Lu Anne:
I didn’t see Jack again until Neal and I went back to New York in December 1948. In the meantime, Neal went to San Francisco, got involved with Carolyn, got her pregnant, and decided to marry her. But first he had to get his marriage to me annulled.
When Neal drove me back to Denver to get our annulment, it was really the greatest trip we ever took—it truly was. We were all living in San Francisco. Neal was with Carolyn, who was like four months pregnant. We knew we had to do it quick. We only had two days before I was going to turn eighteen, and we couldn’t have gotten an annulment after that. So Neal made another one of his nonstop drives.
The judge barely gave us the annulment. Neal was all over me in the courtroom. I’m telling them that he chippied on me all the time, and he’d beat me, and I wanted this annulment. There was a woman judge, and she called us into her chambers. We’re sitting there in front of her, and Neal couldn’t keep his hands off me. She kept saying, “Are you sure you kids want an annulment? You seem like you get along quite well together.” Because Neal wasn’t with the program at all; he should’ve at least acted like he was upset. But when she kept asking us if we really wanted the annulment, Neal started laughing. He says, “No, no, no, I always chippy on her. I’m always running around with other women!” I’m telling her, “He beats me all the time!” and then Neal would give me a big kiss! It was an insane scene. This judge, she just didn’t know what was happening, but she finally gave in and we got the annulment.
We were gone for a while—ten days, or maybe a couple of weeks.
We drove back to San Francisco through another snowstorm. It seemed like we were always going through snowstorms. That trip was in March too. When we reached California, we went through the Sierras, and they were still having snow.
Neal Cassady in the driver’s seat, on the way to Bolinas, 1962. (Photo by Allen Ginsberg or Charles Plymell; courtesy of Allen Ginsberg Estate.)
PART THREE
Neal married Carolyn Robinson on April 1, 1948, in San Francisco. Through his uncle, Hinkle had already been hired to his life’s job on the Southern Pacific Railroad; impressed at his fistful of pay stubs, Neal asked Al to help him get hired too. Soon Neal was earning a good salary on the railroad, and according to his letters, seemed to be enjoying his new domestic life with Carolyn. He hadn’t written anyone during those few months of confusion and terror when he had been so torn between Carolyn and Lu Anne, but now he wrote both Jack and Allen about all his newfound pleasures. He also started work on his autobiography, which would never be finished, and which would be published posthumously as The First Third. He especially hoped Jack would consider coming out to San Francisco and getting work on the railroad too, with the idea that they could eventually live and raise families near, maybe even next door, to each other. Although Jack was still working on his first big novel, The Town and the City, he had no money and no real life of his own. He was living with his mother, Mémère, and his sister Caroline and her husband and newborn son in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.
But Neal could not get Lu Anne out of his system. He grew tormented again when she became seriously involved with a seaman named Ray Murphy, and was stunned when she accepted Murphy’s marriage proposal. He seemed unable to believe that she would actually go through with the marriage. But Lu Anne, as if to insist further on the finality of their break, went home to Denver to await Murphy’s return from a long sea voyage. In a letter to Kerouac in June, Neal made a not-so-veiled reference to Lu Anne as “my cause of neurosis.”
On September 7, 1948, Carolyn gave birth to a daughter, Cathleen Joanne Cassady. Neal wrote Jack that she was his fifth child, but only the first one that he would actually keep and raise. Neal seems to have loved the baby a great deal; but in early December, when he and Hinkle were laid off from the railroad, he took the family savings, bought a brand-new maroon Hudson automobile, and asked Hinkle to take a trip with him.
According to Hinkle, Neal never said what the ultimate destination was, though he mentioned “maybe going back to Denver for a while.” Although Neal never stated as much, it seems what he was really after was reconnecting with Lu Anne. Because he had been working longer, Al would have unemployment compensation to live on; Neal would leave Carolyn with nothing to live on. Since they needed extra money for the road, Al asked his girlfriend Helen to come along. Helen agreed, so long as Al married her—which he did. In a travel bureau in San Francisco, they also picked up another rider to help with gas money, a sailor bound for Kansas. No one seems to have worried about the fact that, with his limited funds, Neal had chosen to add a radio to the car instead of a heater.
