The highway east of Albuquerque wound up the Santia Heights out of the Rio Grande Valley. The summer air lost its heat, as the rusted pick-up climbed toward the pass. AK and I were relieved by the cooler temperature. Late-June in 1974 was murder on long-haired hitchhikers crossing the Far West. Rides were few and distances were far. This driver of the Ford 150 was heading to Amarillo, Texas. The distance was a little under 300 miles between the two cities.
The hippie farmer belonged to a Jesus Freak commune in the Panhandle. He refrained from any preaching, but his young buxom wife asked us at a pit stop along the Pecos River, if we believed in god.
"I'm half-Jewish," AK answered with a Long Island accent. I had never seen AK say a prayer in the three years that we knew each other. "The other half is agnostic."
"That's okay, Jesus loves everyone." She smelled of patchouli. Her blue eyes were dazed by the bliss of divine love. The teenage blonde was the epitome of trailer park beauty. If she was jesus, then I would have worshiped at her feet, but I had converted to non-believerism at age 8 and she was simply a girl on the cusp of womanhood.
"Everyone will be welcome at his table. Even sinners, if they repent at the last moment." She touched my hand with a promise of more at the commune. Her husband wiped the windows clean of insects. A big man with a bushy red beard. He seemed the type to get jealous real quick.
"Doesn't look like I need to repent this very moment." I gently pulled away my hand. The sky was cloudless. I had $15 in my pocket. AK had at least $150. He wouldn't let me starved on the road. "It's a beautiful day."
"Praise the Lord for that." The burly driver pushed his long hair under a straw cowboy hat. "But Jesus never predicted the day of deliverance. Could be five hours from now or three seconds."
I counted that latter span of time. Nothing bad happened at a count to three and the driver shrugged with indifference to the coming apocalypse. He motioned for us to get in the back and studied the searing sun. "Praise the Lord. You'll get a little taste of hell this afternoon."
The flatbed of the Ford 150 offered no shelter from the sun. We were baked to a crisp. The ragged mountains became a fading memory and the landscape was ruled by sere buttes and endless vistas of dry ranchlands. The wind whistling over the truck killed any conversation. AK and I pointed out wind devils scouring the desert plains. There was not enough moisture in the air to strengthen them into tornadoes. The driver kept the pickup to the speed limit.
55.
The sun set into a flat horizon. The dying light scorched the featureless terrain of the northern Chihuahuan Desert a rabid red. The night sky soon shone with a billion stars. The dark did nothing to chill the air. AK and I sweated in the blow-torch humidity. Our water was down to a few drops, when the driver stopped for gas in Amarillo.
"I'm heading north from here. A small town near the Rita Blanca Grasslands."
His wife stayed in the pick-up. She looked at AK with yearning. Her gaze betrayed that the high plains were a lonely place anytime of the year and the commune needed new blood.
"You sure you don't want to join us. The girls at the commune are friendly to strangers new to the Lord. We believe that the moment of orgasm is a gift from god. You don't have to convert. All you have to do is listen." It was a friendly pitch and at this time of night sharing a bed with a hippie Jesus freak girl was an enticing temptation. "They can wait and the girls at the commune would like to see new faces."
"Thanks, but I have a girlfriend back in Boston." AK had been faithful on this month-long trip from Boston to the West Coast, although not from a lack of trying. He had tried to pick up a go-go girl in San Diego. Maya hung out at a gay disco. She danced like a snake on acid. AK's friend had called her a 'fag hag'. AK refused to believe that she wasn't interested in sex. I wish that he had been right.
"What about you?" The truckstop lights painted the parking lot a cruel yellow. The semi-trailers rumbled V8 threats. The hippie was staring me in the eyes like he had the power of mesmerism.
"We have to meet friends in Tulsa." I had met the Spear sisters the previous summer. Vicky was a detective with the Police and her sister was a freshman at Oral Roberts University. It was a dry town, but the sisters knew where to have fun. "Then it's back east."
"To what? A life of sin?" He shifted his weight like he thought about hitting me.
"Something like that." I had graduated from college without honors. No bank would hire me and even the CIA had rejected my service. "Thanks for the ride."
"Thank the lord. He provides for all."
The hippie jesus freak smiled with a shrug of surrender. Our souls were lost to the devil. He got in the pickup and his waifish wife waved goodbye from the passenger window. They disappeared into the night and we walked into the air-conditioned truck stop. it was good to get out of the heat, however the long-haulers glared at our appearance with disdain. I couldn't blame them. Dust coated our long hair and our clothing was stained from sitting in the back of pick-ups. In their eyes we were dirty hippies.
"How about burgers?" AK dropped his bag near the counter. "My treat."
"Milkshake too."
