The Empty Chair (6 page)

Can I talk about my affair with Carolyn Cassady?

I know I'm skating around. Are you sorry you got yourself into this, Bruce?
[laughs]
I just can't seem to approach it headlong.
I suppose I
could
get right to it—the full catastrophe—I just don't want to be rude and take too much of your time. But I promise I'll get to it.
Soon.
First, let me tell you about this thing I had with Neal Cassady's wife. It's guaranteed to amuse. Then I'll talk about . . . all the rest.

So there I was, falling for Kerouac head over heels—mind you, this wasn't all that long ago! What can I say? I was a late-bloomer. The book that knocked me out, as I was telling you, was
Big Sur.
That novel's actually become more of a draw for me to come back—here—than my Camaldolese hermit friends. When I make my pilgrimages, it's to Jack's spirit and the book that I come. To the beginner, I'd recommend
Big Sur
first
 . . . On the Road
isn't even on my shortlist! I know that sounds terrible. Did you know there are
Madame Bovary
haters?
Mais oui.
They're of the opinion—people have
beaucoup
opinions out there!—that Flaubert loathed his own creations, from the
Madame
on down, and his contempt bleeds through and ruins the text. Corrupts his achievement. Another
group considers
Gatsby
a novel that fails in its prose but triumphs in evoking a world and a time, a kind of ghost book that lingers like a scent made from flowers pressed
between the lines
, all fairy- and fingerprint dust. I'm in agreement! Oh, those F'd-up similes that fall so trippingly off the tongue! The glibness gets treacly once you've had your fill—which for me was around Page 2. Vomitous! I have a
fitzsimile
of my own, if you please: at his best, which is most often his worst (at least in
Gatsby
), Fitzgerald is like a too-congenial whore, wearing too many perfect gossamer gowns. Take that, Mr. Jazz Age! And you heard it here! (I actually believe I'd have made a pretty good critic. I really do think about books all the time and have formed my opinions with great care. Eventually, I may try my hand at an essay or two. Wouldn't it be marvelous to publish a monograph with the “Vanzen” imprint?) To do what Fitzgerald did is an impossible trick and I'd put
On the Road
in the same camp. Does it evoke the ineffable? Does it evoke lost youth? Does it evoke the sights and sounds, the promise and magic of a time, an era, a world on the brink, of something mysterious and noble, numinous and
new
? Without question! Good Lord.
Yes.
Is it a wonderful novel? A resounding no! It's an
experience
,
not a novel. It's a mess.
Gatsby
and
On the Road
are like owner manuals for products that can never be delivered. And yet, how beautiful! The spell they cast is diabolical, untouchable. The
genius
of it, to create a text, an
illuminated
text of words that somehow alchemize—
atomize
—into fragrance and music, that kick up the dust of the future and
past, and the present too! Good Lord! Perfect mystery-tumbleweeds emitting the warm odor of nostalgia and the cold ardor of timeless, terrifying
Silence . . .
skeletons exposed to weather.

But enough about that.

I was telling you about my affair with the ancient widow of Neal Cassady aka Dean Moriarty, that square-jawed beefcake—
Beat
cake—bigamist fountainhead, automotive contortionist and cuckolded sex addict, that douche bag writer manqué who was Jack's woman as well, his muse and creator
.
Jack's
man . . .
who died on the wrong side of railroad earth's tracks.

When I reached the end of
Big Sur
—“Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur,” the great heretical coda—when I finished reading that end-poem, awash in the
Term Term Klerm Kerm Kurn Cow Kow Cash Cluck
and
Clock
of it, oh what a
staggering
thing it is!—which, by the way, like wine and wafer, is no
representation
of Jack, but
the very blood, body and brain of him, in those stanzas the man truly dug his own deathless, unintelligible, operatic, watery grave—when I got
finis
with
Sur
, I went straight to the Internet and found a website
for the estate of Neal Cassady. And there it was . . . a
real-time contact
for Carolyn! I have no memory of the emotions that compelled me to send what I believed at the time to be a short, sweet, wryly seductive e-note. It was late, and I was actually
here
—at the hermitage—of
course
I was, on a star-tossed mercilessly typical Big Sur night. After firing off my communiqué, I went outside and stripped naked, delirious with joy, got my skin tasered by stellar wind while listening to the rapturous offstage massacre of waves being their usual demure, assassin selves—warriors unlike Arjuna, with never a moment of doubt.

