What Gets Kept

Summary

Six months later, in February, 1943, most of the men Jack sailed with that summer—including Glory and the pastry chef—were killed when the Dorchester was torpedoed by a German U-boat. More than six hundred people died. Jack was so shattered by the news that his hands shook for weeks afterward. I remember him wearing the leather jacket even after he became famous and could have afforded a new one. I wonder if it reminded him of what Buddhists call the void. We were all heading there, he told me more than once, though he knew I didn’t like to hear about that.The week before our blind date, Jack’s previous girlfriend had thrown him out of her apartment, on the advice of her psychiatrist, so he was in serious need of a place to stay, as he had often been during his travels. Since I happened to be a young woman with an apartment of her own—something of a rarity in those days—Allen Ginsberg, whom I’d recently got to know, had arranged for us to meet. My two haphazardly furnished rooms were in a brownstone a couple of blocks from Columbia. The windows looked out on a back yard where generations of bedsprings rusted and a tree of heaven grew. Just before we stepped inside, he pulled me close and kissed me. “I don’t like blondes,” he murmured, which I thought was too ridiculous to take seriously. By the time we’d left the subway and his arm dropped around me as we walked along Broadway, it was clear that we were going to be friends, whatever else we might be to each other.I had just survived a bad breakup and a really awful year, which should have made me cautious. Instead, I had a nothing-to-lose feeling. The next day, Jack moved into my apartment with a zippered sports bag that he picked up from the cheap hotel on Eighth Street where he’d been staying. It contained a notebook and a couple of changes of clothes, mostly from the Salvation Army.I knew he’d be leaving as soon as he got his first five-hundred-dollar check for “On the Road,” which Viking Press was finally going ...