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.
PART TWO
Lu Anne went back to Denver on her own, but Neal had promised to catch up with her in June at the latest, when the college session was over, and they planned to reunite then. Hal Chase and Ed White would return to Denver for summer vacation, and Kerouac and Ginsberg were also planning to come west in the summer, so Neal would no longer have any reason to stay in New York then.
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.
Neal and Jack were slower in coming together. Jack knew that Neal was laying down an elaborate con, pretending excessive admiration for Jack’s still conventional prose in an attempt to lure Jack into teaching him the literary trade. Jack’s mother, Gabrielle, known as Mémère, condemned Neal as what people then referred to as a juvenile delinquent, a petty criminal who’d try to lead her son away from the path of respectability for which she and her husband had groomed him. Jack’s parents didn’t care what career he ended up in—whether sports star or writer or insurance salesman—but they wanted him to make a good living, get married, have kids, and live a clean-cut middle-class life. Gabrielle sensed correctly that Neal Cassady would be more hindrance than help to Jack on such a path. And Jack, at this period, was still deeply in thrall to his mother’s opinions and prejudices. He was starting to break away, starting to test out the world on his own; but her views, and especially her feelings, still carried a lot of weight with him.
Nonetheless, Jack’s fascination with Neal was already starting to grow. Clumsy and shy, tongue-tied with women, unable even to drive a car, Jack couldn’t help admiring Neal’s ability to zoom cars around a New York parking lot and fit them within seconds into a tiny slot, or to pick up a beautiful woman with a look, a gesture, and half a dozen words, or simply to move through the world as if he owned it by right of his kingly body, his impeccable physical grace. Jack respected Allen’s intellect enormously, so the fact that Allen treated Neal as a mental equal also forced Jack to give more credence to Neal’s intellectual pretensions. By the time Neal left New York for Denver, in March 1947, Jack no longer wanted to go west just to see the mythological West he’d read of, and watched movies about, since childhood—the West of self-reliant cowboys and death-defying gunfighters and rugged woodsmen and indomitable pioneers. He also wanted to go west—maybe now the most important reason for him—to see Neal again, to see Neal in his natural element, to see what Neal was going to do next.