One and Only (9 page)

He left and ran to get the bus. I had to pack all of our stuff in this trunk and lug it two blocks to the bus and get it on the bus and take it all the way to Jersey City, where Neal was waiting for me. I mean, I was going through these insane things that I was putting myself through—stuff there was no need for. We slept in parked cars. It's just like I said. I've thought about it for years and years and years. If I had sat down and plotted it, or thought about it, it would have been different. But I didn't. It just came out of my mouth without one thought about what it would lead to—what kind of reaction Neal would have.

We went through hell. And then Neal got the bus and went up to Hartford, Connecticut, and he was still thinking about us getting back together. He wrote and told me, “I'm looking for a place for us.” Then the next letter I got from him, he said he had found a place for us to live. He wrote, “I've found us a room and I've got a job, and you can come up, in a couple of days.” In the meantime, Allen, Ed White, Hal Chase, and the others were very, very nice to me; but I think that—looking back on it—they would probably have been happy to get rid of me. Of course, at that time they didn't know anything about me having lied about the police being after Neal, but I think they would have liked Neal just to be with them. None of them made me feel that way, really, because they all treated me very well. But as I got older, I looked back on it, and I realized that they probably sighed a sigh of relief when I left.

They all chipped in together to buy me a bus ticket back to Denver. When they took me to the bus station that day, they left about fifteen minutes before the bus came in. It went to Chicago or St. Louis or somewhere like that first. But just before it came in, the bus to Hartford came in, and it really was the most awful decision. I wanted to go to Hartford with all my heart—I really and truly did. I loved Neal so much. More than even my love, we had so many things that we had shared together. We were like a couple of kids growing up together. We had shared so many of those dreams and agonies together that it really was a hell of a decision—Denver or Hartford.

The start of 1947 was a very important season for the development of the Beat Generation, and Kerouac writes of it in great deal in
On the Road
. Neal and Allen quickly developed a close friendship, and as Kerouac relates in his novel, talked nonstop for weeks on end, staring into each other's eyes and probing the depths of each other's souls. Each had his own ulterior motive—Allen seeking the male lover who had so far eluded him, and Neal wanting to learn to write, or at least to learn to talk the New York writer's lingo so that he could begin to join the club. But to put it in those terms oversimplifies it. Neal and Allen would forge a relationship that lasted the remainder of Neal's short lifetime, and both gave each other an
enormous amount of validation for the unconventional lives they'd chosen. When they first came together, each had a huge lack of self-confidence—Allen because he was gay, because his mother was crazy, because he'd got into trouble already at Columbia and wasn't living up to the high standard of respectability set by his schoolteacher father Louis; and Neal, obviously, because many regarded him as nothing but a “jailkid” and street punk from Denver. The love they had for each other was real, even if it wasn't the particular brand of homoerotic love Ginsberg sought. That love may well have saved both their lives.

 

Jack came out to Denver in the summer of 1947 to see Neal, but I didn't learn of that until much later. When Jack was in Denver in 1947, I didn't know it. It seems almost inconceivable to me that Jack was in Denver seeing Neal without my knowing about it. I know Jack wrote about it, and Jack's biographers say it happened, and a thousand people have said that he was there, but what was so strange was that Jack never talked about it with me. The big thing when we left New York together in 1949, Neal and Jack and I, was
the fact that Jack had never been west before—at least I remember us talking about that all the way from New York to New Orleans. That's why when we took off through the Lincoln Tunnel to New Jersey, Jack and Neal were so excited about the trip.
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But I need to back up a little. A couple of months after I left New York, and left Neal up in Hartford, he came back to Denver to get me on my birthday, the first day of March, 1947. From that moment on, I was completely involved with Neal again, and that's why it's so unbelievable to me that I wouldn't have known if Jack
was anywhere in the vicinity. Naturally I knew that Ginsberg was there, because Allen and Neal and I were all together after Allen came. I know Carolyn says she met Neal in Denver that summer, but I don't remember seeing her there either. If I did meet her then, she couldn't have made much of an impression. I still have a hard time believing he met her there. I may not have the most fantastic memory in the world, but I don't remember either Jack's or Carolyn's name coming up when I was with Neal that summer. Neal didn't even stay in Denver that long, because he'd planned to go to Texas with Allen, and then out to the Coast to join up with Jack.

 

 

What is known is that during the summer of 1947, Neal was doing his best to share himself with three different lovers—Lu Anne, Carolyn, and Allen Ginsberg—while attempting to keep each one from knowing the depth of his involvement with the others. Clearly, from Lu Anne's insistence that she didn't even see Carolyn in Denver (although Neal's pal Al Hinkle says they did meet briefly in a social encounter at Carolyn's hotel room), Neal had compartmentalized his life to an extraordinary degree. Neal also managed to keep Lu Anne away from all the wild adventures, the big parties and swapping of sexual partners, that Kerouac chronicled in
On the Road
. Eventually Lu Anne and Allen came to share the same bed with Neal—and while not totally happy with the arrangement, neither seems to have felt excessively threatened by the other. But when Carolyn walked in unexpectedly one day and found Neal in bed with Allen and Lu Anne—with Neal in his usual position, in the middle—the sight horrified her so much that she ran out the door and headed straight for the West Coast.