Excerpt of the Day: "One and Only" by Gerald Nicosia and Anne Marie Santos

Gerald Nicosia and Anne Marie Santos’ One and Only tells the story of Lu Ann Henderson.  At 15-years-old in 1946, she met Neal Cassidy, fast-talking hurricane of male sexuality and vast promises.  The two married and soon were hanging out with a group of young would-be writers, including Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.  Lu Ann become the secret link between Kerouac and Cassidy, helping to ignite the Beat Generation and giving Kerouac material for one of the seminal novels of the twentieth century, On the Road.

Take a peek:

From Part One

Lu Anne:

It all started in October 1946. That’s when we took our first trip to New York. Neal and I sort of ran off from Denver because of what happened between Neal and a girl named Jeannie Stewart. She was this girl Neal had been living with when Neal and I met, and she was holding his clothes as a weapon to get him to come back “where he belonged.” She wanted to keep him at her house, and he told her that he wasn’t going to do that. So Neal and I went to her house, and he climbed up three stories and broke in the window, and rescued his clothes and books. His books were the most important thing to him at the time.

We ran off without anyone even knowing, just took off hitchhiking, and we wound up in Sidney, Nebraska, where I had an aunt and uncle living. In Sidney, Neal got a job as a dishwasher, and I got a job as a maid—making twelve dollars a month! When I think back, my God! What child slavery they practiced in those days! They really did. One day off a month—that’s all I got. I had to be up at five in the morning and have the whole bottom part of the house cleaned by the time the family got up at seven, and I finished at seven in the evening. But it all came to an abrupt end very soon.

It was just getting into winter, and we were having our second snow already. The woman, Mrs. Moore, had me out on this veranda scrubbing everything—the railings, even the side of the house. Neal happened to come home that day and saw me scrubbing this idiot thing—he saw that my hands were turning blue. He said, “That’s it!” So that’s when he took my uncle’s car. He just told me he was gonna get a car—he didn’t tell me where he was gonna get it or anything. I almost died when he drove up in front, thinking what I would have to face with the family. But, in any case, we took off at midnight.

I only had one trunk, and we loaded it into the car. It was a wild ride, let me tell you, because the whole windshield was completely iced over, and the windshield wipers wouldn’t work! And of course, Neal always had a terrible fear of the police, so he had me looking out the rear window to see if we were being chased. Since my uncle worked at the railroad, Neal had no idea when he might discover it and turn it over to the police. My uncle would have had no way of knowing it was Neal and I who had taken his car. Whether that would have made any difference in his going to the police I don’t really know. In any case, Neal wound up on the passenger side, driving with his left hand, looking out the window with this scarf tied around his head, and me looking out the driver’s side because all the windows were totally iced up—to see if anyone was following.

I’d never gone through anything like that in my life. My father was a policeman, and I’d grown up with policemen. I had no fear of policemen at all. They were part of me, you might say. But between Neal’s fright of the police and my own fright of my uncle—my fear of being found out by the family, that I would have done such a thing—we were both pretty much out of our heads. We drove the car off the road a few times, and finally it went completely off the road, and he couldn’t get it started again. We’d made it to another small town in Nebraska—I can’t remember the name—but not too damn far from where we’d started. Maybe a hundred miles or so. It seemed like we’d been driving for hours—most of the night. We had intended to drive to this friend of Neal’s, Ed Uhl, whose family had a ranch near Sterling, Colorado. Neal told me we were gonna go to Ed’s and stay the night, and then have Ed drive us to Denver. We really had no idea at that point that we would end up in New York.