One and Only (2 page)

—Tony Rodriguez, author of
When I Followed the Elephant

 

“In
One and Only
, Gerald Nicosia treats Jack Kerouac with the respect he has always shown for this great writer, just as he has always been a friend and supporter of the real Kerouac family. It's an extremely well-done book, in which we see the
On the Road
story through other people's eyes, in a way that is sometimes painful and sometimes humorous, but always definitely real. In Jack Kerouac's own spirit, Nicosia gives us the full, no-holds-barred telling of a story we only heard parts of before.”

—Paul Blake, Jr., Jack Kerouac's nephew

—A.M.S.

 

 

 

—G.N.

 

—Neal Cassady to Lu Anne Cassady

O
f course, my first thanks go out to the spirit of Lu Anne Henderson Cassady. If she hadn't granted me those two interviews, neither this book nor a whole lot else would exist. Thanks of course to Larry Lee, too, another angel who got his wings the hard way. It was Larry's act of kindness in sharing Lu Anne's whereabouts with me that opened the door for me with her in the first place. A big thanks to Walter Salles and the entire cast and crew of the movie
On the Road.
If Walter hadn't asked me to be part of the initial work on that film, I would not have listened again to that full seven-and-a-half-hour taped interview, which had been locked up in an archive in Lowell, Massachusetts, for many years, beyond everyone's reach. My work as an advisor to Walter and other crew members, especially Kristen Stewart, Sam Riley, and Garrett Hedlund, helped me focus my own thoughts about Lu Anne.

There is no way I can adequately express my enormous debt to Lu Anne's daughter, Anne Marie Santos, who allowed me to put my brief experience with Lu Anne in a far larger and longer context. By
the same token, I have to thank Al Hinkle and his daughter Dawn Hinkle Davis for their great generosity in sharing stories that added vastly to the richness of the narrative. My editor and publisher, Brenda Knight, was a
sine qua non
of this project, as were the core staff members of Cleis Press and its co-publishers Felice Newman and Frédérique Delacoste. Thanks to so many others who contributed photographs and other key pieces of the puzzle—including, especially, photographers Jerry Bauer, James Oliver Mitchell, and Larry Keenan, Jr., who by themselves and on little funding documented a wide swath of America's germinating counterculture. Thanks to my family, of course—Ellen, Amy, and Peter—for support and patience during my work on the book. And thanks most of all to the angelic spirits of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady—not for getting us all into this mess, but for showing us the beginning of a way out.
Pax vobi-scum
to that whole ragtag bunch called the Beat Generation.

First thank-you goes to Gerry Nicosia for reaching out to me and guiding me through this amazing experience.

To Brenda Knight and all those at Cleis Press and Viva Editions who believed in this project.

Thank you to my love Reuben (TT&F), to Katie, Erin, Mason, and Mia, without whom I could not exist.

To all the women in my family who came before, onward we go.

Most importantly, to Mother and my daughter Melissa, the bravest and most loving of women, and I was the lucky one loved by both. Thank you.

B
ack in 1978, when I was traveling around the country doing interviews for my biography
Memory Babe
, there was a lot going on in the Kerouac realm. New Kerouac biographies were in the works by both Dennis McNally and the team of Barry Gifford and Larry Lee, but the hottest action was going on down in Hollywood—the filming of Carolyn Cassady's memoir
Heart Beat
with such stars as Nick Nolte, Sissy Spacek, and John Heard. I counted myself lucky to be a friend of Carolyn's, and through her I wangled an invitation to the set down in Culver City in early October of that year. I had just missed seeing my new friend Jan Kerouac, Jack's daughter, there. I'd also managed to connect her and Carolyn, so that Jan got a bit part in the film—a part that was, unbelievably, left on the cutting-room floor. Jan was working on a memoir too, as were Jack's ex-wives Edie Parker and Joan Haverty, as well as his quondam girlfriends Joyce Johnson and Helen Weaver. The women were surfacing, though it would be almost two more decades before they got their due in Brenda Knight's landmark book,
Women of
the Beat Generation
, as well as Richard Peabody's lesser-known but equally important
A Different Beat
. One woman had notably been absent from all this neo-Beat hullabaloo, the woman every Kerouac fan knew as “Marylou” from
On the Road
: Lu Anne Henderson Cassady. No one had heard from her in a long time. No one seemed to know where to find her.

