3

THE ROAD

“What’s your road, man?—holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow.”

—DEAN MORIARTY IN ON THE ROAD

Jack Kerouac, Denver, 1950. Photo courtesy of Justin Brierly.

JACK HAD BEEN at work on The Town and the City for eight months when Neal Cassady burst onto the New York scene in December 1946, his teenage bride, Luanne, in tow.

Hal Chase, Allen’s roommate from Denver, had described Neal to Ginsberg and the others as a self-aware representative of the American underclass, a reform-school punk with an eye for poetry. From Hal’s letters and from conversations during Chase’s summer vacations, Neal had decided that Manhattan was exactly the place for him, a city of poets. In much the same way, Jack yearned to head west to the frontier that he imagined remained there. This is the basic equation of the friendship between Jack and Neal that turned Kerouac in the direction of his best work.

There was an instantaneous understanding between the two men, who, in photographs taken in the early fifties, resembled each other so closely that it is difficult to tell which is Jack, which is Neal.

Neal was four years younger than Jack, born to a wandering family that the Depression would scatter. He had few warm memories of that family. His half-brothers by his mother’s first marriage were a good deal older, and they routinely beat Neal’s father bloody whenever he came home drunk. Neal recalled his brother Jimmy as a bully, and his younger sister only as a dim memory. When Neal was six his parents separated and his half-sisters were sent to orphanages. Each summer, Neal was left to the care of his father.

Neal Cassady, Sr., was “the barber” to his fellow denizens of Larimer Street, Denver’s skid row, but, aside from manning a third chair at a friend’s shop on busy Saturdays, he really followed neither that trade nor any other. Instead he drank.

After the separation Neal’s mother stayed on in Denver, and Neal returned to her occasionally until her death when he was ten, but his loyalty was with his father, who offered a world of saloons, flophouses, and mission meals purchased with a hymn. Neal grew up canny and street-wise, turning his remarkable mind to the immediate tasks of survival for himself and his father.

Neal reached out for whatever he wanted, whether it was a girl or a car. He was unburdened by doubts about motive or method. He bragged that he had his first girl when he was nine and stole his first car when he was fourteen. It was the cars that got him into trouble. In a typical incident Neal “borrowed” his boss’ car and, when it broke down, hailed a policeman for help. The car had been reported stolen and Neal’s boss pressed charges.

In Neal’s conversation and in Jack’s fiction Cassady spent five years of his youth and young manhood in jail, but this is an exaggeration. The five years beginning in 1940, when Neal was fourteen, were checkered with convictions and reformatory terms, including one successful escape, but the total time served was less than a year.

When he was sixteen Neal met the man who would supply the roundabout link to Jack Kerouac and his friends. Justin Brierly was inspecting one of his rent-houses in Denver when he encountered Neal in a hallway.

Cassady regarded him as an intruder. “How did you get in here?” he asked. “This is my house.”

“I’m sorry,” Brierly said, holding up the key. “This is my house.”

Brierly, then in his midthirties, was a handsome attorney who sat on the school board and was active in Denver art and music circles. He was involved in formal efforts to aid truant boys and he served Columbia University, his alma mater, by screening local applicants for admission. This last role was his connection to Hal Chase, Ginsberg’s friend.

Neal was naked at the time of their surprise encounter, and Brierly cannot but have been struck by Cassady’s piercing blue eyes, his chiseled features and his hard, well-muscled body. After a few minutes of talk he also was impressed with Neal’s energy and intelligence.

By 1944, when he was sentenced to ten months in the Colorado State Reformatory at Buena Vista, Neal had come to rely on Brierly for a variety of favors. He wrote, asking the lawyer to cover an unpaid bill at the bar where Neal’s brother Jack had worked before joining the Army, and he chided Brierly for failing to cadge permission from the warden for Neal to visit a medical specialist in Denver, a trip that would have amounted to a leave.

In the dense block of rules and questions printed at the top of the prison stationery, Neal explained his relationship with Justin by the word “friend.”

Neal’s friendships and sexual relationships held a quality of transaction: something Cassady wanted in exchange for something the others needed, hard-pressed though they might be to give it a name. For Kerouac and Ginsberg—although not for Burroughs, who remained unimpressed—Neal provided an example of instinct in action. In exchange, Neal wanted from them instruction in how to express his feelings. For Neal, in this instance, the transaction was incomplete. Aside from a few fragments of autobiography and his voluminous letters, he did not become the writer he said he wanted to be.

But Jack found in Neal the principal character for the novel that his closing scene of The Town and the City pointed toward, the road book, and Neal also gave Jack the method of telling that story. As Kerouac once put it, “The discovery of a style of my own based on spontaneous get-with-it came after reading the marvelous free-narrative letters of Neal Cassady, a great writer who happens also to be the Dean Moriarty of On the Road.”

When Kerouac and Cassady became friends late in 1946 and early in 1947, Jack was working on the idealized version of his boyhood which fills the early pages of The Town and the City, pages Neal read over Jack’s shoulder as he typed. When he began his own writing exercises with Jack as tutor Neal set down his boyhood in letters meant to please Kerouac, and in those written with the help of marijuana Neal abandoned the etiquette of the “friendly letter” as taught at Denver’s East High School, piling impression upon impression, all of them tumbling off the page with the clatter of life itself.

A few nights after Neal arrived in New York he seduced a trembling Allen Ginsberg after an evening wandering across New York with Kerouac and other company, and the two pledged undying love. However authentic that love was—and Neal’s letters to Allen indicate that it was genuine—Cassady’s pansexuality differed from Allen’s confirmed, if uncomfortable, homosexuality, a difference that led to a good deal of pain for Allen in the years ahead.

At one point when Ginsberg was imploring Neal to experiment with a monogamous, gay life together Neal patiently explained that his feelings for Allen transcended physical sex, and that the ideal situation would be one in which the two of them lived together with a woman whom they both could love.

Because Ginsberg, Burroughs, Huncke, and others in the circle are homosexuals, it has become fashionable to assume that Jack and Neal were gay men, too repressed to act out their love for each other openly, a theory ratified by the fact that both men did, on occasion, sleep with other men. There is no evidence, documentary or otherwise, to support the notion. However, it would be difficult to imagine two human beings, sex and sexuality quite aside, more intensely interested in the contents of each other’s minds than Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady.

Throughout the late forties, as The Town and the City accumulated page by page, startling Allen and the others with its bulk and the precision of its recollections, Neal gave Jack a focus for his impulse to stand up from the typewriter, kiss Mémêre good-bye, and go on the road.

From a distance of two thousand miles, Larimer Street, a dismal, redbrick dead end, glowed for Jack with the leftover magic of the West and the roads that led in that direction. In the summer of 1947, six months after he met Cassady, Jack went west for the first time, to Denver. Neal was involved in a bisexual quadrangle that summer and had little time for Kerouac, but the trip gave Jack a chance to see the scenes of Neal’s childhood and young manhood and, the following winter, to try on Cassady’s prose style for a possible fit, writing about the easy society of the poolhalls in a narrative which was a discarded beginning to On the Road.

On the Road, the book which finally brought Jack fame and a degree of material success, existed in his mind and under that title for four years before its composition and for ten years before its publication. It was not until 1951, as John Clellon Holmes has described, that Jack sat down and simply wrote the book, as Neal would have written one of his long letters. The book’s center, its energy, is Neal himself: Neal driving, Neal stealing cars, Neal talking his way out of a tight corner, Neal and his women. (Neal and his men were left out.)

Thus, the book is a prolonged meditation on the subject of Neal Cassady and, even at that, could not contain all that Jack wanted to write about this remarkable figure. For example, some of the material about Cassady which Jack wrote during his attempts to begin On the Road during the 1940s became the opening of Visions of Cody, written as Visions of Neal. The latter book was completed with rhapsodic variations on a documentary record of the two men’s time together in 1952 with Neal’s last wife, Carolyn, a time when the Cassadys were more or less settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. From that point on Jack traveled alone, alternating between compulsive wandering and a return to the home—Mémêre’s, Nin’s, the Cassadys’—where he wrote the bulk of his legend.

On the Road is the portrait of a man racing to make up for any and all lost time, a portrait of Neal. It gives the impression of a single journey that sweeps back and forth across America. In truth it was several journeys, consolidated at the behest of the book’s editors, who, noting the absence of solid motivation for the trips in the first place—Jack’s accurate recollection provided fiction stranger than fiction was expected to be—insisted upon compression.

On the Road opens with Neal’s first visit to New York in 1946, follows Jack to Denver in 1947, and on to solo adventures in California, but the book is at its best when Neal is onstage and the two are on the road together.

Their first trip took them from the East Coast to San Francisco by way of the Burroughs’ household in New Orleans in early 1949. Later that year, there was a trip from San Francisco to New York and, the final episode of On the Road, a journey from New York to Mexico in 1950, The motivation for the trips which On the Road’s editors had sought was, in fact, the complicated sex-life of the book’s principal character, Dean Moriarty—Neal. It is present, of course, between the lines of that novel, but Jack’s record of the time did little to convey directly the passions involved, perhaps because they were unfathomable to the principal actors in the story at the time.

Instead Jack centered on accurate description of Neal’s world, and Kerouac’s summer alone in Denver in 1948 offered him a chance to range Larimer Street and reconstruct the world of the flophouses and poolhalls where Cassady had grown up.

In Jack’s homemade mythography Neal’s poolhall cronies took on the quality of the hero’s companions in an ancient epic. One such companion was “Tommy Snark” of On the Road, “Tom Watson” of Visions of Cody, a slump-shouldered youth with a soft voice, large, hurt-looking eyes and a nearly unbeatable pool-hustling style. He has remained in Denver for the rest of his life, pursuing his skills with a cue, at cards, and at the track. His real name is Jim Holmes.

Jim Holmes:

I knew Neal very, very well, and for years before the other people involved knew him. I felt that there was a little feeling of, oh, perhaps jealousy or some sort of hostility between Jack and I when we first met in relation to the amount of time that Neal was going to spend between the two of us. Not that I really cared, but somehow I think he did, and so we never went out of our way to be around each other very often.

I’m not a very big person, and so I have to compete in things of skill. I played table tennis before I played pool. As soon as I got good at one thing I would start on something else, and so at the end of my table tennis playing, I started playing pool, and I was very good at playing pool. I thought I was the best pool player in Denver, but I imagine that was a matter of opinion.

Neal used to come in and watch me play. Finally he approached me and said, “Well, come on and let’s get something to eat,” and I went down and I thought he didn’t have any money, which I found out later was usually the case, and so I bought him something to eat. The man was very, very energetic and very personable and he would—I don’t think intentionally—but he would actually flatter you, your ego, in such a way that he would almost immediately be liked. Like when I bought him the meal, you would think it was the greatest thing that ever happened in the world. Of course, that makes you feel good, and so almost immediately we became friends.

Regardless of what you did or who you were, Neal approached everyone over the years the same way. For example, if you were a young girl and he was interested in you and you were going to college, immediately: why that’s the greatest thing that ever happened. You know, “You really are going to college?” and all that sort of thing. I don’t think it was a put-on. It was a technique, however. But it wasn’t a con. He really respected the individual.

And it would be such little trivial things. If you had a record player at home, well, “Would you take me over to your house to listen to your records? I don’t have a record player. I haven’t had one in years. I know I would just love to hear so-and-so.” And he really would want to hear so-and-so.

But at the same time, the people that he’s talking to, he really puts them on, too. It was just his way of doing things. I think that this was a natural gift, so to speak.

The man was very energetic, he was very handsome—had a strong body, before he dissipated it—and he could go for days without sleeping or resting or anything. And wanted to. And didn’t need drugs or anything to do it. What he wanted to do was just be active and move constantly, and the only time that he lived that I know of, except on rare occasions, was right now.

Tomorrow meant nothing. I mean tomorrow like tomorrow, Wednesday or Thursday, would mean something, but tomorrow like two weeks from now didn’t mean anything to him. He never planned his life in terms of goals, like a five-year goal or something, or even a two-week goal. He might in terms of next Sunday, but never any future dates like most people do. He lived right now, right at the moment. And he hardly ever lived in the past unless he was relating an incident that had happened to him that applied to what was taking place now. And it was just a natural gift.

The man was fantastic! You couldn’t hardly help but love the man, and I mean that literally. Jack idolized Neal. In fact, almost everybody did. Except my grandmother, of course.

Neal came to live with us and he had been in jail for stealing an automobile or something, joyriding, and he had a crew-cut haircut. Well, back in my grandmother’s generation short hair was bad, where in this generation long hair is bad. And so she said, “We can’t have this boy coming in here with short hair. What will the neighbors think?” And so I said, “Well, we’ll just have to let the neighbors take care of their own problems.” And so Neal moved in, and somehow or other they didn’t get along too well. It was never anything unpleasant or anything, but there always was this conflict that maybe he was going to lead me astray or something.

Neal could talk forever. Not that he wasn’t a good listener as well. And he could paint pictures with words. Kerouac, in my opinion, was as much of a reporter as he was a writer. He would take a situation as it happened and report it as accurately as possible, even using the same words, if possible, and then he assumed, of course, that over a given period of time that the motives would come out naturally, as they do when you report. Kerouac was pretty accurate. It might not have taken place in the same order, in sequence, but that’s about what happened. It was a little exaggerated and flowered, of course, but that’s about the way it happened.

Neal had problems, of course, and he was pretty sad. That might be why he was so talkative and concentrated so much on now, because he had a very strong death wish. He didn’t really want to commit suicide, but he felt that he was going to, and he kind of hoped it would be in an automobile.

One time, for example, we were in California and I think we were driving toward his home. And there was always something going wrong with his car, which I think was a kind of omen. The lights went out, and he said, “Well, we’ll just follow this car,” the car up in front of us. I said, “Well, fine.” And so we followed the car and started going out with no lights—it’s about one o’clock at night—and he starts going about sixty miles an hour and half hoping that he would run into another vehicle. I know what he has in his mind, and I didn’t like that, of course. So I told him to stop and let me out. If he was going to kill himself, I didn’t want any part of it.

He wouldn’t, and so I thought, “The best thing I can do is jump out.” I knew that would be very dangerous, but I figured the worst I could do was break an arm, or something. So I opened the door and started to jump, and just about the time that I was crouched and ready to go, he said, “Wait, wait…” So I shut the door and we went over to the side of the road and talked for a few minutes. I said, “I’d like to walk into town.” And he said, “I really will wait for another car and follow up.”

I remember another time that he thought that since he was going to kill himself anyway that somebody should make a profit out of it. And I thought, “Well, this is kind of ridiculous.” But I wanted to see what he would do. He said, “Why don’t we go down to the insurance company and write out a policy—a double-indemnity policy—and then I can borrow Bob Speak’s car, and then when I take his car and run into this other vehicle, you can all make some money.” So I went along with him and we went up there and talked to the insurance man, but I don’t believe we ever put any money down. But then he went and talked to Bob Speak, this other character, and Bob wouldn’t let him use his car, so this idea passed.

His death, as it turned out, may very well have been on purpose. I don’t know.

I actually lived either with Neal in the same room or within a block of Neal for maybe three or four years. We were very, very close.

He would describe things that went on with his father or an incident or something that took place, but he would never get down to basic things like love and that sort of thing. I’m sure he loved his father in a way, but he could never live with him or anything. It was somebody that he would like to see about every year or so, just to see how he was getting along.

And Neal did write. I read, I don’t know if it was two or three chapters of a book that he’d started. As a matter of fact, it was very humorous. He had never gotten past the house that he lived in in about three chapters, and every other word of this house had some sort of a sexual meaning. When the house would creak in a certain way it would remind him of a woman. He got about three chapters of this humorous house and nothing’s happened except all these things in this house are just simply a woman to him, really. The house, in his imagination, does everything that a woman would do.

His whole life revolved around sex. It may not have been sex in the physical sense all the time, but there was a great deal of that. A lot of it had to do with prestige. We were all young people, and young men, sex to them is a sort of plaything. Before you get serious, of course. He would do such things as date two women and have them both at different hotel rooms the same night, that sort of thing. And try to see if he couldn’t satisfy both of them and keep running back and forth without either girl knowing that he had the other one. More than anything else sex was a game for him, and also it was proof of manhood, I guess. And so there was an awful lot of sex.

I think that one of the reasons that he had to be so active and to do things—talk so much and be with people all the time and have sex all the time—was to keep his mind occupied because of this death wish that he had. He didn’t want to think about dying, and that was in the back of his mind all the time. Many of these people, though, I guess didn’t know it.

Neal never settled down. Now he might look like it. He worked here in Denver at various jobs and stuff, but it was just something that he did. Even if you’re not settled down—suppose you’re on the road all the time like a salesman, but if your mind is settled down and at home and you’re thinking about the wife and the children and that sort of thing, you’re much more settled down than a guy that’s there at home, working, and his mind is off somewhere else all the time. Neal was never settled in that sense. His mind was always somewhere. His mind was always here, now, but I mean he wasn’t home very often, and when he wasn’t home, he wasn’t thinking of home, he was thinking about whatever it was he was doing at the time.

Jack would have liked to have lived the life of Neal, and in a sense he did. He imitated Neal. It’s awful hard to explain Neal Cassady because you just don’t run into people like that. You just never see them, somebody who is willing to give you their undivided attention for hours at a time. How many people do you ever know that will do that? For nothing?

