I would recognize him because he was wearing a red-and-black-checked shirt. I was at Elise’s apartment one night when the phone rang, and it was Jack calling from 18 th Street, and he said he was at Howard Johnson’s and did I want to meet him. In January, Allen decided to arrange a blind date between me and Jack-not for any romantic reasons, but because I was that rare thing: a girl with her own apartment. Allen had just come back from San Francisco, in the fall of ‘56, and was staying with my friend Elise and with his lover, Peter Orlovsky, and Jack had come back from San Francisco too. I had met Allen Ginsberg through the Columbia scene when I was going to Barnard he knew my friend Elise Cowen. I think that’s why the whole thing caught on so quickly. The audience had been waiting for someone to say these things. When Jack published On the Road and also when Allen Ginsberg published Howl, it was like taking the cork out of a bottle. That’s what was so compelling about it: In the 1950s people had all these feelings bottled up, intense frustrations with the culture. Jack’s achievement in developing a voice is really something that people should appreciate. First of all, On the Road is an American classic.
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