One and Only

by Gerald Nicosia

  Jack Kerouac, unknown person, and Neal Cassady, auto garage, San Jose, 1952. (Photo by Al Hinkle.)

  We had one room with a kitchen, and I went to the dime store and bought paper drapes, and I hemmed them. They weren’t totally paper—they were like a paper type of material—and I can still remember sitting there hemming these ridiculous things. After I hemmed them, Neal assured me that they were gorgeous and beautiful. I brought home all these other little goodies. I had that room fixed up, it was home, and Neal kept telling me how much he liked it. And then I cooked the first meal for Neal. You know, I’d boiled hot dogs and things, but I was gonna fix him a meal now that we had a kitchen.

  I fixed spaghetti for him—God bless his soul! I knew nothing about spaghetti. You know, I never had to cook at home, and so nobody’d bothered to tell me that when you cook spaghetti you have to put it in boiling water. I put it in cold water and brought it to a boil, and I had this sauce that was nothing but tomato sauce. I don’t remember if I even had any hamburger in it or not; but, in any case, this spaghetti came out in one big lump! I didn’t know what had happened, but I knew it wasn’t right, and I was all teary-eyed and upset when Neal got home from work. “Don’t worry, honey, it’s gonna taste delicious!” —that’s what he said, God bless him. I had to slice it and put it on our plates and put this crappy sauce over it, and God love him, he sat there and ate every bite. He really and truly did, telling me it was beautiful, it was terrific, it tasted great. I am a pretty damn good cook now, but I will never forget the first meal in our little kitchen. We laughed about that for years—that spaghetti that I cooked him. We had to cut it off in hunks. It was insane—oh God! But anyway…

  Things had finally gotten to where I had everything I’d ever wanted—Neal working, and I had a little home, such as it was. I actually thought it was beautiful. And I swear to this day, I have no idea of why I destroyed it. But when Neal came home from work this one night, without any planning, without it even having entered my head—nothing!—when he came in the door that night, it just came out of my mouth. I told him that the police had been there. I swear to you on my grandchildren—if there’s more than one—that I tried to analyze it, but I never found the real answer. As the years went by, Neal and I talked about it. Neal had his own theories. He felt that because of all these things that had happened after we got married, that it was my kind of a self-saving reaction—an unconscious thing to get myself out. But I didn’t want out. I mean, I didn’t think I wanted out. Everything was exactly the way I had always dreamed it would be. But then I did that—I went ahead and told him that the police were looking for him.

  From the moment I opened my mouth, I wanted to tell him the truth. But of course Neal was excitable enough as it was—that was just his natural state—and when anything happened that would upset him like that, there was no way to stop him from overreacting. There was no way I could’ve sat down with him and said, “Neal, I didn’t mean it, it wasn’t true.” I couldn’t have stopped him even if I had wanted to, because he probably wouldn’t have believed me. He would’ve thought I was trying to calm him down. So I put myself through this total nightmare, going through every bit of this agony with him, and every minute of it hating myself.

  He left and ran to get the bus. I had to pack all of our stuff in this trunk and lug it two blocks to the bus and get it on the bus and take it all the way to Jersey City, where Neal was waiting for me. I mean, I was going through these insane things that I was putting myself through—stuff there was no need for. We slept in parked cars. It’s just like I said. I’ve thought about it for years and years and years. If I had sat down and plotted it, or thought about it, it would have been different. But I didn’t. It just came out of my mouth without one thought about what it would lead to—what kind of reaction Neal would have.

  We went through hell. And then Neal got the bus and went up to Hartford, Connecticut, and he was still thinking about us getting back together. He wrote and told me, “I’m looking for a place for us.” Then the next letter I got from him, he said he had found a place for us to live. He wrote, “I’ve found us a room and I’ve got a job, and you can come up, in a couple of days.” In the meantime, Allen, Ed White, Hal Chase, and the others were very, very nice to me; but I think that—looking back on it—they would probably have been happy to get rid of me. Of course, at that time they didn’t know anything about me having lied about the police being after Neal, but I think they would have liked Neal just to be with them. None of them made me feel that way, really, because they all treated me very well. But as I got older, I looked back on it, and I realized that they probably sighed a sigh of relief when I left.

