A bridge spanned the flooded Mississippi and the Torino climbed a steep bluff into Iowa, speeding past heavily-loaded semi-trailers heading west. Our car was the only passenger vehicle on the highway. The rest were long-hauling trucks. The station wagon's headlights lit up the dotted lines separating the two lanes. One came right after the other in the hundreds mile after mile.
AK and Pam were asleep in the back of the station wagon. The radio offered country-western from Davenport. An ad promoted ticket sales to the minor league Quad City Angels, then the DJ played Melba Montgomery’s # 1 hit NO CHARGE followed by Ronnie Milsap’s PURE LOVE.
I had taken cover the wheel from AK less than fifteen minutes ago, but it felt like ten hours. We had driven straight from Boston to here only stopping for gas and food. I cracked down the window to let the wind blow in my face. The cool air had little effect of reviving me.
After the municipal airport I struggled to keep my eyes open. The towns stretched apart, as the interstate stretched straight through the farmland. The exits were devoid of the most meagre civilization. A hurried glimpse at the map informed me that the next truck stop was in Atalissa, which at 75mph was about thirty-five minutes away. Once I had some coffee in me, I would be fine. I might have made it too, if the DJ hadn’t cued up Dolly Parton’s I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU. One yawn led to two. On the third I rested my right eye and fifteen seconds later switched to relieve my left. This was a dangerous game and I threw water in my face. Charlie Rich’s chartclimber I DON’T SEE IN ME IN YOUR EYES helped for about a minute, then I shut both eyes and my hands dropped off the steering wheel.“Yo, man.” AK shouted, as the Torino’s tires edged off the asphalt.
I snapped awake and righted the car onto the interstate. A half-mile later I pulled over to the shoulder. The landscape beyond the highway was buried by night.
“What happened?” Pam asked with alarm.
“Your gentleman fell asleep at the wheel.” AK got out of the car and I opened the door for Pam. “I think it’s your turn to drive.”
“Why don’t you sleep in the back?” Pam suggested with a renewed disappointment, as she sat behind the wheel.
“I don’t mind if I do.” My falling asleep could have happened to any of us, but it had been a close call and I crawled into the back seat to lay my head on a pile of sleeping bags.
Pam put back on BLUE.
Like most college girls of the 70s she was a Joni Mitchell fan to the core and I mumbled, “What is it about her that you like so much?”
“Her songs create a magic for my soul. She sings about our lives. I know it’s not cool for men to like her, but what she says is what we want to hear.”
“I saw Dave Van Ronk perform CLOUDS at the Club 47 in Harvard Square. Before that I thought she had nothing to offer. I was wrong. Tom Rush covered her URGE FOR GOING. I’m probably in this car now as much for that song as Kerouac’s ON THE ROAD. I’d love to hear it now.”
“I can play it on my kalimba.” AK lifted his African thumb piano.
“You can?” I was amazed by his virtuosity.
“I know all the words.” Pam stepped on the gas. A billboard advertised the truck stop in Atalissa. It was less than twenty miles away.
“I can help on the chorus.”
AK plucked the plaintive chords of Joni’s song on the thumb piano. Pam was a decent soprano. I backed her with my baritone. We sang URGE FOR GOING twice and the second time tears stained the corners of my eyes. I had been so wrong about Joni. She sang for everyone who wanted to listen and I fell asleep with the wheels repeating the chorus.
“And I get the urge for going.”
I woke with AK behind the wheel and the infant cornfields tipped white by the rays of the sun rising in the East. Pam lay asleep against the window. The radio was playing Kenny Rodgers’ RUBY. We were crossing the Missouri at Omaha.
“Morning, sunshine.” Pam offered with a smile. The sleep had sweetened her disposition.
“Where are we?” A city surrounded the highway.
“Omaha.”
“We’re making good time.” I rubbed my eyes. Pam had to have driven at 90 to get here this fast.
“But I don’t think we’ll break your record.” AK offered from the passenger seat, as the Torino sped through the sleeping city at 70.
“I really did make it cross country in fifty hours.”
“Yeah, right.” Pam and AK laughed at my claim. Neither of them believed my story about hitchhiking from Boston to San Francisco in 1972. A speed freak picked up my friend and me in Omaha. His Super Bee only dropped below 100mph to get gas. Lucky had been heading to LA. He should have been on I40 instead of I80. We didn’t tell him about this mistake until Winnemucca.
A ribbon of mist mapped the course of the Platte River. The Indians had hunted buffalo on these plains. The pioneers had followed the river into Colorado and over a century later their path was ours.