Tired of Neal’s smoking pot with Al, as well as his refusals to stop for food or rest, Helen began complaining quite vociferously. Neal solved that problem by dropping her off in Tucson. Having more scruples than Neal, Al at least gave her his railroad pass, and told her to ride to New Orleans, where she could stay with William Burroughs and his wife, Joan. Al promised they’d pick her up in a week. Then, in the middle of New Mexico, and much to the sailor’s chagrin, Neal turned the Hudson due north for Denver. The sailor quickly bailed out, and their new destination—after picking up a certain blonde female who was now wearing an engagement ring—became New York. Of course, there would be a slight detour to North Carolina to pick up Neal’s “blood brother,” as he had taken to calling Jack.
Lu Anne:
Neal was driving cross-country with Al Hinkle, and he came and got me in Denver. It wasn’t snowing in Denver yet when Neal came after me, so I always thought it was around Thanksgiving, but Al swears it was just before Christmas. In any case, we headed straight for Rocky Mount, North Carolina, to pick up Jack. It took us about six or seven days to get there.
Believe me, that trip across the country was a test of endurance for all of us. It was a grueling thing. I don’t remember if Jack wrote much about that or not. Again we had to drive with the windows down because of the frost—and whoever wasn’t driving, the other two had to sit pressed against each other. Just to keep warm we had to hug each other. I mean, we practically had to crawl inside each other, because it was cold, cold, that winter!8 And then, somewhere along the way, we slid off the road and landed in a damn ditch!
Neal got out, cussing of course. Any inconvenience, anything that disturbed the plan, drove him absolutely crazy. He ran off looking for help; and I don’t know where in the world he dug him up, but within a very short time here he came with a farmer and these two horses. And they pulled us out of the ditch. We might have set there for two days, because it really was out in the middle of nowhere.
So we went on our way, but it wasn’t long before we ran out of money for gas. I mean, we literally didn’t have any money. We ended up pawning everything we had except my diamond engagement ring and my watch.9 That money ran out too. The only way we could make it across the country was to keep picking up people, hitchhikers, and getting a couple of bucks from them. Or sometimes we pulled into a gas station, and Neal knew how to run the pump. He’d put in some gas and run it back to zero, put in some more and run it back to zero again, quick before the guy got out and could see what we were doing.
Another time, we picked up an old wino. He wasn’t really that old, but he seemed old to us at the time. He was probably in his forties. He told us he could get us some money for gas if Neal drove him home. So, of course, we went like two hundred miles out of our way and brought him home, and it turned out there was no money. That was when I went foraging in his room. It was the filthiest place I’ve ever been in. It was just a horror. And while Neal was out with this guy trying to find some money, Al and I found these old potatoes underneath the sink. They weren’t rotten, but they were old and soft, sprouted, and we found an old greasy frying pan to cook them in. He had a little two-burner stove, so I burnt the pan off to clean it as much as possible, and then I fried those damn potatoes. They tasted so good! The truth is, they were lousy. I probably couldn’t even stand them if somebody se
rved them to me now, but you should have seen the three of us eating them. You would have thought it was a gourmet meal! Oh God, we were so hungry!
We didn’t get any money from the wino. That was the first and only time—except for myself—that I ever saw Neal use physical violence on anyone. Neal was not a violent person, and most of the time he didn’t get mad enough to use physical violence—except with me. And when Neal would hit me, that was simply emotion. I mean, that’s the way it was with us. It was either loving or fighting, one of the two, with us—especially at that age. But when the wino couldn’t come up with any money, Neal was livid. That was the one time he was mad enough to hurt someone, and he hit the guy. I know it shocked Al and I so much, because we knew that under normal circumstances Neal would never think of hitting another person.
Gabrielle Kerouac and Caroline Kerouac, at home, 1940s. (Courtesy of Paul Blake, Jr.)