Within an hour, I received a reply.

From
her . . .

I was stunned out of my skin.
Gob-smacked
, as Carolyn would say, for she'd written back from England, where she made her home. 'Twas mid-morningtide in Blighty.

Now
please
keep in mind I had just finished that wonder of a book in which Carolyn is portrayed as “Evelyn” and I had a bit of a—no, I had a
massive
crush on the gal I came to know as the fag hag Iron Lady. So, I write
back
and she writes
me
and before you know it we are
corresponding.
Her emails sounded young, Bruce, young, smart and
with it
,
and suddenly I get paranoid. As if maybe I'm unwittingly participating in some kind of Web thing someone wrote code for, you know, being duped by a promotional goof the publishers use to hawk new editions of
The First Third
or
Off the Road
(fag hag Iron Lady's memoir)—half of me thinks I might be playing the fool for one of these newfangled interactive artificial intelligence ad campaigns getting written up in
Wired.
Remember too that in the initial throes of it, I was most likely drunk and had probably smoked a little, partaken of the
chronic
as my younger friends would say . . .
plus
,
I'd
just
finished this glorious, glorious book and was so full of the Beats I was practically the fifth
Beatle
! I was
horny
for them, and lo and behold there I am having a sudden chat-fest, basically
flirting
with Neal Cassady's
wife
! In my mind she's not even his
widow
, all of them are still
alive
, and it's all happening
now
—like something out of Philip K. Dick!
But I'm still paranoidly thinking, you know, uhm, okay, if this isn't some slick viral campaign then maybe someone hacked into the website, it's a
rogue program
merely
drone-responding
to the pathetic battalion of geeks that have Roman candle crushes on “Carolyn Cassady”—
who's long dead.
Of course! She's dead! What was I thinking! I was swooning so hard, I hadn't even bothered to check if she was still alive . . . all I had was a “contact” proving otherwise. I'd been “corresponding” with a rudimentary A.I. program that held up its end of the conversation with sad, schmucky groupies before eventually diarrhea-ing the humiliating contents all over the Web. Because how could it be possible that the
real
Carolyn Cassady, a wizened old woman, got it up for emailing—
immediately responding
—to strangers?

This went on for a month or so. (The Internet informed that Mrs. Cassady was
alive and well.) I didn't mean to imply there was anything sexual about it, of
course
there wasn't, not that
I
didn't feel sexual, Lord, I had a hard-on whenever I wrote her! Nope, nothing remotely immodest, in terms of content. I'm sure she sent the same incisive, vivacious emails to other fans but
no one
could take away from me what I considered to be fact: I was now, by definition—mine!—having a
ménage à quatre
with Neal, Carolyn and Jack. I'd have been the Ginsberg in the group. See, the miracle of Jack is that, from everything I know, from everything I
intuit
, he was a mess, and a not too
friendly
one. Kerouac was drawn to women but was so awkward around them, so deeply uncomfortable, so needy and nasty that he was a faggot by default. He was really kind of an alien, an extraterrestrial. The way he treated his poor daughter Jan! Shitting on her when she came to visit that first time—that
only
time?—she was just a kid!—disowning her to the end, can you imagine the pain of that young girl? Jesus, it'd have been more merciful if he'd killed her with his own hands. Both those boys—Jack Sundance and the Cassady Kid—had
serious
mommy issues.
Ti Jean
's trouble was that he always felt like he was cheating on his mother. Gabrielle was his enduring love, his true wife. And Neal, well, the minute he got a gal pregnant, the minute she became a
mom
, he'd have to marry her on the spot, even if he was already married to someone else! Gotta do right by Mom!
R-e-s-p-e-c-t.
(Find out what it means to me.) Neal liked pimping his women—wives—Moms!—to Jack (to an extent). And the only real way Jack got off was sleeping with women who were “taken.” That was the pathology. You don't need to be a therapist to figure
that
one out. Incest ruled the day. I've always thought of Carolyn as the Mother Superior of the Beats . . . Mother Superior—that says it all, don't it?

