One and Only

by Gerald Nicosia

  James Bullard, Lu Anne’s dad, and Lu Anne, age 12, Compton, California, 1942. (Photo courtesy of Anne Marie Santos.)

  Of course, through the months we had talked over and over about Neal’s big dream, which was to get to New York and take extension courses or whatever he had to do—anything—just so he could go to Columbia. Hal Chase and some of his other friends were already there. Neal didn’t have a high school diploma, but Hal was supposedly setting up some kind of oral examinations so that Neal could get directly into Columbia anyway. Neal had talked so much about it, and we both dreamed about it; but like I said, up to that point we really hadn’t made any definite plans.

  When we’d left that night, we’d stolen some money. These people that I worked for had a box that they kept petty cash in; and when we left, Neal sent me upstairs to get it. It turned out there was close to three hundred dollars in it. To us, it seemed like a hell of a lot of money. So when the car went off the road, Neal said to me, very determined, “We’re going to New York!” It turned out he’d been driving east all the while—the opposite of the way he would have needed to go to get to Ed Uhl’s ranch. We were just outside of North Platte, Nebraska. So we managed to get into North Platte and went straight to the bus station. We were both so excited just by the thought of it!

  We didn’t plan—we didn’t anything! We just bought our tickets. It was New York, you know—we couldn’t wait! Five days it took us on the bus, and of course Neal was so excited he couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t do anything except talk the whole way across about what we were going to do. We talked about this and that—but above all, he said he was going to Columbia! Suddenly we actually were making a million and one plans. When you’re that age, everything is glorious and the world is yours. And one thing we had in our favor, money never bothered Neal and I. I mean, we were both average kids; we both liked nice clothes, and we both liked to have a good time. Of course, the raising Neal had, he’d had next to nothing. But I had been raised in what would be considered—especially for that period—a middle-class home. I’d had more than a few advantages, but it didn’t bother me to give them up. We didn’t mind being cold—we didn’t mind anything! Really, we were happy just as long as we could go where we wanted to.

  So when we got on the bus, then he told me all these fantastic things that he was gonna do. He was gonna write—that was his chief goal. And of course at this time too he was kind of going through a Pygmalion type of thing. And you’ve got to understand, with me—especially around Neal—I’ve always felt so inadequate, because I had never read any of these things that he was into. Proust and Shakespeare were the main writers he liked back then. Of course, I wanted to read them too, but I didn’t know anything about them—about what books I should be reading. Neal was fantastic—like, when we were in Nebraska, we’d stay awake three-quarters of the night, and he would read Shakespeare to me. He was very patient as a teacher; he was reading to me constantly, or giving me books to read. If I didn’t understand why they were important, he would sit down with me and we’d discuss them.

  Neal was four years older than I was. I was fifteen when we married, but I was sixteen when we went to New York. All we did all the way across country was talk and read, and talk and read, and talk and read! When we got to New York, the first thing that happened was we got in a big fight in the bus station. I was going home, and I walked off. Of course, he came after me. We were both broke. Having no sense about money whatsoever, we had exactly thirty-five dollars in our pocket when we got there.

  The first thing we did in New York was to go in a big cafeteria around the corner from the bus station. It was full of glittering foods, as Jack wrote, and it became a symbol of New York for Neal. When we walked in, neither one of us had ever seen anything like it. It was really just an automat, but we had never seen anything like all these goodies. Neal was always very magnanimous whenever he had anything in his pocket at all, just anything, so we were buying just about everything we saw. As I said, we had no sense about money.

  Then, for what seemed like hours, we stood on Times Square looking at those big lighted signs. There was the Camel sign with someone blowing smoke rings; the black washerwoman, a typical mammy with a bandanna tied around her head, bending over this tub that suds came down from; and then there was Felix the Cat, acting out a series of little comic strips. These were all in neon lights that ran around the side of the Times Building. Neal and I used to talk about it years later. We must have stood there for at least three hours just enthralled looking at all of these things, the Times Building and all the neon signs. And then there were the Nesbitt’s Orange stands, which were famous for their orange juice. We stopped in there, and it was the first time either of us had ever tasted an Orange Julius.

