Neal Cassady and the Beats

Last Saturday evening in San Miguel de Allende I attended a celebration of the Beat poets. Neal Cassady, the catalyst who changed the direction of Jack Kerouac's writing -- to the more free flowing, stream of consciousness Beat style -- breathed his last breath here. He'd been to a wedding and probably took some downers that night, where he expired by the railroad tracks.

His son, John Allen Cassady, was named for Cassady's two best friends, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Kerouac's first name was actually Jean, pronounced almost like 'John' -- so why didn't he name him "Jack Allen Cassady" you ask? Well, Neal Cassady said, "If you say Jack Cassady fast, it sounds like Jackass-ady; and no one is going to call my son a jackass!" John Allen Cassady, who is now in his late 50s, returned to grace the local literary group with some funny stories of his father, who died when John Cassady was just 16.

The evening began with a couple of speakers providing a summary of the history of the Beats, and particularly the development of their friendship and writing, and their ventures to Mexico.

"Don't do what I did, 20 years of fast-living and my kids are all screwed up," Neal Cassady had said. But his son, John, a blond-haired man with a beard, bushy eyebrows and a sunny disposition, has nothing but fond and humorous memories of his father. When I asked him about what his father had said about screwing up his kids, John said, 'Well, my dad was very protective. He cared for us very much."

John Cassady went on to talk about the funny things his father did to entertain the kids, and how he never said an unkind thing to them -- or anyone else. On one trip to Mexico he brought back a small wooden pig that had a removable plug for a tail. "Watch this!" Neal said to his kids. He went and got a flyswatter, and swatted a fly, not killing it, but just stunning the fly. Then he pulled the tail-plug from the little toy pig, inserted the dazed fly and replaced the tail. As the fly came to, the pig's legs started to move and soon it was dancing on the table. The kids were delighted! John said, "That was funny, but what's even funnier is, 'Who is the Mexican who thought of this in the first place!?'"

John's mother, Carolyn, was left to be the disciplinarian. You'd think that a kid who smoked mota with his father and accompanied him to the bars while still in elementary school would be all messed up. But John Cassady is a happy man, a shining, jovial light who is and always was, very proud of his parents.

I approached John after dinner with his mother's book, Off the Road: Twenty Years with Cassady, Kerouac & Ginsberg. Before he signed it for me, he flipped to a picture of his dad in his prime and said, "Look at my dad. Look what a handsome devil he was!" Then he flipped to his mother's 1946 picture, a stunning profile of a classic blonde, and commented boyishly, "Look at how beautiful my mom was!" John was supposed to be shuffled off to speak on the closing panel, and the event organizers were getting impatient, so I took a picture of John signing my book, we shook hands and I left, treasuring the moment.

Seriously, John had the experience of learning the guitar from Jerry Garcia (Garcia credited Cassady for the formation of the Grateful Dead), he knew Kerouac and Ginsberg as his father's friends, so how cool is that? In one aside, John said that Garcia told him as a teenager not to use a certain album as a guide to the Grateful Dead's music style, "We were speeding and played the whole thing in triple time!"

Also speaking that evening was George Walker, one of the Merry Pranksters whose nickname was "Hardly Visible." He's a colorful man, wearing bright hippie colors topped by a knit skullcap, and he had some colorful stories about LSD-laced cross-country bus rides and wild trips to Mexico. Mostly the stories had to do with getting high, having fun, and barely escaping the Mexican police!