135 IN THE SHADE from BACK AND FORTH a hitchhiking novel by Peter Nolan Smith

Two days later Sean and AK swam one last time at Moonlight Beach. After packing their bags, they hugged their host, Helen, then got into the Benz with Victor and Cuchillo. Victor drove the Mercedes convertible on the San Diego Freeway. AK was in the passenger seat and Victor's boyfriend sat in the rear with Sean.

"Good-bye summer," said Cuchillo.

"Good-bye California, added Vince. "Summer's not over until the equinox." Sean hadn't ventured this far north since June.

"I was talking about being in Encinitas."

"In that case you're right."

"All good things come to an end."

"Some before their time."

"Like you and Floe?"

"Yes, but I was thinking of going up to Big Sur to find her?"

"It's big place and I'm not sure Floe would want to see you just yet. she hated violence and your fight on the beach with that redneck wasn't a pretty sight."

"No, it wasn't."

Cuchillo nodded to the two friends in the front of the Mercedes. Neither of them could hear the conversation, but the subject was obvious.

"Victor's trying to convince AK to stay with us. What do you think of the chances that he'll do that?"

"LA might be the entertainment capitol of America, but AK has a girlfriend back in Boston."

"That didn't stop him being with Pam."

"He was on vacation, plus he has a job back there."

"Teaching school."

"He also has a car."

"I wouldn't be caught dead in that old beat-up Firebird in LA."

"There's his music. He's going to be in a band."

"A funk band out of Boston. That's four strikes against staying there and for living out here."

"I have less than that."

"I imagine you do."

The interstate skirted the ocean as far as Capistrano Beach and headed inland into Orange County, since Victor was dropping them at the eastern end of the San Fernando Valley and Cuchillo said, "Pam's leaving must have shocked AK."

"He handled it better than me."

"Not a good morning for either of you."

"At least we have a ride north."

"You know you could stay here in LA." Cuchillo was a coke dealer. He had money.

"Doing what?" Sean wasn't into selling drugs.

"My friends produce movies."

"Gay porno?" It was a guess, but right on the money.

"Yes, but you don't have to be gay to be in them. $200 a day."

"No thanks."

"It was just an offer. That audience loves straight boys." Cuchillo was only trying to help.

"Thanks for the offer, but I'm heading back east.

"Hitchhiking? How?"

Before leaving Helen's bungalow Sean had studied the western map and now explained, "I-8 cuts east straight from San Diego, but it goes through the Mojave Desert as does I-10, so we opted for a more northern route of I-15, which is why we're with you."

"But not to stop in LA."

"No."

Sean's only reason to stay in California was to be with Floe and that wasn't in his cards, so he sat back and listened to the wind.

The freeway passed through Anaheim before the Mercedes exited onto I-605. The suburban development yielded to the harsher landscape and San Gabriel Mountains loomed over I-210 all the way to Devore Heights.

Victor stopped at the onramp. After Sean and AK got out of the Benz, Cuchillo sat in the front.

"I wish you were taking a bus." The handsome drug dealer was concerned about their upcoming voyage. "There are dangerous people there. Murderers.

"And lesbians."

"Yes, that too, but I doubt you'll run into those two in the desert, but maybe that drifter."

"I doubt it, plus hitchhiking is free."

"Don't accept a ride, unless it's going to Barstow," Victor told AK. "You don't want to be stranded out there and don't stand on the highway. The highway cops will arrest you and bring you to court for a fine."

"Thanks for the advice." Sean shook the blonde dealer's hand.

"You take care of my friend," said Victor from the driver's side of the Benz.

"Same as he takes care of me."

"If you're stuck in the desert, take a bus back to Hollywood," Victor said to AK.

"Getting stuck would be a sign, we're supposed to stay in California." AK stepped away from the convertible and Victor drove away with Cuchillo waving good-bye. Ten seconds later the Mercedes disappeared into the westbound traffic.

AK and Sean surveyed their surroundings.

A dry wash scrambled through desert brush. Willows and cottonwoods wavered along the waterless creek. AK and Sean drank water from their canteens.

"You ready for this?" AK stuck out his thumb to a four-door sedan.

"I am, but I don't know about getting a ride here."

Passing drivers ignored them.

"They probably blame us for Nixon's resignation."

"Leaving any city is tough."

"Especially when the next city is Albuquerque, which is over 600 miles from here."

"And nothing in between?" The West was a land of long distances.

"Just small towns probably populated by rednecks and son of Okies. Neither likes hippies."

Sean stuck out his thumb to a battered pickup. The cowboy behind the wheel gave them the finger.

"Well, we aren't on the coast anymore." Sean changed from flip-flops into boots. "Damn, that feels strange."

"And sandals aren't manly footgear." AK wore his sneakers.

"Not here." They were once more in White People territory.

"You got that right."

"Floe and Rockford are probably in Big Sur by now."

"You thinking about her?"

"Yes."

Days on the beach.

Nights in bed.

All gone after one punch to a redneck.

"That fight with Bill wasn't in your best interest."

"I thought I was protecting us."

"Floe hated violence."

"I know, I know."

They dropped the subject and traded turns hitchhiking.

About twenty vehicles sped onto the Freeway. A Greyhound bus motored underneath the overpass. The warm morning was promising to get hotter.

"I could front you the money for the bus."

"I don't see a bus stop."

"Then it's back to hitchhiking."

Thirty minutes passed before a Monza convertible stopped for them. The blonde driver was a pretty teenage girl the same age as Floe.

"Thanks."

"My parents would kill me, if they knew I picked up two men, but it isn't easy catching a ride out of here. Get in the car."

AK sat in the front.

"Where you going?"

"To Victorville to see my grandmother. You mind if I play Joni Mitchell?"

"We love Joni." The folk singer was Pam's favorite. Floe liked her too.

The cute driver played the new Joni Mitchell 8-track on the stereo.

The Monza struggled up the pass. Its engine wasn't designed to carry this much weight.

"My parents won't let me listen to music, but her voice is so pretty, so I bought a tape deck for the car. I have to hide it from my family."

"You're a Mormon?"

"Yes, but my people don?t believe in polygamy."

Sean had never met a girl belonging to the Latter Day Saints.

"And you are into music. Are you a Jackie Mormon?"

"Only when I'm away from my family."

AK glared Sean a warning to not mention his family connection to Joseph Smith.

"We'll keep your secret."

"Thanks." She turned up the volume and Sean wandered in his thoughts until the young girl stopped on Roy Rodgers Drive. AK and he got out of the car.

"God be with you."

"And you too."

They waved good-bye.

"And you too?" AK was no stranger to his devout atheism. "Are you finding religion?"

"Not at all, but we are making good time, so why jink it?"

It was barely 11AM.

"What kind of town you think Victorville is?" asked AK.

Dust billowed down the street. The sand bit into their skin. A car filled with young teens drove past without a smile on their faces.

