I was a 15 year-old boy living on the South Shore of Boston. 3000 miles separated my body and soul from San Francisco. My entreaties to convince my parents to visit California proved fruitless and they dropped me once a month at the Terminal Barber Shop in Mattapan Square. My father had a crew-cut. None of his sons were going sissy.
Scott McKenzie scored a huge hit with ARE YOU GOING TO SAN FRANCISCO. Several older teenagers in my home town joined the westward exodus of teenagers seeking the hippie paradise of Haight-Ashbury. They returned in the fall with tales of the Jefferson Airplane at Winterland, love-ins, long flowing dresses, free love, communes, and sex.
I was no druggie. Beer was my high, but I read about the movement of youth in LIFE and TIME as well as Boston's underground newspaper, the AVATAR. My hair lapped over my ears. My father protested to my mother. She defended my decision to go hippie. I really didn't care about being a hippie. I was into free love with hippie girls. They had to go all the way.
"You were the same at your age." She had grown up swooning to Frank Sinatra.
"I was no bobby-socker." My father was raised by the banks of the Presumpscot River. His father had been a doctor. His teen years were spent during the Depression. Mindless fun was for the rich, not the working classes. "Only girls wore bobbysox. I'll give in this time, but I don't want to see my son wearing his hair down his back. Call me old-fashioned, but there's something wrong about the hippies."
His views on the counterculture didn't prevent him from driving my brother and me to rock concerts. We dressed in bell-bottoms and fringe suede jackets. Sandals were tough on the feet in the winter of 1968. Fyre boots with buckles kept out most of the wet.
None of us realized that the hippie movement had been declared dead in the 'Death of the Hippie' mock funeral on Oct. 7, 1967. Haight-Ashbury had devolved into a hellhole with rip-offs, rapes, and bad LSD. The Second Summer of Love was canceled in 1968. Woodstock promoted a return to the land, however San Francisco remained a magnet for youth of the loose.
My hair drifted down to my shoulders in college and I hung around Cambridge Commons listening to the Beacon Street Union and Ultimate Spinach. Upon completion of my freshman year my good friend Petrus Gorski and I hitchhiked west at the end of the summer. $300 in our pockets and a telephone number in San Francisco. We planned to loop up to Seattle and recross the northern states. On Friday the 13th Petrus and I walked over to the Mass. Avenue exit of the Mass Pike and stuck out out thumbs. We were California-bound.
By that evening we had reached Buffalo. The next day dawn on Iowa. A trucker brought us to Omaha, where a speedfreak in a GTO stopped for by the Platte River. Lucky was headed for LA. It wasn't really in the same direction as I-80, but Lucky was into fast.
"I stay off the highways. The cops in these bodunk towns like catching hippies and cutting off their hair." He was transporting medical meth back to the Coast. Lucky talked for 20 hours straight, as his GTO thundered through small farming communities. Lucky was a good name, because the police never bothered to chase him. The GTO had too much engine.
Lucky drove at 120 mph through Nebraska into Wyoming. The landscape was turning to the scenery of a thousand cowboy movies. Drivers in pick-ups wore Stetson. Rifles spanned the rear windows.
"EASYRIDER land." Lucky refused to make eye contacts with the cow-punchers. At our speed they only had a second to look at us. No chance to reprise the ending of the hippie biker movie. We were safe from harm at 120 mph.
Lucky played every tape on the Doors. It had been almost two months since Jim Morrison had been found dead in Paris. He thought that the CIA had killed him.
"The Lizard King had too much power."
Petrus and I heard THE END ten times in a row someplace west of Cheyenne. Lucky was losing it. He fell asleep at the wheel and I steered from the passenger seat. Petrus wanted out of the GTO, but it was the dead of night and no a single light dotted the desert mountains. I opened the window and breathed in the perfume of the road. We were over two thousand miles from Boston. Finally a little after Salt Lake City Lucky pulled off the highway. It was one in the morning.
A few truckers were parked in the rest area. The moon lit the stark white pan stretching north and south as far as the eye could see. The Bonneville Salt Flats were famous for speed trials. Our speed was zero.
"I need to crash." Lucky mumbled and two seconds later his head flopped against the steering wheel, as if he had been shot in the head.
"I crashing on the ground." Petrus threw his sleeping bag on the hard-packed salt. His long hair was stiff from the road. Neither of us had washed more than a face since Boston.
"Me too." I stretched out my kinks and laid atop my sleeping bag. The stars numbered in the billions. Petrus was a math major. I had been one also until nearly failing Multi-Variable Calculus in the autumn semester. His minor was astrology and he picked out lesser-known constellations in the heavens. The mantra put me to sleep like listening to sine and cosine angles.
We woke the next morning. The sun was swelling over the eastern mountains. I half-expected the GTO to be gone, but Lucky beeped the horn.
"Let's go, I got places to be."
LIGHT MY FIRE was booming on the stereo.
"Do we really have to?" Petrus was over the Doors.
"It's not like we can stay here." The only civilization within sight was the rest rooms and the highway, but I inhaled deeply. The air was tanged with salt and diesel fumes. This was the West. Land without man. If we walked north, Petrus and I would perish from exposure to the elements. The siren of the Bonneville Salt Flats desired my bones and I understood the pull of nature on the dog Buck in Jack London's CALL OF THE WILD.
Only I was no dog. San Francisco was 1200 miles from where we stood. I sang the song.
"If you're going to San Francisco,
be sure to wear some flowers in your hair...
If you're going to San Francisco,
You're gonna meet some gentle people there."
Petrus joined the chorus. Lucky shook his head. He revved the engine. The V-8 drowned out the words.
"Let's go."
I sat in the front seat.
"You looked like you wanted to stay there." Lucky stamped on the gas. The tires peeled rubber and the GTO fishtailed across the oil-stained parking lot onto the highway. It was a straight line to the mountains.
"No staying there. We were heading to San Francisco."
"They got some pretty women there, but none of those hippie girls shave. Someone should take a mower to them." Lucky shuddered with disgust and hit 130 with a tailwind. The Coast was only 10 hours away at this speed. In Reno Lucky realized that he was was on the wrong road.
"It's been real, but my deal in in LA." He waved good-bye.
"Sad to see him go." Petrus stuck out his thumb. We were standing by the Truckee River. San Francisco lay over the Sierras.
We had been on the road 30 hours. The rest of the trip was with 4 ex-cons in a Riviera. Two Indians, a Mexican, and a black man. All in their 40s. They were drunk and asked me to drive. Peter had to sit in back between the Indians. They finished four bottles of whiskey by the time we pulled into the Bay Area. The owner said he was going to drive and I pulled into a gas station.
“We’ll get out here.” 43 hours had elapsed since our first ride, so we were in no suicidal rush to reach San Francisco. The Riviera pulled out of the station, stopped, and then backed up to roll over the service island. The crash ignited the pump and I pulled the drunks from the car. The gas station attendant extinguished the fire before it killed anyone. Peter and I got a ride from a Marine just back from Viet-Nam. He dropped us in the Haight an hour later.
The girls had long hair.
Everywhere.
44 hours coast to coast.
The ride back was much slower.
No comments:
Post a Comment