  They all chipped in together to buy me a bus ticket back to Denver. When they took me to the bus station that day, they left about fifteen minutes before the bus came in. It went to Chicago or St. Louis or somewhere like that first. But just before it came in, the bus to Hartford came in, and it really was the most awful decision. I wanted to go to Hartford with all my heart—I really and truly did. I loved Neal so much. More than even my love, we had so many things that we had shared together. We were like a couple of kids growing up together. We had shared so many of those dreams and agonies together that it really was a hell of a decision—Denver or Hartford.

  PART TWO

  Lu Anne went back to Denver on her own, but Neal had promised to catch up with her in June at the latest, when the college session was over, and they planned to reunite then. Hal Chase and Ed White would return to Denver for summer vacation, and Kerouac and Ginsberg were also planning to come west in the summer, so Neal would no longer have any reason to stay in New York then.

  The start of 1947 was a very important season for the development of the Beat Generation, and Kerouac writes of it in great deal in On the Road. Neal and Allen quickly developed a close friendship, and as Kerouac relates in his novel, talked nonstop for weeks on end, staring into each other’s eyes and probing the depths of each other’s souls. Each had his own ulterior motive—Allen seeking the male lover who had so far eluded him, and Neal wanting to learn to write, or at least to learn to talk the New York writer’s lingo so that he could begin to join the club. But to put it in those terms oversimplifies it. Neal and Allen would forge a relationship that lasted the remainder of Neal’s short lifetime, and both gave each other an enormous amount of validation for the unconventional lives they’d chosen. When they first came together, each had a huge lack of self-confidence—Allen because he was gay, because his mother was crazy, because he’d got into trouble already at Columbia and wasn’t living up to the high standard of respectability set by his schoolteacher father Louis; and Neal, obviously, because many regarded him as nothing but a “jailkid” and street punk from Denver. The love they had for each other was real, even if it wasn’t the particular brand of homoerotic love Ginsberg sought. That love may well have saved both their lives.

  Neal and Jack were slower in coming together. Jack knew that Neal was laying down an elaborate con, pretending excessive admiration for Jack’s still conventional prose in an attempt to lure Jack into teaching him the literary trade. Jack’s mother, Gabrielle, known as Mémère, condemned Neal as what people then referred to as a juvenile delinquent, a petty criminal who’d try to lead her son away from the path of respectability for which she and her husband had groomed him. Jack’s parents didn’t care what career he ended up in—whether sports star or writer or insurance salesman—but they wanted him to make a good living, get married, have kids, and live a clean-cut middle-class life. Gabrielle sensed correctly that Neal Cassady would be more hindrance than help to Jack on such a path. And Jack, at this period, was still deeply in thrall to his mother’s opinions and prejudices. He was starting to break away, starting to test out the world on his own; but her views, and especially her feelings, still carried a lot of weight with him.

  Nonetheless, Jack’s fascination with Neal was already starting to grow. Clumsy and shy, tongue-tied with women, unable even to dri
ve a car, Jack couldn’t help admiring Neal’s ability to zoom cars around a New York parking lot and fit them within seconds into a tiny slot, or to pick up a beautiful woman with a look, a gesture, and half a dozen words, or simply to move through the world as if he owned it by right of his kingly body, his impeccable physical grace. Jack respected Allen’s intellect enormously, so the fact that Allen treated Neal as a mental equal also forced Jack to give more credence to Neal’s intellectual pretensions. By the time Neal left New York for Denver, in March 1947, Jack no longer wanted to go west just to see the mythological West he’d read of, and watched movies about, since childhood—the West of self-reliant cowboys and death-defying gunfighters and rugged woodsmen and indomitable pioneers. He also wanted to go west—maybe now the most important reason for him—to see Neal again, to see Neal in his natural element, to see what Neal was going to do next.

