One and Only

by Gerald Nicosia

  Something had to give somewhere, and the trigger was finally pulled by William Burroughs, who called from Algiers, Louisiana, to demand that somebody come and pick up Helen Hinkle, who had moved in with him while patiently awaiting the return of her husband. She was penniless and a burden to Burroughs, who was also probably uncomfortable to have her witnessing his many forays into the New Orleans underworld as he attempted to satisfy his heroin addiction.

  For traveling money, Hinkle sold his leather jacket, and Jack withdrew what was left of his GI benefit checks from the bank. They headed south, to get away from the winter cold in New York, but didn’t get far before being pulled over by cops in Virginia—when Hinkle, then driving, passed a stopped school bus—and having most of their trip money taken away under threat of being put in jail. The remainder of the trip became the usual struggle of squeezing gas money out of hitchhikers and Neal pumping his own gas when the attendant was asleep or not looking.

  Lu Anne:

  When we got down to Algiers, down at Burroughs’s place, then I felt a change in Jack. He was doing a lot of talking alone with Bill, and there was a lot of stuff being discussed between them that they didn’t share with us. I got the impression when we were there that Bill was very unhappy with Neal. Bill didn’t show it in any way, or say anything in particular to us. It was the first time I had ever met him, and we didn’t talk a lot with each other, so it was something I felt more than anything he expressed directly. Because, during our stay there, Bill was very kind, very like an old friend. It was obvious he was very glad to see Jack. But I perceived—not a big difference, I can’t say that—but something subtle change inside Jack. Jack was still excited about the trip, and clearly happy being on this trip, but I felt something had begun to trouble him. I felt it was connected either with something he and Bill had discussed, or with some impression he’d gotten from Bill—maybe Bill putting Neal in a little bit different light for him. So I don’t really know what it was, but there was a definite change that I felt in Jack. He was no longer quite as exuberant over the whole trip.

  The coming down to Algiers had been an absolute fantasy for us. We just really had a ball—like the night he described in On the Road. We were going through the bayous, and Jack was telling me about Lucien and David Kammerer, and describing in detail how Lucien had stabbed him to death one night in a dark park by the Hudson River. Of course, when we were kids we all used to listen to The Shadow Knows,13 you know, and such as that. We were all nuts about scary shows like that. And we had just been listening to some scary shows on the radio, which is how the subject came up. And then Jack got excited and couldn’t keep from telling me his own scary story. It was like he was telling a ghost story to a kid.

  Jack was over by the door, Neal was driving, and I was in the middle. I was leaning toward Jack, and Jack had his arm around me, and he was saying in this low, mystery-story voice: “And, after he stabbed him, Lucien looked at the bloody knife…” And he went through the whole thing, one gory detail after the next. I mean, he really did it vividly! He had me sitting there on the edge of my seat, and of course he knew it. And Neal was giggling with him—like a conspirator with him. They were acting like they were gonna do just those very things to me—or like somebody was gonna jump up behind me at any second. That’s just exactly how I felt. Trees were overhanging the road, and it was black night all around us. It was really a scary scene, and listening to him and knowing that it was all true made me even more frightened. He was talking in this silly low voice: “And then… And then!”—building up to bigger and bigger crescendos. He was doing his best to torture me, but I loved every minute of it.

  It was a fantastic trip down to New Orleans; and on that last part of the trip, it was just Neal, Jack, and me. Al had only come part of the way with us out of New York. We had gotten stopped by police when Al was speeding, somewhere in Virginia. Al offered to spend a night in jail, to keep Neal from having to pay the fine, but the cops made Neal pay it. We were lucky we all didn’t end up in jail. We were carrying a little pot, but I had stuffed it down my pants, and everything would have been fine, except that when the police questioned us, Neal’s story didn’t match mine. I was eighteen at the time, but I looked very young, younger than eighteen. It was this small Southern town, and you know how they are, when they sense something that might possibly be “immoral.” They decided they would question me by myself, away from the others. They asked me what my name was and what I was doing and where we were going, and I told them automatically I was Neal’s wife.

  Well, in the meantime, Neal had gotten out of the car because he was furious that they had pulled us over. These kind of things—anything like that, that interrupted the trip—used to just make Neal insane! He was outside the car, just screaming and ranting. Well, when they asked him what he was doing, he tells them that he’s going back to California to his wife—meaning Carolyn. To his wife! Which he thought sounded better, because there were two other men in the car. I could have been with one of them. Well, you know, the stories didn’t jibe, and then I had to go through the whole thing of explaining how I’m not his wife now, but I used to be his wife—we just got an annulment a few months ago, and blah blah blah blah!

  So we all set out together again, but in Florida we needed money, so Al set to work washing dishes. For some reason, Al must have chosen to stay over there for a night. Al joined us a day later at Burroughs’s place, where he was supposed to meet up with Helen.

  William Burroughs and Alan Ansen acting out a routine, Tangier, 1957. (Photo by Allen Ginsberg; courtesy of Allen Ginsberg Estate.)

  People have talked about how weird Burroughs’s household was, with him shooting lizards and Benzedrine inhalers for target practice, and so on, but it didn’t seem particularly weird to me. Bill, for the most part, just sat in one spot. I never saw him hardly when he wasn’t sitting in his rocking chair with a newspaper in front of him. I mean, I don’t care whether if you got up at four in the morning, or it was eight o’clock in the morning or eight o’clock at night, there he sat! He’d sit there hunched over, as if he was absorbed in his newspaper. He presented the image of a quiet, thoughtful sort of person. He didn’t seem unusual to me. Because, to be honest with you, by this time I had met a lot of strange people! And when you grow up meeting different sorts of people like I had, you don’t really find people that strange anymore—especially as you’re growing older. I mean, probably if I had met someone besides Neal when I was fifteen, and my life had gone a whole different way, things like that might have shocked the hell out of me. A lot of the different things that happened to me might have seemed shocking to another person. But, let me tell you, meeting Neal at such a young age was an education in itself!

