One and Only (20 page)

Years later, when we were both a lot older, we discussed this—discussed what had happened to his dreams. He said, “Well, you know, I had a responsibility then.” Although Neal and responsibility didn't always go hand in hand, Neal felt it greatly. Regardless of what other people have thought, or anything else people have said or written about him, Neal did feel a
big
sense of responsibility! A lot of those things they say about him make me angry. Being raised the way Neal was, Neal hadn't been given a big sense of security—he didn't have a lot to work from. He didn't really know how to handle responsibility because
no one had ever been responsible for him.
And the only one he'd ever had to be responsible for was himself. But he still tried to be responsible, when he could. Even with me, he did the best he could. He was always very gentle with me and tried to make everything nice for me, because he felt I had been shortchanged by being on my own so young. He knew I wasn't prepared for life on my own, the way I had been raised—which was always a proper and protected environment. So he felt a sense of responsibility toward me, but at the same time he felt sure I could learn to take care of myself—that I could make it on my own if he gave me a little help in that direction.

Neal had a large sense of responsibility, or he would never have married Carolyn. He would never have married Diana either. He would never have gone through the whole bullshit of annulments and divorces just so he could keep getting remarried and taking care of his different families. And he would never have even tried to get Carolyn alimony at various times when she told him that she and
the kids were desperate for money. He was always really
worried
about her and the kids. He really tried to help them out. I know that, especially in the earlier years, Carolyn thought that Neal could have cared less whether they were eating or had a roof over their heads. The truth is, he really was concerned. Unfortunately, he just didn't know what to do about it, but he felt it greatly.

In a way, he was just like Jack with his emotional dependency thing with the women. Look at what happened with Joan.
²⁵
When Jack was with a woman he cared about, I think he would love to have been in the traditional role of husband and father; he would love to have been able to take over the reins and do the things that he knew might have to be done, or should be done, to take care of his family. But since all these things had been done for him all his life—and done by a woman, his mother—he really had no way of knowing how to do it. Jack's mother had made him dependent on her, and it made him helpless in a lot of ways. It was the same with Neal in that respect. He didn't have a mother making him dependent, but he had nobody giving him a responsible model either. Neal really wanted desperately to take care of his responsibilities, and live up to them, and he just really didn't know how to go about it.

Jack used to talk about how “the place for a woman is handling the money.” He really felt that way—that the woman should take care of the practical things in life. With Neal, because of his upbringing on skid row, where you had to fight to protect whatever belongings you had—with Neal, it was always a “This is yours, and this is mine!” type of thing. It was hard for him to feel a togetherness thing with anyone—to really open up and share with anyone.
I mean, we had a tremendous togetherness; but from a material standpoint, Neal didn't even begin to understand what it might mean to say the word
ours.
If he had five bucks in his pocket, it was his five bucks! And he needed it. If Jack had five bucks, of course, it was his mother's five bucks.

The funny thing is, they were both nearly broke when they died. In their last years, they were barely able to take care of even themselves. Jack couldn't pay his bills, and Neal was simply living off of others. From all the conversations that Neal and I had through the years, I think Neal was a little resentful as he grew older—not resentful of people, but just of circumstances, the circumstances that placed him where he landed. He ended up being kind of half-assed famous, but for nothing he had done—at least nothing he was proud of having done. It was not like he had a profession he could be proud of, or any way to earn a living. They even took away his job on the railroad.
²⁶
Especially toward the end of his life, like when he was with Kesey, he began to grow very bitter.
²⁷

He sometimes drove over to my house with the bus, and one time we spent a couple of weeks together down the Peninsula, close to Los Gatos. A friend of Neal's, John Gourley, had a cabin down there. When Neal used to get tired, those were usually the times he'd come and see me and we'd go away together. And he would just kind of let down with me. One of those times, he was telling me about his
“throwing the hammer” bit.
²⁸
It's strange, because he had never done it in front of me—almost as if he was ashamed to actually let me see it. A lot of people had told me about it. They said it was frightening to watch him, because it seemed like he would never stop. But now Neal was telling me about it himself. He talked about it like he was a performing monkey. He said something like, “I put on my act at six o'clock and eight o'clock.”

One day I happened to be down at the warehouse where the bus and everyone was staying. Neal and I were having one of our heart-to-heart talks, when he got a call from Kesey. Some show on KPIX was doing an interview with Kesey, and Ken wanted Neal to come down to KPIX and be part of the show.
²⁹
Neal asked me to come with him—maybe for moral support. It was like being with someone who was a professional performer. Our conversation completely stopped when Kesey called him. On went the pink satin shirt, and he just completely went into an act. It was as though he instantly became someone else. It was like there were two Neals. I was talking to one person one minute—to
Neal
—and the next minute he was a different person, a stranger in a pink satin shirt with a sledgehammer in his hand.

