To truly understand this part of the story, one has to get a fuller picture of just how ill she had become. As with many people who have chronic illnesses, which erupt and then subside, it was not always easy to see how sick Lu Anne was. When not having an acute attack, she could look well, her beauty still shimmering, her mood still upbeat—the very picture of health. But, in fact, she had come close to dying at least three times already. In 1957, in Tampa, an attack of her IBS had caused her so much pain that she’d been hospitalized. Annie recalls that her survival was touch and go for a few days, and that when she was finally released, she was still extremely weak and fearful that she would not recover. That was when she drafted a desperate letter to Neal, printed later in this book, that she may or may not have ever mailed.
Then in 1962, in San Francisco, she had a hysterectomy, which led to the discovery of 20 stones in her gallbladder that were removed a week later. The two back-to-back surgeries led to severe blood clotting. They had to pump three cups of clotted blood out of her femoral artery; her artery was clogged from her leg all the way to her lung. She remained in the hospital for three months, during which time she almost died twice; and at one point, Joe and Annie were summoned to the hospital because she was being given last rites. Lu Anne was put on Coumadin, a powerful blood thinner, which kept her alive but resulted in frequent bleeding under her skin, which would sometimes leave whole patches of her body black for weeks on end.
Her IBS grew worse too, and for the rest of her life she suffered enormous amounts of pain. She began using Miltowns as well as powerful prescription painkillers. As Annie points out, during the sixties a wide variety of opiate drugs became easily available, and Lu Anne did not shy from using anything that helped her. But according to Al, her moving up to morphine and heroin had much more to do with the connections she retained to San Francisco’s club scene through her frequent part-time jobs as bartender and waitress. At some point in North Beach, she met a guy known as Peepers,33 who was always trying to find people to help him score hard drugs. He would often start by offering friends a taste of whatever he was using, as a way to get them interested in acquiring more. According to Al, Peepers got Lu Anne hooked on heroin; and for several years in the mid-1970s, her life went straight downhill.
After Joe got out of jail, he opened an after-hours music-and-dancing joint in the Tenderloin called the 181 Club, at which famous musicians like Nat King Cole sometimes dropped by after their regular gigs. The club was successful, but Joe was tied up for long hours working there. Annie Ree got pregnant, moved out, and began raising her own baby when she was still quite young. With Lu Anne’s husband away most of the time, perhaps it was loneliness that got to her, but she began using morphine and heroin more and more heavily.
According to Hinkle, she used up her husband’s merchant marine checks to pay for the drugs; and when she again ran out of money, she borrowed against her house, then had trouble making the new mortgage payments. Al knew she was starting to get in too deep when her phone was disconnected. He paid the bill for her, but he recalls that strange people would answer her door when he came over, some of whom didn’t even seem to know Lu Anne, and he sensed that they were all high on drugs. Eventually Lu Anne lost her house. At some point, she moved in with Joe, a few blocks from where she used to live, but her desperation for money increased. Al remembers her frequently coming to see him on the railroad, pleading for small loans of 10 or 20 dollars, which he always gave, and promising that she would go into a Methadone treatment program soon. He was appalled by the degrading lifestyle she’d fallen into, and felt ashamed of his own inability to refuse her money, since he knew he was contributing to her downfall by helping finance her habit.
Al recalls that Annie Ree was really worried about her mom at this time, and of course Al and his wife, Helen, were too. Lu Anne’s husband, Bob, was highly disapproving of her drug use, in fact would not tolerate it, and so the two separated for a while. At one point, Al says, Lu Anne actually disappeared for almost six months—though it turned out she had merely gone back to Denver. As sympathetic as Al was, and as pained as he felt to witness Lu Anne’s humiliation, he was also puzzled and a bit dismayed that a woman in her forties would allow herself to become hooked on hard drugs. He could see people experimenting in their youth, he says, but he felt that somebody in middle age should know better than to embark on such a dangerous lifestyle. It also didn’t accord with the Lu Anne he and his wife thought they knew—the woman who was usually so truthful and outgoing and loving, who didn’t seem to have a selfish bone in her body, who loved children and in fact often babysat Neal’s kids (without Carolyn’s knowledge) when they were young, the woman who would endlessly do kind things for her friends, like passing her own daughter’s clothes and toys on to the Hinkles for their daughter, Dawn, who was two years younger than Annie Ree.