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.