It wasn’t a con insofar as I would go through a certain amount of lying and pretext to get you to play me a game of pool. It wasn’t that sort of thing at all. Neal didn’t care whether he won the pool game or he lost it. It was the fact that he went through this process and played pool.

Neal was the kind of guy who could do more with, say, two to fifty dollars than any man I ever knew. He could make it last longer, go farther with it and so on, but if he got over fifty dollars, say he had five hundred, he would get rid of four hundred and fifty dollars so quickly you couldn’t believe it—until he got down to the fifty. And then that fifty dollars, it would last longer than you could believe, too.

He had a theory that the third favorite would come in at the track every day. And the third favorite did come in almost every day. So he would go out to the track and play the third favorite every day, and it would come in, and then he would continue to play till it would come in the next time. And then there would be a period of three days during the year, of course, when it wouldn’t come in at all, and he would lose all the money he made—plus.

Now you could do it if you qualified it and you had a lot of patience and you took, say, the four best trainers and the four best jockeys, and when you had the best trainer and the best jockey on the third favorite and played him, you would come out at the end of the year with a slight profit. But Neal just simply played the third favorite, regardless.

If it was less than fifty dollars, he would never lose it, but anything over fifty dollars, he had to lose. We went out to the track and he’s sittin’ there, and he said, “Can you imagine that this must be one of the most wonderful things that ever happened to me? Here we are. Just think about you and I [sic] being here, and we’re experiencing this.” I thought, “Hell, are we experiencing it now?” And he said, “It’s been almost two and a half days and the third favorite hasn’t come in yet. Isn’t that wonderful?” And I thought, “Yeah, it’s a little unusual, but I wouldn’t put it into the wonderful class.”

But to him it was living an event. Even though it was a trivial event, he was living it. It had happened. The money didn’t make any difference. The fact that he’d been losing for three days didn’t make any difference.

And so my whole point is, even though it looked like he was doing all this conning, that wasn’t his motive. He wasn’t interested in conning people. He was interested in the thing happening. He was a natural Buddhist, if that makes him a Buddhist, because that’s the way he was—perfect.

Neal’s high school friends included both the rich and the poor of Denver, and one of the other boys who arranged for Neal to stay with his own family during the early 1940s was Bill Tomson, who stayed in Denver to build a successful retail lumber business.

Bill Tomson:

I met Neal through some friends at East High School, and he later lived with me for about three months in my parents’ home. Then our relationship was a fairly strong one. I was the youngest of the group. Neal was four years older than I am.

I remember reading in one of Jack’s stories something about Jimmie Holmes’ gang or something like that. I think that’s either a misconception on his part or a literary thing, because there wasn’t any gang, either in the literal or any other sense in terms of working together towards some common end. It was rather a loose relationship of close friends and that was about it. The friends involved Jimmie and Al Hinkle and Neal and myself, and we all had friends other than that, outside that situation basically based on the pool game and movies and cars. Also, we were all at that time reading the philosophers—Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and so forth.

I think Neal probably picked up his intellectual interests from Justin Brierly. I think Neal searched for a father kind of relationship and security in almost everyone he met, and Justin was a rather pedantic, but whimsical, bright teacher who took a tremendous interest in Neal. Neal had gone to East High School prior to going to Buena Vista Reformatory and met Justin at that time. When he got out Justin took quite an interest in him. He wanted to try and get Neal some sort of academic structure.

I thought that in part Neal used homosexual relationships to gain favor and to continue a relationship that was otherwise beneficial to him. I don’t think that it was as casual a thing for Neal as some people might think. I think he viewed it totally differently and didn’t take the same things from it as he did with girls.

I think Jack was probably just totally amazed in the beginning with Neal’s energy. Neal was an extremely hyper person—very, very hyper, very energetic. He was exceedingly persistent for things that he wanted to do in the short run, just very persistent. He came to New York probably feeling a little bit uneasy to meet all of Hal Chase’s friends. I think he used that energy to bolster any feelings of insecurity, to show that he could meet head-on these people at Columbia.

Neal was seriously affected by Jack. I remember getting a letter from Neal when he first went to New York, and he was calling me “younger brother” and Jack the older brother. So Neal looked up to Jack for his tenacity and for his intellectual competence, as well as finding companionship in Jack’s energy.

I think that all of us were pretty much malcontent in the sense of looking at society. Not alienation, exactly. It just seemed to me at that point in life you’re ravenous, going around eating big gulps of other people’s ideas and then trying to compare that with a fairly youthful idea of reality. And bang! All of a sudden you’re acting differently, doing things differently than other people on the street—and thinking. I don’t think that people were considering starting movements. I think that it was part of the intense life, that kind of compassion and intellectualization that was the “historical” thing. It was the energy of that moment. I don’t think there was a great deal of looking into the future.

When Neal went to New York late in 1946 he took along his fifteen-year-old wife Luanne, and his close friendships with Jack and Allen—a sexual relationship in Allen’s case—were deferred until she returned to Denver two months later.

Luanne, a blonde with masses of curls and a movie starlet’s good looks, appeared as a “child bride” to such members of Jack’s set as John Clellon Holmes. Near the beginning of On the Road, in which she is “Marylou,” Jack sketches her as “a sweet little girl . . . awfully dumb and capable of doing horrible things.”

Later in that book Marylou and Dean quarrel, and Sal Paradise, the Kerouac figure, remembers something that his “aunt” (Mémêre) once told him, that “the world would never find peace until men fell at their women’s feet and asked for forgiveness.”

Dean Moriarty replies that he knows this, and Paradise tells him, “The truth of the matter is we don’t understand our women; we blame on them and it’s all our fault.”

Throughout the course of their friendship Jack and Neal shared several of the same women as lovers, including two of Neal’s wives. The pattern was usually the same. Neal would build up Jack in the eyes of the woman concerned, signal his consent to Jack, maneuver the two of them together and retire from the scene. Luanne was among the first of the women with whom this happened.

By the time that Jack wrote his description of Luanne as “awfully dumb” he had gone through a brief but intense affair with her, late in 1949. While Jack might accurately have portrayed Luanne as inexperienced (she was, after all, only a teenager) he had ample evidence against her stupidity.

Even as a confused teenager, Luanne was a complex individual. She idolized Neal and wanted desperately to share his life, but she, like Carolyn, came to recognize the difficulties implicit in maintaining that liaison, and resolved to make the best of it. Luanne and Neal had grown up in similarly difficult circumstances and were each set adrift early on; perhaps, combined with their early experiences together, this helped her understand Neal better than anyone else.

Luanne Henderson:

Hal Chase and Justin Brierly and Neal were all very close before I met Neal. I was fourteen. He was nineteen. We were married when I was fifteen.

Neal was living with a girl named Jeanie when I met him. He stayed at her house with her and her mother and her grandmother. That was really a weird one. The grandmother was an alcoholic, as well as the mother, and she must have been about in her seventies then. The mother was about in her fifties and Jeanie was a little younger than I was, because she was behind me in school. And somehow or other, I don’t know how, she and Neal had become acquainted, but he was without money, not living anywhere, and Jeanie took him in. And he promptly took over all three of them, taking turns with the grandmother and the mother.

I was sitting in Walgreen’s Drugstore and Neal and Jeanie came in, and he walked up to me and turned around to Jeanie and said, “That’s the girl I’m going to marry.” We’d never met or anything, but he didn’t know Jeanie knew me. This was right by the pool hall, the pool hall where all the boys used to hang out.

Denver was really a very small town then. It was large in area, but you knew everybody in town and after dark it was all young people that were out. So Neal sent Jeanie over to get acquainted, and she finally told him that she knew me, so he sent her over to ask me if I would like to go to a party. And so I gave Jeanie my phone number and she called, and I talked to Neal and he said he was trying to fix me up with a date. He got me a date with Dickie Reed, who I’d known for years. He was like a brother to me, but I went ahead and said yes, because I was interested in Neal. And it started that night.

He passed me a note when we went to a bowling alley and said, “I’ll call you in the morning.” And I was thrilled. Oh, God, my heart was pounding. At fifteen you can get pretty emotional about little notes and such as that. And we just went from there. I saw him every day.

I knew Neal was staying with Jeanie, ’cause I used to go over to the house with him, but I didn’t realize that she was as involved with him, because, especially at that time, I was very sensitive to being accused of being a man-stealer. And when Jeanie broke down in tears in front of me I really got uptight about it. But Neal hadn’t told me and it made me realize that Jeanie really did care a great deal for him.

It was all so damned serious. The night that we got married, I’m standing on the streetcorner across the street from the drugstore and Neal’s having a big meeting with Jeanie over in front of Walgreen’s. Bill Tomson’s trying to make me. It was just a ridiculous scene.

My mother was aware of us getting married because I had trouble with my stepfather before this had happened, when Neal and I were going together. My stepfather had given my mother an ultimatum: it’s either her or me. He was getting interested in me and it was becoming a problem, for him as well as me. I was supposed to go live with my brother, an older brother. That never mattered because I went ahead and got married.

Neal and I got married August 1, 1945. I had been seeing him off and on and in between, while he was living with Jeanie. There was a cabin up in the mountains that someone in Jeanie’s family owned. One night Neal was working—and by this time he and I were getting quite close and were talking about marriage—and I had to wait until he got off work, which was about eleven o’clock. There were two other couples waiting with us. I was alone. We decided to take a ride up and show these two guys that were with my girlfriends the cabin, since they’d never been there. There was a secret way you got in, underneath the boards, under the windows. It was a magnificent cabin. Old roller pianos, trunks of old clothes from the eighteen hundreds. We were all dressing up. Everyone was playing house.

So we spent the evening there for about an hour, and the police broke in on us. It seems that there had been a tough-looking blonde going up the road in a ’38 Ford coupe—me. We had to pass one house getting up to the cabin. They were saying that dope had been hidden in the house. I mean heavy—heroin or something. I was so unaware of anything at that time. Pot and pills, but not heroin. Anyway, I was the only blonde in the crowd. We were all taken in. And being totally ignorant as to how police work, they scared the hell out of the other kids. I refused to tell who I was for three days and sat there languishing, playing my dramatic role. I’d seen too many movies of Humphrey Bogart. I wasn’t going to talk. Until they started talking about fourteen years in jail.

Luanne Henderson Cassady, 1945. Photo courtesy of Carolyn Cassady.

We were in there with another girl who had murdered her baby. She was eighteen years old. She waltzed up and said, “What are you in for?” And, really, none of us knew. So my girlfriend asked her, “What are you in for?” And she said, “Murder.” She’d seen too many movies, too, but she made a very dramatic point out of murder and it scared the hell out of everybody.

My friends were all let loose because they told their parents’ names. Neal wasn’t with us. We were supposed to have picked him up at eleven o’clock. But I had to stay for three days, and Neal was going crazy trying to find out where I was. When they finally released me after I told them my mother’s name, Neal met me when my mother came to get me and he said, “That’s the end of that. We’re getting married.” I had to go to court, and they finally just charged everybody with malicious mischief.

This was in the summer when all this occurred, because we were married the first day of August. I had to go to court that morning and pay a thirty-five dollar fine for the break-in, and then we went and got married that evening with Jimmie Holmes as an attendant.

But in any case, Jeanie was very, very jealous, very possessive of Neal. Since she’d been supporting him, she considered that she was doing the whole bit for him. He was trying to see her without my knowing it, and of course I knew it. We were going through a very bad scene when he was running with Jeanie and any other girl that happened to be walking by while I was working all the time. And finally I gave him an ultimatum and I told him, “Let’s just forget the whole scene, or else do it. One way or the other.” And so he said, “Okay, but we’ve got to get my clothes out.” Neal’s books were very important, and that’s what he wanted mostly. So we went to Jeanie’s together and asked her for his clothes and books, and she said no way. He was going to have to come back home, and that was all there was to it.

So we left her at this apartment of Al Hinkle’s girlfriend and went over to her house, and Neal climbed up on the roof and went in and got his things and threw them down to me in the alley and we both went running out of town.

We hitchhiked to Nebraska, where Neal got a job as a dishwasher and I got a job as a maid. I was working for this blind lawyer and I got one room for both of us, but no board. Twelve dollars a month. I got one day off a week. I had to be up at five in the morning and have the house downstairs cleaned before the family got up, and I didn’t finish until after dinner, which was about seven o’clock at night. Of course, I used to sneak food down to Neal before he got the dishwashing job. We didn’t have penny one.

I had an aunt living in Sidney, Nebraska, that we stayed with the first couple of days we were there, but this lawyer and his wife were no relation whatsoever. She was really a bitch. She worked me like I was some kind of horse. I was just fifteen and I didn’t know that much about heavy housecleaning, and I’d have to do things over three and four times, cleaning blinds and scrubbing toilets. And at night Neal would read Shakespeare and Proust.

I think at that time Neal was just trying to consume anything and everything. He was into Proust for quite a while, but he was just jumping from one thing to another. He was trying to get everything that he could. He was eating up books and trying to teach me at the same time. We would read for hours and hours and hours at night, and if I didn’t understand something, he was very patient with me. He was good. He would take the time to explain and get into it a little deeper, and the thoughts behind it.

Neal was something to behold. I’ve never met anyone like him yet to this day. I doubt if I ever will. Neal was a very, very unique individual. Of course, he cheated himself, but I feel that he was cheated terribly, not only by life but by those who were around him. I think people got into a very bad habit of taking from Neal. I don’t mean that there wasn’t love or anything of that sort, but Neal, when we first met, had a tremendous amount of ambition, which was why we went to New York.

When we left Nebraska Neal came home to find me on the front porch in the middle of a big blizzard. She was making me scrub the porch on my hands and knees, and I was turning blue. Neal came home and he took one look and he said, “That’s it,” and he jerked me up and said, “We’ll pack, and then we’re going.” Later that night I went upstairs and stole three hundred dollars that I knew they kept in a box, and he went out and stole my uncle’s car, which I know Neal would never have risked otherwise. He had been in Cañon City [reformatory] before that, and he was just literally terrified of jail. I mean, he was really terribly paranoid at that time. A policeman would just send him into a fit.

We left Sidney, Nebraska, that night. He had to drive on the passenger side with a handkerchief tied over his eyes and me looking out that window for the police, because all of the windows were totally iced. You couldn’t see a damned thing. He finally changed and got over on the passenger side because he was more sheltered. He was driving with one hand and one foot on the gas. I don’t know how in the hell we made it, ’cause those roads were like ice that night. We did slide off the road a couple of times.

So we made it, and the car conked out when we got as far as North Platte, which wasn’t too damned far. At first Neal had it in the back of his head to go to his friend Ed Uhl’s ranch and try to get some money. But then during the night when we were driving, he said, “The hell with it. We’re going to New York.” Ed White, Hal Chase, all of them were back there then. I don’t think he was too much in correspondence with them, but he’d been close with them before they had gone.

I knew very little about Ed White. I didn’t meet him until we got to New York. Ed was always very, very kind to me. I was much younger than most of them. To me, they were all a great deal older and more experienced and mature and sophisticated. I always felt like that.

It was always kind of hoped or assumed that Neal would eventually get to New York, because it was his big dream, getting to New York and wanting to go to Columbia. At that time I don’t think that Neal was aware of Jack, because Allen was primarily close to Neal on that first trip. We were involved with Jack and saw him often, but not nearly as close as Allen and Neal were.

When we got to New York we went to Columbia right away and got ahold of Hal, and he introduced us to Allen and Allen’s cousin, a redheaded student who lived over in Spanish Harlem and was kind enough to let us stay with him over at his place. It was a large, cold-water-type flat. So Neal and I stayed with him.

I got a job at a bakery and got caught stealing the first day I worked there. Fainted because of the whole scene and everything. I’d never been involved in anything like that and I wouldn’t admit that I’d taken the money, and the way I did it was so stupid, it’s no wonder I got caught. I deserved it. But I fainted, and the manager of the store was nice enough that she didn’t do anything about it. She put me on a bus. Neal was waiting for me up at Columbia and I didn’t have any money—or a job, then. First day, which was a disaster. It put me through a bad month or so. I really went into a depression.

Neal and I had gotten an apartment over on 113th, not too far from Columbia. Neal wanted to go to Columbia. He wanted to write. He had already attempted writing when we were still in Denver, when I was working and he was either running around or sitting at the typewriter, one of the two. But he had definite dreams and motivation, then especially, that he knew what he wanted and was going to do it. And then after we went to New York, and it seemed like especially after Neal and Jack got very close, he was involved more with Jack’s writing or getting more interested in their aspirations. And the fact that they were writing about him, of course, was a lift for him, that they found him interesting enough at that point.

But that thing at the bakery really sent me into a tailspin. We moved to New Jersey, we spent Christmas over there. We went to Bayonne and got a room. Neal was working at the parking lot next door to the New Yorker Hotel, and finally things had settled into a beautiful routine as far as what I thought I had always wanted, with Neal coming home from work every night. It really was, it was beautiful.

We had one little room with kitchen privileges. I can still remember Neal laughing. I went to the store—we had no money—and I got paper drapes and a phony rose. I really was fixing that room up. I hemmed these silly drapes. And I cooked Neal the first meal that I’d ever cooked for him. I cooked spaghetti. I’d watched my mother cook spaghetti, and who couldn’t cook spaghetti? No one bothered to tell me that you boil the water before you put the spaghetti in, right? In it went, and it came out just one big lump. I had to slice it to put it on the plate for Neal, but he ate it, every damned bite of it. He ate it. Both of us did. Of course, in those days we would have eaten most anything, I think.