"You got it. We just escaped salvation."
"You got that right." I had lost friends to bible-thumpers. Some of them forever, but I was done with god for this lifetime, even having gone as far as unbaptized myself in Lake Sebago at the age of 10.
The burgers tasted good and after AK slurped down the last of his chocolate soda, he asked, "Were you thinking about going to that commune?"
"Not really."
"It;s not like you have anywhere to go."
"I have Boston."
"No job, no girlfriend, no place to live but your parents. 22 and no future."
"Thanks for the bummer, but I'm not into god. Not since I was 8."
"What happened then?" We hadn't spoken for hours and AK wanted to loosen his jaw.
"I had a best friend in Maine. We did everything together. We used to raid the strawberry fields in the farm behind our houses and crawl on our backs eating strawberries from the plants. We watched the YOUNG RASCALS together. His family and mine were good friends. We went swimming together at Lake Sebago. I thought we were going to be together forever, but my father was transferred to Boston. Chaney, that was his name, and I promised never to go swimming unless we were together."
"Not an easy thing if you're living in Boston and he's in Maine." AK signaled for the check. The waitress told us that we could wash up in the men's room. We must have smelled a sight. AK tipped her a dollar on a $6 bill.
"No, but I kept my end of the bargain." An 8 year-old boy wasn't allowed to leave his neighborhood and my South Shore town had no beaches, only the Quincy Quarries which were off-limits for any one other than juvenile delinquents. AK and I entered the men's room. "And come June my parents were taking us up to my grandmother's in Westbrook. It was only a few miles from Chaney's house across from Portland.
"A reunion of friends." AK washed at the sink. The water off his face was gray. Mine was closer to black.
"A week before our departure I'm watching TV with my brothers and sisters. We were already out of school and could watch it if we had done all our chores. My mother came downstairs to the den." Our family like thousands of other suburbanites lived in a split-level ranch house. The house was painted pink, although my mother called the color 'teaberry'. "She told me to go sit in our station wagon. Not everyone just me."
"What had you done?" AK took off his shirt. His arms and face were tanned by the sun. The rest of his body was white as chalk. He wet a paper towel and wiped at his skin. I did the same.
"Nothing, but I obeyed her, since that was what 8 year-old boys were supposed to do, if they knew what was good for them." My words transported me back to a late-June day in 1961. The family car was a Ford. My father only bought Fords. His first car in college had been a Model Ford. The interior was steel, glass, and plastic. I was wearing shorts. My legs stuck to the seat. "My mother came out to the car. She opened the door and said that Chaney had drowned. Her explanation was short. He had been swimming in Sebago, while everyone else was water-skiing. He had just received a diving mask and snorkels."
"Must have been when SEA HUNT was on TV." The popular series ran from 1957 to 1961 and featured Lloyd Bridges as free-lance scuba diver Mike Nelson.
"Guess so, but anyway Chaney was left with his grandmother. She was from Czechoslovakia." I put on my last clean shirt. "She escaped out of Prague riding on top of a train."
"She must have been Jewish." AK's father had liberated a death camp outside of Munich. He refused to buy anything German. It was an easy boycott after the war. The Nazis had been bombed to the Stone Age.
"Not Jewish. A communist, but that has nothing to do with this story, except she couldn't swim."
"Why? Because godless commies can't swim." AK and I left the bathroom.
"Commies can swim. They swim gold medals at the Olympics." We exited from the restaurant. The gas station was empty of cars. The clock on the truckstop's billboard said the time was 11:45. "And swimming has nothing to do with whether you believe in god."
A sign on the on-ramp bore a warning against picking up hitchhikers. We ignored this edict. There was no other way out of here than by the thumb.
"Anyway Chaney was swimming, but went out over his head and started to drown."
"What about the snorkel?"
"He panicked and started hyperventilating. His grandmother tried to rescue him, but he was out to far. When help finally came, it was too late. My mother told me that story in less than 30 words and then left me in the station wagon to watch the sun set over Big Blue Hill. I didn't go to the funeral, since then I haven't believe in god."
"You don't ever doubt his existence." AK pointed to the cosmos swirling over our heads. The Milk Way dominated most the the sky.
"The universe was eternal. Always was, always is, always will be. I wrote a thesis in my math class that E = MC squared meant that eternity is forever and there never was a god. Going to a Catholic school, that theorum earned me an F." That grade cost me my scholarship. "My godlessness broke my mother's heart. She had wanted me to become a priest, but then a god who let my friend drown was no god of mine."
AK sat on his bag and I stuck out my thumb. No one stopped for us. It didn't really matter. Tulsa was several hundred east. Sooner or later someone would stop for two dirty hippies.
It was written in the stars.
Only the time was missing.