  We started looking for a hotel, and none of them would rent us a room, because they thought we were trying to shack up. I didn’t have our marriage license, and no one would believe us. No one would rent us a room. In one hotel, somewhere right near Times Square, there was a long stairway with a desk at the top, and for some reason there was a policeman up there. I don’t know whether it was a house of prostitution that had been raided, but something obviously had happened not too long beforehand. And the cop was pretty nice. When we walked up and Neal told him we wanted a room, the cop told him, “Why don’t you just go find the back of a car or something?” You know, in other words, “You kids go shack up somewhere else, but don’t be trying to rent hotel rooms around here.” By this time, Neal was getting very irritated, he was just very upset, and he blew it.

  Neal finally decided to try the St. George Hotel by himself. He said, “You wait downstairs,” and he went up and rented a single room. About an hour later, he came back down, and we got something to eat. Then he sneaked me up. I had to sneak up to get in the damned hotel, and our room was just a little tiny thing with a single bed in it, not even a double bed. Our window overlooked this alley—the world’s worst impression of New York City your first night there! But to us it was beautiful. We lay there looking out the window all night long, with Neal telling me all of his little dreams and hopes for our future and what was going to happen in the days ahead. He was so excited and so full of ambition!

  The next morning, we went up to Columbia University and looked up Neal’s friends Hal Chase and Ed White. We hadn’t met Allen Ginsberg yet. Neal was very, very fond of Hal, and very close to him, and Hal introduced us to Allen the first day. So right away we moved to a boys’ dorm at Columbia, Livingston Hall. In the lobby there were all these couches and chairs, and we stayed there all day and half the night. Of course only Neal was allowed to go up to the rooms. But once, when they weren’t watching too closely, Neal sneaked me up into one of the fellas’ rooms.

  I remember meeting Tom Livornese. He had dark, curly hair, and was a little more quiet than the others. He later said that all the guys were crazy about me, but I used to always feel so inadequate around all of them. In the first place, they were all so much older, and they all seemed so sophisticated, and so intelligent. I always felt like such a klutz around them. I loved every one of them, and I loved being around everything that was going on. They kind of treated me like one of the fellas—they really did! It wasn’t like any of them was trying to get me off into a corner—nothing like that—because they were all very involved with each other and the happenings of the day. There weren’t many women around, either—not that they weren’t looking at all times, when we’d go into the bars and things like that. But I was usually the only girl that was around, because Neal had to spend ninety-nine percent of his time with the guys, and of course I was lost without Neal. I was scared to death to be alone there, anyway.

  It wasn’t long before I met Jack Kerouac too. Jack was on the quiet side, like Tom—at least at that time. He really wasn’t an extrovert like a lot of the guys. Most of the guys were saying, “Yeah, come on! Let’s go here! Let’s go there!” Hal was kind of in between—he wasn’t a total extrovert, but I wouldn’t call him quiet a
nd reserved, the way Jack was. It always seemed if you were alone talking to Jack, or if you were on a one-to-one basis with him, he was interested in what you said, and always acted very nice. I adored Jack anyway because he always treated me terrific! I never felt quite so inadequate around Jack—he just had that knack. He never talked down to me—never!

  But when there was a group of people, Jack more or less listened. He was not one of the more active participants in all the conversations that were going on. Allen did a lot of the talking, but no one talked as much as Neal.

  It seems like I met Jack on our first full day in New York. I’m almost certain it was in that dormitory at Columbia, and not the way he described it in On the Road. He wrote about Neal opening the door in the nude, but that didn’t take place—at least when we first met Jack. There were several things in On the Road, actually lots and lots of little things, that Jack changed or just invented. That was one of the reasons he didn’t want us to read the book, but I’ll talk more about that later.

  When we met Jack at Livingston Hall, several of the fellas were already there—five or six of them. Allen was there, probably Ed White too—I don’t remember who all. And then Jack happened to walk in. Well, Allen had been telling Neal that he wanted him to meet Jack, and then all of a sudden: “This is Jack Kerouac!” And of course when Jack came in, especially in those days, any girl couldn’t help looking at him. Jack commanded attention from the female because he was so pretty. He really was a handsome, handsome boy.