"One that doesn't like hitchhikers," Sean said and they walked to the Interstate, where a long queue of hippies waited on the eastbound onramp.

"This doesn't look very promising."

"I count forty-six in front of us."

"At least none of them are Bill."

"I hope we don't run into him again." The violent drifter seemed to be have been following them around America.

"We should only be so lucky."

AK and Sean proceeded up the ramp.

The dented guardrail was covered with graffiti cursing this exit. Across the interstate were a gas station and a diner. Sean smelled bacon in the air. It was almost lunchtime.

"What do you think?" AK asked with a canteen in hand and sipped some water. The hitchhikers in front of them licked their lips with envy.

"We'll have to go easy on this." AK put away his canteen.

Cars and trucks whizzed past on the Interstate faster than 55 MPH, but speed wasn't an issue in the Mojave and a CHiP cruiser patrolled the onramp every twenty minutes to enforce the anti-hitchhiking law.

After an hour a van stopped to pick up three hippies.

"Was it this bad last year in Berkeley?"

"This is worst. That wait had only been an hour."

"Are you going to abandon me like you did your friend?"

"I don't think a beautiful woman in a Maverick will stop here." Marilyn had space for one. Nick understood his leaving. She and Sean had made love on the Bonneville Salt Flats.

"You never know if lightning can hit twice until it strikes you dead."

AK was right and Sean strolled down the line to speak with the other hitchhikers, who all told the same sad story.

"Ten hours."

"Twelve hours."

"Fifteen hours."

No one was going anywhere fast.

A New Orleans-bound couple was fortieth in the line-up and they were suffering the throes of cold turkey.

"Seventeen hours?" Sean surveyed the cloudless sky. "It has to be in the low 90s now."

"It might hit 100 by the afternoon." The junkie was too sick to feel the heat. His rail-thin girlfriend wore a wide-brimmed hat, but her face had been torched a torrid red by the merciless sun reflecting off the black asphalt and she said, "Thankfully the temperature drops at night."

"Night."

"You're not getting out of here until tomorrow. Us too."

Four other hippies stood behind the couple. Sean and AK were #44 and 45.

"You two should split up. No one picks up two guys." The skinny girl had calculated the probabilities of getting a ride countless time. "Anyone will pick up a single girl, but I don't want to end up in the desert with some crazy cowboys."

"So you're stuck with me for better or worse." Her strung-out old man had hair down to his ass.

"Unless you dig perverts." His girlfriend sneered at her old man.

"Yeah, I've had a couple of offers from some sick fucks. They were into men," he said, as if homosexuality was a sin.

"They wanted me to watch." The young girl's face screwed up with disgust. Sex was as distasteful to junkies as it was to nuns.

"Nothing wrong with acting queer." Sean had danced with gays at the 1270 Club in Boston and the Brass Rail in San Diego. They liked a good time. "Especially if it gets us out of here."

"These guys weren't after sex." The junkie hinted at murder.

"Earlier in the summer I traveled the PCH down from Big Sur. A madman had been caught for chopping up co-eds. Another murderer was shooting men in the Valley. Some of the Manson Family was at large. This desert had been their home."

"Murder and death. That's the desert for you." The young girl shivered from fear.

"Good luck."

"We all need it."

"What do you think?" AK asked upon Sean?s return.

"That we might be here for a while."

A Greyhound bus exited from the Interstate and pulled into the forlorn gas station to let off a few passengers.

"Bus?" AK asked the obvious.

"Hell, yes."

AK and Sean grabbed their bags and ran to the diner. The Greyhound billowed diesel fumes in idle and its driver opened the door. The two of them climbed on board.

"How far we go for $5?" AK pulled out his wallet.

"$4.25 will buy you a ride to Needles."

"Make that two."

"I'll be leaving in ten minutes, so if you want any food or drink, this is your chance."

AK and Sean bought cokes inside the diner and they climbed aboard the cool bus. The driver had a schedule and pulled out of the gas station on time. As they rounded the onramp, they stared out the window at the stranded hippies. Ten minutes ago they had been them.

"Good move." AK finished the Coke.

"You boys look hot." An old black woman across the aisle was peeling an orange.

"We were stuck back there." AK wiped the sweat off his face.

"Hitchhiking?"

"Yep." Sean's dry tongue was glued on single syllables.

"You'd have a lot more luck, if you cut your hair. You look like girls and not pretty girls either." The old black woman laughed with a friendly wickedness. "But these peckerwoods out here ain't too particular about pretty after they drunk. They get too much sun out here and too much sun ain't good for no one."

The old lady handed them each an orange. They sucked on the sweet fruit, as if they might not taste another for a long time.

AK and Sean pored over the map, as the bus sped down I-15.

With each mile the desert became more desert and the window was warm to the touch, even though the bus interior was ACed to Alaska.

Two rangy cowboys and the old black woman got off in Barstow and the driver announced that the next stop was Needles, which lay on the west of the Colorado River on I-40.

Two and a half hours later the bus pulled into the desert town. Sean counted the number of trees in sight on both hands and said, "The Joad family's first stop in THE GRAPES OF WRATH was Needles."

"They drove through the night to avoid the Arizona heat and they arrived here in the morning." AK had written a paper on John Steinbeck in college. "The California Dream."

"A hot one." Sean stood up to pick up his bags and peered out the window. Nobody was walking on the sidewalks of the dust-blown town.

AK didn't want to get off the bus and said so.

"This is my stop. You want to go, go. In this heat it's every man for himself."

"No, I'll stick with you." He hefted his bag over his shoulder.

"Really?"

"Did you ever doubt I would?"

"Not for one second." Sean would have bet his last dollar on AK's ditching out on him.

The bus braked at the small terminal and the driver announced a thirty-minute break.

They exited from the bus to be greeted by a wall of torpid heat from what Sean figured to be the exhaust fumes of a thousand diesel engines, except the Greyhound was the only bus in the sweltering parking lot.

The sun beat down with a merciless intensity and his boots stuck to the molten asphalt.

Across the street in a small park a large thermometer displayed the temperature. It was next to a Dairy Queen.

135F.

"That can't be right," AK gasped for breath.

"No one else is outside."

"For a good reason."

"135.

I-40 shimmered in the distance. Cars and trucks wavered like waterbugs on a mirage. It was less than a mile away. In this heat that distance tested human survival and the two of them looked at the Dairy Queen, then raced toward the promise of cold ice cream and AC.

"Shut the damn doors," the counterman shouted from the cash register. "I'm not cooling the outdoors."

"Yes, sir," Sean answered, closing the glass door.

The other customers appreciated the gesture.

Hippies were not a common sight in the Mojave, but the farmers, teenagers, and young children re-directed their attention to spooning sundaes and floats into their mouths.

"What will it be?"

"Two vanilla ice cream sodas for me." His mother had given the sweet slurry of cold comfort to Sean during a bout with strep throat.

"I'll have two chocolate ice cream sodas, please." Andy stepped up to the counter.