The cornfields were replaced by wheat. Low hills bordered the horizon. Men in pick-ups wore cowboy hats. None of us had bathed in a day and AK pulled off I-80 into a truck stop offering showers.
A young black teenager with reddish hair was pumping gas. Pam got out of the car and his eyes followed Pam’s every move. The blonde nursing student was a living mirage this early in the morning.
“Fill it with high test,” AK told the young man.
I exited from the car.
Back in 1919 white crackers had savagely lynched a black man suspected of rape and attacked the black section of Omaha without mercy. I was a hippie, but I was white too and the teenager lowered his gaze.
“Time for a shower, if you like.” I pointed out the bath facilities attached to the diner. A wind devil swirled across the parking lot. The fine grit biting into my eyes and added another layer of dirt onto the patina of the road I had collected over the last day. “The word is not like. It’s love.” She grabbed a towel from her bag and got out of the car with a smile for the black gas attendant. He scrapped the smear of insects from the windshield and I tipped him a $1. “Thanks, mister.” The teenager nodded before attending to the next car. He was in no danger from AK or me. I sat back in the Torino. “Bet he’s the last black we see before Nevada.” AK started the car, watching Pam stroll to the showers. “You’re probably right.” This young man might have been related to Malcolm X came from Omaha.. His nickname had been Red. “The last time I drove cross-country the only minorities were Mexicans until we passed through the Navaho reservations.” “Few Indians left in Nebraska now.” “I counted six reservations on the map, but they’re stuck in the middle of nowhere.” Their original grants had been seized by the federal government to provide homesteads for the generations of Nebraskan Cornhuskers, but I couldn’t throw any rocks. The Yankee side of my family had seized the lands of the Abenaki. Maine was a beautiful state. “Same as Long Island.” AK parked the station wagon between two campers with out-of-state plates. They were vacationeers like us. “The Shinnecocks have a reservation the size of Yankee Stadium.” “Better than nothing.” My Irish Nana’s family had been forced off their farm by British landlords. His father’s family had fled the Russian pograms. They were as innocent of the extermination of the Indians as was my Nana. “What about Mormons?” I sniffed at my shirt. It wasn’t close to clean. “They’re more a cult than a minority, plus we won’t see them until the western reaches of Colorado’s. So for now we longhairs are the only minority in sight.”” AK shut off the engine and got out of the station wagon. The front end was covered with insect suicides and the rest of the car was surfaced by the passage of seven states. “You know I’m related to Joseph Smith?”“I’ve heard that before.”
“It’s the truth.” My grandmother had told me that more than once and she had never lied to me.
“Mormons believed that the only blacks in heaven will be slaves.” He looked over this shoulder at the gas attendant.
“I don’t think that we’ll make it into their heaven either.” I pulled a new tee-shirt, sox, and underwear from my bag. The jeans were good for another day.
“You don’t even believe in God.” AK pulled out clothing for a full change.
“Guilty as accused.” Gods were for mortals and the furling western wind transformed me to an immortal, for the road offered the traveler a choice of heaven and hell between long section of purgatory.
“Don’t tell anyone out here that. This is Bible thumping territory.”
“I know how to keep my mouth shut.” I said, as we walked to the men’s showers.
Nixon’s Silent Majority were right to call us ‘dirty hippies’, but everyone on the highway was ripe after a few days on the road. Crackers were dirty, families were dirty, and we were dirty. AK stopped in the toilet.
“See you in a minute.”
I entered the shower room.
A tattooed trucker was soaping his naked body. He nodded a hello. His erect penis possessed an obscene thickness. I stripped off my clothes and washed fast, then dressed in clean clothes even quicker. I didn’t like the way that he was staring at my crotch or my ass. I met AK in the corridor.
“That was quick.”
“With good reason. Watch out for the trucker in there. He’s looking for a friend.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
I stopped at the payphone in the hallway and called my parents collect. No one picked up the phone on the South Shore and I hung up the receiver. The diner was half-filled with sleepy truckers in desperate need of a lift stronger than coffee. I sat at the counter. AK joined me three minutes later.
“You can’t believe what that guy said to me.”
“Oh yes, I can.” The trucker’s mind was easier to read than a dirty stroke book.
AK and I accepted the waitress’ offer of coffee, while waiting for Pam. None of the truckers commented about hippies. They wore their hair long too.
I picked up a discarded local paper and scanned the sport pages for baseball result. The Red Sox were still my team, despite the previous season’s epic collapse. They had lose the day before and I turned to the front page.
Watergate dominated the headlines. Nixon was more guilty every day. Patty Hearst remained on the run from the police. The heiress topped the FBI’s Most Wanted List.
