I got a job working downtown, at the drugstore next to Radio City Music Hall, but it didn’t last very long. We had a party one night, and I got loaded. Of course there was always some booze, but that night there was some pot too. There weren’t many drugs around—nobody was really into drugs, unless you want to consider pot a drug. Of course they were all doing pot pretty heavily in those days. I remember talking to Lucien Carr that night, and Al Hinkle was there with some little girl that he had been trying to make all that evening at the party. Hal Chase might have been there too. They knew I had to go to work the next morning, so they gave me one of those Benzedrine inhalers to perk me up. I was supposed to be at work at seven o’clock in the morning, and Hal and some of the others took me down. I was in absolutely no condition to go to work. They got me down there, and we went to a restaurant across the street, and they all came to the conclusion that I wasn’t quite ready to go to work! So they took me over to John Clellon Holmes’s apartment on Lexington Avenue.
Al Hinkle came along with that pretty little girl he was with—she was a blonde, about nineteen or twenty. But anyway, they were going to straighten me up by giving me a bath. The blonde came into the bathroom supposedly to help me, but it came out that she was gay! She admitted to me that she lived with a couple of other girls. When I told Al, he got very upset, and he was so disappointed, because he couldn’t believe it! She told him herself after that; but she had been with him the whole night, just talking and partying, and she had never mentioned it. I suppose it’s possible she didn’t think Al had any romantic intentions toward her. But in those days, I would have called it kind of “leading him on.” I can still remember Al’s reaction when I told him that I didn’t think it was going to work out between the two of them! It blew his mind.
I wound up losing my job, which wasn’t really any great loss, because it wasn’t too long after that that we left on our big trip west. We were only in New York about a month, but a whole lot of things happened during that time. I met a lot of people who really impressed me, and one of the most memorable was John Clellon Holmes.
Alan Harrington, Jack Kerouac, John Clellon Holmes, Old Saybrook, Connecticut, 1962. (Courtesy of John Clellon Holmes.)
We actually stayed at Holmes’s apartment for a week or so before we moved over to Allen’s. John and his wife, Marion, were just great, because they didn’t know Neal and I at all, and Jack took us over there and said something like, “Here are my friends, and I don’t know what else to do with them—so here they are!” But they were just terrific.
They didn’t have an extra bed, but around the living room they had benches with pillows on them. That’s where Neal and I slept. Really, I loved their apartment. It was like one big long room, and there was a small room off of that where they slept. John had his table with his typewriter in the big room. Marion went off to work every day, and I remember being extremely impressed with John, because regardless of what was happening in the apartment—and believe me, something was always happening when we were there—he would sit down and write for several hours. Jack came every day, of course, and there were just people coming in and out all the time. It always used to impress me tremendously that John could write with all this chaos going on around him. It just used to blow my mind that he could be so dedicated or self-disciplined, or whatever you want to call it, that he would at least try to write something every day, no matter what was going on.
I was really disappointed and hurt later on when Neal told me that Marion had left John shortly before his first book got published. They had both worked so long and hard together—with her having a full-time job and him writing—that it seemed like a shame that they would split up just before his success. They were both so dedicated—she was dedicated to bringing home the bread, and he was dedicated to becoming a published novelist. It wasn’t just talk with John—he really did his thing! I liked John very, very much. I didn’t get to know Marion all that well, because she was gone so much, but they both certainly treated us very nice.
John was very quiet most of the time, and I did notice that Marion was attracted to Jack. It was kind of obvious—even to John it had to be—the way she used to flirt with Jack. Jack, of course, never mentioned it when it was going on. He acted like he didn’t notice. I always had it in my mind that nothing really culminated from it—it just seemed like a mutual-admiration-society type of thing. But there might have been a mad, heated thing going on, and I might not have known about it. I do know that Jack never went out of his way to respond to her flirtations. Years later, I heard she had claimed to have had sex with Jack.