The funny thing is, they were both nearly broke when they died. In their last years, they were barely able to take care of even themselves. Jack couldn’t pay his bills, and Neal was simply living off of others. From all the conversations that Neal and I had through the years, I think Neal was a little resentful as he grew older—not resentful of people, but just of circumstances, the circumstances that placed him where he landed. He ended up being kind of half-assed famous, but for nothing he had done—at least nothing he was proud of having done. It was not like he had a profession he could be proud of, or any way to earn a living. They even took away his job on the railroad.26 Especially toward the end of his life, like when he was with Kesey, he began to grow very bitter.27
He sometimes drove over to my house with the bus, and one time we spent a couple of weeks together down the Peninsula, close to Los Gatos. A friend of Neal’s, John Gourley, had a cabin down there. When Neal used to get tired, those were usually the times he’d come and see me and we’d go away together. And he would just kind of let down with me. One of those times, he was telling me about his “throwing the hammer” bit.28 It’s strange, because he had never done it in front of me—almost as if he was ashamed to actually let me see it. A lot of people had told me about it. They said it was frightening to watch him, because it seemed like he would never stop. But now Neal was telling me about it himself. He talked about it like he was a performing monkey. He said something like, “I put on my act at six o’clock and eight o’clock.”
One day I happened to be down at the warehouse where the bus and everyone was staying. Neal and I were having one of our heart-to-heart talks, when he got a call from Kesey. Some show on KPIX was doing an interview with Kesey, and Ken wanted Neal to come down to KPIX and be part of the show.29 Neal asked me to come with him—maybe for moral support. It was like being with someone who was a professional performer. Our conversation completely stopped when Kesey called him. On went the pink satin shirt, and he just completely went into an act. It was as though he instantly became someone else. It was like there were two Neals. I was talking to one person one minute—to Neal—and the next minute he was a different person, a stranger in a pink satin shirt with a sledgehammer in his hand.
There were periods in the late sixties when I didn’t see Neal for a long time. The last time I saw him was in the fall of 1967. This was just before he went down to Mexico, on that trip he wouldn’t come back from. The period before that visit, he had been gone from the Bay Area for quite a while. I think it had been a year probably since I had last seen him. He was getting very tired at that point. He met me at the restaurant right down at the corner near my house in Daly City. He had that small minibus that the Pranksters used to get around in when they weren’t driving the big bus. He told me he had been down to see his daughter Cathy’s first child—I think they were living in Texas—and it was as though he were relieved that he had gotten this accomplished. I mean, he talked totally unlike Neal. Even at periods like when Natalie had committed suicide, and even when he was really down, Neal had never talked the way he talked that day. It was as though—and I later told Allen Ginsberg this—it was as though he was just tired of his whole life. And he asked me, “Where do we go from here, Babe?”
He couldn’t connect with me the way he had in the past. I can’t quite describe the way he was, because Neal had never been like that before. He was extremely quiet, for one thing. He wasn’t talking. He was so down that he really didn’t have anything to say. Then he told me he was going to Mexico, but he had to go up north first, to Oregon—or he had been to Oregon, I can’t remember now. But it was as though he was saying, “I’m tired of the whole fucking mess—it just isn’t worth it anymore.” I told Al Hinkle about this too. This was long before I heard about Neal dying in Mexico. I was in the hospital when he passed away. It was as though he was through. He just didn’t want any part of life anymore. He didn’t want anything anymore. The only thing he was relieved about was seeing his grandson, his first grandchild. He said, “I at least did that. I at least got down there to see her baby.” Cathy was kind of special to him. Well, she was his first kid—at least the first one that he raised, that he acted as a father toward. He’d heard that she was about to have a baby, and he raced down there—got down there while she was still in the hospital. It was something that meant a great deal to him, that he felt he had to do. He was very relieved that he had done it—as if this was one thing that he had finally done right with his life.