Part 1.

I first met Neal shortly after my wife had died. I was holed-up in the attic of a boarding house in the middle of a safe zone just outside of Denver, recovering from a long illness that had beaten me down through most of the winter. I was thin as a waif, looking emaciated despite the repeated attempts of my aunt, who lived in a room below me, to try to keep some meat on my bones. I’d withered to a hundred and forty miserable pounds when spring finally came, my long fever broke, and we knew the long days and nights of maddening siege would come again. My old friend Allen, who had wintered in the room next door to my aunt, had told me stories of this crazy saint who drove the open roads through swarms of the dead.

Neal Cassady drove the bus, an old 1940 Chevy school bus- armored along the flanks, with barbed wire across the cattle-catcher grill, and painted in wild, swirling purples, reds, and greens- in that great arcing triangle between the safe zones of San Francisco, Mexico City and Denver, moving supplies, drugs, soldiers and stragglers to the places they needed to go. He’d pick up an occasional survivor along the way and regale them with stories of the road. He was a madman, sweating and shouting as he drove that bus. To me, the whole thing seemed like suicide going out there like that on the vast, still-infested stretches of the west. My first ride went something like this:

He angled that bus out of Denver, down the lonely two lane roads that connected the burned out remnants of the western towns which stood between the outposts of survival. He knew every little spot in-between the fortified safe zones where he could hole-up and pack it in for the night without waking up surrounded by a thousand ghouls, but he usually never stopped the bus for anything, driving on through days and nights. He’d take off and run that rig at 90 miles an hour, left hand on the wheel as casual as can be, sitting sideways in his seat, cigarette tucked into the corner of his mouth, flipping that goddamned hammer of his in his right hand. He didn’t carry a gun. That wasn’t like him at all. I don’t know if he even knew what to do with one, because I never saw him so much as touch a gun, but he carried that hammer. It was just a regular carpenter’s hammer, something odd and useful that he’d picked up along the way, and when it wasn’t in his hand he’d tuck it in his belt, brown, beaten and old, which held up his baggy trousers. He’d sit there on the edge of his seat, almost spilling out of it in his enthusiasm, balling that jack in his mad hysterics down narrow country lanes, driving and laughing, his attention on a hundred things at once. He’d flip that hammer over and over in his right hand, lick his lips, whip that bus between lanes, around burned-out wrecks, gracefully flick his wrist and run down a ghoul straggling along the shoulder, pull it back onto the road, not missing a beat in his story, which was usually about some army nurse that he screwed in ‘Frisco or LA or somewhere in-between.

Miles and miles, he went on like this. He was totally unlike me, a real man of the old school, afraid of nothing, living right there in that moment, taking in everything, whatever it was, while I was dreaming about writing for the few people who were left alive after all of this goddamned mess, after all of this got settled and America was America again. But for now, Neal liked having me beside him in the bus, and I liked watching the madman drive. He knew I was a writer, which was why he wanted me along with him, and I’m sure he thought that I could show him a thing or two. He’d spent most of the war in jail and had just gotten out when the outbreaks began, and he’d done some writing while he was in there. He shared a bit of it with me on our first trip out together, running down the west side of the Rocky Mountains on a purple April morning. Most of his words were like sediment in a fast-flowing stream, but there was clear water there, and I’d help him find it if he wanted me to.