was completely iced over, and the windshield wipers wouldn't work! And of course, Neal always had a terrible fear of the police, so he had me looking out the rear window to see if we were being chased. Since my uncle worked at the railroad, Neal had no idea when he might discover it and turn it over to the police. My uncle would have had no way of knowing it was Neal and I who had taken his car. Whether that would have made any difference in his going to the police I don't really know. In any case, Neal wound up on the passenger side,
driving with his left hand, looking out the window with this scarf tied around his head, and me looking out the driver's side because all the windows were totally iced up—to see if anyone was following.

I'd never gone through anything like that in my life. My father was a policeman, and I'd grown up with policemen. I had no fear of policemen at all. They were part of me, you might say. But between Neal's fright of the police and my own fright of my uncle—my fear of being found out by the family, that I would have done such a thing—we were both pretty much out of our heads. We drove the car off the road a few times, and finally it went completely off the road, and he couldn't get it started again. We'd made it to another small town in Nebraska—I can't remember the name—but not too damn far from where we'd started. Maybe a hundred miles or so. It seemed like we'd been driving for hours—most of the night. We had intended to drive to this friend of Neal's, Ed Uhl, whose family had a ranch near Sterling, Colorado. Neal told me we were gonna go to Ed's and stay the night, and then have Ed drive us to Denver. We really had no idea at that point that we would end up in New York.

 

Of course, through the months we had talked over and over about Neal's big dream, which was to get to New York and take extension courses or whatever he had to do—anything—just so he could go to Columbia. Hal Chase and some of his other friends were already there. Neal didn't have a high school diploma, but Hal was supposedly setting up some kind of oral examinations so that Neal could get directly into Columbia anyway. Neal had talked so much about it, and we both dreamed about it; but like I said, up to that point we really hadn't made any definite plans.

When we'd left that night, we'd stolen some money. These people that I worked for had a box that they kept petty cash in; and when we left, Neal sent me upstairs to get it. It turned out there was close to three hundred dollars in it. To us, it seemed like a hell of a lot of money. So when the car went off the road, Neal said to me, very determined, “We're going to New York!” It turned out he'd been driving east all the while—the opposite of the way he would have needed to go to get to Ed Uhl's ranch. We were just outside of North
Platte, Nebraska. So we managed to get into North Platte and went straight to the bus station. We were both so excited just by the thought of it!

We didn't plan—we didn't anything! We just bought our tickets.
It was New York, you know—we couldn't wait!
Five days it took us on the bus, and of course Neal was so excited he couldn't sleep. He couldn't do anything except talk the whole way across about what we were going to do. We talked about this and that—but above all, he said
he was going to Columbia!
Suddenly we actually were making a million and one plans. When you're that age, everything is glorious and the world is yours. And one thing we had in our favor, money never bothered Neal and I. I mean, we were both average kids; we both liked nice clothes, and we both liked to have a good time. Of course, the raising Neal had, he'd had next to nothing. But I had been raised in what would be considered—especially for that period—a middle-class home. I'd had more than a few advantages, but it didn't bother me to give them up. We didn't mind being cold—we didn't mind anything! Really, we were happy just as long as we could go where we wanted to.

So when we got on the bus, then he told me all these fantastic things that he was gonna do.
He was gonna write
—that was his chief goal. And of course at this time too he was kind of going through a Pygmalion type of thing. And you've got to understand, with me—especially around Neal—I've always felt so inadequate, because I had never read any of these things that he was into. Proust and Shakespeare were the main writers he liked back then. Of course, I wanted to read them too, but I didn't know anything about them—about what books I should be reading. Neal was fantastic—like, when we were in Nebraska, we'd stay awake three-quarters of the night, and he would read Shakespeare to me. He was very patient as a teacher; he was reading to me constantly, or giving me books to read. If I
didn't understand why they were important, he would sit down with me and we'd discuss them.

Neal was four years older than I was. I was fifteen when we married, but I was sixteen when we went to New York. All we did all the way across country was talk and read, and talk and read, and talk and read! When we got to New York, the first thing that happened was we got in a big fight in the bus station. I was going home, and I walked off. Of course, he came after me. We were both broke. Having no sense about money whatsoever, we had exactly thirty-five dollars in our pocket when we got there.

The first thing we did in New York was to go in a big cafeteria around the corner from the bus station. It was full of glittering foods, as Jack wrote, and it became a symbol of New York for Neal. When we walked in, neither one of us had ever seen anything like it. It was really just an automat, but we had never seen anything like all these goodies. Neal was always very magnanimous whenever he had anything in his pocket at all, just anything, so we were buying just about everything we saw. As I said, we had no sense about money.