Then one day, while I was still out in California, I got a call from Larry Lee. Larry deserves remembering here. A Peabody-award-winning journalist for KRON television in the Bay Area, he was one of the first prominent gay men in San Francisco to die from that epidemic that would take so many thousands of lives out here—including, a little later, the tremendous writer Randy Shilts. It troubles me to see how quickly Larry Lee's name has been forgotten in the Bay Area, and how people now routinely ask “Who?” when his name is mentioned. Time buries us all, but maybe those who die young get buried quicker, having had less time to leave a testament to their memory.

Larry was short, slender, with a walrus mustache and a pixieish smile. But his brown eyes could burn into you when he was after some critical information. He had one of the sharpest minds I had yet encountered, and he was nobody's fool. But one thing stands out about him in my memory more than any other. Of all the Kerouac critics, scholars, and biographers running around then—and running in ever larger numbers nowadays, in veritable wolf packs, in fact—he was the only totally noncompetitive one I knew. Maybe he could afford to be noncompetitive because he was a journalist, only on the periphery of those bloody fields of literary combat, where every writer seems out to climb a step higher on the backs of his brothers. But I don't really think that was it. Larry was just a kind man—that was the essential thing about him. When I first came out to the Bay Area and had no money to live on, he cashed a check for me that no
one else would touch. When you looked at his face, you saw some past hurt there that had left him with a deep compassion for the whole human race, but I never knew him well enough to find out what that hurt had been.

Larry called me around the middle of October, just as I was getting set to return to my mother's house in a Chicago suburb named Lyons, which was my home base at that time, the place where I was finally beginning to turn years of research into the thousands of lines of inked typeface that would eventually become
Memory Babe
. “I know where Lu Anne is,” Larry told me. “Would you like to know?” Was the pope Catholic?

Lu Anne, as it turned out, was at that very moment in San Francisco General Hospital. As much as I wanted to interview her, she was in no condition to endure a barrage of questions while I ran a tape recorder on her; but she could receive visitors, I was told. Larry may have spoken to her about me—I don't remember. I had also recently interviewed her good friend Al Hinkle. That might have helped too. I don't remember all the steps exactly, but she consented to see me, and I got down to San Francisco General as fast as my rental car would carry me.

San Francisco General, for those who don't know, is not a hospital for the rich and privileged. It is a place where insuranceless patients routinely get shuffled, where bloodied gang members routinely get treated. It also, later, became a center of treatment and mercy for the hordes of needy sick during the AIDS epidemic. It is a large gray building with numerous wings down at the base of Potrero Hill, in the less-than-fashionable southern annex of San Francisco. The staff there are notoriously dedicated, and the atmosphere in the hospital has always been one of cordiality and heartfelt helpfulness.

I entered Lu Anne's hospital room not knowing what I would find. Those years of cross-country travel and hundreds of interviews
had been a dizzying roller coaster, meeting crazy alcoholic barroom bruisers who threatened my life, and a few poets who threatened my life too, as well as some of the loveliest, sweetest people in the world, people who were ready to do anything to help someone (me) write the truth about their late friend or relative Jack Kerouac. What I saw was a large (larger than I'd expected), beautiful fortyish woman with a full head of blonde curls, in a blue hospital gown, with one hand swathed completely in white bandages, giving me the softest, kindest, most understanding smile I'd seen in a long, long time. She was absolutely radiant, beaming at me with an expression of gentleness and intelligence that reminded me of various Marys I had seen in the Catholic churches of my boyhood. I think I was a little in love with her before she even spoke.

I told her who I was, that I wanted to talk to her about Jack Kerouac for the book I was writing. Then a look of sadness crossed her face, and she told me that too many people wanted to learn about her life, and the lives of her friends, but it didn't seem like anybody really wanted to know why she and her friends had done the things they did. To her, the most important thing was finding out why people acted in certain ways. Once you understood them, she felt, their actions almost always made perfect sense. They stopped being freaks or criminals or outcasts or whatever else the world had labeled them as, and they became instead someone like yourself—a friend. It baffled her, it truly did, that so many writers, as well as the legions of Beat trekkies that were beginning to hit the roads of America, were smitten by the flashy and often trashy surface of the Beat movement, but had failed to understand—actually seemed incapable of understanding—that the Beats were ordinary people, just as they were.