After a 3rd ice cream soda their core temperature had descended to 98.6.

"Is that thermometer outside right?" Sean asked a local rancher.

"Sun got to it. Ain't right by 15 degrees. Makes it 120. Hot, but ain't half as hot as July 2, 1967. That day it hit 122. The two degrees don't sound like much until you been in 122," he spoke with pride. "Not many humans can survive that heat. It felt like the Devil was burning my bones. You boys going east?"

"Yes, sir." The heat brought out the polite in him.

"I can give you a ride to Topock. Some fifteen miles from here. It's on the other side of the Colorado. You have some money for gas?"

"Sure." Sean donated $3 to the driver's fuel fund.

"Every little bit helps with gas at 40 cents a gallon."

"Same goes for us. Walking in the desert is life or death."

"Mind if I fill up my canteen before we go?" AK lifted his metal water container.

"Make it snappy." The Okie exited from the Dairy Queen. The back of his Ford pick-up was loaded with bags of grain. His dog sat in the front seat. When Sean approached the passenger door, the black dog snarled with bared fangs.

"Ranger don't like the heat. Don't like strangers too. You gotta sit in the back."

"Okay." Sean touched the truck. The steel was frying pan hot. He sat on a burlap bag and pulled on a baseball cap. The sun was high in the sky.

AK came out of the ice cream shop and jumped into the back.

"Damn." He leapt off the steel flatbed like a fried egg with legs.

"Sit on a bag."

The sign next to the Dairy Queen hovered around 131. It might have been the wrong reading, but Sean's mind registered the temperature as the real thing.

"We're ready when you are." He rapped on the rear window.

Fifteen minutes later the pickup crossed the Colorado River into Arizona. The farmer pulled off the interstate. The town was two miles away to the north. He drove away without a word. His dog barked their good-bye. The only shade was a bullet-holed billboard some 300 feet in the scrubby desert.

"That wasn't much of a ride for $3."

"Better than walking here."

"It isn't any cooler."

"Maybe a little. We're next to the river."

Sharp mountains rose farther north. A railroad bridge traversed the river and another bridge for cars spanned the low stream. Weeds grew out of the pavement of the Route 66. Cottonwoods dotted the near shore before the river curved to the east, otherwise low scrubs and yellow dirt dominated the desert.

"I wish I was back in Encinitas." AK loved Moonlight Beach.

"I wish we were back two weeks ago."

"If only I was Dorothy and could click my heels." AK had been brought up on THE WIZARD OF OZ.

"Then we'd end up in Kansas."

"Kansas, Kansas." AK snapped his sneakers together.

"No such luck. There?s only one way out of here."

Sean stuck out my thumb and pretended to be Jack Kerouac's illegitimate son. The beat writer had to have one somewhere.

"I look more harmless than you." The Berklee School of Music graduate had perfect teeth and pushed him to the side. The second car stopped for them.

"We're out of here." He sprinted to the waiting Delta 88.

"Thanks for stopping." AK jumped in the back. "It's a life saver."

"Nice car." Sean's father drove a gray version.

"Good AC." AK sat in the rear. "Where you going?"

"Up to Kingman. When it get this hot, I haul ass out of here."

"Here?"

"Topock. I know there's not much here, but the Colorado runs natural here, not like down on Lake Havesu."

"Isn't Lake Havasu where they put the London Bridge?" Sean had read about its sale in LIFE magazine.

"Yes and no." The husband was a full head of hair and drove with both hands on the wheel.

"The developer bought the old London Bridge, thinking it was the Tower Bridge."

"But it wasn't." His white-haired wife muffled a pleasant chuckle with her hand.

"Still they reconstructed the London Bridge and people come from all around to see it," her husband explained with an apologetic tone.

The bridge doesn't go anywhere." His wife found it amusing.

"No, it goes nowhere."

"It seems like there is lot of nowhere out here."

"You got that right. I wish I hadn't moved down here from Michigan. Sometimes down here my head feels hot enough to fry an egg on."

The driver might have said the line a hundred times. The punch line was funny, because it was true.

"It isn't this hot all the time." The desert sun had leathered his wife's skin as brown as a Naugahyde couch and her silver-blonde hair honored the singer Dinah Shore. "We have grandchildren in Detroit. They come and visit sometimes. That's why we picked you up.?

"They're hippies too." The old man smiled in the rearview mirror. "You must be thirsty. There's lemonade in the cooler."

Four glass screw-top bottles were stored in ice.

"Don't be shy." The driver floored the pedal and the big V8 ate up the road. ?Drink as much as you want.

Andy and Sean drained one in thirty seconds.

Mountains rose from the plain.

They were leaving the desert.

Just before sunset the interstate was replaced by an old section of Route 66. Within a few years the legendary road from Chicago to LA would be replaced by the interstate. The old couple pulled into Kingman, Arizona and the man said, "We're staying here for the night."

A motor lodge offered rooms for $20.

"We'll keep on going.? Sean shook his head.

"I'd pay for a room." The old man had a kind heart.

"No, thanks, we'll be fine now we're out of that furnace." AK opened the door to the mountain air smelling of pine.

"God be with you."

"And you too."

This was God Country.

It was loaded with lots of white people too.

They bid the old couple good-bye from the shoulder of old Route 66.

"I can't believe two hours ago it was 135 in the shade." The cool air at 3000 feet was relief and Sean stuck out my thumb.

"That thermometer was broken." AK sat on the guard railing.

"Broke or not it was as hot as I've ever been."

"You can say that again."

Sean didn't bother to repeat the obvious and asked, "What do you think Pam is doing?"

"She probably making love with her boyfriend."

"And Floe?"

"Sitting around a fire in the Redwoods with Rockford."

"And us."

"We're on the road."

The sun was setting in the west and a semi?s diesel engine throttled closer to Kingman.

"Together."

"Yes, together farther down the road."

"Are you okay with that?" Sean was hoping AK suggested turning around. LA was only five hours behind them. Big Sur was another five up the coast.

"As long as it's not 135 again, yes."

"There's more desert tomorrow." The north of the Sonaran desert occupied most of Arizona and New Mexico.

"But not like Needles."

"No, not like that."

Wherever they would be tomorrow morning was a night away and the night was cool in the mountains.

IN ABSENCE OF AMNESIA - Chapter 6 By Peter Nolan Smith

At the beginning of 1986 Candia left for a photo shoot in the Alps.

Several days later She phoned to say her boss had invited the fashion team for a ski trip to Isola 2000. Having heard her opinion that skiers were too poor to vacation in the tropics, I bit my tongue and drank heavier than normal that weekend. Candia called on Sunday to say they were stranded by a snowstorm. After she hung up, I convinced myself this was a fling and everything would be like it was before, otherwise she would have never bothered with the call.

On the day of her return I cleaned the apartment, bought flowers, chilled a bottle of champagne, and sprayed a perfume on the bed for an evening of coaxing her into my arms.