We were getting along just beautiful, everything was going fine, and, without planning it or forming it in my mind, or anything else, Neal came home one night from work and it just came out of me. This is something that I’ve tried to sort out in my mind, the reasons behind it, a thousand times, and still never really can come up with any satisfactory answer. A thousand excuses. But I told him that the police had been there that day, knowing Neal’s fear of them, and put myself through a complete, endless torture.

He went into a complete panic, and I had to start throwing everything in the trunk, which was one of the few things that we had that we were dragging around with us, a huge trunk and the suitcases. And Neal left me to bring all the things and meet him in Jersey City. I had to struggle with these things down to the bus stop and get them on the bus, two suitcases and this trunk, and we went on the road around New York City and New Jersey. We were sleeping in parked cars for about three weeks.

I wound up taking a bus back to Denver. Neal stayed in New York. I slept in a bus station for two nights and I finally called my mother.

By early 1947, when Luanne left Neal behind in New York, Jack had spent more than a year on composition of The Town and the City, alternating bouts of work on the book at his mother’s flat in Queens with excursions into the city to reconnoiter the Forty-second Street scene with Huncke and his friends.

Although Jack was wary of Burroughs’ morphine and, to a lesser extent, of the general experimenting with marijuana, he found Benzedrine useful as his Wolfean manuscript reached, and then surpassed, a thousand pages. One of his first pieces of writerly advice to Cassady was to “write with the zeal of a benny addict.”

Late in 1946 Kerouac had been stricken with thrombophlebitis, a blood-clotting disorder, which in Jack’s case was confined to his legs. They became enormously swollen and tender during an attack. His general discharge from the Navy qualified him, barely, for veterans’ benefits, and he had been in the V.A. Hospital in Queens undergoing treatment for the ailment just before Neal and Luanne arrived in New York. The affliction was painful and persistent, and it brought the threat of clots that could reach his brain or his heart and kill him. It was a reminder of mortality that cast its shadow over the novel that he was writing, and made him hungrier than ever to see the world beyond New England and New York.

During Neal’s nine weeks of flight from Luanne’s phantom policemen, Cassady sometimes took refuge with Jack and Mémêre in Ozone Park, and it was during these visits that his friendship with Kerouac was cemented. The conversations between them grew into the exchange of letters that provided Jack with the seed for On the Road. Late in February Neal returned to Denver and to Luanne.

Allen promised Neal that he would join him there when the spring semester ended. Burroughs and Joan Vollmer, now married, had moved to Texas with Joan’s daughter by her first marriage, and Allen began making plans for a big summer reunion on Bill’s farm.

Luanne Henderson:

Neal showed up in Denver on the first of March 1947, my birthday, and we moved to a hotel together. I had moved to a hotel earlier, for about three days, and my stepfather tried to get me to come home. I wouldn’t and he had taken me to a juvenile judge, since I was under age. And she just talked to me for about an hour, and she told my mother and father, “She’s a married woman and, as far as I can tell, she’s a perfectly capable and responsible young woman. And if I find either one of you bothering her again…” It really did something for me to know, ’cause I expected to be in all kinds of trouble. I’d had no idea that marital status meant something, even at sixteen. I wasn’t asking them for anything. But during this thing I had moved back home ’cause I was scared to death that I was going to go to juvenile home or something, and that’s when Neal showed up. So we immediately moved to a hotel, and after that we got a boarding room in a private home.

That’s when Neal went to work. I can’t remember now what the hell he was doing. He was wearing coveralls and he was going out of town working. It was some kind of job. Neal was very proud of it, even after it was over.

Throughout the spring of 1947, Neal maintained his correspondence with Jack, including a long, story-like letter in which he described his seduction of a girl on the bus on the way back to Denver that February.

As promised, Allen arrived in Denver that summer, got a job as a stock-boy in a department store, and arranged his life to accommodate Neal’s busy shuttle between his job and Luanne. Allen and Neal’s lovemaking continued, and so did a series of conversations in which they relentlessly analyzed their thoughts and actions in an attempt at total mutual self-knowledge. Ginsberg laboriously recorded the progress of their relationship in his journal, and he worked on a series of poems he called the “Denver Doldrums.”

Early that summer sitting in Mémêre’s apartment in Queens, Jack consulted a map and traced the red line of Route 6 westward, not knowing that this old highway had fallen into disuse. He hitched upstate to the point where Route 6 would take him west and stood in the rain for several hours before buying a bus ticket for Chicago. He was on the road at last, with Denver as his first destination and beyond that San Francisco, where his old Horace Mann friend, Henri Cru, offered the prospect of a merchant marine job.

But by the time that Jack reached Colorado Neal had met and begun an affair with Carolyn Robinson, a graduate student in fine arts at the University of Denver. Like Luanne, Carolyn was a striking platinum blonde, but she was two years older than Neal, and in her own way determined to take life on her own terms. She had received her undergraduate degree from Bennington and was planning a career as a Hollywood costume and set designer. Involved in a busy quadrangle with his wife, Luanne; his lover, Allen; and his girlfriend, Carolyn; Neal had little time for Jack when he arrived. (Nor was Neal welcome among all of Jack’s Columbia friends.) Kerouac accepted the hospitality of Ed White, the Columbia architecture student. Allan Temko was, a guest in the same apartment, where he worked on short stories and sought to maintain order during the frantic visits by Cassady and his entourage.

In On the Road, where she is dark-haired “Camille,” Carolyn is as hazily depicted as many of the other women in Jack’s writing. Bill Tomson had dated her for several months before introducing her to Neal and losing her to him. In the novel that meeting is portrayed as happening in the space of a single evening in which Tomson, “Roy Johnson,” picks up Carolyn and takes her to a hotel room in the company of the poolhall gang. Among them is Neal, who signals with four fingers that he will return to her at four o’clock in the morning. The truth was different.

Bill Tomson:

I went into the service underage and started at the University of Denver as a freshman and met Carolyn, who at that time was a graduate student in art. We had a few dates and talked and so on, and I introduced her to Neal, and they—in a relatively short period of time—became very close. I thought it was a mistake for about two or three weeks, in the sense of, “God damn it, I’ve lost this blonde.”

Neal met her in the Colburn Hotel, where she was living at that time.

Carolyn Cassady:

The way Jack wrote about my meeting Neal in On the Road was wrong and seamy. I took offense because he said something about how “Roy Johnson” had picked me up in a bar and taken me to a hotel. I lived in the hotel already, and I’d known Bill on the campus for quite a while. He’d tell me all these wild stories and great escapades that he and this other guy, Neal Cassady, had done, only he took most of the credit for himself. But I still was beginning to think this Cassady guy was pretty fantastic.

One Saturday afternoon I was in my room in this stuffy residence hotel, and Bill called from downstairs and asked if he could come up for a minute. I was all disheveled, and I opened the door and here he is with this other guy, and came stomping in and introduced him as Neal.

Carolyn Cassady, 1947.
Photo courtesy of Carolyn Cassady.

I thought Neal was at Columbia, a student, with Jack and Allen, because Bill had told me about them. So here he was in Denver, and I guess during the course of our conversation he said he’d come home for the break, or something like that. Anyway, Bill had told Neal that he had this girl with this fabulous collection of Lester Young records, who was Neal’s current passion. And of course, I’d never heard of Lester Young, much less had any records. This was to get him up there, I think. Just to be sure to get him there. He’d been telling me so much about him, I guess he wanted to produce him.

He hung around and we talked for a while, and then Neal asked us to go with him to pick up his things. Of course, everything was very confusing because of all these stories; none of anything was true that they were saying. So I was sort of mystified and of course I’d never met anybody like Neal anyhow. But we went with him to this house where two nurses lived that he’d been living with or staying with before he went to New York. And he’d brought his stuff back there. So we went and he packed up everything and went downtown with him to a cheap hotel and went upstairs to this room. I’m just following along. And the room was all torn up, and obviously some woman was staying there. It was a single room and nothing but female things around. So he left his suitcases and we went back downstairs and down on some main drag.

There was a little hamburger joint, just a counter and a couple of little tables, so he said, “Wait a minute,” and Bill and I waited outside on the sidewalk and he went in. There was this really young girl behind the counter, and they were having this heated discussion. And I kept saying to Bill, “Who’s that? Who’s that?” And as usual he kept trying to dodge, and finally he said, “That’s his wife.” I said, “Wife?” I had already been getting interested, and Neal had been making all sorts of subtle passes, so that was a blow. I thought, “Oh, well. That’s that.”

Then we went to a record store. He wanted to go hear some music, and in those days you could get a pile of records and take them in a booth and play them. So he didn’t get Lester Young or Charlie Parker or all those things he liked. He got a whole bunch of Stan Kenton, Duke Ellington. Our song is Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing.” He played that and played that, and jumped around and did his act in the booth at the record store.

So then he said, why didn’t we get together for dinner? He had to go back to the hotel or something, I can’t remember all the excuses. Anyway, Bill and I went to where we were all supposed to meet and sat and sat and sat and nobody showed up. So we ate, and then Al Hinkle and his girl, Lois—and I guess that’s the first time I met Al—came in and said that Luanne and Neal couldn’t make it and that they had already eaten, but that everybody was going to come up to my room for a party to welcome Neal back.

And I thought, “Why my room? All these people live in Denver and don’t have any homes? How come everybody has to come to my room?” And I was having this feud with this Filipino elevator boy at the hotel, and so I was real nervous about this, but Bill said he’d monitor and it would be fine. And Al explained that since Neal and Luanne had just seen each other for the first time after a long time that you know what they’d done instead of coming to dinner. So, okay. They came up.

When they came up there, I met Luanne. I guess she was trying to look older, so she had her hair all pulled back. She and I were sitting on the floor and Al and Bill and Neal were going over old times and old things, and I still didn’t know. I thought Neal had come back from Columbia, that he’d been a student there and he’d come for a break. Neal didn’t deny it. He just dodged it. Luanne’s sitting there on the floor telling me about how wonderful their marriage is, and she’s going on and on with how in love they are and how great he is and she shows me this diamond solitaire ring. I still don’t know where that came from. I didn’t know where he’d gotten it, but then I didn’t know anything about him.

Then she said that there was one thing he couldn’t stand, and that was to have his pants rumpled, that he was very proud of his creases. And he had on this pinstriped suit. So she said, “Here, I’ll show you.” She jumps up and goes and plops in his lap. He was sitting in an easy chair, and he just threw her on the floor and she came bouncing back, saying, “See?” So she was gushing away all this time and he was being really just dramatically gloomy all the time and I kept looking at this gloomy guy and listening to this gushing girl and trying to figure it out.

And Al is trying to make it a party for a homecoming and all this. It was strange. Neal got up and stalked around and looked out the window and looked irritated and anxious. When it got to be midnight I indicated to Bill it was time to go, because of this stuffy hotel. So they did. But as Neal went out the door he turned around—they were all going down the hall—and held up two fingers. Two for two A.M. I didn’t know that’s what he meant, but I didn’t have anything to go on, so I didn’t know what he was talking about.

Bill hung around for a while and it took me a long time to get him out, because now I guess he was beginning to get jealous. We had had absolutely no romantic inclinations. Or I hadn’t. But I guessed now he was going to start that, so I did not want him around.

It was about one when he left. I had a bed that folded up in a closet door, but when it did fold down it took up the whole living room. So at two o’clock there’s this knock on the door. I was just about to get into bed. I had my pajamas on.

I opened the door, and there’s Neal with his suitcase. Of course, I had to let him in, and then sat and argued with him and he made everything I said sound ridiculous. Why was there any problem? He said that he and Luanne had been having all this trouble, and that they had been separated for months and he’d come back and tried to make it up, but it wasn’t going to work. The same old story. It didn’t fit with what she’d been doing all evening, gushing away about their marriage, so I was even more confused.

I tried to get rid of him. And well, for one thing, as I said, I’d been having this big thing with this Filipino elevator guy who was apparently the watchdog of all the morals of the hotel, and most of the people in the hotel were retired and very sedate. I was the only single girl and the only under-fifty resident.

I’d already had a boyfriend previously, who had come up in the elevator quite a bit until this elevator guy had turned me in, and I’d had a little chat with the management. They said that they really didn’t like anybody staying overnight, so it was very touchy.

So anyway, the point is, I’m teetering. I said to Neal, “My God! How did you get up here?” And he said he’d come in and the night clerk was dozing and the elevator was closed, and he just went up the stairs and nobody saw him. I said, “Well, that’s good, but now you can’t go out.” I couldn’t risk his leaving, either. So that was handy for him.

Then I couldn’t get him to sleep on the couch. He said, “Well, now, look at that great big bed, half of it going to waste. It doesn’t make sense.” He made everything seem so dumb that I was saying. So I said, “Well, all right. Over there.” I didn’t sleep a wink, but he instantly passed out, so it worked out all right.

Then in the morning he couldn’t leave right away. We had to wait for a reasonable time for him to go out. We sat there and strung little tiny glass beads on a wire. I still see him sitting there doing this intricate little thing. I was making a set for a model theater, a miniature set, so he was helping me and being terribly charming.

Some time during the morning the phone rang, and it was Bill. For some reason he asked me to come downstairs. Well, I didn’t want him to see Neal, either, so I did go downstairs. He fiddled around not talking about much of anything, but what he was doing was that Luanne had already come up the stairs, and the minute I got in the elevator, she shot in the room.

Pretty soon Bill said, “Let’s go upstairs,” and there she was, talking to Neal. I talked to her and she was crying and carrying on and said that their marriage was no good and how mean Neal was. Then she said something about they’d both been in New York, and I was even more confused. But she lied as much as he did, so that it was really hard to figure out.

It was obvious that they were not going to go on with this marriage. And she convinced me that she never wanted to see him again. So I really thought they were through, which, of course, turned out to be pretty funny, especially in On the Road, when Jack knew that Neal was running from one to the other of us. Because I believed Neal completely, from that day forth. It was a couple of years later before I found out anything. So she had a good cry, and she left with Bill.

Then it was every day after that, a big, heavy, moving trip, and I’m believing every word. I asked him if he was going back to Columbia, and he said he couldn’t afford to and that he would just stay in Denver and get a job.

I moved out of that hotel, and I think Jack had gotten to Denver about the time I was moving. I was there when Allen arrived in July 1947, because Allen stayed in the hotel room for a while. He wrote some of “Denver Doldrums” in that room while I was at school.

When Allen came out to see Neal, Neal brought him up to my room. I see now that Allen was interested in Neal more than just intellectually, because Allen got me to draw a nude picture of Neal. They both made it sound objective, impersonal and artistic. They could always do it so I’d sound like an idiot making any of the usual objections. I was embarrassed the whole time, Neal standing there in the altogether, posing just like some Greek statue, with Allen sitting over at the window watching this whole procedure.

I don’t know if they were having a heavy affair at that time. Neal was rejecting him somewhat. Jack wasn’t really in on all this all the time, but he used to come out to the campus when I was rehearsing plays. I decided to do some acting there, because I was too self-conscious to do it at Bennington. Of all things, one play was The Blue Bird, and I was “Light.” This thing was fantasy, you know, so who cared? When Jack was there he’d sit and wait for the rehearsals to end, and then ride home with me on the streetcar. I don’t know why he was there by himself. I just thought of him as a friend of Neal’s. That was my only interest in him. One time Neal and Jack and I all went out to a tavern. Jack and I danced together, and he said, “Too bad Neal saw you first.”

Neal and I moved to a room in a rooming house, and Allen would come there sometimes. He really was great. He helped me with my school work. I had to do an oral report once, which I loathe. Allen just told me all this wonderful stuff, and kind of edited the notes and all. So when I gave this talk, there was this absolute silence, and I thought, “Oh, God, what have I done?” Everybody was dumbfounded, and the department head acted as though it was just the greatest thing that had ever happened, so good old Allen was really nice and helpful.

Neal was very intellectual and talked clearly and sounded like he knew a lot, and certainly Jack and Allen didn’t seem to top him that way. He had all of us going at once, and he was able to keep all these balls in the air. He got a job as a jitney driver, and we lived together in this rooming house with a community kitchen.

And then Neal and I rode up to Central City^* on a bus. It was going to be this great weekend. I’d never been to the operas up there, but I knew a lot of people from the university that had. So we got off the bus and Neal said he was going to go do something down the street and be right back, and he disappeared. He just vanished. On the way up on the bus he had been real quiet and moody, so he made up some sad story of how torn up he was about something that he couldn’t explain, enough of a story that satisfied me, so here I am patting him and telling him it’s all right and how sorry I am and all that. That was the first time he’d ever disappointed me. Only the beginning.

Of course, he was torn up about something about Luanne, as usual. I suppose now he realized he’d gotten in too deeply with me. He’d done a super con job, and I’d bought every bit of it, and so he was getting a little panicky that he was really tied up. It was getting tougher and tougher to discourage me, so maybe he was trying to show me that he wasn’t all that great, but I was so convinced already I couldn’t see it, and I’d forgive him everything. The poor guy.

But then Allen was going to go to Burroughs’ ranch, and Neal told me some story about his relationship with Allen and how he felt this obligation to try and be gay. I didn’t like it, but I could accept it, so I said, “If that’s the way it is, I don’t want you, if you don’t want me. It’s as simple as that. If you want Allen or something else, then go to it.”

