One and Only

by Gerald Nicosia

  I saw Jack three times when he was out here in 1957. Al Hinkle and Neal and I went over to see him when he was staying in that little cottage over in Berkeley with his mother. It just happened to be the day his box of On the Road books arrived—none of us knew he was going to get his book that day. And of course we were all totally thrilled—Jack’s first book!22—and I can still remember Jack sitting at that big old round table with the stack of books in front of him. All of us were bending over him—hovering over him—and flipping through the pages and trying to read this and read that. And Jack was going through agony—he really and truly was. He kept apologizing to us. He says, “You gotta understand now, I was mad at you here… I was mad at you here….” He was apologizing to us through the whole book, and you know we could’ve cared less. We were just so excited that Jack had had a book published, and I don’t think any of us—at least I didn’t—we never really thought about Jack being famous. It wasn’t about fame—that wasn’t it. What made us so happy there that day was just the togetherness and the fact that he had done it. There it was, and it was in print! But he was just completely embarrassed. I guess all of these things kept flooding down on him. He would remember this line that he had written maybe about me, or some story about Neal, something bad Neal had done—but none of us would have taken offense. I might have called him on a couple of things; in fact, later, I found lots of little things in On the Road that just didn’t match what I remembered.

  But the discrepancies, or the things he had changed, were all he could think of—that’s where his head was. He said, “Now you gotta remember, I was mad at you here—that’s why I wrote that.” On another page he smiled sheepishly and said, “I know this part is just a little bit off, but I had to write it that way.” And yet he was also excited and happy over the strange coincidence that all of us wound up together on the day that he got his book. And he was eager to celebrate with us. In fact, after we had closed the book, after we’d kind of gotten our fill of going through and looking for parts about ourselves, we went over to this friend of Jack’s, just to get out of the house and away from his mother. Then Jack relaxed, started becoming himself and enjoying all of us being together again. But up until then it really was a painful experience for him. I really felt sorry for him because he was feeling so ashamed. Actually, I think Al and I talked about it later. The way he’d reacted made us more eager really to read the book simply to find out why he was acting like that—why he was in such a state. Al and I had the feeling that there must really be something bad about us in there.

  Because when you’re going through a book like that, just reading a line here and there, you’re not getting any real sense of it. Without meaning to, Jack had made us all a little more curious than we might have been otherwise. Of course, we would all have read the book in any case. Even if it had been the greatest flop in the world, we would have thought it was great, because it was our friend who had written it. But Jack was sure Neal would disapprove of it; he was in total agony from the minute Neal laid eyes on it. I mean, it was obvious he really didn’t want to show us the book—he didn’t want any of us getting into the book. And if we were going to read it, he didn’t want to be around when we did. He couldn’t stop making excuses and apologies for different parts that he knew weren’t quite right. He’d say, “You’ve got to understand that I had to change a few things here and there.” But none of us really cared.

  Afterward, Neal and I discussed the book many times. Well, in the beginning, Neal was thrilled. I mean, no one could have given Neal a finer compliment—in his eyes. He was proud that someone found him interesting enough to be written about, but especially someone that he thought so much of as Jack—someone he admired as much as he did Jack. The strange thing about the two of them, when they were with each other, it seemed like they were totally unaware of the other one’s real feelings. This was true even for Neal—even though he knew Jack had written so much about him. I mean, they knew that they cared for each other; but I think on both of their parts they felt the friendship was unequal. They, Jack and Neal, each felt it was more on their part than it was on the other side. Do you understand what I’m saying?

  They were both very envious of one another. It never interfered with their association, but it was a very obvious thing when you’d see them together. Everything that Neal was, Jack would want—had wanted—would like to be. And everything that Jack was, Neal would have given his right arm to be, or to have. Neal not only envied the schooling Jack had; he also envied the football thing, the athletic ability, the good looks, the ability to sit down and write the way Jack did. There were just so many things Neal didn’t have that had come naturally to Jack. And on the other hand, on Jack’s part, he envied Neal for his powers with women, of course; but he also envied Neal’s whole attitude, the confidence that Neal projected that Jack lacked. Neal’s ability to go anywhere and to act sure of himself was something Jack was very envious of Neal about. I think the women part of it was a small part. I mean, Jack was very envious of Neal’s ability to talk to women so easily, and talk them into anything so easily, but I think that’s on any man’s mind.