What a motley crew we were, my God, by the time we got to Jack’s house in North Carolina! Jack’s sister had a turkey on the table, which may be another reason I’ve got Thanksgiving in my head. I had on a pair of Neal’s white gas-station coveralls—which he also had on a pair of. We’d been in the car all those days, and I didn’t have many clothes to begin with.
Jack wasn’t embarrassed at all. He was absolutely fantastic. It was one of the things that impressed me, because I hadn’t seen him in so long. Neal had been back to New York on his own, because he had gone down to Texas to be with Allen and William Burroughs, and then he’d driven Burroughs’s load of pot to New York.10 In any case, Jack’s welcome was the most welcome thing in the world—not one bit of embarrassment at all. “Come in! Come in! Come in!” he kept saying. “You’re finally here!” And he was so happy, there wasn’t a trace of “Gee, Mom, I’m sorry” in his voice. Just welcome, total welcome. Neal was usually kind of oblivious to the impression he might be making, but Al and I both felt a little embarrassed in front of Jack’s mother and sister. There we were, so crummy and dirty, and we were hungry too, oh my God! When I think back to it, anything they offered us would have sounded fantastic. And when Jack said, “Come on in and eat!” we were so happy we couldn’t believe it, but we were also a little afraid to take him up on it. But Neal immediately headed straight into the kitchen. There was never any embarrassment on his part in things like that, because when someone said, “Come on in and eat,” Neal took them at their word. That was one of the good things about Neal. He accepted what people said, until they showed him different. Neal just couldn’t move fast enough getting to that food! Al and I sort of trailed hesitantly behind him, looking over his shoulder at the turkey and all the trimmings. Oh my God, were we hungry!
This was the first time I’d met Jack’s mother, and I was scared to death of her for what I’d heard. I hadn’t met her previous to North Carolina. I had heard that she didn’t welcome Jack’s friends too readily—and especially people of Neal’s type! Neal had told me that she and he had not gotten along too well in the past. It might not even have been anything that she voiced, but just something that Neal felt. But he at least thought he was not too welcome at her house. So naturally, if you’re with someone you know isn’t welcome, you don’t feel too at ease; but she really and truly was very gracious to us. For total strangers to come walking into your home like that, she certainly didn’t treat us as unwelcome. Al and I both mentioned later how comfortable she’d made us feel. I was prepared for her to tell us to “get the hell out!”—but that didn’t happen at all.
The kindness I sensed was just in the way she acted toward us. I don’t remember her talking to us very much. As for his sister, Nin, I only saw her just that one day when we were there; and as I remember, she just sort of reflected his mother, really. I don’t remember feeling any particular out-of-the-way welcome from Nin, but I don’t really have much of a recollection of her. She always seemed to blend in with his mother in my mind. I understand that Nin died fairly young, even before Jack. I think it must have been hard on Gabrielle when Nin died, especially since it took place in the sixties, when Jack was drinking so heavily. But Neal told me a secret—he told me that Jack’s mom used to drink with him!
Now at first I had some doubts whether this was true. Neal could sometimes be cruel, and at first I didn’t believe him. I told Neal, “You’re telling me a story!”—because in my memory she certainly was not the kind of woman who’d sit and hoist a few! But Neal said, “I’m telling you that she gets loaded with Jack!” The thing was that she would rather sit and get loaded with Jack than have him go out to a bar and get drunk with someone else. Having known her the way she was, how close she felt to Jack, I could well understand that. But I still thought it was carrying things a bit far, for her to start drinking heavily at her age. Neal insisted, “It’s the truth—she drinks right along with Jack.” It’s hard for me to imagine her like that—drinking her Southern Comfort, which is ungodly sweet stuff, unless you drink it with soda and lemon. That was the first thing I ever tried to drink, by the way, which is why I remember it so much! When I was about fifteen, I got sick as a dog on it.
