From: tcbowden@clovis.felton.ca.us (Timothy Bowden)
Newsgroups: rec.music.gdead
Subject: the Cassady Chronicles
Summary: Neal & Al & Luanne take a trip!
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 92 10:41:33 PST
Organization: Yucca Flats II in Felton, CA

"I forgot to mention he was very gallant with the ladies.  Helped 
them on with their coats.  That's the way to do things."

Kerouac was writing about Big Ed Dunkel, in real life Al Hinkle, 
Neal Cassady's old running buddy from Denver days, and I was there 
when he came calling on Carolyn one bright day during the 
seventies.  He had a mission of sorts.

Carolyn had just been interviewed in Rolling Stone, and that year 
the center had become her life with two husbands, Neal and Jack 
Kerouac.  Some of the ugly had come out, and others of the women in 
the drama objected.

Neal hit women on occasion.  Carolyn only once, she said, during a 
confrontation at home when a blow had actually knocked her head 
into son John's, who was a toddler in those days.  Neal was very 
contrite, and posed in profile provocatively until Carolyn hit him 
back.  He was completely happy and satisfied after that, he even 
had a nosebleed for his penance.

Carolyn had suggested the other women liked the beatings.  Ann 
Maxwell and the wonderful first wife, Luanne (I would love to know 
more about the later life of Mary Lou from _On The Road_, this same 
Luanne Henderson) were a bit upset about that, and Al came to tell 
Carolyn so.

Al was a high-up railroad union official by then, and he told an 
ironic story about his son working at one of the cinemaplexes in 
San Jose during a projectionists strike where he had to keep the 
reels running in two theatres, which required him to cross the 
picket lines many times each night.  "Why shouldn't he be able to 
work wherever he wants?" asked union official Al.

He also told me briefly about a trip across the country which was 
off-page in _On The Road_ (first appearance was with Neal's 
"Hup-Hup!" outside K's mother's place in Long Island) in 1947.  
That one was the most interesting perhaps of the whole of them, Al 
suggested.

Along for the ride were Luanne, Al, and Neal.  (Aside:  it was one 
of those occasions where Neal had been behaving as a proper family 
man for some time then suddenly had dumped his job and took off 
again across the country.  Neal was probably a textbook manic 
depressive;  he could be effusive and charming and dilligent and 
dutiful and then distraught and desolate and at least on one 
occasion laying out in front of his house in his auto with a fully 
loaded pistol musing suicide.) Up into the Rockies, the heat had 
gone out of the hupmobile, and Neal had to lean out the window to 
clear ice away from the windscreen to see.  Al told me Luanne took 
the frozen hands of both Neal and Al and slipped them into her 
pants to warm them.  I ventured how that might have distracted me 
from driving and Al looked at me with one of the more puzzling and 
ironic comments I witnessed during that time:  "I was a bit more 
responsible than that."  

Anyway, I appreciated he thought more of Luanne than to allow a 
leering suggestion to stand, and I commend him for it.

Carolyn knew from the postcard Neal mailed to her from Colorado 
above Route 66 during this trip that he was going to pick up Luanne 
again, all assurances to her before embarking with Al to the 
contrary.  It was during these years when Neal "was three times 
married, twice divorced [actually, once at that time;  the Mexican 
divorce from Carolyn apparently never happened] and living with his 
second wife." as Kerouac put it in _Road_.

Where is Luanne Henderson today?  She was in South San Francisco 
twenty years ago, but I fear the trail may be cold by now...

There's more, and we'll get to it, after this...


-Trem











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