Henri turned away. Henri had gotten tickets for the Duke Ellington concert at the Metropolitan Opera and insisted Joan and I come with him and his girl. Henri was fat and sad but still the eager and formal gentleman and he wanted to do things the right way as he emphasized. So he got his bookie to drive us to the concert in a Cadillac. It was a cold winter night. The Cadillac was parked and ready to go. Neal stood outside the windows with his bag ready to go to Penn Station and on across the land. “Goodbye Neal” I said. “I sure wish I didn’t have to go to the concert.” “D’you think I can ride to 40th St. with you?” he whispered. “Want to be with you as much as possible, m’boy and besides it’s so durned cold in this here New Yawk…” I whispered to Henri. No, he wouldn’t have it, he liked me but he didn’t like my friends. I wasn’t going to start all over again ruining his planned evenings as I had done at Alfred’s in San Francisco in 1947 with Allan Temko. “Absolutely out of the question Jack!” Poor Henri, he had a special necktie made for this evening; on it was painted a replica of the concert tickets, and the names Jack and Joan and Henri and Vicki, the girl, together with a series of sad jokes and some of his favorite sayings such as ‘You can’t teach the old maestro a new tune.’ So Neal couldn’t ride uptown with us and the only thing I could do was sit in the back of the Cadillac and wave at him. The bookie at the wheel also wanted nothing to do with Neal. Neal, ragged in a motheaten overcoat he brought specially for the freezing temperature of the East, walked off alone and the last I saw of him he rounded the corner of 7th Ave., eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again. Poor little Joan my wife to whom I’d told everything about Neal began almost to cry. “Oh we shouldn’t let him go like this. What’ll we do?” Old Neal’s gone I thought, and out loud I said “He’ll be all right.” And off we went to the sad and disinclined concert for which I had no stomach whatever and all the time I was thinking of Neal and how he got back on the train and rode over 3,000 miles over that awful land and never knew why he had come anyway, except to see me and my sweet wife. And he was gone. If I hadn’t been married I would have gone with him again. So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old brokendown river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the evening-star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks in the west and folds the last and final shore in, and nobody, just nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Neal Cassady, I even think of Old Neal Cassady the father we never found, I think of Neal Cassady, I think of Neal Cassady.
*In the cast of characters in a manuscript titled “‘On the Road’ as reconceived Feb 15, 1950” Chadwick “Chad” Gavin, Brooklyn baseball player, scholar, jailbird, and roamer, is half brother to Dean Pomeray Jr. Pomeray is a “hipster, hot-rod racer, chauffeur, jailbird, and teahead.” The men are “half-brothers in blood; each 1/16th Comanche.”
*One side of the cover page of the 297-page draft of On the Road has the carefully written holograph title “The Beat Generation” crossed through and “On the Road” written less carefully above it. On the other side of the title “On the Road” is typed in caps and there is a thickly deleted five-word subtitle, the first three words reading “On the Road.” Below the title Kerouac has typed “by John Kerouac” and deleted the “John,” handwriting “Jack” above it in caps. In the lower-right-hand corner of this page Kerouac has typed his name with the “John” once again crossed through. Below this his address is typed as care of “Paul Blake,” Kerouac’s brother-in-law, with a