So I took all my belongings to another teacher’s house for my last night in Denver, because I was going to drive to Los Angeles with some friends the next day. I came by in the morning to say one more good-bye to Neal, and I walk in the room and here is Neal in the middle and Luanne and Allen on either side of him in our bed . . . the three of them. And, of course, I thought Luanne was long gone.

I was twenty-four; she was seventeen. I felt really sorry for her, but I had no doubts that there was nothing more between them. So it was a terrific shock to see the three of them. I had been pretty sheltered. In college, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was out of the library all the time, but that’s about the extent of it. And I just gasped and went out again, thinking it was all over between me and Neal.

Luanne Henderson:

When Allen came from New York that summer of 1947, he literally broke my heart, because he got Neal to go down to Burroughs’ place in Texas with him.

Neal and I had a very dramatic scene on the grass at the Capitol Building. Neal was telling me good-bye, and I was crying and telling him that I couldn’t live without him. It was just a young girl pouring her heart out. I really and truly thought I would die. At that point I had no visions of any life at all with Neal gone.

He started to leave and I grabbed him around the legs, and he tried to get up, and I was saying, “Please don’t leave me, Neal. Don’t leave me.” And he kind of gave me a little shove and I just fell down, and I stayed there, I was crying so hard. I thought he was gone.

All of a sudden I felt his arms around my shoulders and he said, “I don’t ever want to see you begging or crying like that for a man again.” He said, “Come on. Let’s go.”

So we went over to the rooming house, and the three of us spent the night together, and Neal talked to me most of the night, and I was able to accept it. He explained his part with Allen and where he was headed, and that it didn’t mean that we were separated or anything else. Anyway, I had finally gotten to the point where I had accepted it, and by this time Allen came home and the three of us were just balling around.

It was about four o’clock in the morning when Allen came home, so it couldn’t have been more than a couple of hours elapses and in waltzes Carolyn. I was aware of Carolyn. Of course, I’d met her. She was going with Bill Tomson. But this was shortly after Neal met Carolyn at that point, and I was really unaware that Carolyn and Neal had gotten that involved. But she walked in and caught me in bed with Neal, and she just went insane.

I couldn’t understand how she could be the injured party when I was his wife. I just wasn’t aware that it had gone as far as it had.

Like the time early that summer that Neal was out all night long. Bill Tomson very kindly came up to our hotel room and told me where he was—Carolyn’s room at the Hotel Colburn. Bill was madly in love with Carolyn and was going through just the tortures of hell with Neal there in her hotel room.

“You’ve got to go up and get him out of there.” Bill felt that there was no chance against Neal whatsoever, and that if Neal was allowed to be there much longer, Bill knew that he was a loser. So he was using me to get Neal out of Carolyn’s apartment. Which I wanted him out [of], anyway. Regardless of whether I had learned to accept these escapades, it didn’t mean I enjoyed them. Neal became very, very discreet after that.

That’s why I was a little shocked when Carolyn came to the apartment that morning before Allen and Neal left, and when she saw Neal in bed with me she was livid. She blew it.

Neal was, of course, jumping up and down, trying to explain to her. He had three of us. He had Allen, me, and Carolyn, all of us in the room and [was] trying to placate all three of us.

Allen wanting him to go to Texas. Me, of course, wanting him to stay there. Carolyn was on her way to San Francisco then. He was being pulled in quite a few directions emotionally, and trying to please all of us. So he finally left with Allen the next day, and that was the end of an era. I grew up.

Jack had quickly excused himself from the complicated situation in Denver, moving on to San Francisco, where his old friend Henri Cru and his girlfriend lived across the Golden Gate Bridge in the makeshift village of Marin City. The town had been built during the war when the nearby fishing village of Sausalito was the site of a shipyard. By 1947, the town was the staging center for construction workers headed out to rebuild Japan.

There was no seaman’s job, but Cru helped Jack hire on at the construction workers’ barracks as a night guard. He wore a uniform and—uncomfortably—carried a gun. He was no more at ease posing as authority than he had been in saluting authority as a Navy recruit, and he barely escaped being fired for failing to control the wild parties each contingent of workers staged on the eve of sailing.

Just as Jack had found Neal engrossed in his affairs with Carolyn, Allen, and Luanne, Henri Cru was quarrelling constantly with his girlfriend. Cru alternated between miserliness and extravagant binges, and he drew Jack into an enthusiastic scheme to sell a screenplay treatment to his girlfriend’s Hollywood cousin. Cru and his girlfriend flew to Los Angeles with a scenario Jack helped to write, but, aside from a round of parties in Hollywood, the plan came to nothing.

Neal and Allen parted after several weeks together on Burroughs’ farm in Texas. Huncke was there that summer, in an uncharacteristic setting, and Joan’s son by Bill was born there. Allen, who had made his first journeys as a seaman in the coastwise trade, took a ship from Houston to Africa, where he experienced and wrote the “Dakar Doldrums.”

As October neared Jack felt his autumnal urge to head home. He set out for New York by way of Los Angeles. Despite Jack’s eventual reputation as the patron saint of hitchhikers his travels often involved buses and trains, as he says plainly in On the Road. The last leg of his first trip to Los Angeles was made by bus, and on that bus he met a young Mexican-American woman named Bea Franco, whose family were migrant farmworkers in California’s Central Valley.

Jack followed her there, and spent two weeks living with her in a tent as they followed the crops. In Selma, California, he picked cotton himself, because he needed the money. Kerouac and “the Mexican girl,” as he wrote of her in On the Road, promised to live together when Bea could reach New York, but she never did.

A few days later, flat broke, Jack was back in Ozone Park. He had just missed Neal, who had returned to New York with Burroughs, and had managed to talk Mémêre into letting him stay in Jack’s room for a couple of days. Since the night that Carolyn had discovered Neal in bed with Allen and Luanne, Neal had conducted his pursuit of Carolyn by mail. Carolyn had moved on to San Francisco.

Carolyn Cassady:

He wrote and said he wanted to come and marry me. I think in one of his letters he said I wrote him eighteen times a week. It wasn’t quite that much. But once he’d written me one of his famous letters . . . apologetic, endearing, horrified at how his behavior had looked . . . I bought that, too. I believed him again.

He was writing me how he was unhappy, and so forth. And when I went to San Francisco I had a permanent address, and he wrote all the time, like every day. I wish I’d saved those letters. They’re the love letters of the century—any century.

So he got on a Greyhound bus, and he had this enormous collection of records that some singer in New York had given him—two or three big cardboard boxes full of records. He rode on the bus in that suit, very careful, every time he sat down, he told me he would pull the jacket down under him so it wouldn’t get wrinkled. All the way across the country without creasing his pants or his jacket.

Neal got off the bus and I met him outside the store where I worked, and we took a taxi to my apartment.

Neal and Carolyn had no money, and because Mrs. Robinson disapproved of the match, Carolyn could not ask her mother for help. Neal applied for his seaman’s papers and worked at unsatisfying odd jobs such as selling encyclopedias door to door and pumping gas. His Denver friend Al Hinkle had moved to the Bay Area and soon, as he had promised, helped Neal to secure a training job with the Southern Pacific Railroad. Neal’s railroad duties took him as far away as Bakersfield in Southern California, and the small, intermittent paychecks were barely enough to see the young couple through their first months together as man and wife. Their first child was on the way.

Soon after Neal followed Carolyn to San Francisco in the fall of 1947, Luanne followed Neal. At first, her presence was kept secret from Carolyn. Since they first met and made love, Luanne had known that Neal wanted her to bear a child by him and that he blamed her for not becoming pregnant. Now, with Carolyn pregnant, Neal talked Luanne into cooperating with him in securing annulment of their marriage. They traveled to Denver together and got the necessary papers. Carolyn became Mrs. Neal Cassady.

Neal continued to send Jack long letters about what he was reading and thinking, but in a letter to Allen in the spring of the following year, 1948, confessed his pessimism about fulfilling his ambition to write:

I wrote for a month straight—what came out? terrible, awful, stupid, stupid trash—it grew worse each day. Don’t tell me it takes years. If I can’t write one good sentence in a month of continuous effort—then, obviously, I can’t realize or express.

Neal’s morose verdict upon his talent was written in answer to a letter in which Allen had described his joy and awe at seeing the completed manuscript of The Town and the City. Jack already was sketching out openings for On the Road, showing them to John Clellon Holmes. He had written his first novel. Now it was only a matter of selling it. Then he could hit the road again. By mail Jack and Neal traded fantasies about buying a ranch together somewhere in the West.

There was no question in Jack’s mind about which publisher should bring out The Town and the City. He sent it to Scribner’s, where the patient and brilliant Maxwell Perkins had shaped Thomas Wolfe’s huge manuscripts into publishable novels. Scribner’s turned down Jack’s book immediately. Kerouac was not discouraged, but it would be another year before the manuscript reached the hands of the network of friends who would pass it on to Harcourt, Brace and its acceptance there by Robert Giroux.

In August 1948, Neal began pondering names for the baby Carolyn would deliver soon—“Allen Jack Cassady . . . but, to me, he’s always Jacques, Jocko . . . and at times of anger ‘John.’” Or if a girl, “Cathleen JoAnne Cassady . . . Cathy Jo.” Cathy was born on September 7.

When the air turned cool that October Jack set aside his first attempts at On the Road and, working on the basis of his earnest exchanges of childhood memories with Allen and Neal, began to sketch a “novel of children and evil,” using the new, impressionistic style he had developed from Neal’s writing experiments. This was the germ of Doctor Sax. Jack’s attempts to capture the spirit of the road had been less free in style, written in the formal, third-person, omniscient manner of The Town and the City. The successful version of On the Road would begin with the letter “I,” with Sal Paradise, Kerouac’s persona, onstage as a recorder and interpreter of events and Neal and the others at the center of his—and the reader’s—attention. The book wanted to be written, but Jack could not accomplish the task until there were more travels to write about, and late in 1948, Neal arrived to help provide the impetus for them.

When Cathy was born Carolyn was waiting to begin work in Hollywood as a costume designer, and Neal awaited the vote on the full-crew railroad law that should have guaranteed him a regular job on the Southern Pacific. Neal even went so far as to assure Allen (who was pondering a career writing television scripts for children’s shows) that the three of them might be able to live together comfortably on Carolyn’s income alone, and that the proposed arrangement of a year earlier, a comfortable ménage à trois, was now within reach. But neither job came through, and Neal longed to get behind the wheel of a car again.

The car was a brand-new 1949 Hudson he had bought with the savings from his railroad work when he thought jobs and comfort lay just around the corner. Neal explained to Carolyn that he wanted a brief vacation, only a week or so in the east. Carolyn was furious, but Neal wanted to see Jack and Allen again, and he never needed a good reason to travel.

He engineered the companionship of Al Hinkle and his new bride, Helen, a quiet girl with a sternly religious upbringing. The first stop would be Denver, where Luanne was waiting for a man she planned to marry to return from overseas.

A grand round trip was sketched out. They would pick up Jack in the East and return to California by way of New Orleans, where Bill and Joan Burroughs had established housekeeping in the suburb of Algiers. By November 1948, when Neal and Al and Helen left the Bay Area in the maroon-and-silver Hudson, Jack was in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, visiting his sister, Nin, and her husband, Paul. Gabrielle was there, too.

Soon after the trip began Helen Hinkle found herself unprepared for Neal’s nonstop approach to crossing the country. Her pleas for meals, motels—even a chance to use the bathroom at a filling station—fell on deaf ears, and in Arizona she parted company from the rest. She would go on to New Orleans alone and rejoin her husband and the others when they reached the Burroughs’ house.

Luanne Henderson:

Neal was married now and had a baby, and I had to find a life for myself. A fellow I had planned on getting married to had gone overseas. He wasn’t going to be back for about two months, or three months, so I decided to go back to Denver to wait until he came back. I really didn’t have anybody in San Francisco.

I’d been back there about three weeks, and about four o’clock one morning, there was a knock at the door, and I said, “Who is it?” This voice said, “Your husband. Open up.” And in walked Neal, on the way to New York. That’s when he stopped to pick me up, he and Al Hinkle. That was the last part of 1948, because we spent Christmas with Jack in North Carolina.

We got there Christmas Day, as a matter of fact. Neal and I both in white gas-station coveralls. It was his sister’s house, and when the three of us walked in, you can’t even begin to imagine the shock. Here I am, with long, blond stringy hair to my waistline. It looked like a hippie troupe of today. In those days you just didn’t go around like that. It wasn’t that I wanted to. I loved pretty clothes, but I didn’t have any. Neal wasn’t about to start dragging the suitcases and clothes, which, of course, was why Helen wound up waiting for Al Hinkle. She had started wanting to stay at motels at night and stopping for food and such nonsensical things as that, and Neal said, “That’s ridiculous.” Someplace in Arizona Neal told Al, “This has got to cease.”

When Neal showed up he just said, “We’re on our way to New York, get packed.” And I said, “Okay.” I wanted to go back to New York again, just wanted to go, because we were going to wind up back in San Francisco, which should have been about the time that the man that I had met should have been coming back from overseas. And I was aware that Neal was coming back to Carolyn. He was aware that I was supposed to be coming back to get married, but he wasn’t accepting it. He wouldn’t believe it.

When we first got to Jack’s sister’s house in North Carolina Jack handled it beautifully, really. He was so happy to see Neal that there wasn’t the slightest hesitation or embarrassment or trying to make excuses, ’cause I’m sure his mother must have put him through a scene. I’m sure she did. But he couldn’t have cared less, at least at that point, because the welcome wagon was out. We were all three just starving to death and freezing to death, and so happy to be somewhere where there was warmth and food and people happy to see us. It hadn’t been an easy trip.

We had picked up this old wino and had gone two hundred miles out of our way with the promise of getting Neal some money for gas. While he took Neal out someplace to get the money, Al and I were rummaging around looking through the room for food, anything, and I found this sack of potatoes, half-rotten. He had a hot plate in the room and this greasy, dirty old frying pan. So I got the pan out, and the potatoes, and I fried up this big mess of potatoes. There was no water in the room to wash. There was nothing. I burned the pan to try to clean it as much as possible. But Neal and I and Al, we ate when Neal came back. That tasted better than any meal I could remember. Those damned potatoes tasted like the nectar of the gods to us.

So, we were hocking all the way across, and Neal of course would leap out of the car at each gas station, and pump some in and run it back to zero. It’s a good thing he knew how to do it. We never would have made it.

Once we went into a tailspin on an icy road and got off in a ditch and Neal had to walk I don’t know how far. Al and I sat in the car hugging each other, trying to keep warm. Neal got to a farmhouse and the farmer brought the horses over and pulled us out, and then we went on our way.

So by the time we got to Jack’s house, we were really ready for a little bit of love and attention, and he gave it to us. Then Neal got renewed vigor, and we went up to Long Island, and then Jack and Neal drove back to North Carolina to get the furniture. Neal moved Jack’s mother’s furniture while Al and I stayed up in New York. I don’t remember how long we stayed at Jack’s mother’s apartment, but she was lovely. From all the things that I had heard about her from Neal up to that point I was scared to death to really go there.

To me Jack and Neal were like two much younger men than they actually were, like two kids, maybe eleven, twelve years old, getting their first buddy, their arms around each other over the shoulder type of thing. They could talk, they could have fun, and it wasn’t a sexual thing. Very close and very warm and discovering things together, or discovering that they had liked the same things, that they had thought the same things.

Jack was absolutely enthralled with Neal and Neal’s ability with women, his ability to talk with them so easily, because it wasn’t easy for Jack.

Jack was beautiful, he was a beautiful male, and you’d have thought that women weren’t any problem at all, which it wasn’t—as far as attracting women. But Jack didn’t have the easiness that Neal did, accepting whatever the situation happened to be for what it was, for the moment. This was something that I think Jack admired in Neal, as well as his unending vitality.

And Jack was everything, I think, that Neal would like to have been: a football hero—physically, he thought Jack was magnificent—and also the stability, the ability to sit down and write. The discipline which Neal didn’t have.

I think they were very jealous of each other in many respects, but not jealous in a way that it interfered with their relationship. It was just something that each would have liked to have of the other one. What one didn’t have, the other gave. All during the time that we were in New York, it was really almost closer than brothers.

Until December 1948, Jack’s friend John Clellon Holmes had only heard of Neal, but never had met him. Holmes’ first wife had become accustomed to, if not pleased about, Jack’s frequent visits to the Holmes apartment on the West Side. For Jack the calls were a chance to break away from his mother’s side and to make rounds of parties. Holmes’ wife worked at a secretarial job in order to give her husband time to write his first novel, just as Jack relied on his mother’s income from the shoe factory (along with disability payments from his phlebitis) in order to finish The Town and the City. Now Holmes, who already had met and observed Allen, Burroughs, Huncke, and the rest with a novelist’s eye, met the most unforgettable character of them all, Neal.

John Clellon Holmes:

Neal blew into town one day with Al Hinkle and Luanne. She was one sweet cookie. Anyway, they came in, it was just before Christmas ’48. I had heard about Neal. Neal was not at that point to Jack the sort of mythic figure he became later. Jack was all excited by Neal—by his energy, by his ability to function, and so forth. So Neal and that whole crowd were there for about two weeks over that New Year’s.

