But he was troubled about his relationship with Neal and Carolyn. He said he wasn’t going to stay with them much longer. He was planning on going down to Mexico to live near Burroughs. He just said he couldn’t continue staying with Neal and Carolyn, but he didn’t go into a lot of detail. I don’t know really how long he did stay with Neal and Carolyn after that. He told me that he and Carolyn had become involved—that Neal had kind of gone through the same scene as with Jack and I, that Neal had pushed them together. And then that it had gotten to be a tempest-in-a-teapot kind of situation. That’s all he said about it. He said there were things that he had been thinking about wanting to do, and that he thought he was just ready to leave. This could have been around spring 1952, because I left San Francisco myself not too long after that, and Jack was already gone. After that day at my house, I only saw him twice more with Neal. And then I didn’t see him again until he moved to Berkeley in 1957.
I saw Jack three times when he was out here in 1957. Al Hinkle and Neal and I went over to see him when he was staying in that little cottage over in Berkeley with his mother. It just happened to be the day his box of On the Road books arrived—none of us knew he was going to get his book that day. And of course we were all totally thrilled—Jack’s first book!22—and I can still remember Jack sitting at that big old round table with the stack of books in front of him. All of us were bending over him—hovering over him—and flipping through the pages and trying to read this and read that. And Jack was going through agony—he really and truly was. He kept apologizing to us. He says, “You gotta understand now, I was mad at you here… I was mad at you here….” He was apologizing to us through the whole book, and you know we could’ve cared less. We were just so excited that Jack had had a book published, and I don’t think any of us—at least I didn’t—we never really thought about Jack being famous. It wasn’t about fame—that wasn’t it. What made us so happy there that day was just the togetherness and the fact that he had done it. There it was, and it was in print! But he was just completely embarrassed. I guess all of these things kept flooding down on him. He would remember this line that he had written maybe about me, or some story about Neal, something bad Neal had done—but none of us would have taken offense. I might have called him on a couple of things; in fact, later, I found lots of little things in On the Road that just didn’t match what I remembered.
But the discrepancies, or the things he had changed, were all he could think of—that’s where his head was. He said, “Now you gotta remember, I was mad at you here—that’s why I wrote that.” On another page he smiled sheepishly and said, “I know this part is just a little bit off, but I had to write it that way.” And yet he was also excited and happy over the strange coincidence that all of us wound up together on the day that he got his book. And he was eager to celebrate with us. In fact, after we had closed the book, after we’d kind of gotten our fill of going through and looking for parts about ourselves, we went over to this friend of Jack’s, just to get out of the house and away from his mother. Then Jack relaxed, started becoming himself and enjoying all of us being together again. But up until then it really was a painful experience for him. I really felt sorry for him because he was feeling so ashamed. Actually, I think Al and I talked about it later. The way he’d reacted made us more eager really to read the book simply to find out why he was acting like that—why he was in such a state. Al and I had the feeling that there must really be something bad about us in there.
Because when you’re going through a book like that, just reading a line here and there, you’re not getting any real sense of it. Without meaning to, Jack had made us all a little more curious than we might have been otherwise. Of course, we would all have read the book in any case. Even if it had been the greatest flop in the world, we would have thought it was great, because it was our friend who had written it. But Jack was sure Neal would disapprove of it; he was in total agony from the minute Neal laid eyes on it. I mean, it was obvious he really didn’t want to show us the book—he didn’t want any of us getting into the book. And if we were going to read it, he didn’t want to be around when we did. He couldn’t stop making excuses and apologies for different parts that he knew weren’t quite right. He’d say, “You’ve got to understand that I had to change a few things here and there.” But none of us really cared.