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.
Jack appealed to Neal physically, and he was jealous automatically—tremendously jealous—of these beautiful looks of Jack. And after we were introduced, Neal was immediately drawn to him from his conversation. Jack never came on to girls—he never used his looks. In fact, it was like he was totally unaware of his own sex appeal. Really, it used to kind of amaze me. Jack never seemed to be aware of this attraction that he had for the female. In fact, it always seemed like he felt inadequate, like he wasn’t much of a ladies’ man. He would always say that the rest of the fellas could all do much better than he could—he really always had that feeling, and he actually gave that impression. I really believe it to be so. I don’t really think he had any egotism whatsoever concerning himself.
Jack Kerouac doing Bogart impression, New York, 1942. (Courtesy of Edith Parker Kerouac.)
I later heard that Hal felt the same way—that it seemed strange to Hal too that Jack could never seem to get started with a girl. He always had to have an introduction from somebody, his friend’s girlfriend or something, because he couldn’t seem to make it on his own with girls. I don’t think Jack had any confidence, which is really strange in a boy that looks like him. Especially in those days, a football player had no trouble finding a girlfriend. I don’t care if you looked like Dracula, if you were on the football team, ninety percent of the girls in school were all over you! Just the prestige of the whole thing was a magnet for girls. But Jack, like I said, always seemed totally unaware of his own power as a male. He was never aggressive with women. I never saw Jack, unless with Neal’s pushing him and maybe being loaded, get a little confidence to approach a girl. He’d finally get nerve enough, whatever you want to call it, but then he would overdo it—he would come on so strong and so bad that he’d scare the girl off!
I remember that party that John Clellon Holmes wrote about in his novel Go. This was a couple of years later, in 1948. It was this fantastic party that we went to on New Year’s Eve in a huge basement apartment not too far from Columbia. I really didn’t appreciate it at the time, not until I got older and realized how many different people were there—from Neal and I and all the fellas at Columbia to all sorts of out-of-town people, women from uptown, women with furs that I thought of as “older women,” though they might only have been twenty-three or twenty-four years old. But they seemed very old and sophisticated to me, and it wasn’t till years later that I realized how special a party it really was—and I wish I had been old enough to have been able to circulate a little bit. Because, we mostly stayed in one room with our own little group. Jack was loaded, and there was some girl there that Jack kind of had eyes for, and Neal was gonna fix the whole thing up. Well, Neal wound up going out to the car with her instead, and Jack was left with me. Jack and I always had a good rapport, but that night he was furious. I think probably that was the only time I ever heard Jack—mainly because he was loaded—get really irritated with Neal and start cursing him out. “He was supposed to get her for me, and he’s takin’ her out to the goddamn car!” Jack yelled. “That’s the end of that!” He even started making threats against Neal. “Well come on, you and I’ll just settle this!”—that kind of thing. He would get kind of cocky, and he was even willing to challenge Neal—he was gonna tell Neal what he thought of him when Neal came back in. Jack said some pretty hard things—without meaning them at all.
Of course, back in 1946 and ’47, I didn’t really get to know Jack that well. There used to be a little bar near Columbia—it may have been a restaurant too—where we always used to sit around with some of the guys. It was right by the university, the place where all the fellas went. Everybody used to go in there for hours, sipping on beers.4 In Desolate Angel, Dennis McNally’s got Neal and I meeting Allen there. It tells about us coming to New York and we were sitting in one of the booths when we supposedly bumped into Allen. We did used to go over there quite often, and we may have met Lucien there, since Lucien was always coming in.