  Kerouac’s working-class, French-Canadian Catholic world was about to explode. Ginsberg was about to learn that love—gay or straight—was not the simple matter he had thought it. And Cassady was about to go on the ride of his life.

  The stage was set for a huge drama to unfold—the drama that would give narrative bones to one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century. Poor Lu Anne, slaving away at a hamburger joint to save money for her husband’s return, had no inkling of all that was coming down the pike at her.

  Lu Anne:

  Jack came out to Denver in the summer of 1947 to see Neal, but I didn’t learn of that until much later. When Jack was in Denver in 1947, I didn’t know it. It seems almost inconceivable to me that Jack was in Denver seeing Neal without my knowing about it. I know Jack wrote about it, and Jack’s biographers say it happened, and a thousand people have said that he was there, but what was so strange was that Jack never talked about it with me. The big thing when we left New York together in 1949, Neal and Jack and I, was the fact that Jack had never been west before—at least I remember us talking about that all the way from New York to New Orleans. That’s why when we took off through the Lincoln Tunnel to New Jersey, Jack and Neal were so excited about the trip.6

  Lu Anne in front of car, Denver, circa 1947, during the period when Neal rejoined her after their first trip to New York. (Photo courtesy of Anne Marie Santos.)

  But I need to back up a little. A couple of months after I left New York, and left Neal up in Hartford, he came back to Denver to get me on my birthday, the first day of March, 1947. From that moment on, I was completely involved with Neal again, and that’s why it’s so unbelievable to me that I wouldn’t have known if Jack was anywhere in the vicinity. Naturally I knew that Ginsberg was there, because Allen and Neal and I were all together after Allen came. I know Carolyn says she met Neal in Denver that summer, but I don’t remember seeing her there either. If I did meet her then, she couldn’t have made much of an impression. I still have a hard time believing he met her there. I may not have the most fantastic memory in the world, but I don’t remember either Jack’s or Carolyn’s name coming up when I was with Neal that summer. Neal didn’t even stay in Denver that long, because he’d planned to go to Texas with Allen, and then out to the Coast to join up with Jack.

  The evidence of letters indicates that Neal got to Denver later in March, more than a week after Lu Anne’s birthday. It’s also unclear exactly when Neal met Carolyn Robinson, the Bennington graduate then enrolled at the University of Denver.

  Carolyn Cassady, Jack Kerouac and Cathy Cassady, San Francisco, 1952. (Photo by Al Hinkle.)

  What is known is that during the summer of 1947, Neal was doing his best to share himself with three different lovers—Lu Anne, Carolyn, and Allen Ginsberg—while attempting to keep each one from knowing the depth of his involvement with the others. Clearly, from Lu Anne’s insistence that she didn’t even see Carolyn in Denver (although Neal’s pal Al Hinkle says they did meet briefly in a social encounter at Carolyn’s hotel room), Neal had compartmentalized his life to an extraordinary degree. Neal also managed to keep Lu Anne away from all the wild adventures, the big parties and swapping of sexual partners, that Kerouac chronicled in On the Road. Eventually Lu Anne and Allen came to share the same bed with Neal—and while not totally happy with the arrangement, neither seems to have felt excessively threatened by the other. But when Carolyn walked in unexpectedly one day and found Neal in bed with Allen and Lu Anne—with Neal in his usual position, in the middle—the sight horrified her so much that she ran out the door and headed straight for the West Coast.

  A lot of what followed is murky. Different players have left different versions. Carolyn Cassady went to Los Angeles to get a job as a costume designer in the film industry, was told she’d have to wait for an opening, and then went to live in San Francisco in the meantime. Carolyn has written that Neal begged her forgiveness for the sexual contretemps with Allen and Lu Anne in Denver, couldn’t wait to join her in San Francisco and resume their love affair, and showed up at her place of work on October 4—after which she took him home to her apartment in the Richmond District and they began living together with plans to marry as soon as he could get his marriage to Lu Anne annulled.