Candia arrived late. A new silver fur coat adorned cinnamon skin untouched by the alpine sun and my heart crumpled like a cheap beer can. The telephone rang and she snatched the receiver out of my hand. After several whispers Candia announced, "I have to meet the Italian client at the Hotel Crillion for dinner."

"Go ahead." The look in her eyes said nothing I could say would change her plans.

She left without mentioning what time to expect her home. For certain it wouldn't be early.

I had dinner at La Coupole and took a taxi to the club. It was an off night and I ordered a whiskey-coke. By 3AM I drank myself partially deaf and dumb.

"What's wrong?" Bernard stopped my dancing on a stool to Arthur Lee's HEY JOE.

"Nothing another whiskey-coke wouldn't cure." I shouted for a refill and Bernard annulled my order. "Go home and sleep this off?"

"A house is not a home." I staggered to the entrance and a runway model from Baltimore waylaid my departure. "Care to join me for a nightcap."

"Where?" I had champagne waiting in a bucket of melted ice.

"Where is unimportant." And she whispered an obscene proposal. Her idea of a nightcap differed from mine. "So?"

My girlfriend was probably making love to another man, however I held the high moral ground. "Another night."

"Another night?" The beautiful redhead graced the cover of Elle. No male in their right mind had refused her favors and she said, "You're making a big mistake."

"It won't be the first or the biggest." I weaved out of the club into a flurry of errant snowflakes. My feet trudged across Place de La Concorde to the Seine. The river lay between the two banks like octopus ink and I lifted my leg onto the parapet.

Rue St. Honore. I ran off the bridge, as the fat flic yelled, "Arrete, arrete."

I easily outran the portly gendarme into a thick snow softening the night. Cars glided noiselessly on the streets, as I marched relentlessly to the 15th arrondisement, realizing while I might not forget this trespass, I could forgive Candia's sin. I just needed the chance.

Reaching the Impasse Dantzig I lifted my eyes. The lights in the atelier were off. My key turned in the lock. The door opened with a creak. An empty champagne bottle was on the floor between shiny Gucci loafers. They were neither my size nor style. A man moaned behind the nearest closed door and I charged into the bedroom with a roar. A balding man lifted his arms too late to deflect my fist and he tumbled semi-conscious onto the floor. I threw Candia on the floor. The girl nursing my cold, the lover cuddling me after sex, and the dinner companion laughing at my jokes were gone

"Why?"

"You know why," she spat with an unrecognizable hostility. “You never loved me. You loved a ghost. Your cousin told me about this 'Lisa' and she never loved you. No one will ever love you.”

I envisioned a deadly blow, police, and trial. No French court had convicted a man of a crime de passion, but my blow would have been revenge for her speaking the truth. I chucked the Mickey Mouse telephone through the window into the street, after which I scourged the couple from the apartment with the frayed wire. The man's suit and shoes followed it out the broken window as a petty act of vengeance.

I packed my clothes, journals, tape deck, camera, and photos. Five minutes later I fled the apartment fearing the arrival of the gendarmes, and hailed a taxi on the nearest boulevard. The hour and my bag explained the story and the unshaven driver shrugged knowingly, "Un hotel?"

"Ouais, le Hotel Marais." My accelerated breathing worried the driver, who asked, "Mssr., vous etes okay?"

"Ouais.

I lowered the window. The cold air failed to pluck the splintered razors from my heart. A bottle of tranquilizers rested in my coat. Three or four were on the menu. It took the driver 20 minutes to reach Rue Des Ecouffes. I paid with a 100-franc note.

"Keep the change." The sky was cloaked by glowering gray clouds. The day held no promise of a dawn.

"Merci." He drove away to pick up a couple holding hands.

I entered the hotel lobby with my hand gripping the bottle of tranks. The old woman was asleep at the desk. Waking her seemed a sin, except I had nearly broken the 5th Commandment twenty minutes before. I rang the bell and she blinked several times before recognizing my face from the previous stay.

"Ah, Mssr., je imagine que vous voulez une chambre."

"Une chambre pour un nuit." A room with a bath fulfilled my physical needs.

"Chambre 312." She passed over a brass key and indicated the stairs.

It was the same room from my previous stay. Nothing had changed. I sat on the soft bed and weighed my options. The pill bottle was only one route. The window was another. Neither would save my soul and I dropped three pills. The rest would have to wait for a more desperate occasion.

I woke to the shouts of the little gangsters on Rue des Ecouffes. The bells from a nearby church toned out the noon hour. The throbbing of my hangover was replaced by the resurrection of Candia's infidelity. She had brought her lover on purpose. Jack Lemmon must have felt the same way in THE APARTMENT when he realized Shirley MacLaine was having an affair with his boss, Fred MacMurray.

My hands mimicked the act of strangulation. I choked her ghost dead. Thin air was no replacement for a seventeen year-old's neck, except I was only a murderer in my most grievous thoughts and Candia's wrongs were forgiveable to a lost man, but I tore up the photos of Candia naked in the changing cabinets of the Piscine Deligny, singing in Clermont-Fernand, and visiting her grandmother in Vichy. The shreds built a pyre in the hotel ashtray and burned with a chemical speed. The flames wrinkled her face and an acrid fume corkscrewed into my nose. Fearing Candia might invade my body, I flushed the flaming photos down the toilet, then left the hotel for a drink.

The icy wind hurried me to the Tartine on Rue Du Rivoli and I sat on the terrace sheltered by a glass wall. The waitress wrote down my order of a cafe au lait, croissant, and two shots of Calvados before disappearing inside.

Waiting for my breakfast I viewed passing couples with hatred. Two more Calvados numbed my senses to the grisly weather and diminished the bite of Candia's words, Vanessa's coldness, and Lisa's disappearance. After a fifth applejack I failed to register someone sitting beside me, until he lit a cigarette.

"I've been looking for you." Bernard's stubble indicated taht he had not woken at his apartment.

"Why?" My face was numb from the alcohol.

"I called your house this morning and spoke with your girlfriend." Bernard signaled to the waiter for another round.

"More like my girlfiend." The change from dropping an 'r' from friend was lost on the Frenchman. "What she say for herself?"

"She is worried about you.” Bernard's eyes pursued two schoolgirls.

"If she cared about me, why she bring home that man?" I blew into my hands.

You Americans treat women as men. They are women and we have to protect the double standard, otherwise the battle between man and woman will be lost." Bernard waved to a model heading to a casting call. "You allowed her to have affairs and she concluded you did not care about her. She said you were still in love with another love. Some blonde."

I had told Candia the story once. I hadn't thought about Lisa since then. At least I didn't think that I had thought about her.

"I struck that man."

"He deserved The French like stories of hot blood. "Excellent, and now she respects you."

"Respects me?"

"Yes, a woman is like a horse. You hold the reins tight and the horse will throw you. Too loose and she will run away." He slapped his hands together. "Yeehaw."

