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…