One and Only (25 page)

Neal,

I've suddenly realized at this late date that you're my what? I don't know what really, all I know is that as I'm sitting here in Tampa I can't stand the thought of not knowing you. I can't put down what I'm feeling & yet I'm trying. I wonder can I put down the emotion within me, even when I'm with another, someday, someway, I'm listening to Frank Sinatra. Oh Neal I love you. Have you ever just sat & wrote what you felt. I feel you as much now as when I was sixteen. I don't know if you're a hangover or am I mad. I've made so many moves, but not until this last year have I realized why. Neal please. I started to say please help me & I don't really know if it was pride or once again I'm stumped. I'm sitting here with my head in my hand trying to say the right thing. What is the right thing. Even when I say I love you I cringe. You've dominated most of my life, & if I could feel your arms around me I could go on forever. Is that theatrical? I'm just talking baby. Just anything to ease some of this torment. Somehow you've become like some irritation on the skin and keep getting bigger and bigger & even when you squeeze it, no it's not gone, just a permanent scar (forever). Is that the way it is. I hate to think I'm a martyr
[?]
, and yet do I. I don't really know & once again I'm back to saying please help me not in the usual sense, but I started to say because we're friends. I love you or whatever it is Neal & can't get over it. You have to teach me, tell me know me & mostly I want you to love me with your lips, your eyes, your hands & as always just to have you walk to me, you make love to me. I'm afraid Neal that you left me as a child & will once again find me the same, I take that back. I just got mad at myself for thinking that, you won't find me a child, maybe in ways, but talk to me & love me & you'll find I'm a woman, but more than that, you'll find I'm a woman you've molded without ever being near. I know how you think, but regardless you motivated more things in my life than anyone living.

 

M
y Mother was Lu Anne, the model for “Marylou” in
On the Road.
She is known to most of the literary world as Lu Anne Henderson, although she was born Cora Lu Anne Bullard.

She also had the surnames Cassady, Murphy, Catechi, and Skonecki. Each one of these names represents a husband: Neal Cassady, Ray Murphy, Sam Catechi, and Bob Skonecki. But each also represents a different time in her life. Even more than that, they really were clear and separate lives—each having the joys and sorrows of love found and lost. Mother always spoke with love and kindness of all of these men with whom she shared her life, though in later years she would reflect on the hardships she endured while living with some of them. All of these husbands—including eventually even Ray Murphy, from whom she'd initially had to hide for a couple of years after their divorce—remained loving toward her, just as almost all the people she met throughout her life remained her friends. She was one of those people who drew others in to want to know her. She invited you in by her smile and sparkling eyes. Her gentle, warm greeting, “Hi honey,” got them at the first hello. Being pretty, smart, humble, caring, and a good listener didn't hurt either. I always describe her as a cross between Auntie Mame and Holly Golightly.

 

My friends were always envious of her; they always said that I was the only one with a “fun mother.” Since I was an only child, she made sure I always had friends around. When I was little and she worked at San Francisco Airport as a cocktail waitress, she would rent a motel room for the day at Casa Mateo, which was close by, and we would swim all day until she got ready for work. Or she would take a carload of her friends and us kids to Marin Town and Country Club for barbecue and swimming. In the summer she would rent a cabin at Rio Nido on the Russian River, and over the summer people took turns staying with us. One summer she surprised us with tickets to see the Beatles at the Cow Palace. She had her friend Joe come and pick us up in Rio Nido and deliver us back after the show. She loved playing board games and cards or just playing records and singing and dancing around the house. One of the highlights for my two best friends, Tina and Sharon, was to put on shows with me for my mother and her friends. She would let us get in her closet and wear all her beautiful dresses, high heels, furs, and jewelry—nothing was off-limits.

We went out to dinner all the time and saw floor shows at places like Bimbo's 365 Club, Sinaloa Mexican restaurant, and the Forbidden City in Chinatown. She always got the best seats, and my friends and I would usually be asked on stage because she almost always knew someone who worked there. She even took Sharon to Las Vegas one time by herself because I had been there with my mother the year before and didn't want to go again. They saw
Flower Drum Song
, and through my mother Sharon met Joey Bishop. Kids felt they could confide in her when they needed an adult to really
listen to them. All my friends remained close with her.

Though we were surrounded by many friends who loved us, when I was very young I would always wonder why we seemed to have no family. She would tell me that we actually had a very large family back in Colorado and that we would go visit sometime. But we never did. Sometimes she told me about how her great-grandparents and grandparents had homesteaded large tracts of land around Peetz, Colorado, and that those ranches were still thriving. I knew that my grandparents were in England, because “Pappy,” as I called my grandfather, was in the Air Force. When Pappy and his wife, Thelma, came back to the United States, he was stationed in Florida. They had been there when I was born; then he was stationed overseas for a few years. They would send gifts at the holidays, which are some of my earliest recollections of them: Christmas stockings with nuts and oranges, and a tea set that I still have. My mother's half brothers moved to Los Angeles when I was about five years old, and soon after that we did make a trip there so that I could meet my family for the first time.

Flying to Los Angeles was my first big trip. We got to the airport late, because Mother was never one to watch a clock. The gate was closed and the stairs were pulled back from the plane. But since she worked at the airport lounge, she knew some of the ground crews there. As the plane was pulling away, she managed to talk one of the airport workers into stopping the plane. “Oh, honey, I really need to get to L.A.,” etc, etc., she rattled on, and sure enough the plane stops, turns back, the stairs are rolled back out, and up we go. In the same way, she could talk her way into clubs where the act was sold out and there were no seats left. She could talk anybody into just about anything.

As a child, I tended to be embarrassed over everything she did to call attention to herself, but when Mother rolled into the plane that
day, laughing and smiling, all I could hear were people whispering, “Is she a movie star?” or, “Is that Doris Day?” Later in life, with her hair short and bleached, she actually did look a lot like Doris Day, or maybe Kim Novak. Anyway, we made our flight and spent the weekend with family. As a surprise, she took me and her nieces and nephew to Disneyland, which had just been opened. So for me it was a magical weekend. Seeing these cousins was a rare treat, but I felt very close to them. Besides her two brothers, Lloyd and Lowell, Mother had eleven aunts and uncles and 41 first cousins, and she said that drama followed wherever her family went. That, she explained, was why we were better off living in California. The suggestion was that she was trying to avoid drama, or maybe she'd just had too much of it in her life already. Still, she would do anything for family members when they asked, and they were always asking.

I knew nothing of the Bullard side of the family—her father's side. She loved her father very deeply, but had a guilt about their relationship that burdened her terribly. It all stemmed from her childhood. When she was only four years old, she left the only home she had known, in Peetz, Colorado, up on those mountain ranches, and moved to Los Angeles to live with her father and his new wife and two daughters.

Mother was born March 1, 1930, during the Depression years, and life was extremely difficult in the farming communities everywhere. Her parents' marriage did not survive the economic stresses, and her father, James Astor Bullard, moved to Los Angeles and found work as a private security guard and later as a member of the Compton police force. Los Angeles was growing, and he had job security as well as the opportunity to get ahead. He persuaded her mother, Thelma Stone, that he could provide better for Lu Anne at that time. “Gramps” (which is what we all call my grandmother) had two older sons from a previous marriage, who were old enough to work and help on the Stone family farm, so she agreed that it would be for the best to send Lu Anne to Los Angeles for a while. That “while” ended up being eight years.