Neal and Luanne slept a couple of nights with me. I don’t know where they slept otherwise. With Allen, I guess. And sure, my God, I reacted to Neal the way I suppose Jack must have in the beginning. Neal was frenetic. Neal wanted to abolish time—that’s why the music was always on. Neal could handle himself in situations which most of us knew nothing much about. Neal was attractive.

Neal, although to anyone with any perceptions he was immediately recognized as a con man, was not a cruel con man. He wasn’t just making a score with you, he needed something to go on to the next moment, and you could come with him if you wanted to.

I never felt hustled by Neal. I must have given him twenty-five bucks over the years, which was just chicken feed, but he always returned more than that—in good feelings and in energy and discovery.

When Neal came to town, that was total, man. The wives of people and the girlfriends of people looked upon Neal as an enemy, perhaps because their men were so attracted to him. I don’t mean homosexually, but attracted to the pole of this vigor and this energy and the simplicity that he seemed to offer. I mean, “Let’s roll up to Harlem and see what’s going on!”

Neal had a capacity to make—he didn’t intend this, I don’t think—some kinds of people feel inauthentic. I was always afraid I wouldn’t respond in the right way. Neal never put you down. Neal never said, “Oh, come on, man, you’re a square.” Never anything like that, because he was always looking to the next moment. To how to move it. How to get it going. So even if you did something dumb, Neal never sneered at you. He had no sneer in him at all, not in those days, at least.

But of course, it was all brand-new to me. I mean, here was a guy who had stolen five hundred cars, or however many there were, whom I had seen seduce endless numbers of women in literally two minutes. Walk in—boom!—into the sack. He was a marvel in this way.

He concentrated, and he just poured it in. I believe Neal was a psychopath in the traditional and most rigorous sense of the term. That is, he acted out everything that occurred to him. He wasn’t an ugly person, and he wasn’t really a very violent person, but when he saw a chick, he poured it on and everybody melted. I suppose there must have been girls that didn’t. I’m not trying to say that every female person can be had, but Neal’s score was incredibly high. Many of us have tried to use that technique, but a technique is different from really feeling it, and he really did. He was indefatigable that way. By that I don’t mean that he would make love all the time, but that there must have been a degree of guilt in it, so that he was constantly trying to make up for something.

When he was fastening his attention upon you he was fastening everything, and he was anticipating what you hadn’t even thought of.

Jack took something in himself, fastened it on one character, and then spread it out over a lot of things. The Lost Generation’s the same way. How many Julien Sorels were there, from The Red and the Black? People seize upon something that appears to be the embodiment of the things they themselves can’t act out. And the reason why “Dean Moriarty” became the sort of image or metaphor that he did become was because people were feeling that way. Why Jack fastened on this is peculiar to him, but it’s also peculiar to genius to pick out instinctively—he didn’t do it cognitively—something that was going to be the next move.

Neal was always, I bet, somewhat embarrassed by this.

He had these incredibly complicated day-to-day schedules: “I’ve got to fuck so-and-so at two o’clock, and then I’ve got to rush off and do this.” He had all this energy, but he never finked on anything. I can remember lending him five bucks and saying, “Look, I’ve got to have this back at five o’clock Thursday afternoon because, literally, we can’t have dinner without it.” Man, he turned up with it.

I didn’t resent Jack’s attraction to Neal. I didn’t feel that my friendship with Jack was being drained in the other direction. I often sometimes felt that Jack was romanticizing Neal. We even talked about this occasionally. Jack couldn’t articulate—at least in conversation—why he was so fixated on Neal.

I don’t think that Jack and Neal were hung up sexually. I don’t think that Jack’s attraction to Neal was sexual at all. I think Neal made Jack feel inauthentic, too. That was his attraction. Most people never made Jack feel inauthentic, most people never made Jack feel square. Neal didn’t mean to make him feel square, but Neal was real. That is, Jack got scared when Neal stole a car. Jack got scared when Neal did a scam. Jack was a very, very proper middle-class boy from a mill-town in New England. He believed that life could break open somehow. He wanted it to break open, but he didn’t have the guts to do it himself. He didn’t have the way to do it himself.

Neal was enormously attractive to people who sat on their ass most of the day in a dim room, biting their nails, and typing out shit.

Jack lived a much more conventional life than I did. I was married and living in the city and I knew all kinds of different worlds. Jack, basically, was living with his mother in a lower-middle-class setup, itching, as one does. He constantly wanted a wife. He constantly wanted a girl. He constantly wanted some other order than this.

Neal in effect said to everybody—his lifestyle said: “It’s simple. Forget it. Toss it over.” Neal was like a Zen master who hit you on the head with a bamboo stick and said, “That’s satori.” Boom!

Jack had no center to begin with. His center had begun to disintegrate with the death of his father and the move from Lowell, and he was looking for some kind of new center.

Neal seemed to offer, not a center, but a trajectory, out.

I didn’t spend much time alone with Neal, two or three nights, the nights when he and Luanne stayed in my apartment. She went to bed and Neal and I would stay up, and we talked a lot. I was—Christ, I was young. He and I were almost the same age. I guess he was even younger than I am.

It was all new to me. He was so open, and he wasn’t laying a trip on anybody. He didn’t make me feel that I was what I really was, a sort of migraine-headache intellectual. He just gave it right on out, and I accepted it because I was ravenous for it, and interested.

Luanne Henderson:

Neal was having a bad time as time went on, and it came closer to getting back to San Francisco. His relationship with Allen and me was deteriorating again. In the beginning of course it had been up to the mountaintop, and it was sliding back down now because I realized that the time was getting closer when we would be separating again. And Allen also realized it was getting toward the time when Neal was going to go home again.

Allen was working on a newspaper, we were living with him, and we were taking turns sleeping. Allen only had one little cot and a couch, Al Hinkle was sleeping on the couch. Neal and I were sleeping in the bed at night and then Allen would come home like six or seven in the morning, and he’d usually climb in bed with the two of us. It was just a small cot, a three-quarter bed.

I had planned on going back to New York after I got back to San Francisco then, to move in with Allen, because we were both—especially the last week—devastated because that was the end of something again. So when we left, that was shortly before Allen had a breakdown.

Neal and Jack and Al and I headed for Bill Burroughs’ place in New Orleans.

In Virginia we got stopped by a cop and there was a fine attached to it if we were to get out. I had all the pot down my pants, scared to death. Immediately they asked who we were. I said, Luanne Cassady, Neal Cassady—and Neal is extremely nervous, talking a mile a minute. “I’m on my way back to my wife, and this is my ex-wife…” Automatically, this policeman’s ears popped. “What are you doing with her if you’re going back to your wife?” And Neal’s trying to say, “It’s not important. It’s just enough for you to know that I’m on my way back…” But to the cop it was important. “I want to know what you’re all doing together.” He didn’t think I was eighteen.

Al had been driving and he committed some infraction for which Neal was ready to kill poor Al. Neal was just infuriated over the fact that we’d gotten stopped. And of course, I was shaking in my boots because I’d heard so much about the small towns in the South. Here I am with all this dope down my pants and not having the least idea of how I’d even try to get rid of it, if I had to. But fortunately, it didn’t come to that.

For Al Hinkle’s young bride, Helen, the trip east from San Francisco was a honeymoon interrupted by her own discomfort in Neal’s company. She had gone on to Louisiana alone to await a reunion with Al on his swing back west with Jack, Neal, and Luanne.

Helen had been brought up by a family so strict that movies and lipstick were forbidden. She was an innocent, but sharp-witted enough to retain her poise as her naïveté evaporated in the company of Bill and Joan Burroughs. The Burroughses made her welcome at their rambling rented house in Algiers. Only a few minutes from New Orleans, Algiers, with its unpaved streets and lush vegetation, looked like a small southern town, an odd frame for the Burroughs ménage. By the time Jack, Neal, Luanne, and Al reached Louisiana, Helen had accustomed herself to the more bizarre aspects of life in the house, but she was furious at her husband for his tardiness. It was not the last time Al would go off alone in this manner, nor was she the last of the circle’s women to be abandoned—though Al’s absences were temporary—in this way.

Helen Hinkle:

I was staying—much to Al’s discomfort—at Burroughs’ place, Algiers, in New Orleans. That was my very first look at Jack.

He was coming in the back door in Burroughs’ place, sort of with trepidation, walking in like, “What’s going to happen?” I had called repeatedly trying to reach Al at Jack’s mother’s home. And of course Neal arrives with a woman, whom he introduces to me as his wife. Well, I had just met his wife in San Francisco. All of this happens, and in comes Jack, dressed in a pair of black cotton pants and a white shirt.

Al and I immediately repaired to the bedroom to do some arguing. Al didn’t argue. I argued. And Jack busied himself, started immediately to fill the vacuum. It was a weird scene. Burroughs was enraged, and I had known Burroughs for all of a month. So everybody’s kind of embarrassed when these people walk in.

Then Jack started doing the most insane thing. He asked to make crêpes suzettes. He had a recipe. Nothing was happening, so he had to start saying something. He said, “Do you have flour and eggs?” That’s when Al and I left to argue.

Luanne came in and sat on one of those twig-benches that was in the room and said, “Aren’t you going to screw? I’d like to watch.” Aaaah.

I hadn’t even been to a movie until I was twenty-one. Being so naive, I had no idea what was going on. I had no reason to be suspicious, although it was odd behavior. Joan’s raking lizards off a tree all night long is odd. Bathing thirteen cats and tying them up in strings is rather odd. But then, I had met Neal Cassady, and that was pretty odd, too.

Burroughs was enraged that Neal was coming, because he knew Neal was a con man and was going to con him out of something. And I expected when Neal walked in that he was going to kick him out, or there would be a fist fight. When Neal got there, Burroughs was very nice to him, polite. But I think Jack expected fireworks. And nothing happened.

I thought that Neal was the devil incarnate. I’d never seen anybody smoke marijuana before. But he had been one of the three or four people at our wedding, and on the way over to meet Carolyn I could tell that there was something the matter with him, because he was dancing up and down and jumping and the radio was blaring, and I was saying to Al, “Is he smoking mari—”

So I had been telling Burroughs all this time what a dreadful person Neal was. He smoked marijuana. And Burroughs said, “Well-l-l, marijuana…” And he gave me the La Guardia Report on marijuana to read, and he said, “Now the thing you never want to get involved in is heroin. Now that’s the real evil.” Actually, at the time, according to Neal or Jack, he apparently had twenty acres of marijuana under cultivation in Texas.

At the time we met Burroughs he was thirty-five going on ninety-five. And he talked like an old man. I had met him in a Chinese restaurant, a dungeon of a place in New Orleans, told him my plight, and he nicely asked me to come and stay because I couldn’t get reservations anyplace. It was Sugar Bowl week. A few days before the game I had to leave the hotel I was in. Fortunately, somebody got me a room in a brothel a few doors up.

All I had, really, except my home address in San Francisco, was Burroughs’ address and phone number. I told him my plight and he replied with a long, long speech on prefabricated housing. It was the time of The Man in the White Suit,^* and he got into nylon hose, and Bill was shaking with rage at the nylon hose. But he nicely asked me to come, and he said, “We do have a room. Please do come over.” And the crazy thing is, those people wanted to reconvert their chicken shed into an apartment for Al and I. I mean, for some crazy reason, they liked having us around. How I spent my days in order not to be a bother was, I’d get up in the morning, leave, and come back in the evening.

Now Burroughs liked Jack, and he was really pleased that he was coming and he was pleased to see him. There was no jealousy. Burroughs didn’t feel like he had to protect himself against Jack. But he was enraged about Neal, and then he didn’t say a damned thing. “And if that Neal Cassady comes, I can tell you right now…” Generally, he didn’t speak about things personally at all. Generally he talked about anything but people—things. But I think he figured that Neal was going to con him out of something.

Al Hinkle:

I remember having a conversation with Burroughs over Westbrook Pegler. The discussion was over not what Pegler was saying, which Burroughs thought was all hogwash, but the way he was saying it. He just admired his prose, his ability to write the English language, and he’d think, like, he’s the best writer writing for newspapers in the United States.

Helen Hinkle:

I left during the day. Sight-saw a lot, and then I used to get Joan one Benzedrine inhaler a day. Once somebody offered me a dozen and I said, “Well, no. One is enough.” I asked Joan. “Oh,” the druggist said, “I’d, sell you a dozen because I know you wouldn’t, couldn’t misuse them.” I said, “Misuse them?” I went back to Joan, I said, “I could have gotten you twelve today,” and she said, “GOD! I hope you got them!” I said, “Well, no.” And I said, “By the way, it says on those tubes that they last six months. I don’t understand what you’re doing.” Then she showed me what she was doing.

She’d break the cap off and take the little cotton out and swallow the cotton.

The kids used her Revere Ware pots to crap in, and they were the same ones we used to cook in at night. She mopped every day, scrubbed those kids’ rooms just like a hospital room, because she had to. But the kids didn’t bathe. You bathed that little girl, and you could tell she hadn’t been washed in ages. That little girl—she bit her arm all the time. She had great, terrible scars on her arm. Bill called the boy “Little Beast.”

Joan had a limp. Very quiet. Sort of looked like an overworked, dreary housewife. Straight hair tied back with wisps hanging. She never wore a bra. There was something kind of naked about her. I don’t think she ever wore shoes or hose. She looked rather childlike.

Al Hinkle, 1976.
Photo by Lawrence Lee.

It was like going to another world then, Algiers was, and I think that Burroughs was very much horrified by his neighbors and they by him.

Joan, of course, never slept. And because the kids would be sleeping and Bill would be sleeping for part of the night, she had to do something. There was a barren tree right outside the porch. The house was L-shaped and porched all around, and there was this dead, ghastly tree. It was just covered with lizards, and she used to rake lizards off the tree at night. I don’t think she killed them. Of course, they went back. That was their home. It just gave her something to do at four o’clock in the morning in the moonlight.

As we left there Burroughs was building a table that would last a thousand years. And it was absolutely eaten full of wormholes.

They ate very well. By that, I mean they ate a good deal, and well-balanced meals, and cared about what kind of meat and vegetables. I think Burroughs used marijuana for an appetite, just so it would give him some reason to eat.

He carried a gun holster, and he used to shoot those Benzedrine capsules with an air gun.

Al Hinkle:

He’d take these Benzedrine plastic things and set ’em up and then shoot them with a gun.

Helen Hinkle:

You always had to knock at his door before you’d walk through, and the easiest way to the john was directly through his room. Otherwise you had to go out on the veranda and through the kitchen. You could usually hear when he was shooting. He’d line up her Benzedrine capsules and sit on the couch and: pyoo! pyoo! pyoo!

Then he had a shoulder holster and a side arm. The first day Jack was there he and Bill got out there in the front yard, and they each strap on guns, playing fast draw.

Al Hinkle:

Jack had one of the kids’ cap guns.

Luanne Henderson:

I didn’t really have any opportunity to get well acquainted with Burroughs at that time. I don’t think even Neal and Jack got too much of a chance. Jack, more than Neal, was talking with Burroughs, and kind of in need of Burroughs at the time. The fact that we were going down by Burroughs really meant a great deal to Jack. When we would talk or anything, Burroughs was very much a part of him, like a teacher. He always found a way to take Burroughs aside and talk with him.

Neal kind of avoided Burroughs for some reason. I think Bill was a little unhappy with Neal at that point. I wasn’t really too sure then why, what the whole thing was about, but I got the definite impression that Burroughs wasn’t all that pleased about seeing Neal. It kind of put me in a position of holding back.

Joan was really involved in speed, that inhaler trip. We cleaned Algiers out and then had to start going over into New Orleans, making trips to every drugstore in town, because I think at that time—I’m not positive—she was taking about eight tubes a day.

I never saw her sleep. I don’t care what time I got up or came home or anything, Joan was up, either with the broom or rake, scraping lizards off of the tree, in the kitchen washing walls, continuously scrubbing.

There were several evenings that we all sat around Burroughs’ feet, him in his rocking chair. I don’t think I ever saw Bill out of that rocking chair all the time we were there, except a few times outside with Jack. Listening to Bill was very interesting.

He was directing most of his conversation to Jack, more than Neal or I, concerning things in New York, and Jack’s writing. And I think Neal felt all that deeply, and proceeded to agitate or irritate Bill further by some of his antics, which Neal had a tendency to do when he felt inadequate around someone. It would speed him up even more, and then he would get into things that normally weren’t part of him.

After we left Algiers for California we were going through the bayous. It was midnight on this spooky little road with all the willow trees hanging down, and Jack proceeded to tell the story of the death of David Kammerer, just like we were listening to a version of The Shadow. It was really wild. He had me just with shivers up and down, and he was talking in that kind of voice deliberately. We’d been listening on the radio, ’cause at that time, all our spook stories were on, like The Shadow and some other old-time radio shows, and that’s just how Jack related it. Speaking in a very low, mysterious voice, and picturing the whole thing of the river, the darkened streets. He really went into vivid detail, and I felt like I was there, and I got the shivers. Jack and Neal, of course, were giggling like they were telling ghost stories.

Then we all took our clothes off when we were going across Texas. Jack went through that thing in On the Road, saying I smeared them with cold cream, and all that, which was totally unreal. We did take our clothes off, because it was sweltering hot. I mean, we were just dying. We didn’t have any cold cream. I would have loved to have had some. Any kind of cream.

