One and Only (30 page)

Neal's showing up at her apartment with a gun took place on February 8, 1948. Cathleen Joanne Cassady was not born until September 7 of that year.

Melany Jane “Jami” Cassady and John Allen Cassady.

Anne Marie Murphy was born on December 18, 1950, which was only about a year and a half after Lu Anne married Ray Murphy.

Kerouac did include a very condensed version of this scene in
On the Road
.

Al Hinkle claims Neal told her, “You can sleep with anyone on this trip—just not with Hinkle.” Al says he later asked her why Neal didn't want her to have an affair with him in particular. He says Lu Anne told him that Neal was jealous of him. When Al asked her, “Why would Neal possibly be jealous of me?” she told him, “He sees you as a success, and he thinks of himself as a failure.”

During the spring of 1949, after Jack returned to New York, Neal continued to live with Carolyn and his baby, but at the same time he resumed his love affair with Lu Anne, who had decided to go ahead and marry Ray Murphy. Murphy knew about Neal and wanted to kill him, while Neal was furious at Lu Anne for her willingness to “betray” him by marrying anyone else. In the midst of one of their violent arguments, Neal took a swing at her, but his hand struck the wall instead, and he broke his thumb. It was put in a cast and later became infected, perhaps because he had to stay home every day taking care of the baby, and changing diapers, while Carolyn went to work to support the family. The tip of his thumb eventually had to be amputated, which Neal considered his “karma” for having attempted to punch Lu Anne in the face.

Lu Anne either didn't know of, or had forgotten, the publication of
The Town and the City
in 1950.

Natalie Jackson was a lover with whom Neal had set up housekeeping in San Francisco. He talked her into forging his wife Carolyn's signature on a bank document, so that he could withdraw $10,000 to implement his latest betting scheme at the racetrack. Neal lost the money; and Natalie, filled with guilt and afraid that she was about to be arrested, jumped to her death from the roof of her apartment building.

Neal was found unconscious beside some railroad tracks, his body unclothed, his blood filled with downers and alcohol, in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, in February 1968. He was pronounced dead from exposure a few hours later.

Joan Haverty was Jack's second wife. They married in November 1950; but when she got pregnant a few months later, Jack abandoned her, refused to admit paternity of her daughter, Janet Michelle, and refused to pay child support until he was compelled to do so by a court of law.

Neal had been arrested in 1958 for handing two narcotics agents three marijuana cigarettes in exchange for a ride to the train station one morning. As a result, he received a felony conviction for both possessing and dealing marijuana, and served two years in the California state penitentiary at San Quentin. After his release, he was not allowed to return to his job on the Southern Pacific Railroad.

In the early 1960s, Cassady joined the countercultural band called The Merry Pranksters, which was led by novelist Ken Kesey and based at La Honda, California. The Pranksters rode around the country in a psychedelically painted old school bus dubbed “Furthur,” and Neal became their celebrated driver, as well as a sort of mascot for the entire group.

Cassady was one of the Pranksters' star attractions, and people would come from far and wide to see him tossing a small sledgehammer up into the air and flawlessly catching it, over and over, sometimes for hours at a stretch.

KPIX is a San Francisco television station.

Titled simply
Neal Cassady
, and self-published in Vashon, Washington, in 1998.

William Plummer,
The Holy Goof: A Biography of Neal Cassady
(New York: Paragon paperback edition, 1990), p. 44.

Carolyn Cassady,
Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac and Ginsberg
(London: Black Spring Press, 2007), pp. 1–15.

Not his actual nickname.

PS3521.E735Z794 2011
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