The truth is, those two weeks really were kind of a nightmare for both of us—even though we were clinging together like we didn’t have anything or anyone else in the world. We were clinging together as the only way to keep going. We just sort of stayed in the room for three days and nights—not knowing what to do, where to go. And Jack, unfortunately, didn’t take any initiative. Jack wasn’t the kind of guy who’d say, “I’ll go get a job,” or “I’ll go do something!” I mean, he really was more lost—about the whole situation—than I was.
But anyway, after a few days, I went over to see some friends in order to borrow money from them. This is what Jack wrote about in On the Road—this was the scene he was apologizing to me about when Neal and I first looked at the book. Jack would always say, “I was mad at you when I wrote this,” and blah blah blah. What happened was, I went over to see some friends of the fella I had gotten engaged with. I saw them, and they lent me some money—that was all, nothing else. Jack wrote that they were sailors; actually, they were seamen. And then I ran into another girlfriend of mine, who was going with the fella that owned the bar on Turk Street where my other girlfriend sang. I did get a little upset with Jack about how he wrote that scene. I was gonna go out with her and this guy that owned the bar, hopefully to get a job, because I was still underage. But she was younger than I was, and she was working there. So I figured if she could work there, at least maybe she could help me get some kind of job. That’s where Jack wrote: “I stood in a doorway and watched her get into a Cadillac.” But he didn’t explain about how “she went out and tried to get a job to do something for us”; he didn’t say anything about my trying to help him. He was just mad at the whole situation.
Our desperate time together lasted about two weeks. Finally, by that time, Neal called us, and of course he came over like nothing had happened. And Neal took us out to a couple of places—it was just an insane situation. He was acting as though everything was hunky-dory. “It’s great, isn’t it?” he said. “You kids are over here, and I’ve got my place on Liberty Street—and we’re all just fine!” The truth was that Jack and I were just wallowing in self-pity and misery.
I don’t remember now whether Jack talked to Neal, or Neal talked to Jack, about Jack coming over to his house—because by this time I had gotten to the point of knowing that something had to be done soon, one of us had to do something, or we were going to end up out on the street. We could not sit in that room doing nothing any longer, with me trying to borrow money, and our hotel bill was going up. Neal wasn’t coming up with anything, any kind of solution. Of course, we only saw him twice. His visits were a boom-boom type of thing. So I told Jack that really the best thing would be for him to talk to Neal and see about arranging to stay at his house, and for me to try to go and stay with this girlfriend of mine—at least until we got situated.
For a while, Jack had been fairly serious about us getting married. We talked a lot about it. He felt it would be the best thing in the world for both of us—the only thing in the world for both of us. But of course, this is the type of talk you have laying in bed in the middle of the night, when you’re not thinking about what you’re gonna do tomorrow. Jack wasn’t thinking about anything except how needy he was at the moment. He was leaning on me. I don’t mean “leaning on me” in terms of putting pressure on me. He wasn’t trying to make me do anything—nothing like that. I mean, emotionally—he needed my emotional support. And at that moment, I needed someone to lean on as much as he did, and Jack wasn’t ready to be leaned on.
In realistic terms, Jack was not actually ready to take on the responsibility of marriage—at least not then—and I knew it. He wasn’t ready for any kind of responsibility. And I was confused, because I was thinking about my own obligations. Here I had accepted a ring, and said yes to a man who wanted to marry me. I told him I would wait for him to get back, and I had all intentions of doing so until this wild trip; and then I had gotten all involved back with Neal again. And now, on top of everything, I had really become deeply involved with Jack too. And I can say, had circumstances been different, or if we had had any kind of a thing we could have leaned on—a bundle of money, a place to stay—there might have been a different result in my relationship with Jack. We might actually have gotten married—who knows? God knows I don’t.