Then, for what seemed like hours, we stood on Times Square looking at those big lighted signs. There was the Camel sign with someone blowing smoke rings; the black washerwoman, a typical mammy with a bandanna tied around her head, bending over this tub that suds came down from; and then there was Felix the Cat, acting out a series of little comic strips. These were all in neon lights that ran around the side of the Times Building. Neal and I used to talk about it years later. We must have stood there for at least three hours just enthralled looking at all of these things, the Times Building and all the neon signs. And then there were the Nesbitt's Orange stands, which were famous for their orange juice. We stopped in there, and it was the first time either of us had ever tasted an Orange Julius.

We started looking for a hotel, and none of them would rent us
a room, because they thought we were trying to shack up. I didn't have our marriage license, and no one would believe us. No one would rent us a room. In one hotel, somewhere right near Times Square, there was a long stairway with a desk at the top, and for some reason there was a policeman up there. I don't know whether it was a house of prostitution that had been raided, but something obviously had happened not too long beforehand. And the cop was pretty nice. When we walked up and Neal told him we wanted a room, the cop told him, “Why don't you just go find the back of a car or something?” You know, in other words, “You kids go shack up somewhere else, but don't be trying to rent hotel rooms around here.” By this time, Neal was getting very irritated, he was just very upset, and he blew it.

Neal finally decided to try the St. George Hotel by himself. He said, “You wait downstairs,” and he went up and rented a single room. About an hour later, he came back down, and we got something to eat. Then he sneaked me up. I had to sneak up to get in the damned hotel, and our room was just a little tiny thing with a single bed in it, not even a double bed. Our window overlooked this alley—the world's worst impression of New York City your first night there! But to us it was beautiful. We lay there looking out the window all night long, with Neal telling me all of his little dreams and hopes for our future and what was going to happen in the days ahead. He was so excited and so full of ambition!

The next morning, we went up to Columbia University and looked up Neal's friends Hal Chase and Ed White. We hadn't met Allen Ginsberg yet. Neal was very, very fond of Hal, and very close to him, and Hal introduced us to Allen the first day. So right away we moved to a boys' dorm at Columbia, Livingston Hall. In the lobby there were all these couches and chairs, and we stayed there all day and half the night. Of course only Neal was allowed to go up to
the rooms. But once, when they weren't watching too closely, Neal sneaked me up into one of the fellas' rooms.

I remember meeting Tom Livornese. He had dark, curly hair, and was a little more quiet than the others. He later said that all the guys were crazy about me, but I used to always feel so inadequate around all of them. In the first place, they were all so much older, and they all seemed so sophisticated, and so intelligent. I always felt like such a klutz around them. I loved every one of them, and I loved being around everything that was going on. They kind of treated me like one of the fellas—they really did! It wasn't like any of them was trying to get me off into a corner—nothing like that—because they were all very involved with each other and the happenings of the day. There weren't many women around, either—not that they weren't looking at all times, when we'd go into the bars and things like that. But I was usually the only girl that was around, because Neal had to spend ninety-nine percent of his time with the guys, and of course I was lost without Neal. I was scared to death to be alone there, anyway.

It wasn't long before I met Jack Kerouac too. Jack was on the quiet side, like Tom—at least at that time. He really wasn't an extrovert like a lot of the guys. Most of the guys were saying, “Yeah, come on! Let's go here! Let's go there!” Hal was kind of in between—he wasn't a total extrovert, but I wouldn't call him quiet and reserved, the way Jack was. It always seemed if you were alone talking to Jack, or if you were on a one-to-one basis with him, he was interested in what you said, and always acted very nice. I adored Jack anyway because he always treated me terrific! I never felt quite so inadequate around Jack—he just had that knack. He never talked down to me—
never!

But when there was a group of people, Jack more or less listened. He was not one of the more active participants in all the
conversations that were going on. Allen did a lot of the talking, but no one talked as much as Neal.

It seems like I met Jack on our first full day in New York. I'm almost certain it was in that dormitory at Columbia, and not the way he described it in
On the Road.
He wrote about Neal opening the door in the nude, but that didn't take place—at least when we first met Jack. There were several things in
On the Road
, actually lots and lots of little things, that Jack changed or just invented. That was one of the reasons he didn't want us to read the book, but I'll talk more about that later.

When we met Jack at Livingston Hall, several of the fellas were already there—five or six of them. Allen was there, probably Ed White too—I don't remember who all. And then Jack happened to walk in. Well, Allen had been telling Neal that he wanted him to meet Jack, and then all of a sudden: “This is Jack Kerouac!” And of course when Jack came in, especially in those days, any girl couldn't help looking at him. Jack commanded attention from the female because he was so pretty. He really was a handsome, handsome boy.

And of course Neal was immediately aware of it, which I think sort of attracted and repelled him at the same time. In a way, that was Neal's and Jack's immediate reaction to one another, because they both had mixed feelings about the other.