There’s no doubt that Lu Anne played a significant role in the
Beat Generation, but in one respect her viewpoint was unparalleled, in that she was the only person who observed the tandem procession of Cassady and Kerouac to their nearly identical, self-induced deaths.
Lu Anne:
The funny thing is that Jack was going down, in his own way, at the same time that Neal was. When I saw Jack in 1957, I was shocked by how changed he was. The only occasion when I was over at his little house, where he lived with his mother, was that one day when I showed up with Neal and Al Hinkle. But I also saw Jack a couple of times after that over in San Francisco. Neal was not with me on those other two occasions. I met him down on Broadway one afternoon—I parked about half a block from Vesuvio’s—and we only spent about three or four hours together. That was when I first became aware that Jack was drinking. Before that, I had never seen Jack drunk—never. I mean, I’d seen him feeling good a little, you know, when we were all drinking. But Neal was never a drinker. Neal never drank anything but beer. Back in those early years, none of us were real drinkers. We could all get drunk on two or three drinks. No, I had never seen Jack drink before. That’s why I was concerned and surprised to see him drinking steadily, just one after another.
I was also surprised because Jack was, at that time, kind of putting pot down. He was not really ranting or anything; but unlike the old Jack, he had become very critical of other people. Before, Jack would not have expounded on much of anything, to any extent like that. In fact, Jack used to get loaded on pot all the time! He was always smoking pot with Neal. Pot was just sort of a standard in their group. It was no big thing or anything anybody even thought about. I saw Jack high plenty of times, but I never saw him drunk—I mean, the way he started getting drunk that day. I never got the sort of impressions that I was getting now about his drinking—that it was making him mean and argumentative. I mean, he was drinking! He was drinking hard liquor that afternoon. Both times I saw him in San Francisco he was drinking hard liquor—I think it was whisky. I know he wasn’t drinking beer, which is what he usually had drunk before. He and Neal would always just have a few beers together.
We had hard liquor when we had parties and stuff like that, but we’d have a few drinks and that would be all. Jack wasn’t that interested in hard liquor back then. Except that one time in 1948, when he was having so much trouble with that blonde girl Pauline, the one who wanted to use him to get out of a bum situation with her husband. It seemed like every time Jack saw her, she always had some kind of problem that Jack was gonna have to attack. She kept egging him on, telling him about her husband beating her up. Jack was feeling a lot of pressure because it wasn’t a situation he was prepared to take over. He wasn’t prepared to take on some truck driver, you know, and rescue the fair maiden, and she wasn’t the fair maiden to begin with. Neal was really upset about it. He told me that Jack had started drinking with her, that she was a drinker and liked the hard stuff herself.
Jack Kerouac looking at photos of old girlfriends in his bedroom, Northport, Long Island, 1964. (Photo by Jerry Bauer.)