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drove down to Joe’s tract house in Daly City, carrying a shoulder bag full of notebooks, tapes, and recording equipment.
    Daly City is a working-class suburb in the heavy-fog belt just south of San Francisco. The sky is always gray, and the small, single-story houses are grayish too and tend to be almost indistinguishable from one another. The town has always comprised a lot of immigrants and those who can’t afford the pricey rents of the city itself. It is a bedroom community with few businesses and restaurants and no
nightlife whatsoever. One didn’t expect to find Marylou of On the Road there, even a recuperating Marylou just out of the hospital.
    I spent almost eight hours with her there that day, and for most of that time she remained in a dark-colored, maybe green, overstuffed armchair. I had my tape recorder set in front of her, on a low, round, polished, middle-class coffee table. The furnishings were tasteful but sparse. The house did not look lived-in at all, and the only other resident was apparently Joe himself. There were large glass windows—a California trademark—but they were almost all covered with heavy drapes. Privacy seemed to be the word of the day here. The coffee table also held a large ashtray for her many cigarettes an hour.
    Lu Anne looked puffy and unwell, and her voice was slow and not nearly as strong or energetic as it had been in the hospital a couple of days before. But I could see the strength and determination in her. She could easily have made a poor-health excuse and bowed out of the engagement, but she was determined to tell me everything she had to say, and she kept going even when I began to wear down myself. She kept going even though Joe frequently interrupted with hints that she quit for the day. At one point he even suggested that it was time for her to visit her daughter Annie Ree, who was living close by and raising her own baby now. Lu Anne brushed him off like a queen whose word is unchallengeable. She made it very clear to him how important it was for her to do this interview with me. In some ways, her sedulous insistence on getting her whole story told was an extension of the feelings she’d expressed earlier, in the hospital, about her horror at seeing her role in Beat history distorted and mistold in the movie Heart Beat and elsewhere. Having already been gravely ill several times, she now strongly feared that her real story would never get told correctly. And so she filled cassette tape after cassette tape with the interview I could hardly believe I was finally getting. And what an interview it was!

    Listening to the tapes now more than 30 years later, I realized how much of what she’d said that day I had forgotten—and how much else had simply gone over my head, because I was not yet old enough, nor had I lived enough, to appreciate all the profound life lessons she was sharing with me. If there’s anyone with more insight into Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady than Lu Anne, I have yet to encounter them. I used to think John Clellon Holmes in his several essays, especially “The Great Rememberer,” had the most profound insights into Kerouac. In some ways, perhaps, he still does. But he did not see the whole other dimension of Jack that a woman, especially a sensitive woman like Lu Anne, saw; and Holmes was not nearly as sharp or empathetic about Cassady.
    Carolyn Cassady has now written and rewritten several memoirs, but to my mind they are more about her than they are about Neal and Jack. And Carolyn, not to put too fine a point on it, belonged for better or worse to the square world that Jack and Neal were always trying to run away from. She was more a friendly opponent than somebody who understood from the inside the world they inhabited.
    But Lu Anne was unquestionably on the inside, and remained there even after spending decades exiled from the Beat world in the squaresville suburb of Daly City. Even amid the plethora of