After a few months, the emails tapered off. Carolyn was pushing 80. I started to worry that her health might be an issue. So I resolved to do something bold. I decided to travel to England to meet my pen pal. Why not? Money wasn't a problem; anyway, I'd always wanted to visit the Lake District and see where Wordsworth and Coleridge hung out. Wordsworth was born in
Cockermouth
,
imagine being a homophobe and living
there
! But I was actually thinking in historical terms, literary history mind you, albeit
minor
literary history, and my idea was to write a piece about the whole experience for a journal or a magazine. The notion of how we met and my flying over to meet her struck me as just the sort of thing that might also be turned into a wonderful little independent film. So I wrote to her and said that it happened I was going to be in the Commonwealth—I never told her that she was the only reason I was coming—and would she be amenable to receiving a visitor? She said she would and that was that.

Have you seen photos of her? I mean, when she was younger? They're in all the Beat biographies. There aren't so many, nothing “iconic,” she wasn't really a looker. I think probably no one really
wanted
to take her picture, she was kind of a Debbie Downer. A pain-in-the-ass snob with a stick up her ass. There's nothing worse than a dumb snob, and prudish to boot. It seems like the same few photos are reprinted, over and over. She always looks like she had gas or was being forced to watch dogs copulate—that would be Jack and Neal! Or Neal and Allen. Or Allen and Jack. What stands out the most, in the shots
I've
seen, is her
male energy.
She looks stern, almost mannish. Which makes total sense, knowing all we know now. Of course the Bell's palsy didn't help the overall look.

When I called from London to confirm our appointment, I was beside myself. Welcome to Phil Dick's Match-dot-com!
It was the first time I'd actually heard Carolyn's voice. She pleasantly offered directions to her place. She said she knew nothing about the “motorways” and the only route she could recommend was the approach from Windsor Castle.
Which I thought was apt, because she
was
royalty—it didn't matter that everyone but Neal thought she was a pill and a sonofabitch. She was still the Queen and always would be. And boy, did she let you know it!

She came to the door like a movie legend expecting her biographer, a cross between Barbara Stanwyck—there it was, that male, Stanwyck energy—and Doris Day (the latter-day Doris, the one I've seen in pictures with her doggies in Carmel Valley). She had a throwaway elegance, an aggressively pretentious modesty, as if her role model was Queen Elizabeth in those “rugged” shots in the Land Rover at Balmoral. After all, Carolyn had decades of experience being the grail, or the next best thing anyway, for thousands of fanboys like myself. She'd outlived her men, and in direct bloodline to the gods, had gained immortality herself—

She asked me in for “a cuppa and nibbles” and it wasn't long before she turned on the poison spigot. I'm no Kipling, but I'll do my best to give you a
flavor
 . . .

[A hilarious impersonation of an American dowager followed, his voice taking on a sporadic, contrived “English” inflection]
“By the time Neal was with the Pranksters, he just wanted to die. The trouble was, he no longer believed in suicide. His religion was against it. So he
rolled
busses, he kept ‘rolling' busses. I told Kesey it was terrible what was going on but he didn't want to hear it—Kesey stopped talking to me. They
all
stopped talking to me, heaven knows why. One day Neal showed up at my house without shoes, looking dreadful. I said, ‘Why are you still with Kesey?' and Neal said, ‘Honey, people look at me and expect me to perform.'

“Allen was very close to my son. And Allen was lovely—for a time. But around 10 years before he died, he decided he wanted nothing to do with me. We named my son John Allen, after Jack and Allen. When John was a boy, he
loved
playing with Allen. When Allen was dying, John asked me what he should do because it'd been quite some time since they'd spoken. I said, ‘Call him!' So John did and the person on the other end said, ‘You know, Allen would have loved to talk to you but he's in a coma now.' I'd
go see Allen before he decided not to talk to me, he was in London all the time. He'd come for a reading or to do this or that, see one person or the other, and I'd go see him whenever he needed
a pair of hands
—he loved
applause.
He even went to Venice on a stretcher because they were giving him some kind of an award. As long as Allen was being honored, he'd show up! I told him years ago, if you can't learn to accept the plaudits for what they
are
, it'll never be enough, you'll never be able to get enough praise.
Right up to the end he thought he was worthless. He thought he was worthless when he was young, and he thought as much right before he died.