  There are a lot of problems with Carolyn’s scenario. The biggest one is that the evidence of letters shows that Neal Cassady was in New York City on October 4. After Jack left Denver for San Francisco in August 1947, Neal drove with Allen Ginsberg down to William Burroughs’s farm in New Waverly, Texas. After various misadventures down there with Burroughs and the infamous New York junkie Herbert Huncke, Neal drove Burroughs and Huncke to New York with a load of Burroughs’s homegrown pot. They left New Waverly on September 29 and got to New York on October 2. Originally, Neal had planned to stay in New York with the hope that Allen could get him into Columbia; but Allen, feeling that Neal had jilted him, had left from Houston on a ship to Dakar, Africa. Nevertheless, Neal did stay in New York till almost the end of October, and didn’t get back to San Francisco until early November 1947.

  Although Neal did move in with Carolyn soon after hitting San Francisco, the circumstances seem a good deal different than Carolyn has suggested. Neal’s letters to Jack from Texas indicate that it was Carolyn who was pressuring Neal to get back together with her. “She’s written me 20 times since I’ve been here (18 days),” he wrote to Jack. “See what a persistent cat she is.” He also told Jack that she was “too middle class” for him. In the same letter, he explained that Carolyn not only “insisted” he spend the winter with her, but offered him the incentive that she would be making a “Hollywood salary” with which to support him.7 Considering that Neal had also been having a lot of trouble with the police in Denver that past summer, it is not surprising that he moved on to San Francisco. But as soon as he arrived in San Francisco, he began writing Lu Anne a series of over-the-top love letters begging her to come to the Coast and join him.

  All this is not to deny that Neal felt an attraction to Carolyn, though his letters of the period seem to suggest that it was at best an ambivalent attraction. But versions from Al Hinkle and Lu Anne herself would indicate that he still intended, or at least hoped, to return to his marriage with Lu Anne. After receiving Neal’s imploring letters, Lu Anne asked an old boyfriend to drive her and her friend Lois to San Francisco, where she resumed seeing Neal almost immediately. While living with Carolyn, he got a job at a gas station, where Lu Anne would visit him every day; and he told Lu Anne he was saving up money so that he could eventually go back to New York and enroll in college there. The plan, she said, was for her to go with him to New York.

  Both Hinkle and Lu Anne relate that Neal was in a state of near panic, and great confusion, when he learned, probably in January 1948, that Carolyn was pregnant. He sought and failed to arrange an abortion for her. “It all happened very quickly,” Al said, referring to the annulment Neal obtained in Denver, just before Lu Anne’s 18th birthday, and his subsequent marriage to Carolyn. Lu Anne, no longer sure of Neal’s intentions, had started dating other men, which pushed him even further
over the edge. On his birthday, February 8, 1948, he borrowed Hinkle’s revolver, explaining to Al that the only way he could get Lu Anne to sign the annulment papers was to threaten her life. But when he confronted Lu Anne, as she tells it, he demanded she either go back to Denver with him and live with him again as his wife, or else join him in a death pact. When she refused either alternative, he took her out to the beach and raped her, then brought her back to her apartment and ordered her to pack. Lu Anne did not speak of the rape on the taped interview, though she told it to others; and she hints of it in a way on the tape, saying there are events of that day she is leaving out. In any case, she slipped out of the apartment, leaving him there alone with the gun. In an agony of indecision, he tried and failed several times to commit suicide.

  At the end of February, he made a nonstop drive to Denver with Lu Anne, to obtain the annulment before she turned 18. Carolyn’s version is that he felt his only chance for peace of mind was to marry and settle down with her. Lu Anne’s version is that Carolyn used her pregnancy to force Neal into a marriage he really didn’t want.