When we were in North Carolina, Jack asked us to move some furniture to New York for his mother. It was his sister’s furniture; she was moving and giving the furniture to her mom. So Neal, Al, and I agreed to take the furniture to New York, to Jack’s mom’s apartment, and of course Jack had to come with us, to show us where to put the stuff. That was probably why his mother acted a little more kindly toward us, because Neal was doing her a service at least. On the first trip, we could only take part of the load. Then Jack and Neal turned around and went right back to North Carolina and loaded up the rest of it. I’m pretty sure they put it in a little trailer, because the Hudson certainly couldn’t have carried all the furniture. They brought his mother back to New York on that second trip too.
While Jack and Neal made that trip back to North Carolina, Al Hinkle and I went down to the local pawn shop, and this time I pawned my diamond engagement ring and my watch too. Al and I were staying up at his mother’s apartment, and I remember leaving the apartment that day and walking it seemed like miles before we found the pawn shop. It wasn’t an easy thing for me to do, and I never did get either one of them back. But at least we had a few bucks now to live on, and we wouldn’t be broke when his mother got back. But I ended up being terribly embarrassed anyway, because the day they got back I had clothes hanging all over his mother’s apartment. I was trying to wash all my and Neal’s and Al’s clothes out, so that at least we would have some clean clothes, and I had them hanging through the kitchen and the bathroom and everywhere! Here we were in someone else’s apartment, and it was like we were taking over the place. But again, his mom was really very nice about it. She didn’t get mad at all.
Al Hinkle with pipe, no date. (Photo courtesy of Al Hinkle.)
During that period, while we stayed with Jack and his mom, Jack was writing a great deal. I always remember him sitting at his typewriter there in the apartment. If I’m not mistaken, he was still working on The Town and the City then.11 I also remember him working on a story about Neal, but he had turned Neal into the son of a rancher from California. Neal told me about it. He said Jack had given him an Ed Uhl type of history. Jack was using Ed Uhl’s life on a Colorado ranch for background about the character based on Neal.12
Of course we couldn’t stay at Jack’s apartment forever. It was way out in Queens. After we’d been there a while, we went on down into Manhattan and moved into Allen Ginsberg’s apartment. When we first got there, Allen wasn’t working; he was with us a great deal. But then he got a job working nights at a newspaper. All that he had was a living room with a couch and a Japanese table, and then a little tiny bedroom about as big as a bathroom, with just a single cot in it. We were sleeping in shifts, so to speak.
Allen Ginsberg, circa 1952. (Photo by John Kingsland.)
Allen would come home from work at maybe six or seven in the morning, and climb in with Neal and I. God only knows how the three
of us managed on that little cot, but Neal was trying to be generous with his attention. So Allen would have his head on one shoulder, and I would have my head on the other. But there was no place for Al Hinkle except the couch; and Al being as tall as he was, he had his problems on that damn couch! But we managed. And by the time Allen got his job, we were getting ready to leave anyway.
I remember cooking spaghetti for us in the dishpan several times. I had to go down the hall to borrow any kind of cleaning implements, brooms and such as that, to keep the apartment clean. But we had some good times that trip. Jack was there constantly. You might as well say that he was living with us. He must have gone home once in a while, but he was sleeping here and there, making whatever arrangements he needed to, so that he could spend ninety-nine percent of his time with us.
I got a job working downtown, at the drugstore next to Radio City Music Hall, but it didn’t last very long. We had a party one night, and I got loaded. Of course there was always some booze, but that night there was some pot too. There weren’t many drugs around—nobody was really into drugs, unless you want to consider pot a drug. Of course they were all doing pot pretty heavily in those days. I remember talking to Lucien Carr that night, and Al Hinkle was there with some little girl that he had been trying to make all that evening at the party. Hal Chase might have been there too. They knew I had to go to work the next morning, so they gave me one of those Benzedrine inhalers to perk me up. I was supposed to be at work at seven o’clock in the morning, and Hal and some of the others took me down. I was in absolutely no condition to go to work. They got me down there, and we went to a restaurant across the street, and they all came to the conclusion that I wasn’t quite ready to go to work! So they took me over to John Clellon Holmes’s apartment on Lexington Avenue.
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