  And of course Neal was immediately aware of it, which I think sort of attracted and repelled him at the same time. In a way, that was Neal’s and Jack’s immediate reaction to one another, because they both had mixed feelings about the other.

  Jack appealed to Neal physically, and he was jealous automatically—tremendously jealous—of these beautiful looks of Jack. And after we were introduced, Neal was immediately drawn to him from his conversation. Jack never came on to girls—he never used his looks. In fact, it was like he was totally unaware of his own sex appeal. Really, it used to kind of amaze me. Jack never seemed to be aware of this attraction that he had for the female. In fact, it always seemed like he felt inadequate, like he wasn’t much of a ladies’ man. He would always say that the rest of the fellas could all do much better than he could—he really always had that feeling, and he actually gave that impression. I really believe it to be so. I don’t really think he had any egotism whatsoever concerning himself.

  Jack Kerouac doing Bogart impression, New York, 1942. (Courtesy of Edith Parker Kerouac.)

  I later heard that Hal felt the same way—that it seemed strange to Hal too that Jack could never seem to get started with a girl. He always had to have an introduction from somebody, his friend’s girlfriend or something, because he couldn’t seem to make it on his own with girls. I don’t think Jack had any confidence, which is really strange in a boy that looks like him. Especially in those days, a football player had no trouble finding a girlfriend. I don’t care if you looked like Dracula, if you were on the football team, ninety percent of the girls in school were all over you! Just the prestige of the whole thing was a magnet for girls. But Jack, like I said, always seemed totally unaware of his own power as a male. He was never aggressive with women. I never saw Jack, unless with Neal’s pushing him and maybe being loaded, get a little confidence to approach a girl. He’d finally get nerve enough, whatever you want to call it, but then he would overdo it—he would come on so strong and so bad that he’d scare the girl off!

  I remember that party that John Clellon Holmes wrote about in his novel Go. This was a couple of years later, in 1948. It was this fantastic party that we went to on New Year’s Eve in a huge basement apartment not too far from Columbia. I really didn’t appreciate it at the time, not until I got older and realized how many different people were there—from Neal and I and all the fellas at Columbia to all sorts of out-of-town people, women from uptown, women with furs that I thought of as “older women,” though they might only have been twenty-three or twenty-four years old. But they seemed very old and sophisticated to me, and it wasn’t till years later that I realized how special a party it really was—and I wish I had been old enough to have been able to circulate a little bit. Because, we mostly stayed in one room with our own little group. Jack was loaded, and there was some girl there that Jack kind of had eyes for, and Neal was gonna fix the whole thing up. Well, Neal wound up going out to the car with her instead, and Jack was left with me. Jack and I always had a good rapport, but that night he was furious. I think probably that was the only time I ever heard Jack—mainly because he was loaded—get really irritated with Neal and start cursing him out. “He was supposed to get her for me, and he’s takin’ her out to the goddamn car!” Jack yelled. “That’s the end of that!” He even started making threats against Neal. “Well come on, you and I’ll just settle this!”—that kind of thing. He would get kind of cocky, and he was even willing to challenge Neal—he was gonna tell Neal what he thought of him when Neal came back in. Jack said some pretty hard things—without meaning them at all.

  Of course, back in 1946 and ’47, I didn’t really get to know Jack that well. There used to be a little bar near Columbia—it may have been a restaurant too—where we always used to sit around with some of the guys. It was right by the university, the place where all the fellas went. Everybody used to go in there for hours, sipping on beers.4 In Desolate Angel, Dennis McNally’s got Neal and I meeting Allen there. It tells about us coming to New York and we were sitting in one of the booths when we supposedly bumped into Allen. We did used to go over there quite often, and we may have met Lucien there, since Lucien was always coming in.

