When Neal drove me back to Denver to get our annulment, it was really the greatest trip we ever took—it truly was. We were all living in San Francisco. Neal was with Carolyn, who was like four months pregnant. We knew we had to do it quick. We only had two days before I was going to turn eighteen, and we couldn’t have gotten an annulment after that. So Neal made another one of his nonstop drives.
The judge barely gave us the annulment. Neal was all over me in the courtroom. I’m telling them that he chippied on me all the time, and he’d beat me, and I wanted this annulment. There was a woman judge, and she called us into her chambers. We’re sitting there in front of her, and Neal couldn’t keep his hands off me. She kept saying, “Are you sure you kids want an annulment? You seem like you get along quite well together.” Because Neal wasn’t with the program at all; he should’ve at least acted like he was upset. But when she kept asking us if we really wanted the annulment, Neal started laughing. He says, “No, no, no, I always chippy on her. I’m always running around with other women!” I’m telling her, “He beats me all the time!” and then Neal would give me a big kiss! It was an insane scene. This judge, she just didn’t know what was happening, but she finally gave in and we got the annulment.
We were gone for a while—ten days, or maybe a couple of weeks.
We drove back to San Francisco through another snowstorm. It seemed like we were always going through snowstorms. That trip was in March too. When we reached California, we went through the Sierras, and they were still having snow.
Neal Cassady in the driver’s seat, on the way to Bolinas, 1962. (Photo by Allen Ginsberg or Charles Plymell; courtesy of Allen Ginsberg Estate.)
PART THREE
Neal married Carolyn Robinson on April 1, 1948, in San Francisco. Through his uncle, Hinkle had already been hired to his life’s job on the Southern Pacific Railroad; impressed at his fistful of pay stubs, Neal asked Al to help him get hired too. Soon Neal was earning a good salary on the railroad, and according to his letters, seemed to be enjoying his new domestic life with Carolyn. He hadn’t written anyone during those few months of confusion and terror when he had been so torn between Carolyn and Lu Anne, but now he wrote both Jack and Allen about all his newfound pleasures. He also started work on his autobiography, which would never be finished, and which would be published posthumously as The First Third. He especially hoped Jack would consider coming 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.