All three of us were in the front seat. We were just driving across Texas, and we came to these ruins. I always wished that Jack had put this in the book.19 At first we thought it was ancient ruins, but I don’t really know what it was. There were some great big huge cement blocks and some statues that had been damaged or vandalized. Some of the statues had their arms knocked off, and this and that. But at one time it had obviously been a beautiful thing, maybe an Indian memorial thing of some sort. Anyway, we stopped the car to get out and go examine them, to look them over, and we were all still nude.
Jack and I were extremely nervous; we were, of course, looking for cars both ways. We didn’t want anybody to catch us naked. Neal could have cared less. Well, anyway, we see down the road, here comes this car, and Jack and I are yelling at Neal, “Come on! Let’s get back in the car! We’re gonna go to jail!” But Neal was still examining everything and talking a mile a minute—blah blah blah! Finally Jack and I just said, “The hell with you!” and we ran across the highway and jumped back into the car. The car was coming toward us, and as they were approaching they were sort of slowing down. All of a sudden, Neal gets up on this platform and strikes a pose. And the car slows almost to a stop—it was clear the people inside wanted to get a better look at Neal. We could see them. It was an older couple in the car.
Jack and I were both in our car, bending as low as possible and trying to keep out of sight. I am not exaggerating—we were both just trying to hide. Neal, meanwhile, is standing just perfectly still. You could see them gaping at him. Jack and I started to talk about it, and we knew exactly what they must be saying. We could see the woman talking to her husband and pointing at Neal, and you could just imagine that she’s saying, “Look at these fantastic ruins and that beautiful statue! It hasn’t been marred at all! It’s just in perfect condition!” Because, fortunately, it was far enough away that she couldn’t see the difference between skin and stone, and he didn’t move a muscle. Carolyn has some pictures that she drew of Neal nude, and some of them are really quite good. They show what a good body he had. I mean, the way he was built, he could have been the model for some of those famous statues. I can still see that old lady sitting there, just jabbering at her husband—just bupbupbup-bupbupbup! And he’s squinting and shaking his head, as their car creeps away.
Jack and I thought for sure they were gonna stop to get out to examine this perfect, perfect statue—amongst the entire ruins that were around it. I used to wonder if he were going to put that in the book, because we’d laughed over that, over Neal having the guts to stand up there like that. Because when the car first appeared, Neal really couldn’t make out who it was. It might have been the highway patrol just as easily. And they would have stopped you for traveling with no clothes on—you better believe it! We might have wound up in one of those small-town Texas cells.
We had some very good times on that trip, but then there were other times when I was scared to death. I thought for sure they were both gonna get killed someplace in Texas. Wherever they stopped, Neal was determined to find some pot. In one town, he got ahold of some Mexican kid, and in those days you used to hear a lot of stories about the Mexicans taking the tourists off and promising them a good deal, then robbing or maybe even killing them. Neal never had any fear of anything like that. He’d go into the darkest alley with the roughest-looking characters. But nothing bad ever happened to him. I don’t know if he ever thought about what might happen. Jack was a little more hesitant about following Neal. I mean, he would almost always go, but he would try to talk Neal out of it first—or see if they could arrange something a little safer. Jack would say, “Well, why don’t we meet him at a restaurant? Or some place with a little brighter lights?”
What a trip it was! One day we’d be hunting out Mexican drug dealers, and the next we’d be hanging out with wonderful artists. I’ll always remember our stopping to see the writer Alan Harrington in Arizona. Jack knew him from New York. He was living with an Indian girl—she might have been his wife—and they were living in this little sort of Indian house. It was not a wickiup exactly, but it was an adobe shack of the type a lot of Indians lived in. These were round adobe houses like the ones the Indians had built a long time ago. I can’t think of the proper name of them. But anyway, we stopped, and here he was, the writer Alan Harrington, sitting out there in front of his house, in the hot and dusty desert!