But the most memorable part Jack didn’t go into much description of. We stopped at some ruins and all of us went over there and for miles around you couldn’t see a thing. You could see a car coming for a hundred miles down the road, and we were all cavorting naked through the ruins and we saw a car approaching, which we all proceeded to ignore until it was just a few hundred feet away. Then Jack and I sprinted across the highway to get back in the car. Neal struck this magnificent pose up on one of these concrete platforms. You could see the car slowing down, this elderly couple coming by. You could see this old woman on the passenger side pointing, and Jack and I were discussing exactly what she was saying. “Isn’t that amazing?” Because Neal did have a beautiful body. “Isn’t that a magnificent statue? And the way it’s held up through the years when all this deterioration was around it.” There wasn’t a finger out of place. He must have stood there in that hot sun for a long while, because they just slowed down to a crawl. And of course Jack and I were getting lower and lower in the car. I guess now when I look back on it, we really were lucky none of us was ever arrested.

The ending of that trip was so abrupt, and so cold.

Neal left Jack and I on the street in San Francisco. Neal just drove away, and there was Jack and I without penny one, without anything except a lousy suitcase and each other. We just stood there looking at each other and thought, “Where do we go from here?”

It had been such a happy trip, but, of course, with nobody thinking about tomorrow.

We didn’t have anything when we got to San Francisco. I think, at that point, whatever Jack had, he had given to Neal for gas and food and such. He might have given Burroughs something for the food.

There had been a point when we were in New York, close to the time when we were leaving, and Neal was feeling kind of panicky, and I recognized it. I don’t really know if Jack did at that time. I know he wouldn’t have discussed it with me if he had. But Neal was kind of trying to push Jack and I together, which would have eased things off for him as far as I was concerned. That would have gotten one problem out of the way.

That’s the way it was going, because at this point I felt a definite attraction to Jack, and I felt that he did to me. There really was no need for pushing on Neal’s part, but Al said that if Neal was aware of that, he would have been very unhappy. He was later, when he found out I was really attracted to Jack, and it wasn’t Neal’s idea but Jack’s and mine also. He was very unhappy about the situation, and he tried to reverse it, which wasn’t that easy to do.

But then when Jack and I got to San Francisco we had no money for food, and I went over to this other hotel about a block from the one where Jack and I were staying. This was a girl that I had stayed with previously, and we had learned to use this iron upside down to cook on. You sit it on a wastepaper basket and turn the iron upside down. They didn’t allow hot plates or anything, and the manager used to go crazy smelling coffee or food.

One of her recipes that we lived by was boiling noodles and opening a can of cream of chicken soup and just mixing it up. It was great.

I also had a problem because, as you remember, before I left I was going to be married. It was only about two weeks and he was due home in San Francisco. And here I am and I really didn’t know what to do. Not only because Jack was there alone, but the thing was that I knew Jack would go to Neal, and I was very confused at that point about how I felt.

I was involved with Jack and cared a great deal about him. To me, at that time, three months was like three years, and so much had happened in the three months since my fiancé was gone, I really didn’t have any idea how I felt about him anymore. I’d even forgotten what he looked like, but I did know that the letters were still coming in and he was still expecting me to be writing. I had an obligation to at least give him an explanation of what was happening. He had no idea I’d been to New York.

I went over to a hotel about a block and a half away from the hotel that Jack and I had been staying at, where this girl stayed. She was a hooker, a very, very young girl that I had met when I first came out to San Francisco. I ran into her in the bar that was downstairs from the girl with the iron, and she was living with a guy that owned a bar on Turk Street. I told her I had just gotten back, and that I didn’t have any money or anything and I wanted to get a job at the bar—except that I was underage. She was underage, too, but she was living with the owner, so I thought maybe she might be able to help me through him. So she said why don’t I go out for dinner with him and her and the bartender? I realized they were setting me up, but I didn’t care about that. And she also said she would give me some money, which she did. Anyway, I went out to dinner with them. I didn’t get the job. I didn’t know a damn thing about hustling or anything at all, and I thought she’s being my friend, working with me, but it was the other way around. She was with them and trying to use me. It didn’t work out at all.

Jack called Neal the day before I left for Denver. Neal told him that he would pick him up, and that was all settled and straight. Jack and I spent that whole night talking about he and I, and we both agreed that I had to do something as far as the man I was to marry was concerned—do something one way or the other. And then I was supposed to get in touch with Jack afterward and go on from there.

As it turned out I got married, and I didn’t see Jack or Neal.

I had seen Jack in relationships with other women, but naturally I had no idea whether he was the same with them as he was with me. With me, Jack reverted to a little-boy type of thing. He needed mothering. He was extremely lovable and beautiful, but I think Jack had a need for being taken care of.

But at that time, so did I. I needed someone—not necessarily to take care of me financially, but I wasn’t emotionally strong enough. At least I didn’t think I was. I just didn’t feel secure. Since we didn’t go on with it, I don’t know if things would have changed. But I felt like Jack leaned on me more than I leaned on him. And that was a scary time, and I was the one who would have to make all the decisions or all of the moves, and I wasn’t quite sure I was ready to make all the right ones. I wanted help.

After I got older and I saw Jack, as I did, through the years, I think that made me sadder than anything, that Jack couldn’t get away from that hang-up with his mother, the relationship with his mother, and not being able to find a good, stable relationship with a woman. He just never was able to pull himself out of that.

Neal was very, very jealous of Jack, but I don’t think Jack was appreciative enough of that. I tried to tell him. I really thought it would help Jack to realize that Neal was very jealous of him as a man, because Jack always acted as though the women around would only turn to him as second-best, if Neal didn’t want them. I tried to tell him it wasn’t that way at all, but I don’t think he ever really realized it. He thought I was just saying it to make him feel good, which I was, but not for the reasons that he thought.

I think that Neal tried to prove to himself that even if he gave his women away, he would win in the end. He had the doubt about women and everything else concerning himself, but because nobody else had that doubt, he had to live up to it. Jack wouldn’t expect him to have any kind of worry concerning himself. You know, “Why worry about me with the woman? You know you can have her back anytime you want.” But Neal wasn’t that sure of it.

This was a pattern of Neal’s with most of those who cared for him. They found themselves being left a great many times. I think Neal would feel pressure when he felt someone was relying on him that much. Neal would get panicky, too. I think all of us had a tendency to think that Neal was strong enough and infallible enough to accept anything. When someone would be depending on him a great deal, he would get panicky, not necessarily showing it as panic, but just suddenly splitting from the scene. That way he didn’t have to face up to the responsibility of whatever people were expecting of him.

Carolyn Cassady:

They came back from this first trip to New York—six weeks was all—and I was on Liberty Street and Jack and Luanne were in the hotel. Neal and Jack came over and I said, “How’s Luanne?”

Neal said, “Luanne who?”

I said, “Where is she?”

“I don’t know where she is. How should I know where she is?”

And this time—this time—I knew he was lying, of course, so I said, “Beat it.”

Somehow Neal convinced me he didn’t have a place to go. They both stayed there while Neal had a job selling pots and pans. Of course that job didn’t last but a week. And that is when Jack was disappointed in Luanne and went back to New York on the bus.

Jack was furious. He said that she was deceiving him, and that when he stood there and saw her get into that big car with a fat guy that she was just playing games with him. Of course he was paranoid anyway, so he just put the most paranoid interpretation on it. He was hurt and angry. She says she was doing it to get the money for him, for dinner, but he didn’t believe that.

So then he went off on the bus with his fifteen sandwiches.

Neal was still telling me he didn’t know where Luanne was, and there’s a knock on the door, and there’s Luanne. Of course, this happened to me all the time. It was up and down, up and down. He’d convince me that he was through with her, and the next thing, she’d show up again. This happened for ten years.

I had nothing against her anyway. When she had shown up in San Francisco the first time, the year before, all dressed up to the teeth . . . when I’d last seen this weird little pigtailed girl in Denver, and here is this gorgeous gal, big fur collar and the gold, glistening hair. She was still seventeen, but some guy had bought her all this and brought her out there.

It was so obvious she’d come to torment Neal that I was cheering her on, because he had been rotten to her, I thought. I thought, “Boy, does he deserve it.” It was a good ploy. He was really jealous as hell, and his suicide try came right after that but I didn’t know it then. He’d convinced me he wasn’t falling for all that show.

That had been the year before, but then when she showed up at Liberty Street after their trip to New York, I realized once more that it still wasn’t over with her, and I can remember looking at the cheese toast I was cooking for Jack and Neal, pulling it out of the oven and crying over it in the kitchen.

I stayed in the kitchen while Neal and Luanne were having their little chat. Then of course, when she left I said, “You can go with her. One more set of lies, so go your way. Go, go.” So he left and then came back the next day with a broken thumb. I drove him to the hospital in the Hudson. He borrowed a nickel from me so he could call Luanne and tell her to put all his clothes in the street, ’cause he was absolutely through with her. That’s what he told me. Instead he called her and sobbed about his broken thumb, and she was all sympathy and came running down to pat him. I’m sitting in the Hudson and here drives up Luanne in a taxi. Then Luanne and I went back to my place together.

Of course, she was embarrassed about whose car this was now, since I’d never been in it before and I’m saying, “You want to drive?” I felt completely through with Neal. This was the end—again.

Luanne and I let our hair down, and she loved griping about all the things Neal had done to her and how awful he was and everything, and so when they called from the hospital and said he was ready, she didn’t quit, she just kept right on talking and said, “Let him wait.” So I kept saying, “Don’t you think we ought to get him?” And she’d say, “Aah…” And so finally we went down to get him, and he’s sitting on the curb throwing up. We put him back in the car and took him to my place, and he fell asleep, both of us covering him and patting him.

Then she got up and said, “Well, I have to go.”

I said, “Well, take him with you.”

“I don’t want him. You keep him.”

“No, you take him.”

“No, you take him.”

He’s lying there. He doesn’t care.

So she said she just couldn’t, because her fiancé was coming back. He was a merchant seaman, and he was, coming to that hotel, and Neal couldn’t be there, of course.

So I said, “What am I going to do?” I had to leave him where he was, and he wasn’t going to move, anyway.

After he got better, I couldn’t tell Neal to go to hell. I had to let him stay with me to take care of the baby so I could get a job, since he couldn’t work. So he shaved his head and took care of Cathy. I came home from work one day and looked up at the window and there was this weird bald skull. Luanne came over when I was at work, but I didn’t know it then. Then after I’d found a good job, we moved to Russell Street.

Neal still had his hand in a cast, and they had to cut off the end of his thumb when it got infected. He broke it when he had hit Luanne in the head. The first thing I said was, “My God, how’s Luanne?” And he said, “Fine! God-damned, hard-headed bitch.” Neal never got into fights with men, but he hit women, though no one else got injured. He knew better than to hit me.

Neal was always bored and frustrated when he wasn’t working. Of course, when Jack came out, he got to play. That was my dilemma always, and why I didn’t really welcome Jack at first—I knew it meant I’d be abandoned again. But, if it would make Neal happy, I’d say go ahead and ask him to come. That’s why Jack came back the second time; Neal begged him to, and Jack wanted to get away from his second wife’s demands for money.

Shortly after Jack left Luanne and San Francisco to return to his mother (she sent the bus fare) in January of 1949, Giroux accepted The Town and the City for publication by Harcourt, Brace. The advance payment was a thousand dollars, which struck Jack and Mémêre as a sizeable fortune. Jack considered spending part of it to join Ed White and other Denver friends in Paris that summer, but decided instead to move to Denver himself. He bought Gabrielle a Motorola television set before leaving, explaining that he would find a house there and send for her. Now that he was about to become a successful novelist she could give up her job in the shoe factory and rely on Jack to support her, as he had promised Leo.

Jack and Robert Giroux became fast friends, and Kerouac led his editor beyond the final pages of the novel they were revising together and onto the road itself, to Denver, where Giroux stayed briefly before returning to New York.

Gabrielle came west to see the house Jack had prepared for her, but she disliked the suburban isolation and after a short stay in Colorado, Mémêre went to North Carolina to help Nin recover from a difficult Caesarean section. Jack’s idea of supporting his mother was mixed up in his head with his idea about living in the West, Neal’s West, but Gabrielle was content with her small New York apartment and with the relative closeness to her daughter in North Carolina.

Jack’s months in Denver that summer were lonely—at least so far as having old friends on hand was concerned. Ed White and Allan Temko, who had been in Denver the summer before, were away in France for a brief taste of the expatriation they had read about in Hemingway. Neal was in California, attending to Carolyn and their child.

The summer of 1949 gave Jack a chance to experience firsthand the sights and sounds of Neal’s Denver boyhood. He took a job that Neal had once held, as a common laborer in the Denver wholesale produce market, and after work, during the hot summer evenings, he ranged Larimer Street. The descriptions of “redbrick neon” deadbeat Denver in Visions of Neal/Visions of Cody are products of this stay.

Allen, who had graduated from Columbia in February 1949, had been arrested with Huncke, Jack Melody, and Vicki Russell that spring and, by the summer, had been released from the psychiatric confinement that had spared him trial and sentencing as an accessory in their crimes. He returned to everyday life with an ambition for more or less conventional success, stung, evidently, by the brief loss of his freedom. Neal kept writing Allen—long letters pledging friendship and concern—but it was Kerouac whom Neal summoned to join him in San Francisco that summer.

In August 1949, Jack left Denver and went to San Francisco, planning to stay two weeks. When he arrived at the Cassadys’ house Carolyn was fearful that Jack’s appearance meant that Neal would leave soon. Neal’s problems over money were compounded by the pain from the thumb injury and by a stubborn respiratory infection. He was bored and morose. The urge to go—anywhere—was as strong as ever. Earlier that summer, Al Hinkle had left Helen again, going to live in a separate apartment with Jim Holmes, the pool hustler, and then going on in his company to Maine and, eventually, New York, before returning west. In Al Hinkle’s absence his wife Helen had become Carolyn’s confessor and confidante, siding with her against Neal.

Neal’s Hudson had been repossessed, and so, in order to play host to the visiting Kerouac, Neal turned to his old Denver friend Bill Tomson, who now was married and living in San Francisco. Bill had a car and, although he was sullen about it, agreed to serve as chauffeur and guide. The three men sampled San Francisco’s nightlife, buying marijuana in black neighborhoods and smoking it while they toured the jazz clubs, including the “mixed” bars where a diagonal white stripe across the room separated the black and white contingents of the audience while they listened to such West Coast exponents of the bop style as Slim Gaillard.

As they smoked and drank and explored the city together, Neal, who despaired of pleasing Carolyn, found comfort in Jack’s company. It had been three years since they first met, and although they often had talked and written of simply going on the road together, alone, the ambition had been postponed, as they saw it. The trip of the previous winter, 1948–49, had been too crowded and purposeful for them simply to experience America as it happened to them. Carolyn had done nothing to make Jack feel welcome, so they might as well set out. And there was no reason to confine their itinerary to America. This time they could continue to Europe, as they had fantasized.

But neither of them had much money. Jack had ninety dollars with him and Neal had nothing when, late in August 1949, they left San Francisco and headed east on the trip which is retold in Part Three of On the Road. Although they owned no car they did not hitchhike, as popular imagination later would have it. Instead they called upon the agencies that arranged rides with other travelers or recruited drivers to take cars to their owners in other cities. The first leg of the journey, to Denver, was in the company of a prim homosexual, who drove in evident fear that Neal would rob him, or worse.

Once in Denver, the immediate goal was to find traces of Neal’s now-vanished father, but the idea soon was forgotten. At a roadhouse near Denver Neal insisted on showing Jack his skills as a car thief. While Jack drank inside, Neal went to the parking lot to test-drive the customers’ cars, trying to choose exactly the right one for a joy-ride into the mountains. The police were called soon after the first customers noticed their cars parked in the wrong place, but Neal escaped without arrest. He knew, however, how familiar his fingerprints were to the officers on Denver’s car-theft detail, and so he and Jack wasted no time in leaving Denver. They left in style, in a Cadillac secured through legal means—from an agency. They were to drive it to its owner in Chicago.

Just outside Denver the Cadillac’s speedometer cable disintegrated at 110 miles per hour, and Jack was forced to rely on higher mathematics to calculate their pace, an average of 72 miles an hour from Denver to Chicago, including all rest and food stops. In Chicago they visited a jazz bar to hear some bop, and then set out for Detroit by bus. They were too broke to afford a skid-row room and slept instead in the balcony of an all-night movie house for thirty-five cents a seat. The double feature was a singing-cowboy epic and a spy thriller with Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, and the plots and characters of the two joined and clashed in Jack’s half-sleep. He was worn by the speed and near-collisions of the journey.

The last leg of the trip was with a middle-aged businessman, who charged Jack and Neal four dollars apiece to take them from Detroit to New York. In Ozone Park Gabrielle told Jack that Neal would be welcome only for a few days. Then he would have to leave.

All thoughts of going on to Europe together had been forgotten. Instead Jack turned to the final cuts and revisions of The Town and the City, which was scheduled for publication in February 1950. While Jack was away that summer John Clellon Holmes had begun notes for his own chronicle of the New York scene, Go.

Three thousand miles from his wife and by then two children, Neal watched with fascination as Jack was taken up by the New York literary world. As a soon-to-be published novelist Jack now tried to offer a helping hand to friends who were not so lucky.

Allan Temko:

When I came back from Europe in ’49 I had written a book, a novel, and he took me to Bob Giroux, his publisher.