  Neal, of course, has been portrayed as a complete outlaw. And yet at the same time, Neal had really strict rules for himself. For example, with Carolyn, when he got her pregnant, he felt he had to marry her. The same thing happened a year later with Diana Hansen, whom he also married. When he got them pregnant, he felt he couldn’t just leave them. No one would ever have believed that Neal had such a moral code—that he would feel that kind of responsibility to a woman—because he gave such an impression of not caring about anything like that. He really and truly cared a great deal about everyone.

  The only reason he married Diana, in fact, was because she was pregnant. He was already married to Carolyn, of course. He went down and got the annulment in Mexico from Carolyn. I’m not positive that’s what really happened. Neal told me that Carolyn refused to give him a divorce, so he went to Mexico to get an annulment, which he figured was the same thing. There are a lot of different stories about what happened in Mexico. But Diana was getting bigger every day—just like Carolyn was getting bigger a year earlier—and Neal was desperate to do the right thing. Neal told me when Diana got pregnant, just as he had with Carolyn. But this time, Neal wasn’t all that het up to get married again. I didn’t bother him that much about other women—that’s why he could talk
to me.

  I’m troubled by what Carolyn has written about me in her book.14 It seemed like in her book—I haven’t read it yet—but if the movie script is any indication, it seemed like I was supposed to be following Neal, chasing him all over. And it was exactly the other way around. The only reason I came out here to California, for instance, is because of these mad love letters Neal was writing to me: “Come! Come! Come! … You’re my eyes—I’m blind without you! I’ve lost my eyes!” They were the most insane, mad, romantic letters I’ve ever seen. And so I came. And then, even after he and Carolyn had gotten married, he showed up at my apartment one day—which Al Hinkle will tell you—and he was gonna commit suicide.15 I was either going back to Denver with him, he said, and we were gonna start over and forget all this bullshit, or he was going to end both our lives right there. He was talking like he was tired of it all—this whole domestic life he’d started with Carolyn in San Francisco—and this time he was sure we could make it together, and that was the end of it! He wasn’t going to let me turn him down. And he had this gun.

  Neal was in pretty bad shape at that time. I don’t know what was really happening between him and Carolyn. When we got the annulment, I had accepted that our marriage was over. That was it. I mean, we were still close and everything, but I was now trying to make a new life for myself. But he kept coming over and coming over. But this one morning when he came over—about six in the morning—he was very quiet. Neal was never quiet, and this was the quietest I had ever seen him. He just walked in and pulled the gun out of his pocket and laid it on the table, and he told me, “You’re either packing and we’re going home together, or we’re neither one of us going anywhere.”

  Al Hinkle will tell you how Neal went by himself to ask Al for his gun. We were both surprised by what he did. Like I said, I don’t know what was happening really with him and Carolyn at the time. I don’t think she’d had the baby yet16—or maybe she’d just had it—but here he had married her, and I’d accepted it, and now he was trying to undo all of that. I won’t go through the whole day; but, in any case, he left for a while, but he was supposed to come back and pick me up. When he came back, I was gone. But he made the trip back to Denver alone anyway. Then he apparently had a change of mind and came back again. Neal often changed course like that. I remember how it took Neal a long time to marry Carolyn after we got the annulment. I had been a little miffed at that time, thinking that they had rushed me around—you know, I had to get to Denver before my birthday—and then they screwed around and didn’t do anything about themselves afterward. Neal didn’t actually marry her till a month later, on April Fool’s Day.

  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.

  All three of us were in the front seat. We were just driving across Texas, and we came to these ruins. I always wished that Jack had put this in the book.19 At first we thought it was ancient ruins, but I don’t really know what it was. There were some great big huge cement blocks and some statues that had been damaged or vandalized. Some of the statues had their arms knocked off, and this and that. But at one time it had obviously been a beautiful thing, maybe an Indian memorial thing of some sort. Anyway, we stopped the car to get out and go examine them, to look them over, and we were all still nude.

>   Jack and I were extremely nervous; we were, of course, looking for cars both ways. We didn’t want anybody to catch us naked. Neal could have cared less. Well, anyway, we see down the road, here comes this car, and Jack and I are yelling at Neal, “Come on! Let’s get back in the car! We’re gonna go to jail!” But Neal was still examining everything and talking a mile a minute—blah blah blah! Finally Jack and I just said, “The hell with you!” and we ran across the highway and jumped back into the car. The car was coming toward us, and as they were approaching they were sort of slowing down. All of a sudden, Neal gets up on this platform and strikes a pose. And the car slows almost to a stop—it was clear the people inside wanted to get a better look at Neal. We could see them. It was an older couple in the car.

  Jack and I were both in our car, bending as low as possible and trying to keep out of sight. I am not exaggerating—we were both just trying to hide. Neal, meanwhile, is standing just perfectly still. You could see them gaping at him. Jack and I started to talk about it, and we knew exactly what they must be saying. We could see the woman talking to her husband and pointing at Neal, and you could just imagine that she’s saying, “Look at these fantastic ruins and that beautiful statue! It hasn’t been marred at all! It’s just in perfect condition!” Because, fortunately, it was far enough away that she couldn’t see the difference between skin and stone, and he didn’t move a muscle. Carolyn has some pictures that she drew of Neal nude, and some of them are really quite good. They show what a good body he had. I mean, the way he was built, he could have been the model for some of those famous statues. I can still see that old lady sitting there, just jabbering at her husband—just bupbupbup-bupbupbup! And he’s squinting and shaking his head, as their car creeps away.