AK read the menu, as if he might chose a breakfast other than eggs over easy with bacon, but lowered the plasticized folder the second Pam walked into the room. He wasn’t alone.
Every man in the diner watched the twenty year-old blonde, but several snapped their eyes from our travel companion to the newspapers in their hands.
“I feel like a new woman.” Pam beamed with the pleasure of a hot shower, then her mood shifted upon noticing the attention of the men in the diner. “They stare at me, as if they haven’t ever seen a woman in their life.
“They have a good reason.” I showed her the photo of Patti Hearst in the newspaper.
“They think I look like her?” Pam was upset by their mistaking her for the kidnapped heiress. “I look nothing like her.”
“I don’t think so either, but a reward has a funny way of making people see things that aren’t there.” Mr. Hearst had offered $50,000 for the safe return of his daughter. No one had given her up for that amount. He was a millionaire and they expected more.
“If she’s Patty Hearst, then they must think that we’re the SLA.” AK studied the men at the tables and counter. “You think any of these cowboys have a gun?”
“Some.” Two men were glaring at us, as we had robbed the Hibernia Bank.
“Let’s get out of here,” Pam folded the menu.
“No, we stay or else some idiot will call the State Police for the reward.” I waved to the middle-aged waitress.
“You ready to order?” She posed a pencil over her pad.
“Yes, but we have a small problem.”
“I hope that it isn’t a vegetarian thing, because this diner serves bacon, ham, and steak with breakfasts.” She planted both hands on her hips with a veteran’s disdain for fussiest eaters.
“No, we love bacon.” AK reversed the newspaper. “Maybe a few of your customers think that our friend is Patty Hearst.”
“Patty Hearst?” The waitress gasped with a start, then her eyes flitted between the picture and Pam two times before chuckling, “They’re blind as bat well as stupid as a cow tied to a post. You’re much prettier than that poor rich girl. Let me handle this.”
“Thanks.”
The waitress turned to the other diners.
“You idiots keep your eyes on your food. This pretty girl ain’t no Patti Hearst. She’s like the rest of us. Plain people, so back to your grits and eggs.”
“How can you be sure?” A fat man asked from the back of the diner.
“Jack, you want extra coffee or a check?” Her word was final.
“Extra coffee.” Jack dropped his head.
What will you kids have?” The waitress had enjoyed her tirade.
“Bacon, eggs over-easy, home-fries, toast and OJ.” Pam smiled with equal delight. They were both women.
“Make it two.” I loved breakfast in America.
“Three.” AK nodded and the waitress went to the short-order cook.
Thirty minutes later we exited from the truck stop. A state trooper was filling the tank of his cruiser. His eyes tracked Pam across the parking lot to the station wagon. He smiled and tipped his hat. To him she was another beautiful hippie girl on the way west. She sat in the back.
AK and I stood in the morning light. The humidity of the Plains was behind us and the dry breeze carried half a continent. By the end of the day we would see the Rockies.
“You smelled that?” Alan Lerner had called a wind like this ‘Mariah’ in his musical PAINT YOUR WAGONS.
“It’s the West.”
“It’s getting close.”
“And it will get closer.” AK took the co-pilot seat.
I got behind the wheel and drove at 55 for the next five miles, expecting the cop to ambush me for speeding.
“That was weird.” AK looked over his shoulder to see if we were being followed by the trooper.
“Tania’s wanted coast to coast.” She topped the FBI’s most wanted list.
“Her name’s not Tania,” Pam spoke with reactionary conviction.
“It’s her name now.”
“You have no idea what they did to her.”
“Who did what? The SLA are revolutionaries.”
“Who kidnapped her? Not Nixon. Not General Westmorland. Not the Pope. A female college student like me and Jackie.”
“Whose father controls a newspaper backing the war.” “So she was fair game?”
“An enemy of the State.”
“My father is a lawyer. Yours works for the phone company. They support the System.”
“But I don’t.”
“So they’re targets?”
“Same as a kid in Vietnam.”
“That’s another reason Jackie didn’t like you. You believe that there will be a revolution in this country. Those men back there. They voted for Nixon. They outnumbered you twenty to one. They will never let there be a revolution.”
“Pam’s right. The police beat us in Chicago, the National Guard shot us in Kent State. RFK, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King are dead. They even shot George Wallace.” AK didn’t say who ‘they’ were, because no one knew their names. “Nobody wants to die. Not here and not in Vietnam.People in this country have forgotten the Days of Rage, Stop the War, and the Black Panthers. They’re tired of the fighting.”
“So all they want in a peaceful barbecue on Memorial Weekend.” Most of the troops were home from Viet-Nam, but B52s were dropping bombs on targets big and small in Indochina. “The war is not over.”
