Anyway, by the time we had gotten to San Francisco, it was just sort of expected by everyone that Jack and I were going to be together. But Jack still expected to be with Neal, regardless of where Neal ended up living. Neal had Carolyn in their house, and Jack might have me in some apartment across town, but nonetheless Jack expected that the two of them would still be hanging out together. That’s why Jack started out on this whole adventure.
In Jack’s mind, this whole trip was because of Neal, with Neal, for Neal—whatever. It was a big hurt for him to be abandoned like that. We spent the next couple of weeks sort of consoling one another. The sad thing is that, under different circumstances, I think the outcome might have been entirely different. Things might actually have worked out for Jack and I. But unfortunately we had no money; we had nowhere to go. I talked to a hotel manager at the place where I had lived before, and he let us move into the hotel, on the assumption that we’d be able to start paying the rent soon. It was the Blackstone Hotel on O’Farrell Street. And then I went with a girlfriend of mine over to her house, to get an iron to cook with. She was a singer in the Tenderloin, and I had stayed with her once before. She had taught me how to cook using the heat from a steam iron—which worked pretty well in place of a hot plate. In On the Road, Jack wrote about seeing me get in a car with this girlfriend, and he made it seem as if we were working as prostitutes.
Before I had left San Francisco and gone back to Denver—which was several months before Neal came back to Denver and picked me up to make the trip to New York with Al Hinkle—I had started going with a seaman. We had become engaged in San Francisco. When I first moved back to Denver, I still had full intentions of marrying him. But gradually he started slipping from my mind. His ship was gone for a year, and it was due back now in a couple of weeks. But in the meantime, when Neal asked me to go to New York with him, the only reason I agreed was because Neal assured me he was coming back to San Francisco. He promised me he’d get me back in time to meet my fiancé’s ship. I said, “Okay, I’ll go with you, as long as you realize that I’m not getting involved with you again.” I really had a long talk with him, because when he came after me that night and banged on my door, he was still acting like we were married. As soon as I said, “Who is it?” he answers, “Your husband! Open up!” I mean, he still was going through that thing of acting like I belonged to him. But I told him, I said, “I’m going as a person, and not as your wife. I mean, it’s not gonna be the way it was. This time, I’m gonna have my own fun in New York.” And he said, “Yes”—he claimed he accepted that, which of course he didn’t.20
But then in the meantime, before we got back to San Francisco, Jack and I had become involved; and like I said, it had gotten to the point where I didn’t really know how I felt anymore concerning my fiancé or the marriage that was supposed to take place. I hadn’t seen him in almost a year by that time, and I was even having trouble remembering what he looked like. But I knew that Jack was needing and leaning on me, and I needed someone to lean on! But Jack didn’t have much comfort left to give. Because especially after Neal left, Jack felt lost. Well, he was lost—even more so than I, in a way, because he didn’t know anybody in San Francisco. And the way Neal had done it was cold and cruel. So we talked and talked and made plans to find an apartment where we could live together. We even talked about getting married.