Giroux was very nervous with Kerouac and me. Giroux had gone to Columbia, and to break the ice I came in with the manuscript. Kerouac was very generous to bring me to his publisher and try and get my work published. We were in the boardroom of one of those New York publishing houses, imitation English upper-class paneling, just like Louis B. Mayer.

I had met Alfred Kazin in Paris. I had brought him some work. Giroux said, “Have you shown it to anyone?” I said, “Well, I brought it up to Alfred Kazin, but he was apparently eating his lunch in his hotel room.” Then I said, “He reminded me of one of these guys who used to come up to Columbia on the subway with their corned beef sandwich in their briefcase.”

So that pissed off Giroux, Kerouac later told me, because Giroux had done that. That got him angry at me, so he said, “Well, we’ll read this book with great interest.”

I think he had a fixation on Kerouac and he didn’t want anyone else around. He doted on Jack and, of course, Jack was not above exploiting this kind of thing. In fact he was almost indifferent to it.

I at that time might have been insufferable, because I didn’t like Giroux’s looks, and must have shown my dislike. There was something wrong with the whole scene. I normally would never have hit it off with him anyway, but, typical of Kerouac, he said, “You guys will get along enormously.” And it always turned out to be a disaster.

Well, he felt I would love Neal, which I didn’t. He was always trying to get all his friends to love one another, which was an admirable trait.

Forgetting Carolyn, their daughter, the second child on its way, Luanne, San Francisco, Neal stayed on in New York in the fall of 1949, occasionally joining Jack on his forays into literary society. Cassady’s immense skills as a driver equipped him superbly as a parking-lot attendant, and New York was a city full of women to be conquered. In a matter of weeks he found one woman in particular, a cultivated beauty from a well-to-do Long Island family, Diana Hansen. She was married, but soon she was pregnant by Neal. John Clellon Holmes saw the affair from its very beginning.

Neal Cassady with Diana Hansen and family, Tarrytown, New York, 1950. Photo courtesy of Carolyn Cassady.

John Clellon Holmes:

I knew his wife, Diana. I saw him fuck her for the first time. I saw him score. That’s one of those two-minute things. He walked right in and he looked at her—she was married to somebody else at that point, and I’m not sure if her husband was there—and literally scored with her immediately, and moved in with her, and had the child with her, and lived with her for I don’t know how many months, but it was some months. I visited him very often up there.

She was the wife of a poet. She’d lived in Europe. She was completely New York literary establishment, and she’d never seen anything like Neal, who came roaring into her life. She gave over her entire life to him simply because of this magnetism, which she’d never felt before. It’s become talk of the streetcorner now, but in the early fifties there wasn’t anybody like that.

I remember going up there. The shades were always drawn, and they had a red light, or something. Neal wore a short kimono with his dork showing underneath it—just the tip. And here was Diana—how do I put this without sounding sexist?—all she wanted was for him to love her and she was willing for anything. He could fill their apartment with twenty-five people. She’d never smoked pot in her life. I don’t believe she’d ever heard bop, or anything. And suddenly, her whole life was transformed, but it was all riveted on Neal.

Now Carolyn found herself being nudged aside to make way for Diana. Carolyn was unwilling to step aside quietly, correctly sensing that Neal would return to San Francisco and guessing that she might be able to get him back.

As Jack moved deeper into his friendship with Giroux and his work on revising The Town and the City he and Neal had less time to spend together. Neal’s romance with Allen had cooled into warm friendship, but his child by Diana was on the way, and he wanted to please Diana by giving the child his name. Accordingly, at long distance, divorce proceedings from Carolyn were begun, with Carolyn’s grudging consent.

Neal returned to California, but he was now unwelcome at Carolyn’s house in San Francisco. The railroad had recalled him to work, and he moved to Watsonville, in the Steinbeck country near Monterey, the southern division point on the Southern Pacific lines that served the San Francisco Bay Area. There he took up both with Diana, who followed him, and with Luanne, who took a job in Watsonville to be near him, as he had requested.

Carolyn Cassady:

He went back to New York and took up with Diana Hansen. He was never going to bother me again, he said, and he was really trying to change the whole pattern, thinking it was hopeless, so he lived with her, and she went to bat for him . . . ran all the interference with me, and told me to get a divorce, and I said, “Let Neal ask me for one.” So she wrote the letter, and he signed it. She was pregnant now, too. She and I battled all that year and many more. I had Jamie in the meantime, while Neal was gone. The divorce thing was all very strange. He went to Mexico to get a quickie, since the one I started would take too long, but instead he got pot. Diana never knew. He came back to San Francisco the next summer, but I never filed for our final papers, thinking he had gotten the Mexican divorce.

Luanne Henderson:

I moved down the coast to Watsonville, the other end of Neal’s railroad run, Carolyn not knowing, once again, and I got a job at a drive-in. But Neal was so possessive, he spent one night standing in a telephone booth watching me the whole night. He was there three nights a week. I never really knew when he was coming in. I didn’t know a soul there, not a soul, and I was totally alone in this boardinghouse that we had a room in. And he was just watching me constantly to see who I would go home with. I never went home with anyone, and he was always totally disappointed.

He could walk off and leave me like that at any time, regardless of the relationship, and yet he was so possessive that he would smother me. But that only lasted about a month at the most, and I told him that he was getting goofy watching me.

I told him that if he wasn’t going to trust me, I couldn’t live that way. This time I was getting a little older and Neal wasn’t used to me being independent in any way or making my own feelings known, and I think it was kind of a shock to him. It really was a shock to him when I left. He didn’t think I would, but I did. And it wasn’t a mistake. It was best for him and I, Carolyn and everyone.

Carolyn Cassady:

Watsonville, that’s the other end of the freight line, so instead of living in San Jose or San Francisco he had moved down there so he wouldn’t be bothering me, and also so Diana could come out. He lived in San Francisco for a while in a room, too, and she was going to come out there.

He went to Watsonville so Diana would be farther away from me, but she still insisted on coming by to see me, and I told her to get lost, and then she missed her plane, she said, and came over anyway with all these little gifts for the girls, and she was out to here with his child.

But Neal thought that she had caught the plane in Oakland. So she spent the night, and he arrived on the doorstep at about six o’clock in the morning. Diana was in bed upstairs so I just made sign language and said, “Guess who’s here?” And of course he’d sent her off from Watsonville with one of his big stories, but here he was at my house caught red-handed.

I felt sorry for her that time, I must say. He went up and talked to her, and I guess really put her down. She was pretty forlorn when she went off to the airport.

So then, again, I had to let him stay.

The Town and the City by John Kerouac appeared in February 1950, to reviews that were only cordial. The publicity, and many of the notices, mentioned Jack’s debt to Thomas Wolfe, but Wolfe’s vision of the picaresque novel was no longer fresh enough to fire enthusiasm. The effect on Jack’s mind probably was to ratify the search for a new way to tell the next story, On the Road. He felt certain that Giroux would buy the book for Harcourt, Brace, and that his career would continue, but in a new direction.

Jack planned a long trip that summer that would take him, first, to Denver and his friends there to celebrate The Town and the City, and then on to Mexico, where he would visit with Burroughs’ old friend, Bill Garver. Neal also had plans to visit Mexico. His evident motive was a quick Mexican divorce from Carolyn that would let him marry Diana, if only briefly, to legitimize their child. He also wanted to buy marijuana.

There were two Kerouacs in Denver that summer: “John,” who put on his dust-wrapper-photo suit to sign copies of his novel in the book department of Denver Dry Goods Company, and Neal’s old buddy, Jack.

Ed White’s sister decided to give a party for her brother’s friend, the visiting novelist from New York. She invited her well-to-do acquaintances, and was appalled when Neal and a contingent of Larimer Street buddies crashed it.

Jack had a romance with Beverly Burford, who, with her brother, Bob, would continue to watch Jack’s progress until his death. The Burfords came from a wealthy family, and Bob was able to view Kerouac, Neal, and the others with the detachment of the patron and editor of small literary magazines that he would later become.

Like White, the Burfords were cultivated and widely read young people who were impressed, as they should have been, by Jack’s achievement with The Town and the City. Justin Brierly and his friends were among those who visited the department store where Jack autographed copies of his novel. Denver, then as now, was the major city for many hundreds of miles and was not an unsophisticated place, but a novelist whose advance publicity likened him to Thomas Wolfe was a social prize, and Jack, who looked striking in his dark suit, trotted out his party manners and fresh gossip about the important elbows he had rubbed in New York that season.

Jack’s closest friends among Denver society were easygoing in one another’s company, and Jack, Ed White, and the Burfords chose Denver’s Elitch Gardens, a public park that was deserted at night, as a safe place to smoke marijuana. (They were Bohemian to that degree.) “Elitching” became their private code word for smoking grass. Ed White was a genuine friend of Al Hinkle’s and found no discomfort in the company of Jim Holmes, but to Bob Burford, as to Allan Temko, Neal was an unacceptable friend.

Bob Burford:

I think that Jack just picked up the wrong hero in Neal. There was a character treatment, and then he exaggerated it, and he blew it out of all proportion to anything that was real.

For example, the poolhall referred to is any poolhall you could find along the street. It wasn’t big-time sharks, one guy hustling the other one. There was no big hustle. They were hustling for time, snooker for time, hustling for twenty-five cents. They were playing for a dollar. But Kerouac wanted to see it in a much bigger way. That’s how he saw it, and that’s how he wrote about it, but it just wasn’t that interesting.

I think there were many characters that he could have written about, and really would have developed his talent more than playing around with Cassady. Cassady just wasn’t that interesting.

It was hard for me to look at Cassady when Kerouac himself was of interest. Cassady seemed to be nothing. Ginsberg was just like a figure in the background there; he was even in a shadow. He was more interesting than Cassady. Allen kept Kerouac’s interest in Neal alive, because of his own interest in Neal.

Kerouac did have an immense talent. It was only a question of where you put him. Kerouac was always in a lousy situation. You never saw him at a party where he was really having fun all night, or for many hours. He was never consistently having fun. He’d have highs listening to, say, Charlie Parker, or something like that. And he must have had some times when he was genuinely happy: alone, nature, big nights, and just writing. He loved to write. But he wasn’t a happy fellow.

Jack saw more similarity than there was between himself and Neal, a blown-up picture of greatness in Kerouac and Cassady. It must be fantastic fun to read about them in your living room and then close the book and go about your business, but who would want to set this up as a thing to do in America? He got involved in something, and he was just involved, and I don’t think he liked it.

Kerouac really wanted to redo things. If you call something the Lost Generation, he says “the Beat Generation.” That’s pretty great. That would stick. That was a way-out expression, the Beat Generation. Before beatniks, he said, “This is a beat generation.” He really thought that he could will himself into being someone as great as Thomas Wolfe, or greater. I don’t think he wanted to be greater, he’d just like to be that good.

Jack’s trip to Mexico with Neal during that spring of 1950 provided the final episode of On the Road. The night before they left there was a big going-away party in the bar of a shabby hotel where Neal and his father had once lived. Brierly was there, Bill Tomson and his wife, Jim Holmes, Al Hinkle, Ed White, and Bev Burford. Another Denver friend, Frank Jeffries, was going to Mexico City with Jack and Neal.

By the time they reached Burroughs’ Mexico City apartment Jack had been stricken with dysentery. Before Jack had recovered Neal either did or didn’t get his Mexican divorce and left for New York and Diana, in the old Ford he was driving. The car’s transmission failed, and Diana had to wire him the money to fly on from Louisiana. The day he arrived he married her, legitimizing her child, and with more money from his new wife boarded a bus to return to San Francisco and Carolyn, the wife he had just divorced.

Burroughs, always a diffident host, was deep in his studies of Aztec culture, surrounded as usual by his armamentarium of drugs. The Mexican police paid no attention to the pistol he wore everywhere.

Jack recovered slowly from the dysentery. His friendship with Neal appeared to have played out for the moment. The novel he had worked on for four years had been published to no great success, a third of its first printing left unbound. Jack began to experiment with morphine himself, and for the first time to indulge heavily in marijuana.

By October, the month that usually beckoned him home to Mémêre, Jack was worried that he was on his way to addiction. He returned to Gabrielle and New York. Allen assured him that he was not an addict.

Despite the so-so reception of The Town and the City Jack never wavered in his perception of himself as a writer. The task now was to distill the road experiences into a publishable novel, but he needed a paying job as well. He found it in the New York offices of Twentieth Century-Fox, where he synopsized current and forthcoming novels as possible screen properties.

He resumed his correspondence with Neal who was in San Francisco with Carolyn, and at Jack’s suggestion Cassady began to read Proust again. Neal had a new toy, a tape recorder, and proposed that Jack buy one, too, so that they might exchange long, soulful conversations by mail.

Allen remained in psychoanalysis, convinced that it would cure his homosexuality. One of the women Jack courted at this time was a slender, pretty girl named Joan Haverty. She was the mistress of a hard-drinking law student named Bill Cannastra, whom Jack had met during his bouts of partying in Manhattan. Cannastra had rigged a peephole into his bathroom in order to spy on guests, a device that displeased Jack.

While Jack was ill in Mexico Cannastra had been killed in a bizarre mishap. One evening, headed from one party to another, he boarded a subway train with some friends. While the train was still in the station Cannastra, acting out a story he was telling, thrust his head and shoulders through the window of the car. The train began to move.

Cannastra found himself wedged into place. The others tried to pull him back, but the cloth of his coat tore away in their hands. As the subway train entered the narrow tunnel Cannastra’s skull was smashed and his body dragged out through the window.

According to some of their friends Joan Haverty’s relationship with Cannastra had been casual, but after his death she stayed on in the apartment they had shared, treating it as a shrine to him. It was there that she lived when Jack met her that autumn, and two weeks later, on November 18, 1950, they were married.

Allen, Lucien, and Jack sang together drunkenly at the wedding, as bachelors are expected to do, but Ginsberg noted at the time that a sense of doom hovered over the proceedings.

Later Jack would tell an interviewer, “I didn’t like her. She didn’t like any of my friends. My friends didn’t like her. But she was beautiful. I married her because she was beautiful.”

Within six months they had separated, and Jack returned to Gabrielle in Ozone Park.

In late February of 1951, twenty-eight going on twenty-nine, fresh from the failure of his second marriage, Jack sat down at his typewriter and inserted the end of a roll of teletype paper that Lucien had brought him from the wire service office where he worked. Jack’s thoughts went back to 1945 and the aftermath of his first marriage, and of his illness: “I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up…”

John Clellon Holmes:

He wanted to break loose and he didn’t want to have to pause for anything, so he wrote On the Road in one long paragraph about 120,000 words long. It was unparagraphed, using all the original names and everything. He just flung it down. He could disassociate himself from his fingers, and he was simply following the movie in his head.

Jack was a lightning typist. Once, Jack said, “Let’s write a letter to Alan Harrington.” And I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, you do the first page, dictate to me, and I’ll take it down on the typewriter, and then I’ll do the same with you.” And literally—and I was talking much faster than I’m talking now—he took it down, just as I talked to him. I tried to do it—I’m a very fast but inexact typist—and I couldn’t come anywhere close.

He wrote On the Road in the spring of ’51 when he was living with Joan in Chelsea. They had split by that point and he was then living with Lucien, or he’d moved his desk into Lucien’s apartment, and he was typing it up. Typing to Jack—in Jack’s career—meant rewriting. That’s how he rewrote.

I remember going down there. Allan Temko was there, Lucien’s then-girl, Liz Lerman was her name, was there. Lucien was there, and we were all waiting to go out and do something, and Jack had to finish typing up this chapter. It was noon. So it must have been a week after that that he finished and took it to Giroux and Harcourt, Brace.

How much longer it was after that that they rejected it, I can’t remember. But it wasn’t too long. Two weeks maybe. He never told me the details. He just told me that Giroux had rejected it and said that this isn’t what we wanted. We wanted another novel like The Town and the City.

Here he was, after all the difficulty of writing the book, all the false starts, he thought he had something. So he delivered it to Big Daddy, and then when Big Daddy said no, he was both angry—he was angry on the surface—but I think much more important, he was confused.

I read On the Road. I read the roll, and I read it—I can’t remember exactly, but it was no more than a week after he had finished it. He had not even read it. He brought it to me and it was a roll like a big piece of salami. And he was so confused and exhausted when he was finished.

It was much longer than the book is now, about a third longer, and it went on and on and on. It took me a whole day to read it. I read it like a Chinese scroll. And it was one paragraph! Of 120,000 words, with the names unchanged. We all used to do that then.

I knew it was good. I knew it was something. His work always changed my days, whenever I read anything. His enormous capacity for sense impressions and his gift for catching them on the fly somehow, always changed my reality whenever I read his stuff.

I took it to my agent, MCA, who read it and liked it, but also was kind of persnickety about it, but nevertheless took it on, and they finally—Phyllis Jackson—sent the book to Viking, and Viking said maybe. And that maybe lasted for an awful long time. Meanwhile Jack left town and became a bum, in effect. Worked on the railroad and the whole thing, and went on writing all those books for which we know and love him.