"You've been watching too many cowboy movies. I wasn't raised to ht a woman. A man without a problem. Especially if he is in my bed." Not striking a woman was my parents' one rule that I obeyed without question. I was sadly learning that there should have been more.

"The caveman drags a woman by the hair to the cave." Bernard inhaled deeply on his cigarette. "They have a little corps-a-corps. She stays with him. Not the man who lets her ugh-ugh with another caveman."

"There are no drawings of Neanderthals dong that, only TV cartoons, however man's dominance over woman needs no historical proof in France. Women are not horse. This is the almost the 21st Century."

"Eh, alors, the collapse of classic family structures reinforces the need to establish a rapport de force," Bernard stubbed out his cigarette. "Yell at her, hit her, and make love. She expects you to act like a man, not a Mickey Mouse."

"Couldn't I be another Disney character? I really like Pluto."

"No, you are not a dog, you are not an ape. You are a man." My passivity ignited his machismo for my own good. "I saw you throw Brigitte Bardot out of a nightclub. Your friend Danny talked about your fights with the Russian mafia. Are you going to let a teenager push you around?"

"Sometimes you have to know when to do nothing."

"If you let this wound bleed, you will be no good for the next woman you meet."

"I'm done with women."

"Ha, there is always another woman. Even for you. A plus tard."

To prove his thesis Bernard stalked a fashionably-attired woman in her thirties. Within a few paces she rewarded his boldness with a smile and they linked arms.

Bernard was right. I had sung I'M A MAN a hundred times.

Restrengthened by the Yardbirds song, I shambled to the boulevard, foreseeing my kicking in the door, except every taxi was occupied and the urge to reclaim Candia was humbled by the icy drizzle.

I called Brigitte. She came across the bridge for lunch. Angus was happy to see me.

"I knew this would happen."

"I knew you would say that."

"Philippe said she was too young to be faithful." This was hard to take coming from an adulteress, but my problem with Candia had nothing to do with her infidelity.

"I was faithful."

"Only in body. That blonde in New York has a lock on your heart. She hasn't thought about you in years. Fool." Brigitte offered my old place on the sofa. Sleeping with Angus might accelerate the healing process, however I opted to remain at the hotel.

The owner brought me tea and a baguette every morning. Candia came to the club and asked for a second chance. It was more like the fifth. We slept together three nights and I got a venereal disease. She said it came from a toilet seat. Our final good-bye was at the VD clinic.

I bought a typewriter and wrote a novella about a nightclub owner being offered fame and fortune by Satan. A French production company invested money in a script of GO-GO GIRLS FROM HELL. Bernard hired three models to cut a record TAKE ME HIGHER. The three models got pregnant from their boyfriends and blamed me for the miracle of Immaculate Conception. The hundred sample records of TAKE ME HIGHER arrived warped as potato chips and the film company lost interest without the girls.

Worse Vadim and Lisa showed up at le Reve.

"Surprised to see me here." I bought a bottle of champagne.

"No, everyone said you were here." Her eyes were distant.

"They said it was fun here." Vadim held her hand.

"Some nights it is." Usually the ones Bernard and I drank too much.

"You ever get back to New York?" Vadim ordered a better bottle of champagne.

"Only once. I was told it was a good idea to stay away. No one has told me different."

"I followed the same advice." Vadim's eyes followed the waitress to the bar.

"Vadim can't go back to the States." Lisa ignored his surveillance. Her beauty was still breathtaking, but that gift was endangered at age thirty by the passage of youth.

"But we are welcome in Russia.” Vadim toasted me with a nearly empty glass.

"Back in the USSR."

"You should come out there. Moscow is wild like New York." Vadim glowed with pride. "Another few years and communism is dead."

"Yeah, you two were made for Russia." Lisa's disdain extended to both of us and I wondered how Vadim had survived the last four years with her.

"I like any place fun."

Bernard joined our table. We drank more champagne. Lisa kept saying she wanted to leave. Vadim wasn't in the mood to sit in a hotel. Bernard and he became friends that week. Lisa never came to the bar again.

Bernard accepted Vadim's invitation to vacation over the holidays in Ibiza. He wanted me to come too, but instead I bought a one-way ticket to America from a travel agency on the Boulevard St. Paul.

A taxi got me to Charles de Gaulle Aeroport with an hour to spare. I dumped my spare change into the charity bowl for children. There were no good-byes.

My parents didn't question my unannounced return and I celebrated a family Christmas with all the trimmings. My brothers and sisters sensed my smiles were superficial and asked me to stay, except Boston was too small after Paris and New York.

The Amtrak train took 5 hours to reach Penn Station. A taxi drove me to East 10th street. My apartment seemed tiny after living in Candia's atelier, but the pizza at Stromboli's was good and TV was in English. My friends initially greeted me with suspicion, since any absence from the city was regarded an act of treason to New Yorkers.

No one mentioned the Continental, Viktor Malenski, or Lisa, for Manhattan moves too fast to allow scandals to take permanent root. My mail from the past year held nothing from the NYPD and the phone messages complied by the subleasee were from friends and not Internal Affairs.

At the end of January I instructed Bernard to sell my share of the club. He warned this was an imprudent business move. I needed the cash. The money arrived the end of January.

An albino producer hired me to write a screenplay. We spent the winter in the Berkshire Hills, fleshing out a tale about a young mistress inheriting an offshore island in the Keys. He had me sign over the rights to WHERE THE HIGHWAY ENDS for $10,000 and a 1964 Triumph Tiger. The movie was made it to film.

"You should come out to LA," Sherri said XXX companies were paying good money for porno scripts.

"You said that before."

"And you said 'no'."

"Give me a good reason to come out."

"Maybe you can meet a nice girl."

“In the porno industry?"

"Well, maybe not nice, but sexy." She never lied to me, except about herself.

"I'll come out there."

I flew out to the valley and wrote several screenplays, however the industry was switching from film to video for the fast-forward action crowd and starlets would rather fuck a car valet than a writer. North Hollywood was hell for writers.

Without Che's star quality my cousin's films had degenerated to sloppy free-for-alls. Her name dropped from star to supporting roles and Sherri's condition worsened with an arrest for indecent exposure. After I bailed her out, she drove her battered Skylark directly to the dealer in Sunland.

"Maybe you should cool out. We could go to the desert."

"So you can fuck me for free like everyone else?" This was the drugs speaking.

"No, so you don't die." Her arms and legs were stitched with tracks. She was nodding behind the wheel and we narrowly missed a semi-trailer on the Ventura Freeway.

"Let me drive."

"No."

"You're going to kill us." I was desperate, but not that desperate.

“I survived being abandoned by my mother. I survived adoption. I survived these films. I survived Che leaving me." She cried for an hour by the side of the road. I held her in my arms. Worst was sure to come.

"You can't die on me. You promised you would push me down the stairs when I need to die."

"I’ll live that long." Sherri sniffed away the tears. "Even if it kills me."

