One and Only (17 page)

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949 was a year when great changes were beginning in America—the Cold War was deepening; the Korean War was just a year off; racial unrest was escalating rapidly toward the explosive, if nonviolent, birth of the civil rights movement only a few years later—and great changes were about to overtake the lives of Neal, Jack, and Lu Anne as well. Jack would become a published author, first with a book,
The Town and the City
, that sold only a few hundred copies, and then with a second book that became a controversial national best seller,
On the Road
. Neal too would become a national celebrity, but as the criminal hero of Jack's best seller, and the notoriety would help land him in San Quentin for two years. And Lu Anne would marry, have a baby, divorce, and go on to marry two more times—while never finding any other man she could love as fully and deeply as she did Neal Cassady.

 

It didn't take much time before Neal and I were heavily involved
again—even though my fiancé hadn't yet arrived back in town. Jack decided to return to New York, but in the meantime Jack and Neal would sometimes take me out together. Jack wrote in
On the Road
about the three of us going to hear a saxophone player at an all-black dance over in Oakland. The dance was in an all-black neighborhood, which none of us even thought about—just didn't—because in Denver there were no neighborhoods a white person couldn't go into. We weren't that racially aware, I guess, because it came as kind of a shock when we went over there with this black saxophone player, who was a friend of Neal's, and suddenly found ourselves in a hostile situation. The place wasn't too full at the time; and when we walked in, Neal immediately went up to the bandstand with his friend. Jack and I walked over to a table, and I started to sit down. I was all dressed up in heels and a suit. Just as I'm taking my seat, this black guy in back of us pulled the chair out, and I went
ploooof!
I landed right on the floor. Jack didn't know what to do. He jumped up immediately to help me up, and he was looking wildly around. We both suddenly became aware of the tension, which you could have cut with a knife. The hate in people's eyes was fierce. It was like they were thinking,
What are these intruders doing in our place?

None of us had experienced anything like that. It had never even entered our heads that the black people might not want us there. Neal was totally unaware of what was going on. I told Jack, “Just forget it. Let's sit down, and don't say anything.” But then I had to go to the restroom. We sat there, and Jack was getting more and more nervous. We were waiting for Neal to come back to the table to tell him, “Let's get the hell out of here!” But Neal wasn't coming back, so I finally got up and went into the restroom. Three black girls cornered me in there. I had to tell them I was a whore. Now, I knew absolutely nothing about whoredom! Not even the tiniest little hint of how they're supposed to act. But that was the only way
I could get out of that restroom without getting beaten up. They're asking me, “You working this territory tonight?” I said, “Well, you know, I just thought I'd drop in.” I can still remember telling Jack about this stupid conversation. “I'm just droppin' by.” I don't know what I'm saying, even. All I know is that they're not letting me out of that bathroom. They were
hot!

When we finally got ahold of Neal and told him, “Let's get the hell out of here!”—and tried to explain to him that things were not right—Neal called us crazy. He said, “You're both nuts! Don't be ridiculous!” When we walked out of there, it was like a mob scene in a movie. I wish Jack were here to tell you, because
he was as scared as I was.
You know how in those mob scenes, when someone's trying to walk through, they have to just keep shoving to get a little space in front of them? Believe me when I tell you, when we were walking out of that place, that's exactly how we went through that crowd. Thank God, this friend of Neal's was off—he was taking a break—so he went first, and then Neal, and then me, and Jack in back of me. That crowd did not want to move to let us go through. You know, there would have been plenty of room, but the people had all moved in close around us, to block our way. Jack said he thought any minute he was gonna get a knife in the ribs.

Neal would go anywhere without even thinking. But until then, none of us had ever worried about racial problems either. We'd never encountered any kind of racial anger before. In Denver, we used to go to the Rossonian, over in Five Points, which was a black area, but we never encountered that kind of hostility. And let me tell you, it was a bum experience. It scared the hell out of Jack and I. I don't think Neal really believed us even after we told him all the things that had happened while he was standing at the stage. Of course, he was loaded to begin with. But they had made it very, very clear that they didn't want any part of us in their club. We were intruders there.

In that short period before Jack took the bus back to New York, I saw them both quite often. They would come and pick me up, and we'd go wherever. I didn't get too much of a chance to talk to Jack. When he told me he was going back to New York, we both had a few tears and talked about our old plans to live together in New York. And he talked again about his coming back out here someday when we would both have our lives settled. He would have things straightened out, and I would have things straightened out. And in the meantime, the fella that I was supposedly engaged to would be back, and I would either do what I had promised—marry him—or else rid myself of the obligation—one or the other.

 

 

 

After Jack left on that bus for New York, I didn't see him again for about two and a half years. The next time I saw him was in 1952, when he was living with Neal and Carolyn on Russell Street, on Russian Hill.

Not long after Jack went back to New York, Neal and I decided to get back together again, to actually live together as a couple, and we moved into a hotel downtown. We got into this terrible fight, and he took a swing at me, but he hit the wall instead of me! Later, he would always say that was his own retribution for taking a swing at me. But anyway, he hurt his thumb pretty badly. I don't remember if I ran out of the hotel room, or if he left; but in any case, one of us left the room. Neal ran to his mother, as usual. Jack had a real mother to go to; Neal had Carolyn. After Carolyn took him to the hospital, he called
me
from the hospital—Carolyn not knowing this, of course. Then I rushed out to the hospital, and Carolyn was there in the waiting room. As soon as I saw Carolyn, I turned around and left. I don't know if she realized Neal had just called to let me know where he was; otherwise, I would have had no way of knowing what happened. I had no idea he had broken his finger. I had no idea that anything had happened.