When he sent me Visions of Cody, and even Doctor Sax—Doctor Sax came first—I thought, man, no one’s going to publish this. It’s brilliant. It’s youth. It’s something absolutely new and unique and important, but no one’s going to publish it. I’ll never forget the afternoon. It was snowing. I was living on Forty-eighth Street on the fifth floor of an old tenement, and I read that whole damned book Visions of Cody in one day. And I was depressed, not by the book, but by the fact that I knew he wasn’t going to make it with this book. He wasn’t going to get through. Nobody but me and Allen and a few people would ever read it, it seemed to me. I thought, “Oh, God, Jack! Why can’t you write something that can get published so somebody can understand what you have?” In my foolishness it seemed he was being perverse. I was of two minds. I still am. In those years, in the fifties, it seemed to me most important that somebody come to understand him. They haven’t to this day.

Giroux was deaf to Jack’s explanations of a breakthrough and shocked by the form of On the Road, a singlespaced paragraph more than a hundred feet long. If a friend such as Giroux recoiled simply at the look of the thing, who would read it and publish it?

Jack sought a Guggenheim Foundation grant that spring, but he was turned down. Jobless when summer came, he joined Gabrielle on what would become a regular pilgrimage to Nin’s house in Rocky Mount. Jack had no job there, either, but to his sister’s husband and friends, he was a published novelist working on his next book.

What he worked on that summer was a long story published posthumously as the novel Pic. “Pic” could be read as shorthand for “pickaninny” or “picaresque,” but is the nickname of a black boy christened Pictorial Review Jackson. He lives in the South and longs to hit the road with his wild older brother, Slim, for adventures on the West Coast. There is a great deal of talk in poorly handled black dialect, and the result is an embarrassingly uninformed white man’s version of Langston Hughes’ Not Without Laughter. At the end the two black brothers are standing by the road with their thumbs out. Two older travelers named Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise give them a ride. At the very end of his life, when the words were gone, Kerouac retrieved Pic for consideration by Grove Press and changed the ending at Gabrielle’s behest, removing the scene with Dean and Sal.

That October Jack joined Ed White one evening for a Chinese dinner at a restaurant near Columbia. In a letter to White well after the fact Jack thanked him for suggesting the new form that Kerouac called “sketching.”

White had been a reader and useful critic of Jack’s work all along. A year earlier, during Jack’s 1950 visit to Denver, he had read the then-current draft of On the Road, the much-revised conventional narrative version begun in 1948.

“It had a completely different style, a very ornate sort of introduction,” White recalled. “It was being told by a bootblack or shine boy. It was sort of Melvillean, real heavy prose.”

By the night of the important Chinese dinner Jack had completed the teletype-roll draft of On the Road, which contained brief passages of impressionistic description, as The Town and the City had. Sketching was not a completely new method for Jack, but an intensification of traits that had been evident in all of his writing, including The Sea Is My Brother.

Ed White:

I think I was actually using a sketch pad then, 1951, and just suggested that he could do the same thing with notes. I think he thought about it. I don’t think he said much about it, but then he began carrying his little notebooks around, filling them up. He printed faster than most of us can write. He would show up with his notebook sometimes in the evening, after he’d been downtown all day—at the library, in my apartment or wherever we happened to be at the time; and he’d read parts aloud he’d been writing. We’d usually end up drinking beer and going out and listening to music.

The little notebooks provided raw material of two kinds: diaristic details, like a reporter’s notes, about events at hand and an endless retracing in memory of all the events of his life, reaching back to his earliest childhood memories in Lowell.

The following year, 1952, Jack adopted the sketching form to record his dreams. A selection of these notes, published in 1961 as Book of Dreams, shows the depth of the psychological forces that enrich his novels begun after sketching gave him a way to mine the material. But these dreams, which actually mix dreams with waking recollection, are presented as a patient might recall them for an analyst, without theoretical interpretation of any kind.

In a significant entry in the dream journal police are searching for Jack as an exhibitionist and he is running from them without a pair of trousers. His search for something to cover himself with leads him to a room crowded with his manuscripts and poems, all of them embarrassingly revealing. The dream makes him feel like “a sheepish guilty idiot turning out rejectable, unpublishable manuscripts.”

In another dream Leo rises from the dead again and again to wander the streets of Lowell in search of work, but his ghost never comes home in the evening to Jack and Mémêre.

Late in 1951, utilizing this new technique, Jack had begun to expand his early notes on Neal, which had gone unused in the first draft of On the Road, into the eventual Visions of Neal.

Henri Cru wrote from California with another promise of a berth on a merchant ship, but as before, when Jack arrived in San Francisco there was no shipping job to be had. The trip did give Jack a chance to continue writing about Neal with the model before him.

“You going to write another book, huh?” Neal had written, referring to the embryonic On the Road. “I’m trying to write one, right? You love me, don’t you? I love you, don’t I? If we’re so all-fired good, then think of the funny times historians of the future will have in digging up period in last half of ’51 when K lived with C, much like Gauguin and Van Gogh, or Neitche [sic] and Wagner, or anybody…”

Neal, as a patron, offered Jack the garret of the Cassadys’ rented house on Nob Hill. This visit was Jack’s first lengthy contact with Carolyn. With Neal’s consent and implicit urging the two became lovers.

Matters became strained the night of Neal’s twenty-sixth birthday, February 8, 1952, which was to be a quiet dinner at home for the three of them. Jack never appeared, and late at night, after Carolyn and Neal had gone to bed and made love, Jack telephoned “from the police station,” as Neal told Carolyn. Cassady dressed and left. Hours passed, and neither returned.

Finally, after dawn, Jack and Neal reappeared, drunk, and Jack had with him a prostitute he led to his room in the attic. Carolyn was infuriated. Later Jack added a fresh inscription to the Cassadys’ copy of The Town and the City and laid it on her dressing table. Carolyn had read Jack’s first novel but she was avoiding the manuscript of On the Road because she knew it contained things about Neal and Luanne that would upset her.

Carolyn Cassady:

The inscription he wrote says, “To Carolyn, best wishes for you and your wonderful family, including the old man there, what’s his name, old Neal. Love to you all, Jack Kerouac. December 19, 1951.” Then underneath that he wrote that apology: “With the deepest apologies I can offer for the fiasco, the foolish tragic Saturday of Neal’s birthday, all because I got drunk. Please forgive me, Carolyn, it’ll never happen again.”

Well, it didn’t, actually. Not quite like that.

On the Road I dodged, or I just told him that I really didn’t want to go through all that because I was still so sensitive about all these revelations that I didn’t know about, and it would make me mad at Neal. I simply said I didn’t want to hear about that trip. When I finally did get around to reading it, it was just one shock after another, but by then it didn’t matter. The Diana thing I knew pretty much about because she and I’d been such close correspondents. Jack’s passages about sitting around in bus stations or any of that sort of thing, he’d read us, and that was great.

Like the Visions of Cody tapes attest they sat night after night and wanted to tell each other stories of their past and every other story they could think of, to get all the details of each other’s lives and all their theories about everything. I don’t think Jack had any idea at the time that he was going to use them verbatim. I think it was more a friendship thing of getting together, getting it all told, all understood.

The writing wasn’t an outlet for Neal as it was for Jack. For Neal it was hard work. He did it mostly while he was babysitting. I always had the feeling that it was a forced discipline, and he would rather be out running around Little Harlem. He had to stay home, and so it helped him, but as most of his letters attest he was frantic, and that’s why he had wanted Jack to come out all the time.

In 1951, Burroughs, Joan, and their children had moved to Mexico City. Morphine prescriptions were easy to come by in Mexico City, and Joan could buy her dexedrina over the counter rather than having to eat the drug-soaked wadding from respiratory inhalers.

In the spring of 1952, Bill killed Joan in a game of William Tell at a party in Mexico City. It was she who put the champagne glass on her head and insisted that he fire, but, even at close range, he missed, and the bullet went through her brain. With the help of a Mexican lawyer Bill escaped charges; Joan’s death was ruled accidental.

Now Burroughs, at thirty-five, began to write. He sent Junky, his chronicle of Huncke and Sailor and the early days of his addiction, to Allen chapter by chapter.

Jack Kerouac, Cathy Cassady, and Neal Cassady, 1952. Photo by Carolyn Cassady.

Allen in turn gave it to Carl Solomon, a poet he had met when both were patients at the Psychiatric Institute of Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital. One of Solomon’s celebrated gestures during this period was the incident in which he threw potato salad on Wallace Markfield while the critic was lecturing on Mallarmé. Later he would become an ice cream vendor outside the United Nations, and then an author and book salesman, but in 1952, he worked as an editor for his uncle, A. A. Wyn, the publisher of Ace Books. Solomon convinced his uncle that with appropriate cutting and a distancing “medical” introduction Junky was publishable. Wyn bought it in April of that year for one thousand dollars.

By May the Cassadys were involved in plans to move to San Jose at the foot of San Francisco Bay.

Jack was uncomfortable with Neal’s conflicting signals about the triangular relationship. He left for Mexico City, where Burroughs had begun Queer, a confessional book about his homosexuality intended as a sequel to Junky. In a few months Burroughs would press on to Morocco, and then to South America to search for a drug that fascinated him, yage.

In Mexico Jack turned back to his notes for a “novel of children and evil” and composed The Shadow of Doctor Sax, which eventually was published as Doctor Sax. Burroughs was still involved in his studies of Aztec culture at that time, especially interested in the psychological terror methods used by the priesthood to maintain control over the population. This trip was Jack’s first real exposure to Mexican art, history, and legend; he had been too ill to pay much attention during his 1950 visit. Toltec folklore holds that the site of Mexico City was marked for its founders by an eagle with a snake in its mouth, and it was this image that Jack borrowed to furnish the ending for his apocalyptic vision of the world-snake’s attack at the close of Doctor Sax. As the snake rises from the hill where it has slept for centuries, the storm clouds above Lowell form themselves into the figure of a gigantic eagle, which seizes and subdues the serpent before both vanish with the morning light.

When Burroughs left Mexico City for Tangier in the summer of 1952, Jack returned to Rocky Mount, but he was uncomfortable there. In Book of Dreams he describes himself “like a thinner younger Major Hoople who really had a small taste of early success but then lost it and came home to live off his mother and sister but goes on ‘writing’ and acting like an ‘author.’”

Neal asked him to return to California and Jack did, but the Cassadys and Kerouac were unable to restore the delicate balance of their three-way relationship, and so Jack withdrew to a skid-row hotel.

This particular October 1952 marked the fulfillment of the old dream of Jack’s that had begun on Mary Carney’s front porch in Lowell, his ambition to work on the railroad, as Mary’s father had done. Neal was working full-time on the Southern Pacific and with his help and Al Hinkle’s, Jack was hired as a brakeman.

The prose that resulted was one of Kerouac’s most affecting pieces, “October in the Railroad Earth,” an impressionistic essay that captures the look and the feel of life on the line and in San Francisco’s redbrick derelict streets.

Al Hinkle:

Jack was a poor brakeman. Neal was a natural, a good brakeman. And a good switchman. As a matter of fact he could tell from the exhaust of a steam engine how fast the engine was going, and he could give the signs without even looking around, when he wanted them to stop. But Jack, I think, was afraid. He was afraid of the wheels. He was afraid of getting off and getting on. Neal would get on and off at twenty miles an hour; it didn’t make any difference.

Because Jack was kind of afraid of it he would stay away from any of the jobs that would require a lot of experience and knowledge, instead of trying to get out and learn it.

Actually, what he wanted was to get on the Zipper, one of the long runs, and ride down to Watsonville and get off and go to the store and buy some crackers and wine, or some canned soup, and go down to the hobo jungle and sleep under the bridge of the Pajaro River and then go back to work.

But he liked the money. He liked not to cash the checks, save five or six checks up and then turn them into traveler’s checks. Jack was a great one to carry all this money in traveler’s checks and go down to Mexico and write a book.

I got Allen a job, too, on the railroad, when he came to San Francisco soon after that. They wouldn’t hire Allen as a brakeman at the time because they wouldn’t hire any Jews as brakemen. At that time there was, actually, in the union, a clause that you had to be white—and that included Jews, too. I got Allen a job as a clerk, what you call a mudhop, and it was in South San Francisco, nights. I think he lasted like a week or ten days, getting up fifty or sixty bucks, all he wanted to get anyway. Count the cars, get their number and what track they’re on and make up the switch list for the switching crew so they’d move them to the industries or, if they were empties, to the inbound tracks.

Jack really wasn’t that bad. We got a lot of poor brakemen. In comparison with Neal, who was very good, and myself, who’s about the best as far as knowing how to do the work good, safe, fast. Neal and I worked together a couple of times and Jack and I worked together a couple of times. But because at the time we were mostly all on the extra board, just filling a vacancy as it occurred, we didn’t work together that many times. But we’d run into each other off different crews down in Watsonville and do a little railroading down there. Most of the good railroading is done after the work’s all over, when we’d sit down and talk about it.

Later Jack worked as a switchman in New York on one of those lines that take the boxcars and put them on the barges, take them over to New Jersey and you come back to the New York side, and then the engine goes out and pulls them off the barges and then they take them down to the different wharves. Jack wrote me about this, telling me he had gotten over his fear and could do the work now.

The toughest conductor we had on the SP was a fellow by the name of Ponteau, who was also French-Canadian and spoke French. This conductor was so expertee that I worked for him for four or five months as his rear brakeman on a switching crew, and I’d be standing out behind the caboose while he’d be sitting out on the main line flagging, sitting at his desk, and he’d look at his watch and say, “That crew is twenty seconds overdue to be back for the work they had to do.” Then he’d start walking up to see if there was a switch off.

He was the conductor Jack worked for on his last trip. Jack caught him on the worst possible day, a Saturday, because on a Saturday he wanted you to do eight hours’ worth of work in two and a half hours, so he was a holy terror. You got paid for the whole day, you got eight hours’ pay, but this was Saturday, the start of your weekend.

So at eight o’clock in the morning, we’ll say, the local goes to work out of San Jose, and Ponteau would be down there around 7:45, expecting everybody to be ready to go. If the clerks didn’t have the bills ready, he was right in there screaming. If the yardmaster didn’t have the train put together and put together right, he was on the speaker or would run up the stairs to the tower. And if the brakeman dared to be five minutes late he’d probably just leave him, because he’d leave at eight o’clock.

Well, Jack showed up on time, thank God, and the thing with Ponteau on a Saturday is, you got to have one foot in the air at all times. You got to move.

Jack not only can’t move like that, he doesn’t know what to do. You’d take off with a caboose and an engine and about seven or eight cars, and we’re going to come tearing up through Campbell, up toward Los Gatos, and dump a couple of cars off, pick a couple of cars up, and then up to Permanente, this cement plant, and switch there, and then run down to California Avenue and switch there, the cannery, get rid of a few cars and then streak for home.

That Frenchman just went wild, because Kerouac made boo-boo after boo-boo. Which cost maybe a minute here, two minutes here. He didn’t get off the engine until the engine stopped. He was supposed to get off while it’s still rolling and roll the two cars by. If you’re going to set two cars out, for example, when the engine gets the speed down to about ten miles an hour you drop off the engine, and when he stops, you’re right at the two cars. The minute he stops, or maybe even a little before, still only moving a mile or two an hour, you reach in, turn the hand-cock, pull the cutting lever—because a good engineer will have the cars bunched so that you’re able to pull them—and give him the highball and then grab by him, because then the engine doesn’t even have to stop. You’ve made the cut and away you go. This is the way Ponteau wanted it done on a Saturday.

You didn’t stop that engine and get off and walk back two cars and turn the hand-cock and give the engineer the sign. This is the way you would do it if you were stalling for overtime, but this was the only way Jack could do it, and he’d have to look at his list to see if this was the right car. He’d look at the list and then look at the car number. You’re supposed to have this stuff in your head.

Ponteau just chewed on him. I think Jack was going to split in a week or five days, something real short, but that did it for him. He never went to work again. He told me he’d cut this job and talked to me before, and he thought he was going to get along with Ponteau real good. He was French-Canadian, too. At least these two Canucks could talk to each other in French, but Ponteau wasn’t interested in anything on Saturday but getting through.

After his autumn on the railroad Jack moved in briefly with Carolyn and Neal again, but the three quarreled, and so Jack returned to New York City. It was clear that he was not a recognized novelist, that The Town and the City had not guaranteed him publication of further work, or even a cordial welcome from the major publishers. But The Railroad Earth was a very great work of prose, one whose merits must have been plain to the author, and the railroad job provided another way for him to buy the freedom to travel and to keep writing. Gabrielle was well enough to take care of herself, and in a pinch Jack could claim New York state disability payments on the grounds—which were proper—that his phlebitis prevented him from working without endangering his health.

Heartened by his success in selling Burroughs’ first manuscript to A. A. Wyn, Allen had become an active advocate and promoter of his friends’ reputations. John Clellon Holmes finished his novel of the New York scene in the late 1940s and gave it to Allen, who in turn passed it along to Ace Books. Solomon rejected it, but Scribner’s—Thomas Wolfe’s publisher—accepted it. The Scribner edition consisted of only 2,500 copies, but Go—a title Jack suggested to Holmes—later would be picked up for paperback publication at a price of $20,000. Holmes’ success stung Jack because On the Road, crowded with many of the same characters and some of the same situations, was unpublished. Both men knew that Jack’s was the better book. Holmes would later call Go “almost literal truth, sometimes a truth too literal to be poetically true, which is the only truth that matters in literature.”

Kerouac had followed Holmes’ progress on Go since his friend began the book in earnest in 1949. He encouraged Holmes, and never expressed his jealousy to Holmes’ face.