Several days later Sherri dropped me at LAX and I wondered whether I would see her again. Our friends and enemies died from AIDS, ODs, suicides, and stupid accidents. Natural causes were for the rest of the world and so were normal relationships.

New York women were looking for millionaires. I didn’t stand a chance against bald-headed bankers or loud stockbrokers. On a visit to Boston my mother suggested visiting Ireland to find a woman like herself or my sisters.

"I’ll even pay the ticket. I know you want to marry and have kids."

"I do." It was the first time I admitted this goal.

"You'll never meet a girl like that in New York."

"Other people do. Maybe I'll be lucky."

"Lucky is for horse races." She believed more in prayers than casinos. "What about Ireland?"

“I’ll save it for a rainy day.” Every Irish woman left the Emerald Isle once she's old enough to breed or else she'll have a brood of five by age 20. I would go when the time was right and that time was not now.

Taylor Blue Winsted RIP

a poem of misunderstanding by dakota pollock

why did it have to be taylor when there are others both cruel and inhumane who bankrupt their own brother after violent arguments regarding inheritances; murderers who smile while on trial in court, the families of the victims grieving and weeping and crying trying to find meaning and closure after the lawyers defend these men with twisted and complicated defenses go home to kiss their daughters and teach them about values and morality. that we have to rely on donations to bury our children and buy their medicine so they can continue to live. different children facing disciplinary action and punishment and expulsion threatened by school administration because they can’t pay their lunch bills and the lunch ladies and the teachers fired and fine for giving the lunch away for free because they won’t and cant allow a child to go hungry.

why did it have to be taylor when young, able bodied men sit on the subway benches while a pregnant woman is ready to faint from the extra weight she carries. the bulge of her belly like stained crescent moons annoying the young man. it’s in his way and he has a long night of drinking and harassing women and bartenders and cabdrivers and servers ahead of him.

seagulls swallowing six pack rings and turtles with plastic straws shoved up their nostrils unable to breathe the pollution in the air while their eggs hatch in the oil spills of the sea.

why did it have to be taylor when the misfortune of the people is monetized and exploited so a half dozen men can get even richer and buy homes with unnecessary features like oversized garages and bathrooms attached to waterslides leading to an indoor pool.

why did it have to be taylor when i’d never known someone so sweet and encouraging and rare and while men practice piano and learn how to paint they will never know the talent of living which is a gift you are born with and taylor had easily and naturally perfected it

WHEELS OF FIRE by Peter Nolan Smith

In the late summer of 1971 my college friend Paul Deseret and I were hitchhiking from Boston to San Francisco. Our friends were living in the Haight. They were girls. I had had sex with one of them and sleeping with Marilyn again was enough of a reason to cross a continent, especially since neither of us had ever been farther east than the Adirondacks.

Paul and I were longhairs. We got rides fast from vans and truckers. West of Des Moines a Dodge Super Bee stopped for us. We ran to the muscle car, expecting the driver, to patch rubber and pop a middle finger out the window. The motorhead waited instead. The engine throbbed with low intensity. I ran to the passenger side.

"Hi." Acting friendly was part of hitchhiking.

"My name's Lucky. I'm going to LA." The driver's long red hair was slicked back with Brylcream. His arms were stained with old tattoos. His jaws were grinding teeth.

"We're heading to San Francisco." I yanked open the door.

"I don't know." Paul clocked Lucky as a speed freak.

"It'll be night soon."

Paul was a math major same as me. He calculated the odds of surviving this ride.

"San Francisco is in the different direction than Los Angeles." His girlfriend was waiting for him in Milwaukee. We were stopping there on the way back from the coast.

"There's only one road here and it's heading west." I shoved Paul in the back and sat in the front.

"I'll take you as far as Winnemucca." Lucky revved the engine and broke from the shoulder in front of a piggy-backing long-hauler.

"Great." I had no idea where Winnemucca was, but Lucky's muscle-car version of the Coronet had a 440 cu in V8 engine.

It was more than fast.

He drove 110mph from Omaha to Nevada. He had one 8-track for the stereo. We listened to BAD COMPANY probably fifteen times before he nodded at the wheel. His foot was on the gas.

I steered from the passenger seat.

"Was I out for long?" he asked west of Laramie.

"About two hours." I released the wheel.

Paul was asleep in the back.

It was better if he didn't know about my co-piloting.

"Thanks for keeping us on the road." Lucky's hands seized the steering wheel in a death grip. His foot crushed the pedal to the floor.

Wyoming became a blur.

"You want me to drive?"

"Naw, I'm good."

He stopped only for gas and Coca-Cola to wash down beanies.

When he missed the Winnemucca turning, I said nothing.

"What the fuck am I doing in Reno?" Lucky snapped out of his speed trance upon seeing the Sierras. It was a little after dawn. He turned south on US 395 and stopped the car.

We got out.

The sun was bright. "Have a good time in Frisco."

"You too."

Paul and I stood on shoulder of the highway leading into the mountains. Back in 1849 the Donner Party had eaten each other in those steep heights. This was not winter and thirty minutes later a shiny blue 1965 Riviera stopped for us.

“My friends just got out of prison. I want to celebrate with them. Can you drive?” The dark-skinned driver was sweating behind the wheel. The fifty year-old Mexican smelled of hard alcohol. A bottle of whiskey was held by a bleary-eyed Indian in the back and a scarred black man was leaning against the window.

"Yes." I had reservations. "But you look full."

Not full, only drunk. You wanna to drive. My two brothers just got out of the can in Nevada. We want to drink our way to Frisco." He opened the door and stepped out of the car. He was only five feet tall. "You can drive right?"

“I'm stone-cold sober."

Paul was shaking his head.

“Cool, but I wanna you to drive fast. I want me some pussy,” the black man replied before downing a long slug of bourbon. “It’s been a long time. Maybe I’ll get me some hippie pussy.”

“Maybe you will.” I sat behind the steering wheel. The Riviera had only 2000 miles on the speedometer.

“This car isn’t stolen, is it?” Paul got into the back on the hump.

“The keys are in the ignition.”

Paul shook his head.

"You don't have any guns?" They looked the type, especially the old black git in the back.

"No, only whiskey." The Mexican smiled with two gleaming gold teeth filling a gap in his grin.

"Sure." I was a sucker for a fast car after the ride with Lucky.

"This is not a good idea." Paul was jammed in the back between the indian and the black man.

"I'm driving. How bad can it be?" I was also a Math major.

"Just don't kill us."

The gas tank was full. The highway was recently paved. I stepped on the gas.

The Riviera's nailhead V-8 easily produced enough power to motor up the steep Sierras. I had checked out the price of one last summer. The dealer had asked for $5000 and now one was in my hands.

It hit 100 without any strain.

The convicts talked wildly about their years in prison. The first bottle of whiskey was replaced by a second. I had a sip. The outside temperature was in the 90s. The AC chilled the interior of the Riviera to the coolness of a summer day in Bar Harbor, Maine.

Once we topped the pass, I caught a radio station from San Francisco.