  The tragedy was that they never seemed to be aware of how great, how deep, were the feelings each one had for the other. Maybe in later years they started to understand a little. But I know in the beginning years they didn’t. Neal was always apologizing to Jack. Like when Neal would write letters to him, it was a constant series of apologies. “I’m sorry, well you know how I can’t write,” Neal would always begin. “I can’t write letters—I’m lousy at letter writing,” and blah blah blah. It was torture for him to write to Jack because he felt so inadequate because of Jack’s writing. Neal even felt that his handwriting was bad, and he didn’t feel that he expressed himself well.

  Neal Cassady and Natalie Jackson, San Francisco, 1954 or 1955. (Photo courtesy of Anne Marie Santos.)

  On the one hand, I think when Jack made Neal the hero of On the Road, it changed Neal’s whole life. He was extremely proud, but I think it also started a thing with Neal that he felt he had to live up to. On the Road put Neal on a road of what I would call self-denial. I don’t know if that word is applicable or not, but that’s what it seemed to me. Neal would deny himself certain things—things that he would have done, or would like to have done and might have done—simply because of this image of him that was growing in people’s minds and that he felt he had to keep up with, the image of Dean Moriarty from the book. There was this image now that people had of him—in a way, it meant he had to start performing for Jack, and for other people too. I don’t mean it was necessarily just about how Neal related to Jack. I think Neal felt he had to perform, period—especially as the years went by. Because, when Neal was young, he did have a great deal of ambition, and somehow that just disappeared.

  I know that we all look at Neal in different ways, but I was maybe the only person that Neal stayed close to through all the years; Neal stayed in touch with me always. He came to me almost any time there was some kind of a trauma in his life—like when Natalie Jackson committed suicide.23 That happened in the fall of 1955, when Jack was out here for that big poetry reading. I didn’t see him then, but I stayed with Neal for two weeks after Natalie’s death. I really, really was worried about him. I thought, if Neal ever came close to suicide, that was it, because he felt he had let her down. I think that was a big turning point in Neal’s life too, because every girl he ever brought to me after that seemed to be a girl that he felt needed him, a girl that had some kind of problems. Not necessarily problems with paying the rent or that kind of thing, but psychological problems. After Natalie’s death, it seemed like the girls he was being drawn to were the ones that really leaned on him—because he felt he’d really let Natalie down so badly, and he was somehow trying to make it up by helping other girls who were troubled in a similar way.

  It was a very bad period for him after Natalie died. When he called me, for the first two days all we did was sit together in th
eir apartment, and he just wanted to tell me about her. I just let him talk. He had little notes that she had written him and left for him. I guess she went out to the roof when he was sleeping or loaded or whatever. And he would read these notes over and over and over, trying to find something in them that would take him off the hook—do you know what I mean? Anything that would show he wasn’t to blame for her death.

  I’ve heard people say that the things Jack wrote about Neal in On the Road were the things Neal was least proud of. If that’s true, the book would only have added to all this guilt he was already carrying around.

  PART SIX

  There’s no doubt that Lu Anne played a significant role in the

  Beat Generation, but in one respect her viewpoint was unparalleled, in that she was the only person who observed the tandem procession of Cassady and Kerouac to their nearly identical, self-induced deaths.

  Lu Anne:

  The funny thing is that Jack was going down, in his own way, at the same time that Neal was. When I saw Jack in 1957, I was shocked by how changed he was. The only occasion when I was over at his little house, where he lived with his mother, was that one day when I showed up with Neal and Al Hinkle. But I also saw Jack a couple of times after that over in San Francisco. Neal was not with me on those other two occasions. I met him down on Broadway one afternoon—I parked about half a block from Vesuvio’s—and we only spent about three or four hours together. That was when I first became aware that Jack was drinking. Before that, I had never seen Jack drunk—never. I mean, I’d seen him feeling good a little, you know, when we were all drinking. But Neal was never a drinker. Neal never drank anything but beer. Back in those early years, none of us were real drinkers. We could all get drunk on two or three drinks. No, I had never seen Jack drink before. That’s why I was concerned and surprised to see him drinking steadily, just one after another.

