Friday, December 27, 2013
those leftover things concerning our personal lovethings and at once
begin thinking of specific worklife plans…” and so on in the way that he
had in his early days. I went to the coldwater flat with the boys and
Neal came to the door in his shorts. Louanne was jumping off quickly
from the bed; apparently he was fucking with her. He always was doing
so. The other guy who owned the place, Bob Malkin, was there but Neal had
apparently dispatched him to the kitchen, probably to make coffee while
he proceeded with his loveproblems…for to him sex was the one and only
holy and important thing in life, although he had to sweat and curse to
make a living, and so on. My first impression of Neal was of a young
Gene Autry---trim, thin-hipped, blue eyes, with a real Oklahoma accent.
In fact, he’d just been working on a ranch, Ed Uhl’s in Sterling Colorado
before marrying L. and coming East. Louanne was a pretty, sweet little
thing, but awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things, as she
proved a while later. I only mention the first meeting of Neal because
of what he did. That night we all drank beer and I got drunk and
blah-blahed somewhat, slept on the other couch, and in the morning,
while we sat around dumbly smoking butts from ashtrays in the gray light
of a gloomy day Neal got up nervously, paced around thinking, and
decided the thing to do was have Louanne making breakfast and sweeping
the floor. Then I went away. That was all I knew of Neal at the outset.
During the following week however he confided in Hal Chase that he
absolutely had to learn how to write from him; Hal said I was a writer
and he should come to me for advice. Meanwhile Neal had gotten a job in a
parking lot, had a fight with Louanne in their Hoboken apartment God
knows why they went there and she was so mad and so vindictive down deep
that she reported him to the police, some false trumped up hysterical
crazy charge, and Neal had to lam from Hoboken. So he had no place to
live. Neal came right out to Ozone Park where I was living with my
mother, and one night while I was working on my book or my painting or
whatever you want to call it there was a knock on the door and there was
Neal, bowing, shuffling obsequiously in the dark of the hall, and
saying “Hel-lo, you
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