KAZU.

The DJ played HP Lovecraft's WHITE SHIP

Paul and I were into the home stretch.

The Riviera's top speed was 115.

East of the Bay the driver said he wanted to take over the rest of the way.

"I don't need some white ass long-haired chauffeur to take me home." The whiskey was turning him mean.

"No worries." I pulled off I-80 into a service station. Paul and I got out of the car.

"You white boys ain't comin' with us." The Chicano was wavering in his wide-legged stance.

"You're not in any condition to drive." I felt responsible for them.

"Fuck you, gringo." He sat in the front seat.

"Have a good day." His epithet had negated my obligation.

The Riviera pulled out of the gas station.

“I’m glad to be out of that car.” It had been a long ride for Paul. The Indian and old black man had been feeling up the long-haired math major the entire distance, figured him for stick pussy.

"Me too."

We walked to the onramp. A sign warned against hitchhiking. ChiPs in California hated hippies.

"So we're walking to San Francisco?" Paul was wearing heavy Frye boots.

“”Maybe not.” I pointed to a Riviera back at the gas station.

It had stopped half in and out of the road.

The reverse taillights lit up and the car backed into the gas station to ram the gas pumps. Both exploded and engulfed the Riviera in flames. The driver jumped out of the car. His two friends were struggling to open the passenger door. Paul and I ran to the driver's side and pulled out the two ex-cons. The station attendant extinguished the fire with an extinguisher. He was not happy. His two pumps were trash.

“Why you leave the car in reverse?” the driver asked with a whiskey-thick tongue.

“Me?” I stepped up to him. He might have been a convict, but I was younger by a good 30 years. “I didn’t do nothing wrong.”

A state trooper pulled into the gas station. The convict told him his side of the story and I told him mine. The cop came over after his radio call and said, “That car is stolen. Best you go unless you want to spend more time with your friends.”

“We’re going.” Peter picked up his bag and we went over to the highway. A hippie gave us a ride ten minutes later. The VW van's top speed was 60.

"Now I'm happy." Paul lit up our last joint.

"We're in California."

The trip from coast to coast took us 47 hours. It could have taken a lifetime if it hadn't been for the cop.

That evening we partied with the girls. Marilyn had a guitarist boyfriend. Paul and I crashed on the floor.

The next day we wandered through the Haight.

We were three years late for Frisco’s Summer of Love. Groovy was gone and after two days Marilyn hinted at our leaving. We were third wheels on a scooter.

Paul and I walked to the Golden Gate Bridge. It was our starting point home.

I stuck out my thumb.

Late or not for the Summer of Love we were still long-hairs and the road north was open all the way to Alaska.

Burning California

Throughout the 20th Century California symbolized paradise to most Americans and millions of people from the rust Belt and Deep South and Dust Bowl deserted their hometowns to populate the Pacific state. Towns became cities and cities spread into the mountains as well as up the coast with a foreseeable cost.

Gone are the Los Angeles River, orange groves, and the girls in bikinis. The river is dry, the orange groves are suburbs, and the girls are fat, but even worse is the suburban sprawl has overstepped into the parched scenery and this week home owners in Santa Diego were attacked by Mother Nature as wind-whipped flames flashed across arid slopes to scorch multi-million dollars houses.

Burn baby burn.

Thousands have been evacuated from the path of these fires.

"When will they ever learn, when they they ever learn?" from the song WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE.

Obviously no time soon but then that's why we love California.

It can always be re-invented as something else.

To hear Pete Seeger sing WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE, please go to the following URL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y2SIIeqy34

SPEAKING WITH SEALS by Peter Nolan Smith

August turned hot in San Diego. Floe and I slept outdoors under the stars. Two sleeping bags served as our mattress and a single sheet covered our bodies throughout the night.

I told her everything.

After recounting the fight with the junkie thieves in Haight-Ashbury, she said,

“You scare me.”

“Why?” I was telling her the truth.

“I left home, because my father beat me. I thought I was possessed by Satan.” She didn’t explain why.

“Was he religious?”

“An Army chaplain.”

“I don’t believe in God.”

"But you have a violent streak.”

“I’m trying to leave it behind.” I held both her hands loosely. “You’re helping me.”

“I can’t be around violence.” This was a warning.

“I’ll never show you any.”

A soft kiss sealed our pact.

We woke to the morning mist melting off the flower fields around the bungalow. Floe and I made love with the dawn.

This heaven was meant to last forever.

Within two weeks forever ended with the last day of summer.

Our hostess’ aunt and uncle were coming home.

Helen said they were cool, but even cool people had a problem with strangers sleeping on their lawn, especially when one of them was only seventeen.

“Rockford wants to heads up to San Francisco.” Floe lay close.

“And do what?” Her friend was a wanderer.

“Play music on the street.”

“And live where?” I had passed through the Haight in June. The hippie era had been replaced by a blight of speed freaks.

“We know some people there. I’d like you to come.”

“I’d like to come too.” I offered another option. “Or you could come with me to Boston.”

“That’s so far away and cold. I don’t like the cold anymore.” She was a child of the sun. Her light brown skin had been toasted golden by the months on the beach. The sun had deposited blonde in her dark curly hair. She was a goddess in my eyes.

“It’s a nice city.” It was a half-truth.

I was white and she was black. Boston wasn’t nice to mixed couple, but I could protect her from any harm. I was half-Irish. My family came from Jamaica Plain. We took care of our own.

“Where would we live?” Her ‘we’ included Rockford. They were only friends, but she owed him for saving her from a bad scene.

“There are cheap houses in Mission Hill. Several hippie communes are in that neighborhood. I’ll drive cab at first and then teach school in October.”

“Sorry, but I don’t think I’m ready to settle down. Not on the East Coast.” California was stronger than her Texas blood.

“We don’t have to decide today.” I was a big believer in putting off the inevitable.

“No, we don’t,” she smiled and caressed my thigh. “Today’s the day. We’ll all trip today.”

“Mark is back?”

Rockford and she had been staying with a professor from San Diego State. His field of study was the effect of LSD on the human mind. The two of them were his guinea pigs. They got $20 a trip.

“With a new patch of LSD-25 from Sandoz.” The Swiss-made acid was the purest in the world.

“Then today is the day.” I pulled her on top of me. She liked it that way.

Afterward we joined the rest of the summer commune in the bungalow. Helen was making omelets.

“LSD is better on an empty stomach,” Rockford said, sipping at green tea.

“Not better.” Floe shook her head. “If your stomach is empty, then it takes half the time for the acid to hit.”

“Fastest with the mostest.” Rockford raised his cup of tea.

“Anyone else following Doctor Rockford’s path.” Helen held two plates in her hands. Vincent and Cuchillo loved her cooking.

“We’re in.”

“Me too.” AK was a hearty eater.

“I’m not tripping, so I’ll have a good breakfast.” Pam wasn’t jeopardizing her nursing career with an acid trip.