There were periods in the late sixties when I didn't see Neal for a long time. The last time I saw him was in the fall of 1967. This was just before he went down to Mexico, on that trip he wouldn't come back from. The period before that visit, he had been gone from the Bay Area for quite a while. I think it had been a year probably since I had last seen him. He was getting very tired at that point. He met me at the restaurant right down at the corner near my house in Daly City. He had that small minibus that the Pranksters used to
get around in when they weren't driving the big bus. He told me he had been down to see his daughter Cathy's first child—I think they were living in Texas—and it was as though he were relieved that he had gotten this accomplished. I mean, he talked totally unlike Neal. Even at periods like when Natalie had committed suicide, and even when he was really down, Neal had never talked the way he talked that day. It was as though—and I later told Allen Ginsberg this—it was as though he was just tired of his whole life. And he asked me,
“Where do we go from here, Babe?”

He couldn't connect with me the way he had in the past. I can't quite describe the way he was, because Neal had never been like that before. He was extremely quiet, for one thing. He wasn't talking. He was so down that he really didn't have anything to say. Then he told me he was going to Mexico, but he had to go up north first, to Oregon—or he had been to Oregon, I can't remember now. But it was as though he was saying, “I'm tired of the whole fucking mess—it just isn't worth it anymore.” I told Al Hinkle about this too. This was long before I heard about Neal dying in Mexico. I was in the hospital when he passed away. It was as though he was through. He just didn't want any part of life anymore. He didn't want anything anymore. The only thing he was relieved about was seeing his grandson, his first grandchild. He said, “I at least did that. I at least got down there to see her baby.” Cathy was kind of special to him. Well, she was his first kid—at least the first one that he raised, that he acted as a father toward. He'd heard that she was about to have a baby, and he raced down there—got down there while she was still in the hospital. It was something that meant a great deal to him, that he felt he had to do. He was very relieved that he had done it—as if this was one thing that he had finally done right with his life.

The fact that Neal had become a performer at the end—it was so unlike him, so completely, totally unlike him. It was even unlike the
Neal that all these writers had written about in their books. Even though Neal was a mover, a doer, he was always doing things for himself—doing things he had chosen to do. I mean, his
thought
was the thing about him that got us all so excited. What was remarkable was the fact that he was interested in so many things. Like Al and I were talking about recently, when we were kids, Neal could be reading a book and shooting pool and necking with me at the same time—
and giving his attention to all three.
But those were things that he wanted to do. He wasn't putting on a show; he wasn't trying to impress anyone. He could've cared less if anyone even noticed. That wasn't the case in later years.

It was that change that bothered him. When we would be together, we would talk about the things that might have been, the things that had happened and changed everything. He felt, I think, cheated. I mean, he didn't blame anyone. He blamed himself more than anyone else. Neal was his own worst critic in that respect. He was angry at himself that he hadn't gone ahead and pursued his dreams. Because even when we were first married, Neal would type and write on into the night—whether he would have turned into a great writer, who knows? In those days, of course, he wasn't into whether anyone was ever going to read his work or not. But he wanted to write, and he wanted to go to school. He wanted the education so that he would be able to do it and do it right. Whether or not he had the talent is something we'll probably never know. A few years ago, City Lights published
The First Third.
He wrote that, my God, a hundred years ago—but he never finished it. It was unfinished, like his whole life.

Nowadays so many people want to write about us. They want to know every detail of our lives. What makes me sad is that they don't want to know
why
we did the things we did. We were poor, but we made do the best we could. We tried to keep clean, to be neat. We had purposes and plans, just like everyone does.

 

W
ith a few exceptions, like Tom Christopher's well-researched but still unfinished tabloid-format biography of Neal Cassady,
³⁰
portraits of Lu Anne in Beat histories tend to be extremely reductive, not to say demeaning. William Plummer, in the first biography of Cassady,
The Holy Goof
, refers to her as “a scarcely domesticated barbarian.”
³¹
The most flattering portraits of her are as a teenage sex bomb with blonde ringlets down to her waist—and her chief value and raison d'être seems to be as proof of Neal Cassady's power over women. It's as if she's dragged out on the Beat stage so people can say, “Look at this man's sexual prowess! He could get a woman this desirable and make her do his every bidding, put up with his every infidelity. He must've been quite a man!” Few of these chroniclers have evinced any interest in what ideas the lady might
have had in her own head; and fewer still have asked whether she might have been on some quests of her own. No one, that I know of, has ever pointed out,
She must have been quite a woman to get this interesting and fabled guy to keep coming back to her, all his life—right up to the moment when he left for Mexico and the death he seems to have foreseen coming.