One and Only by Gerald Nicosia

different versions. Carolyn Cassady went to Los Angeles to get a job as a costume designer in the film industry, was told she’d have to wait for an opening, and then went to live in San Francisco in the meantime. Carolyn has written that Neal begged her forgiveness for the sexual contretemps with Allen and Lu Anne in Denver, couldn’t wait to join her in San Francisco and resume their love affair, and showed up at her place of work on October 4—after which she took him home to her apartment in the Richmond District and they began living together with plans to marry as soon as he could get his marriage to Lu Anne annulled.
    There are a lot of problems with Carolyn’s scenario. The biggest one is that the evidence of letters shows that Neal Cassady was in New York City on October 4. After Jack left Denver for San
Francisco in August 1947, Neal drove with Allen Ginsberg down to William Burroughs’s farm in New Waverly, Texas. After various misadventures down there with Burroughs and the infamous New York junkie Herbert Huncke, Neal drove Burroughs and Huncke to New York with a load of Burroughs’s homegrown pot. They left New Waverly on September 29 and got to New York on October 2. Originally, Neal had planned to stay in New York with the hope that Allen could get him into Columbia; but Allen, feeling that Neal had jilted him, had left from Houston on a ship to Dakar, Africa. Nevertheless, Neal did stay in New York till almost the end of October, and didn’t get back to San Francisco until early November 1947.
    Although Neal did move in with Carolyn soon after hitting San Francisco, the circumstances seem a good deal different than Carolyn has suggested. Neal’s letters to Jack from Texas indicate that it was Carolyn who was pressuring Neal to get back together with her. “She’s written me 20 times since I’ve been here (18 days),” he wrote to Jack. “See what a persistent cat she is.” He also told Jack that she was “too middle class” for him. In the same letter, he explained that Carolyn not only “insisted” he spend the winter with her, but offered him the incentive that she would be making a “Hollywood salary” with which to support him. 7 Considering that Neal had also been having a lot of trouble with the police in Denver that past summer, it is not surprising that he moved on to San Francisco. But as soon as he arrived in San Francisco, he began writing Lu Anne a series of over-the-top love letters begging her to come to the Coast and join him.
    All this is not to deny that Neal felt an attraction to Carolyn, though his letters of the period seem to suggest that it was at best
an ambivalent attraction. But versions from Al Hinkle and Lu Anne herself would indicate that he still intended, or at least hoped, to return to his marriage with Lu Anne. After receiving Neal’s imploring letters, Lu Anne asked an old boyfriend to drive her and her friend Lois to San Francisco, where she resumed seeing Neal almost immediately. While living with Carolyn, he got a job at a gas station, where Lu Anne would visit him every day; and he told Lu Anne he was saving up money so that he could eventually go back to New York and enroll in college there. The plan, she said, was for her to go with him to New York.
    Both Hinkle and Lu Anne relate that Neal was in a state of near panic, and great confusion, when he learned, probably in January 1948, that Carolyn was pregnant. He sought and failed to arrange an abortion for her. “It all happened very quickly,” Al said, referring to the annulment Neal obtained in Denver, just before Lu Anne’s 18th birthday, and his subsequent marriage to Carolyn. Lu Anne, no longer sure of Neal’s intentions, had started dating other men, which pushed him even further over the edge. On his birthday, February 8, 1948, he borrowed Hinkle’s revolver, explaining to Al that the only way he could get Lu