Even after they got married, Neal and I tried to make it as a couple several more times. He had me in a little apartment down in Watsonville, where he was working on the railroad. He’d see Carolyn on one end of his railroad job, and see me on the other. I got a job there too. With me living in Watsonville, we were gonna try it again. But it didn’t last long because Neal was always so crazy jealous. It was all right for him to live his own life, but he was an insane man where I was concerned. If he even thought that someone was interested in me, he’d go crazy. I got a job as a carhop down there. He would come in on the train and I wouldn’t know it, and one time he stood across the street in a telephone booth for eight solid hours watching me, to see who I was gonna talk to. If I went home, somebody drove me home. I didn’t know a soul there—not a soul! I didn’t have a friend, I didn’t have anything. I had a room in a rooming house, and I never talked to anyone, I never went anywhere. He never caught me at anything, but even that used to drive him insane! It really did. He used to get absolutely goofy with his jealousies.
After his baby Cathy came, and then two more children,17 he was kind of torn in his relationship with Carolyn. Having a baby with a woman somehow made the relationship permanent for him. The one thing that bugged the hell out of him was that he had no child with me. He insisted for a long time that my daughter Annie was his. “Even the blue eyes—look at her blue eyes!” he’d point out. There was just no way that he’d accept my having a child with some other guy. I was remarried at the time, to a sailor named Ray Murphy, and had been remarried for two years before I was lucky enough to get pregnant.18 But Neal came over to the house when I was like nine months pregnant, and I hadn’t seen him in almost two years—yet he was livid. “You didn’t tell me about the baby!” he accused me, as if I’d been hiding the fact from him. Because I was the only girl Neal was ever with—I mean, women whom he cared about—that he didn’t get pregnant. I’m not kidding. He must have had three or four children when we got married that were from girls he’d been involved with. You know, he kept in touch with them; he had locks of his children’s hair.
You have to understand, it really was a thing about his manhood. Of course, you already know about him and his power over women, his sexual prowess—what pride he took in it, and so on. I think it really was a blow to his ego that he couldn’t get me pregnant, or that he never did. And he wouldn’t accept it, because my daughter’s father had jet-black hair and black eyes, and the fact that she came out blonde with these great big blue eyes was just further proof, as far as he was concerned, that she was a Cassady. In fact, he brought Jack over to the house when my daughter was about a year or a year and a half old, and he was showing the baby to Jack, telling Jack, “See? Can you see how beautiful she is? She looks just like me!” And Jack didn’t say much of anything. I mean, he knew better. At least he thought he knew better. I mean, we could’ve seen one another, you know, without Jack having known. But I think Jack felt that he would have known, that Neal would have told him if he’d seen me again. Neal usually told him everything. If there had been a period in there where Neal was seeing me, Jack felt he would have known about it.
Well, I’ve gotten a little off track from the trip Neal, Jack, and I were making to California. Al stayed on in New Orleans with Helen for a while, and it was just the three of us who set off from Burroughs’s place. When I read Jack’s account of that trip in On the Road, it seemed strange to me, because some of the things he wrote about had actually happened, and some of it he just made up. For instance, he wrote about how we were all driving for a while without our clothes on. That really happened, and it was something else! But when Jack wrote it in the book, he said I smeared—or I rubbed—cold cream all over them, on everything, even their private parts, which wasn’t so. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any cold cream. I might have if we had had any, but I didn’t.
When we were going through Texas, it was so hot! Oh, God, it was ungodly hot! And naturally Neal was the first to say, “Let’s take our clothes off! At least it’ll be cooler.” And Jack and I were both a little more shy—a little more reserved. I have never been one that could go nude in front of other people. I mean, I’ve always been, not embarrassed about my body necessarily, but I never felt that it was the world’s greatest either, you know! So I was never very much of an extrovert when it came to sex—and Jack wasn’t either, to say the least! Neal was. Neal had a pretty body and was very proud of it. So when Neal first made the suggestion that we take our clothes off, Jack and I kind of looked doubtfully at each other, because we weren’t into each other in that respect, even though we had taken baths together and everything. The things we had done in the past didn’t seem quite so like throwing your clothes off suddenly. But anyway, with Neal’s prodding, we all finally did so.