Neal had to wear a cast for months. His thumb got infected, and he lost part of it. The whole thing went on for about a year. He hurt it again after he hurt it the first time. Neal always said, “I had no business taking a swing at you anyway.” He felt that was why the thing was causing him so much trouble. He ended up
hurting it some other way—something else happened to it—and the next thing I know, he had all these wires on it, and it was encased in plaster and everything else. He really had a bad time with that thumb.

Jack came to see him that summer, I think. That was when Carolyn threw them both out, and he and Jack drove back to New York together. Neal got involved with Diana Hansen there, got her pregnant and married her, and then divorced her in Mexico, or so he claimed. Anyway, by 1952 he was back in San Francisco, living with Carolyn and working on the railroad. They had two more children by then, Jami and John.

The next time I saw Jack was when Neal brought him over to see my baby, Annie Ree, who was a just a little over a year old. And then I saw him, met him, one afternoon—I don't know if Neal ever knew about it, if Jack ever told him about it. It took place one afternoon, right around the corner from my house, when I lived on College Avenue and Mission Street. It was just kind of a sweet time—we spent about four hours together. We met in a café, and we finally went back over to the house and talked for a while more, because I had the baby, and she was still small then. He was telling me that he thought he had things pretty well together. He wanted to know if I was happy, and if things were going right for me. Things weren't going right, but I didn't tell him anything about that. I told him that everything was fine and that I was happy with the baby. And he told me that he was getting along.

But he was troubled about his relationship with Neal and Carolyn. He said he wasn't going to stay with them much longer. He was planning on going down to Mexico to live near Burroughs. He just said he couldn't continue staying with Neal and Carolyn, but he didn't go into a lot of detail. I don't know really how long he did stay with Neal and Carolyn after that. He told me that he and Carolyn
had become involved—that Neal had kind of gone through the same scene as with Jack and I, that Neal had pushed them together. And then that it had gotten to be a tempest-in-a-teapot kind of situation. That's all he said about it. He said there were things that he had been thinking about wanting to do, and that he thought he was just ready to leave. This could have been around spring 1952, because I left San Francisco myself not too long after that, and Jack was already gone. After that day at my house, I only saw him twice more with Neal. And then I didn't see him again until he moved to Berkeley in 1957.

I saw Jack three times when he was out here in 1957. Al Hinkle and Neal and I went over to see him when he was staying in that little cottage over in Berkeley with his mother. It just happened to be the day his box of
On the Road
books arrived—none of us knew he was going to get his book that day. And of course we were all totally thrilled—
Jack's first book!
²²
—and I can still remember Jack sitting at that big old round table with the stack of books in front of him. All of us were bending over him—hovering over him—and flipping through the pages and trying to read this and read that. And Jack was going through agony—he really and truly was. He kept apologizing to us. He says, “You gotta understand now, I was mad at you here… I was mad at you here….” He was apologizing to us through the whole book, and you know we could've cared less. We were just so excited that Jack had had a book published, and I don't think any of us—at least
I
didn't—we never really thought about Jack being famous. It wasn't about fame—that wasn't
it.
What made us so happy there that day was just the togetherness and the fact that he had done it. There it was, and it was in print! But he was just completely embarrassed. I guess all of these things kept flooding
down on him. He would remember this line that he had written maybe about me, or some story about Neal, something bad Neal had done—but none of us would have taken offense. I might have called him on a couple of things; in fact, later, I found lots of little things in
On the Road
that just didn't match what I remembered.

But the discrepancies, or the things he had changed, were all he could think of—that's where his head was. He said, “Now you gotta remember, I was mad at you here—that's why I wrote that.” On another page he smiled sheepishly and said, “I know this part is just a little bit off, but I had to write it that way.” And yet he was also excited and happy over the strange coincidence that all of us wound up together on the day that he got his book. And he was eager to celebrate with us. In fact, after we had closed the book, after we'd kind of gotten our fill of going through and looking for parts about ourselves, we went over to this friend of Jack's, just to get out of the house and away from his mother. Then Jack relaxed, started becoming himself and enjoying all of us being together again. But up until then it really was a painful experience for him. I really felt sorry for him because he was feeling so ashamed. Actually, I think Al and I talked about it later. The way he'd reacted made us more eager really to read the book simply to find out why he was acting like that—why he was in such a state. Al and I had the feeling that there must really be something bad about us in there.

Because when you're going through a book like that, just reading a line here and there, you're not getting any real sense of it. Without meaning to, Jack had made us all a little more curious than we might have been otherwise. Of course, we would all have read the book in any case. Even if it had been the greatest flop in the world, we would have thought it was great, because it was our friend who had written it. But Jack was sure Neal would disapprove of it; he was in total agony from the minute Neal laid eyes on it. I mean, it was obvious
he really didn't want to show us the book—he didn't want any of us getting into the book. And if we were going to read it, he didn't want to be around when we did. He couldn't stop making excuses and apologies for different parts that he knew weren't quite right. He'd say, “You've got to understand that I had to change a few things here and there.” But none of us really cared.