In any case, according to Hinkle, at some point around the early 1980s, Lu Anne took herself back to Denver again, determined to get off heroin. Hidden away from everyone except her longtime friend Jimmy Holmes, who was himself dying at that time, she put herself through a rehab program and got clean. And as far as anyone knows, she did not use hard drugs ever again for the rest of her life.
She and Skonecki reconciled, took their savings (for she’d managed to keep a little money from the sale of her house), and bought a trailer up in Sonoma County, an hour or so north of San Francisco. There they seemed like the ideal, loving, and contented retired couple. Lu Anne’s kindness and thoughtfulness returned in full force. When Al’s wife, Helen, died of cancer in 1994, she called him and comforted him greatly. Al returned the favor by visiting Lu Anne several times after Skonecki died in 1995. Bereft herself, she comforted Al again when his second wife, Maxine, whom he married in 1996, fell victim to Alzheimer’s disease only a few years later. She remained in her trailer in Sonoma, where Al would find her ensconced amid hundreds of dolls, with a loyal dog for companionship. Her old girlfriend Lois was now dead, and she had also lost her half brother Lloyd, whom she’d been close to.
But she soon found a new companion. She met Joe Sanchez, a Mexican American man who had dated Lloyd’s widow for a while. Originally from Los Angeles but now suffering through the Denver winter, he told her he was broke and had no place to stay, so she invited him to move into her spare bedroom in Sonoma. He lived there happily for several years—not so different from the stray people Annie Ree remembers ending up at their house in Daly City several decades earlier. By this time, Lu Anne had her own social security benefits as well as Skonecki’s merchant marine pension, and her financial worries were long gone. Just as she always had, she felt it was her duty to help people who were less fortunate than she.
If she were no longer the overtly joyous, impulsive, hell-for-leather young pinup girl she had once been, she was, according to Al, “not unhappy.” She had gained a little weight and appeared slightly “plump,” but most people found her still beautiful. Whenever they got together, she would ask Al about Ginsberg and other people they knew from the old days who were still alive, like Hal Chase. But when he left a message on her answering machine about Ginsberg reading at Stanford and offered to drive her there and back, she never responded.
Annie and Lu Anne, Lu Anne’s last apartment, Clayton Street, San Francisco, 2008. One of the last known photos of Lu Anne. (Photo courtesy of Anne Marie Santos.)
Until she became very sick with cancer during the last year of her life, Lu Anne would call Al about every three or four months to see how he was doing, but she almost never took calls from him or anyone else. She became famous for using her answering machine to screen all her calls, as if she were now relishing her solitude and reluctant to give it up except when she chose to. Often in her calls to check up on him, she’d promise Al that she would “come down soon to see ya,” but she never did.
When they did talk, in person or on the phone, he noticed that she avoided talking about Neal, as if the subject came with a pain she didn’t want to revive. Likewise, she avoided any specific references to the Beat world, and would brush Al off quickly whenever he suggested she should visit or speak at the new Beat Museum in San Francisco. If he’d ask her questions about their time in New York, she’d always answer him, and even talk readily about it, but she would never bring up the subject herself.
Once, he asked her who the musicians were that they had heard up in Harlem with Jack and Neal. He was astonished when she named every person in that band—she recalled the trumpeter, drummer, clarinetist, every instrument and every player there.
“Her memory was still perfect,” he said.
Letter to Neal
Anne Santos found this handwritten, unsent letter among her mother’s papers in her San Francisco apartment after her death. It is clearly written to Neal Cassady. Anne believes it was written in Tampa, Florida, in 1957, just after her mom got out of the hospital following a serious illness, during which Lu Anne may have had to confront her possible death. The handwriting, in light-blue pen, has faded over the years, and her spelling and punctuation are nonstandard, so deciphering the letter was no easy task. In one place, where I was not certain of the reading, I marked the doubtful word with a question mark.—G.N.
Lu Anne’s letter to Neal from Tampa, Florida, 1957, page 1. (Ccourtesy of Anne Marie Santos.)