One and Only by Gerald Nicosia Page B

out to San Francisco and getting work on the railroad too, with the idea that they could eventually live and raise families near, maybe even next door, to each other. Although Jack was still working on his first big novel, The Town and the City , he had no money and no real life of his own. He was living with his mother, Mémère, and his
sister Caroline and her husband and newborn son in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.
    But Neal could not get Lu Anne out of his system. He grew tormented again when she became seriously involved with a seaman named Ray Murphy, and was stunned when she accepted Murphy’s marriage proposal. He seemed unable to believe that she would actually go through with the marriage. But Lu Anne, as if to insist further on the finality of their break, went home to Denver to await Murphy’s return from a long sea voyage. In a letter to Kerouac in June, Neal made a not-so-veiled reference to Lu Anne as “my cause of neurosis.”
    On September 7, 1948, Carolyn gave birth to a daughter, Cathleen Joanne Cassady. Neal wrote Jack that she was his fifth child, but only the first one that he would actually keep and raise. Neal seems to have loved the baby a great deal; but in early December, when he and Hinkle were laid off from the railroad, he took the family savings, bought a brand-new maroon Hudson automobile, and asked Hinkle to take a trip with him.
    According to Hinkle, Neal never said what the ultimate destination was, though he mentioned “maybe going back to Denver for a while.” Although Neal never stated as much, it seems what he was really after was reconnecting with Lu Anne. Because he had been working longer, Al would have unemployment compensation to live on; Neal would leave Carolyn with nothing to live on. Since they needed extra money for the road, Al asked his girlfriend Helen to come along. Helen agreed, so long as Al married her—which he did. In a travel bureau in San Francisco, they also picked up another rider to help with gas money, a sailor bound for Kansas. No one seems to have worried about the fact that, with his limited funds, Neal had chosen to add a radio to the car instead of a heater.
    Tired of Neal’s smoking pot with Al, as well as his refusals to stop
for food or rest, Helen began complaining quite vociferously. Neal solved that problem by dropping her off in Tucson. Having more scruples than Neal, Al at least gave her his railroad pass, and told her to ride to New Orleans, where she could stay with William Burroughs and his wife, Joan. Al promised they’d pick her up in a week. Then, in the middle of New Mexico, and much to the sailor’s chagrin, Neal turned the Hudson due north for Denver. The sailor quickly bailed out, and their new destination—after picking up a certain blonde female who was now wearing an engagement ring—became New York. Of course, there would be a slight detour to North Carolina to pick up Neal’s “blood brother,” as he had taken to calling Jack.
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    Lu Anne:
    Neal was driving cross-country with Al Hinkle, and he came and got me in Denver. It wasn’t snowing in Denver yet when Neal came after me, so I always thought it was around Thanksgiving, but Al swears it was just before Christmas. In any case, we headed straight for Rocky Mount, North Carolina, to pick up Jack. It took us about six or seven days to get there.
    Believe me, that trip across the country was a test of endurance for all of us. It was a grueling thing. I don’t remember if Jack wrote much about that or not. Again we had to drive with the windows down because of the frost—and whoever wasn’t driving, the other two had to sit pressed against each other. Just to keep warm we had to hug each other. I mean, we practically had to crawl inside each other, because it was cold, cold, that winter! 8 And then, somewhere along the way, we slid off the road and landed in a damn ditch!

    Neal got out, cussing of course.