A Cassady childhood #2: How the narcs nailed Neal

Jail term followed drug set-up

Dean Moriarty was the poster boy of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road: his freewheeling exuberance, his high-energy enthusiasm, his sheer lust for life, gave the character a near-heroic status in the fictional pages of that classic twentieth century novel.

Yet for the real Moriarty, Neal Cassady of course, the man’s devil-may-care personality in the pages of the bestselling story earned him a definite notoriety in conventional circles in the years after publication in 1957.

In fact, Neal became something of a marked man among the forces of law and order in San Francisco during that time. Many officers were keen to nail this glamorously dangerous figure who had cocked a snook at mainstream society in the guise of Moriarty and, on April 9th, 1958, agents ensnared him, as this touching piece of memoir by Cassady’s son John Allen recalls…

More than being merely a ‘tire wrangler’ in New York and Los Gatos, Neal was a popular figure, almost a Beat ‘celebrity’, in North Beach in San Fransisco in the '50s, due in part to Kerouac's portrayal of him as Dean Moriarty in his novel On the Road.

There were two ‘narcs’ in North Beach at the time, hounding Neal to score them some pot. Everyone knew that they were narcs. I mean, they wore black Barrett's and go-tees and carried bongo drums. I mean, come on, they looked like Maynard G. Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis!

Neal finally gave in (big mistake) and took their $20. I forget if it was for an ounce or more, but you can't buy a gram for that nowadays! He took their money and went straight to the race track with it, Bay Meadows, which is long gone now.

He put it all on Lucky Boy in the fifth race, or whatever, and the narcs were pissed when he never came back with the pot. They thought that now their ‘cover’ was blown, so they somehow got Neal arrested as if the deal had gone down.

At his trial, Mom Carolyn said that the State had a short, weasel-looking stool pigeon ‘witness’, complete with a striped suit and fedora hat, saying, ‘Yeah, that's him! That's the guy!’ Neal Cassady was led off in handcuffs bound for San Quentin. There was no appeals processes back then, at least none that Mom knew of.

Pictured above: Neal Cassady’s mugshot after his arrest on a marijuana charge in 1958

When he finally got out, after serving two years of hard time, he never seemed quite the same. I wouldn't say that he was bitter exactly (although I would have been), but just not as happy-go-lucky as he was before.

His two years on parole were some of the best memories of the family for me,  because he was home every night. He would change out of his LG Tire uniform, put on his plaid shorts, and float in our little pool on a giant inner tube that he scored from work, sipping a can of Brown Derby beer. Ah, those were the days...

We used to have dinners out on the brick patio in the Summertime. Dad would BBQ steaks on a real brick BBQ while Mom made the salads and stuff. One day Dad had just returned from a trip to Mexico, and he put this little carved wooden pig on the table. With a cool paint job. It had four pins for legs, which could move up and down, and a butt plug for a tail.

Mom's all, ‘What's this?’ He grabbed a fly swatter and started chasing flies that landed on the screen door. ‘Now, you don't want to kill 'em, just wound them.’ Mom rolled her eyes.

He grabbed an injured fly by a wing, and put it into the butt plug of the wooden pig, While the fly was flapping around in its death throes, it made the pig walk across the picnic table! Even Mom had to laugh...

More crazy stories to come, so please stand by.

John Allen Cassady

See also: ‘A Cassady childhood #1: Neal after On the Road’, February 3rd, 2024; ‘Rock Stories #4: Elvin Bishop & John Allen Cassady’, November 6th, 2023; ‘Rock Stories #1: Carlos Santana & John Allen Cassady’, August 27th, 2023; ‘Beat Meetings #8: John Allen Cassady & Allen Ginsberg’, June 11th, 2023; ‘Interview #9: John Allen Cassady’, August 4th, 2022