  Those first few days in New York, Neal and I hung out with Allen, Hal, and Jack, and they were always telling us about things we had to do and movies we had to see. The first one they told us to go see was The Testament of Dr. Mabuse—the French version. Like I said, we had thirty-five dollars when we got in to the city; and within two days, seeing films and eating in restaurants, we had nothing. There we were—totally broke in New York City. So Allen very graciously took us over to his cousin’s, who let us move in with him. I always know his name until I try to say it, and then I can’t think of it anymore. Allen’s cousin was a red-headed boy.

  In any case, we stayed at Allen’s cousin’s place for quite a while. Hal and his girl Virginia—they called her “Ginny”—used to come over, and she danced for us up there. She had dark hair, and she was a model—I think Hal finally married her. He always dressed sharp too. Neal was always excited to see Hal. “We’ve got to go over and see Hal!” Neal would say whenever he heard that Hal was nearby. Hal was an archeology student, and much later I heard that he’d become a farmer in Paso Robles. That’s the last thing in the world I would have imagined him becoming! Hal just wasn’t the farmer type—at least then he wasn’t the farmer type.

  When we left Allen’s cousin, we finally got a place of our own over on a hundred and thirteenth and Riverside, very close to Columbia. It was right by the river, and it wasn’t a bad little apartment—apparently it wasn’t the ghetto, but it wasn’t the best neighborhood either. I guess mainly college kids lived there. It was a small, two-room apartment, and Jack spent quite a bit of time there with us. Jack and Neal started to get comparatively close then. At that time, Jack always seemed like he never had anything to do—like he never had any place to go, and nothing very pressing. Most of the fellas were rushing here or rushing there; they had this to take care of, and that to take care of. But Jack always seemed like he was at odd ends. Of course, he was out of school by then. He was working on his novel,5 but I didn’t know a lot about what he was doing. And then, pretty soon, Neal and Allen were getting very involved, and they’d go off together.

  It was up to me to support us, so I found a job at a bakery. I had just gotten the job that morning, it was my first day, and Neal told me to steal some money! We didn’t have a penny, and Neal told me, like, “Bring some m
oney home!” Well, the woman who ran the bakery caught me, but she didn’t call the police. She just dismissed me. It really put me through a traumatic experience—I don’t know what you would call it, but I went into a state of shock, I guess. Because, after I got off the bus at Columbia, instead of going to the boys’ hall, where Neal was waiting for me, I just sat down on one of those big concrete benches that they had near Columbia. I don’t remember who it was who found me, but I was just sitting out there in the snow, just sort of sitting there in a daze. In any case, somebody found me, and Neal came out and asked me what happened and what was the matter. The funny thing is, I still didn’t feel any disappointment in Neal. It wasn’t even so much the horror of being caught. What I told him was that I felt so sorry I disappointed him. I was in tears.

  For quite a while after that—or at least, it seemed like quite a while, but maybe it was only a few days, though it felt more like a couple of months—I don’t remember exactly—but I would go through these things, these mental episodes, that completely bewildered me. I tried to explain them to Neal. It was as though I was leaving my body. For a sixteen-year-old girl—especially at that time, I had never read anything, never gotten into anything concerning psychology or how the mind works, so I had no way of knowing or even half-ass analyzing what was going on—it was such a frightening, terrifying feeling for me. I was never what you would call a “crier.” Before this time, I rarely cried; I wasn’t into making scenes or screaming or things like that. But I would get so terrified when this feeling would come over me, like I was dying, and I couldn’t stop it. Neal would hold me, literally for hours, walking me and telling me I was going to be okay. It really was a bad, bad time in my life.

  Whether this had anything to do with Neal really kind of settling down, I don’t know, but it’s possible I frightened him. In any case, what happened was that Neal got a job parking cars and we moved over to Bayonne, New Jersey. We weren’t seeing hardly anyone—or maybe I should say, I wasn’t seeing hardly anyone. I guess he would see some of his friends while he was at work, or he would take off work or whatever. I’m sure he was seeing his friends. But the fact is, it was still a really bad period for me. And it was especially ironic because I finally had everything that I thought I had wanted. Neal was working and coming home every night, and I was going through this thing of being a good wife.