One of 3QR’s most popular and magical writers was Diane Sward Rapaport, who passed away just weeks before the pandemic struck. In her last days, she spoke with humor and hope about this next trip into further galaxies. And she knew more than most anyone about being connected to stars and celestial trajectories. She was a former lover, friend, and confidant of Neal Cassady, the scarcely disguised iconic figure, Dean Moriarty, in Jack Kerouac’s counter-culture classic On the Road.

Diane was also family to me. And she sent me this piece for my editing thoughts. Thinking of her, and the loss of enchanted people, we are paying tribute by posting an excerpt of her memoir essay in an era where the ground seems to be shifting anew. Diane was young in the mid-1960s, an expat in San Miguel de Allende. A new kind of magic hung in the air then.

Original memoir post by Diane Sward Rapaport here. Excerpted below.

“One of my friends took me to an evening party at Taboada, a local hot springs out of town. I was surrounded by people who knew everything I did not about the hippie culture, most of them nude, with propensities for consuming large amounts of speed, acid, peyote mushrooms and marijuana, swallowed with tumblers of tequila. 

Neal was hanging out on the outskirts of the group with his back turned on them. He was easily the handsomest man there—early forties and dressed in khaki pants and clean shirt. No beard. No long-hair. As I moved closer, I heard him delivering a rapid-fire monologue to the full moon, describing everyone at the party with what seemed unusual canniness, acerbity, wit and accuracy. As the party got wilder, Neal kept throwing pills down his throat, lucid as the brilliant light that etched him into that surreal scene. When we drove away, he was still talking to the moon, the last man standing.

. . .

Neal arrived in San Miguel de Allende in 1964 in George Walker’s red Lotus convertible, easily the most exotic car anyone had ever seen on these narrow streets. The hippies there  . . . emphasized his assured place in history (how Kerouac worshipped him; how he was the LSD acid king, how he spent two years in prison; how he was addicted to bennies (speed) and could out drink and out drug them all). I was struck by what seemed like hero worship from young down-and-outers who venerated this collection of odd accomplishments. 

What his friends considered heroic, I considered sad. As I came to know Neal, I understood that he too considered his life sad: he was a legend for all the wrong reasons. As I would later find, sadness and isolation often accompany fame, and these can warp into addiction and a self-destruct that finally destroys the talent that spawned it. 

‘How would you like to go out to the hot springs and take some mushrooms,’ Neal asked soon after we met. I said yes, not knowing in the least what was going to happen. He dosed me and then wandered away, as I slowly began to recede into my inner journey. At some point my sense of time vanished. There were no boundaries between me and a color, a word, a number, a star; everything was broken into fragments. I didn’t know whether I was alive or dead and I was too out there to care, fascinated to be floating among so many disparate images. No sentences. No thoughts. No revelations. 

The sound of a train hauled me back to the hot springs. It was beginning twilight, but I had no idea whether I had been there for days or weeks. Then everything became a sequence of comic strips that set me laughing uncontrollably.  No Neal.  The wind rippled shadows through the grasses like waves. Eventually Neal appeared, and we went home. I didn’t speak. Didn’t talk about ‘my trip.’ 

. . .

Neal and I did become lovers, but only for a short while. The chemistry was off. Instead, we became close friends.  We shared a spacious home in the center of town, the Murillo house we called it, with a large interior patio with two trees.

. . .

He’d stick around my house unstoned for many days, and we were easy and comfortable with each other. He liked that I didn’t relate to him as an icon. . . He revealed to me how deeply ashamed he was; and that the drugs were his hideout, and I was a refuge.  . . .

One night, Neal burst into my bedroom while I was sleeping, turned on the light and killed a scorpion crawling towards me on my pillow. Another time he showed up at the house quite unexpectedly, because he had some flash I was going to burn the house down; and indeed I had left a stove burner on with a wooden cutting board carelessly left on top. I was to come to know well the psychic quality in people that had done hundreds of acid and mushroom trips. Their minds become unhinged and they easily pass through the thin membrane that leads to clairvoyance.

. . .

The last time Neal was in San Miguel, he said, “Look, I’m becoming all my worst images. I’ve got no work, and I’m a lousy lover. What else is there, I mean?”  He professed wanting to quit speed; hoped that Allen Ginsberg would come down and somehow save him. He told me how tortured he was by the menagerie that flocked around him and clung like leeches. I would talk to him about what it might be like to live somewhere anonymously and reinvent his life.

. . .

The night before he died, I had a dream. Neal was spinning and breaking up in front of my eyes. He became a shooting star dropping into a small smiling crescent moon that has just emerged from the horizon.

I woke up to a tapping at my door. A policeman had come to tell that me Neal was dead. He was found some twenty miles outside of town, near the railroad tracks.  He had fallen in with a party of Mexicans and rode his life out on speed and tequila, a runaway train bound for destruction.

Later that day, I learned that Neal had written his own epitaph. Scrawled in red lipstick on the bathroom mirror of his girlfriend’s house was: ‘Just a gigolo, wherever I go.'”

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