“Americans don’t care about the war anymore. They have shut off Viet-Nam like it was an old Green Acres re-run on TV.”
“The SLA and Weather Underground are still fighting for freedom.” A week ago four hundred LAPD had surrounded an SLA safe house. The SWAT team had shot tear gas through the windows. The gun battle had lasted until the house caught fire. America did not fool around with revolutionaries.
“The SLA deserved what they get from the police.” Pam came from a good family living outside of Washington DC. Her house was in the suburbs. Mine was too.
“Deserved? The LAPD killed everyone in that house without any attempt to peacefully end the siege.” There had been no survivors, but Patty Hearst was not among the dead. When I was angry, I didn’t think before I spoke and said, “That’s another reason I hate the Beatles. Their song REVOLUTION. “If you want to talk about destruction, then count me out.” I expect nothing else from a group who sold out rock for pop, so they could say they were more popular that Jesus.”
“Time out, time out.” AK lifted his hands to quiet me more than Pam.
“Another thing Jackie didn’t like about you.”
“Another thing?” The list was getting bigger every day of this trip.
“You have a bad temper.”
“Only because I care.” Attacking the status quo had been eliminated by college students seeking a job. Seniors at my college had cut their hair and worn suits and ties to appointments with corporate recruiters. No company wanted to hire a long-hair.
“I care, but I’m not a revolutionary.” Pam glimpsed into the rearview mirror. Our eyes met for a second. She was right. I did have a temper.
“Neither am I.” Bombs, kidnappings, and bank robberies were beyond my commitment to change. I stared ahead at the highway for several minutes, then said, “Sorry, Pam.”
“I’m sorry too.”
Neither of us explained our apologies and we drove listening to the radio, as the distance increased between the small towns off the highway and I-80 arrowed across Nebraska like a snake nailed to the dirt.
After Kearney Pam took over the driving. Parched buttes rose on either side of the interstate. The Torino cruised at 90. I wanted to tell Pam to beware of cops, but she refused to believe that one would give a beautiful blonde a ticket. She was more right than me once again.
I-80 split at Julesberg, Nebraska.
North led to Wyoming and I-78 angled south to Denver.
“First one to see the Rockies wins a beer,” I said to break the silence.
“You’re on.” Pam accepted the wager, but I spotted the mountains first a little east of Sterling, Colorado.
“Break time.” I had the map in my hands.
“Here?” Pam pulled off the highway.
“Route 14 runs to Fort Collins.” I pointed to the distant peaks shining white with snow. “Straight to the Rockies.”
“And you think there’s a bar in this town?” Pam was driving the speed limit for once. A cop car sat at an intersection. The officer was eating a sandwich. Pam waved to him and he waved back.
“Probably on the outskirts.” I was right.
At the western edge of Sterling was a bar called the INFERNO LOUNGE. Two battered pick-up trucks were in the parking lot. The bar itself looked like the previous owners might have serviced wagon trains in the last century. The road beyond the bar ran through calf-high fields of wheat.
“This looks like the place.” It was here or nowhere.
“Looks good to me.” Pam parked the Torino near the entrance and got out of the station wagon.
AK followed the two of us into the bar.
The wooden interior was decorated with the stuffed heads of wild animals, proclaiming the clientele’s fondness for guns and hunting. The two older men at the bar regarded us for a second and then returned to their beers. They had seen hippies before.
“Guess you stopped looking like Patty Hearst.” I sat on a stool with a cracked leather pad.
“I hope you’re right.” Pam didn’t need a repeat performance of the scene back at the truck stop.
“Sorry about before.”
“You said already said that.” Pam turned to me. “Sorry about you and Jackie. Not everything works out the way we think.”
“I know.” I wished that I was talking to Jackie instead of Pam, but my wish wasn’t coming true any time soon.
“What you folks want?” The bearded bartender placed both hands on the bar. The ancient wood was scarred with carved names.
“Coors.” The beer wasn’t available in the East.
“Three.” AK then went to the jukebox.
The beer was cold. Pam sipped at hers, then asked the bartender, if she could make a phone call, putting $2 on the bar.
“Payphone is out back.” The bartender gave her quarters
“Pretty girl. How long you know her?” He had clever eyes.
“I know where you’re going with this. You think she’s Patty Hearst. She isn’t. Pam’s a college co-ed from Boston. She’s friend’s of my ex-.”
“That’s too bad.” He shrugged with a well-aged sense of disappointment. “I could have used the $50,000.”
“Couldn’t we all.”
“Where’s your ex-?” The bartender had heard his share of bad ending involving old girlfriends.
