No matter what Neal decided, Jack was ready to go—Jack wouldn’t ever object to anything Neal wanted to do. Even when I knew or I sensed Jack would feel something wasn’t for him, or wasn’t what he wanted, he would always allow Neal to take the initiative. That was the only thing that bothered me about their relationship. I never felt that Jack emulated Neal in any way, or tried to, or even wanted to. I mean, he might have wanted to be like Neal, but he would never set himself the goal of trying to make that happen. In the first place, I don’t think Jack had enough self-confidence to feel that he could do that, to be very honest with you. But I did hear stories about Jack later in his life, when he was drinking so heavily, that he would be talking nonstop with everybody he met. When Jack was young, when I knew him, he was extremely quiet—he’d sit and listen to others and not talk much himself. But when he became a performer, he had to start talking. And of course—and I’m saying this without having seen him in those years—it wouldn’t surprise me if he had started emulating Neal through his alcoholism, with the courage he got from being drunk.
I saw Jack a couple of times on TV, performing, which blew my mind. It was so unlike him—unlike the Jack I knew—that it wasn’t real. I couldn’t believe that was Jack. I mean, to me it wasn’t Jack, that’s all. I saw him on the Buckley show, Firing Line, in 1968—the one where Allen Ginsberg was in the audience. He acted like he didn’t recognize Allen as his friend. It was just not Jack—that’s all there was to it. I mean, it could have been somebody from Mars, as far as I was concerned. That was no more Jack there than it was anybody else I would have called my friend. I often wondered, after I stopped seeing him, and people were telling me things, or I’d read articles about him, how Jack had become this kind of right-wing bigot, this terrible, angry redneck. Was he really like that? I wondered. I would like very much to have talked with him then. I wonder if he was like that when he was sober. But then I’ve heard he was never sober anymore for the last three or four years of his life—that it was constant drinking.
You see, both of them were desperately trying to get out of it, one way or another—get out of the roles they’d been forced to play. And eventually just to get out of life itself. I felt from Neal, and the things I read about Jack, and the things I saw, that both of them were just hell-bent to destroy themselves. They just were miserable—they were. They wanted to let go, and they both took their own way of doing it, but they were trying to rush it. They were trying like hell just to get out of the whole situation. They just wanted out.
But I hadn’t sensed any of that, in Jack at least, until I saw him in California in 1957. Before that, as far as self-destructiveness, I had sensed absolutely none. On the contrary, I always sensed an eagerness in Jack, almost a little-boy quality of “What’s around the next corner?” He was always eager to see the things that his friends were going to do, to see what would happen next. There was absolutely nothing of that kind of darkness in him then. He seemed like the least likely guy to destroy himself. I could never have imagined it. If anyone had told me, in the forties and even in the early fifties, that Jack would become the way he was in the sixties, I would have fought to the death insisting that they were insane. I would have been sure that they didn’t know him—that they were just making up nonsense about him. It would have been obvious to me: they could not know him, or they wouldn’t say such a thing.
There might have been other people around that were playing death games, like that guy Bill Cannastra who killed himself in the subway, but Jack was always looking for life, always looking for something. He was always eager for what was new. And something turned that around. I think that Neal’s death escalated it.24 He couldn’t accept that Neal was dead. He would tell people that Neal was hiding out from Carolyn—that he didn’t want to pay alimony. If he had accepted Neal’s death, he would have had to confront what he was doing to himself. They went on a hell-bent mission together, but it’s strange how they both took the same road in the end. I mean, there might have been various byways and everything, but they still were on the same damn road. And who could ever have predicted that in the forties, when both of them were so full of hope and anticipation and promise—and their futures, both of them, were bright?