  I was also surprised because Jack was, at that time, kind of putting pot down. He was not really ranting or anything; but unlike the old Jack, he had become very critical of other people. Before, Jack would not have expounded on much of anything, to any extent like that. In fact, Jack used to get loaded on pot all the time! He was always smoking pot with Neal. Pot was just sort of a standard in their group. It was no big thing or anything anybody even thought about. I saw Jack high plenty of times, but I never saw him drunk—I mean, the way he started getting drunk that day. I never got the sort of impressions that I was getting now about his drinking—that it was making him mean and argumentative. I mean, he was drinking! He was drinking hard liquor that afternoon. Both times I saw him in San Francisco he was drinking hard liquor—I think it was whisky. I know he wasn’t drinking beer, which is what he usually had drunk before. He and Neal would always just have a few beers together.

  We had hard liquor when we had parties and stuff like that, but we’d have a few drinks and that would be all. Jack wasn’t that interested in hard liquor back then. Except that one time in 1948, when he was having so much trouble with that blonde girl Pauline, the one who wanted to use him to get out of a bum situation with her husband. It seemed like every time Jack saw her, she always had some kind of problem that Jack was gonna have to attack. She kept egging him on, telling him about her husband beating her up. Jack was feeling a lot of pressure because it wasn’t a situation he was prepared to take over. He wasn’t prepared to take on some truck driver, you know, and rescue the fair maiden, and she wasn’t the fair maiden to begin with. Neal was really upset about it. He told me that Jack had started drinking with her, that she was a drinker and liked the hard stuff herself.

  Jack Kerouac looking at photos of old girlfriends in his bedroom, Northport, Long Island, 1964. (Photo by Jerry Bauer.)

  The second occasion I met Jack in San Francisco, in 1957, we had a better time together. I met him up on Grant Avenue, and we left there and went out to Golden Gate Park, where we spent the whole afternoon. When we first met and we started talking, he was the same old, soft, loving Jack. And then, as the afternoon wore on, he started making more and more trips across the street to this bar—I still know exactly where it is. It was called the “Park” something. I went over with him a couple of times. We sat down and had a couple of drinks together. But it surprised me how he began to change after he’d been drinking for a couple of hours. How could I describe it? He became totally unlike himself, totally unlike the Jack that I had known. He was opinionated about things, and Jack had never been that way. I mean, of course Jack had had opinions, but not like now. Now he was expounding on certain things; and as he drank, he just seemed like he grew harder, like he wasn’t gonna let any feelings come through. Or like he wanted to forget the feelings he had. I can’t quite explain it. It was like he didn’t want to let himself show any of the old tenderness he used to feel for me.

  Actually, in the beginning of our visit, it had been tender and beautiful. And then, as the day wore on, it was as though he just started speaking in clichés. “Don’t let anything bother you!” he’d proclaim in this loud voice. It was this slaps-on-the-back kind of talk. It was like he was bluffing happiness, pretending to be happy when he really wasn’t. He had changed. Like I said, I had seen Neal change. But usually when Neal and I were together, Neal was still Neal. I saw a tremendous change in Neal, but Neal was still Neal when we were together and we talked. But Jack, when he was drinking at least, became someone I didn’t recognize. I wasn’t around him often enough in those days to see if it was a superficial thing, just for then—that particular afternoon when he had to deal with me—or if he acted that way all the time. The drinking put on a veneer that didn’t let any feelings through, and he wanted it there. I mean, he seemed to be able to handle himself better then. When he was drinking, he could tell people whatever he felt like saying. I don’t know. Neal and Jack both changed.

  Jack Kerouac in his study, Northport, Long Island, 1964. (Photo by Jerry Bauer.)

  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 writi
ngs 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.