“She’s seeing her old boyfriend.”
“Old boyfriends are always trouble.” The bartender was a better talker than a listener.
“Yeah, I confronted her about it.”
“How that work out?”
“We sort of made up over a bottle of tequila. I decided to drive home rather than spent the night.”
“A bad decision.”
“Tell me about it. I ran over some bushes and an unmarked car came up on my left. Two policemen were inside. They ordered me to pull over. I decided to run for it. I didn’t make it so far, since I was driving a VW hatchback. It was late and every cop car in the town was on my tail. I pulled into a dead end and jumped out of the car, thinking to tell the cops that the car had been stolen. It wasn’t mine.”
“Was it stolen?”
“No, I had borrowed it from a friend.” I watched Pam put the coins into the slot several times without speaking on the phone.
“And you thought that the cops would believe your story?”
“They didn’t have to. I ran into a backyard and fell over a low ledge into a bush.”
“Bad night for bushes.”
“You got that right. The cops cuffed me and threw me in jail. My uncle paid bail in the morning. He was a bigtime lawyer and got me off with a fine plus paying $200 for the ruined bushes.”
“Damn expensive bushes.”
“I thought the same.” My beer was almost empty. “My girlfriend wanted nothing to do me after that.”
“Can’t say I blame her.” The bartender had regained his power of listening to a sad story.
“Me too.” I turned my head at the sound of Pam slamming down the phone. Her boyfriend wasn’t at home or wasn’t answering the phone. I knew the feeling.
“That’s your girlfriend?” A young farmboy asked with a pool cue in his hand.
“No, we’re just traveling together.” Saying Pam was just a friend sounded weird, even if it was the truth.
“You wanna play a game of pool?” His shirt was covered with shredded hay, his jeans were stained by dirt, and cow paddy rimmed his boots. Farm work was a messy job.
“Not for money.” I wasn’t into gambling.
“A game that’s all. I’m no hustler.” His toothy smile beamed with honesty.
“Eight Ball.” The game required luck as much as skill.
“Good by me. The name’s Billy Bob.”
I figured the farm boy for nineteen. His life was this town and one day he’d end up sitting on a stool like the two older men in the bar..
Pam sat on the stool without a smile on her face. She drank her beer fast and ordered another.
She watched Bill Bob and me play eight-ball, while AK selected songs. Joni Mitchell’s URGE FOR GOING sounded right for the Inferno Lounge. Pam loved Joni Mitchell, but ignored AK’s choice. Her eyes were on the farm boy. He was pure America.
I sunk three balls in a row. The last shot was pure luck.
Billy Bob won on an 8-ball scratch and Pam played the winner. After she sunk the eight, we played teams; AK and I versus the farmboy and Pam. AK was a musician not a pool player and Pam ran the table, as if she were related to Minnesota Fats. Billy Bob was impressed with her skill as were the five other men in the Inferno Lounge.
“Playing pool well in the sign of a misspent youth.” Pam laid the cue pool on the table.
“Herbert Spencer, English philosopher,” AK said to identify the quote a little too quickly and Billy Bob replied, “Ain’t no one around here been named Herbert since Herbert Hoover.”
Billy Bob and Pam walked out of the bar and I ordered another Coors. AK went back to the juke box. My beer tasted as good as the first. My driving was done for the day. Several minutes later AK sat next to me and asked, “You think she’s all right.”
“We’re on the road. She’s fine.” Pam was taking a break from being someone’s girlfriend. Flirting wasn’t a sin.
“I mean…”
“I know what you mean.” AK liked Pam in the same way that I had liked Jackie. They were girls made to love. “She’s just having some fun same as me holding hands with a cold beer and a dark bar.
“Good.” AK peered out the window.
“Yeah, good.”
Pam was taking photos of Billy Bob with her Kodak. The prairies crawled west to the wall of mountains crowding the horizon from north to south.
The blonde nursing student lowered her camera and held hands with Billy Bob.
The Beatles had scored a huge debut hit with I WANNA HOLD YOUR HAND in 1964. As a twelve year-old boy on the South Shore I had sung the song to a blonde girl named Ginnie. She was a year older than me. I put down my beer and went to the jukebox.
A quarter bought three songs.
My choices were all Rolling Stones. STREET FIGHTING MAN sounded good after three beers. Pam was right. The revolution was over, except for the SLA and Weather Underground. Their numbers were too small and the Silent Majority were too strong. I looked out the window. Pan and Billy Bob were gone. Beyond the parking lot were the mountains. They were here before me and they would be here after me.
I had lost the urge for going for the moment.We were in the West.
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