“Just toast for me.” I popped two slices in the toaster and turned to Floe, who said, “I’ll have the same as you.”

Rockford went over to the stereo and put on Tim Buckley’s HAPPY SAD.

“Timothy Leary said mind set was as important as setting. We have Moonlight Beach. A setting doesn’t get better than that and I love STRANGE FEELING.”

The opening song of the LP mirrored the atmosphere of an early morning in Southern California. We ate recapping old trips like a sports team preparing for a big game.

A little after ten Rockford rose to his feet.

“Enough talk. Let’s do it.”

We looked at each other. No one was bailing out and we exited from the bungalow. The sky was clearing up and the bouquet of mist off the flowers was a dream to our senses.

After piling into Cuchillo’s Mercedes convertible, Helen drove us down Encinitas Boulevard across the PCH to the bluff overlooking the beach.

Mark was standing in his front yard.

The lanky professor was wearing a seersucker suit. He introduced himself and wrote down our names in a journal.

“I want you to have a good time and don’t freak out if you see me writing down anything. It’s strictly for my research.”

“The CIA tested LSD on soldiers in the 50s.” AK was anti-Pentagon like the rest of us. The Vietnam War was almost over, but the government had been saying that it had been almost over since Nixon took office.

“I’m not with military. I’m more after opening the mind to other worlds.”

“Same as Aldous Huxley.” Looking at his suit I recalled Huxley grooving on the texture of his gray flannel suit. “Will you be tripping?”

“Not today.” He shut the journal. “But I like it. Now this young lady is studying nursing?”

“Yes.” Pam was going to enter her last year of nursing school in the fall.

“And you’re not tripping either?” Mark asked Helen.

“I like my world the way it is.”

“So it will be the five of you. Normally I would prefer you to stay in the house.”

“We want to be on the beach.” Rockford understood the end of the summer meant the break-up of our temporary commune. “I can handle the beach.”

“Swimming can be dangerous on LSD.”

“We’re all good swimmers other than Vincent,” I explained to Mark.

“I have no intentions of going in that ocean. I’ll be grooving on the beach.” The dancer loved the feel of the sand under his feet.

“I won’t stand in your way, but no one is climbing that cliff high. Understood.”

“Yes.” The five of us replied in unison.

The path to the beach was steep. No one wanted to end up in the hospital.

“Then here it is.” Mark handed us each a small slip of paper. “The dose will be 100 micrograms. Basically the same as a grain of sand. The trip should last about 8-10 hours. I’ll be there to help you through any rough moments, but this stuff is very pure. Happy trails.”

We looked at the small white blotters. Vince was first to go, then Cuchillo, Floe, Rockford, me, and lastly AK. Pam was looking at him with disapproval.

“No one has ever died from LSD,” he said after swallowing the tab.

“No, they’ve only gone crazy.” Pam was very straight about drugs.

The newspapers loved reporting stories of trippers staring in the sun for hours, losing their minds, hurting themselves, and crying for hours.

“RD Laing felt that most bad trips are a result of shaking off the trauma of birth, but there’s no proof of that or that anyone ever destroyed their cornea looking into the sun for hours.”

“Newsweek printed that story.” I had read it in 1968.

“And they reported that North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked a US navy destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin.” AK distrusted any news other than baseball box scores.

“Bad trips do happen,” Mark admitted, but never on this LSD.

“I dropped it ten times this summer.” Rockford opened his hands and said, “And nothing bad ever happened to me.”

“This acid is pure.” Floe was another devotee.

“It’s your picnic.” Pam shrugged to AK. “I don’t want anyone to call me a ‘buzzkill’.”

“No one can say that about you.” AK kissed the blonde. She never nagged him about smoking pot.

“Now that’s out of the way.” Floe held out her tab to me.

I opened my mouth and she put the LSD on my tongue.

“Welcome to the New Church.”

I reciprocated in kind. Cuchillo and Victor put their tabs on their tongues and swapped them with a soul kiss. AK simply flicked his into his mouth.

Victor held out his hand.

Mark gave him another tab.

Victor offered it to Helen.

“Be with us.”

She couldn't refuse the man of her dreams and we applauded her joining the clan.

“I suggest we go to the beach by car.” Mark was playing it safe.

The LSD would take about an hour to hit, two hours to peak to a psychedelic plateau lasting till sunset and then the gradual return to reality.

“Fine with me.” I embraced Floe. She was a good feeling in my life.

Our group divided between Mark’s Saab and Cuchillo’s Mercedes convertible. We listened to Joni Mitchell on the short ride to the Moonlight Beach parking lot.

Weeks ago I had seen the two lesbians with whom I had spent a sordid weekend in Big Sur. They had been with Bill. The drifter and I had fought in San Francisco. He was bad news, but not seeing the girl’s pickup was a good thing and I opened my mind to the world.

Our troupe tramped down the beach to our driftwood shack.

Surfers greeted Mark with hugs and longhaired girls kisses him on the cheek. He was well-liked by everyone and this greeting warmed my heart with a fuzzy glow. We were all part of the great experiment.

“I love it here.” Floe unfolded our blanket. “But there are other places along the coast. I’d like to show you them.”

“I’ve seen Big Sur.”

“Not with me.” She stripped off her top, baring her breasts to the sun. Her body had no tan lines. “And I’m much nicer than those lesbian ax-murderers.”

“Please, no more mention of them.” I grimaced thinking about the three nights lost to their sexual mania. Nymphomania was a dream better left to fantasy.

“Sorry, I won’t bum you out.”

“You never could.” I pulled my shirt over my head and lay on the blanket.

AK and Rockford were respectively playing the African thumb piano and guitar. Floe picked up a tambourine and handed me a kazoo.

“Join us when you feel the mood.”

Moonlight Beach wasn’t a nude beach, but the high cliffs prevented any voyeurs a view of our camp and the police never came down this far from the parking lot. We were free.

Helen, Cuchillo, and Victor peeled down to the state of Adam and Eve. Pam joined them and for the first time I saw what everyone else saw in their mind’s eyes.

Pam possessed the ideal body to satisfy the desire of an American male and probably many females. Her breasts were soft handfuls of flesh tipped by rose nipples and her firm belly curved to an angel tuft of blonde pubic hair separating taut thighs and shapely calves. Even here feet were pretty.’

Her skin crawled with arcane etchings and the sun shadowed runes of lust.

“Stop staring.” Floe whispered without a hint of jealousy.

“I think I just got off.” I turned to Floe.

Her eyes shone a fluorescent green and I grinned with an ignorant understanding of the universe.

“Me too.” Her pupils had consumed her green irises with the hunger of a black hole. “Let’s go let the sea touch us.”

Floe and I rose from the blanket.

The wind off the ocean bore the scent of Arctic brine and the crashing surf revved with the thunder of a herd of Harley-Davidson.

All my other trips had been practice for this day.

A hand unbuttoned my jean shorts. It wasn’t mine.

“We don’t need clothes.” Floe was naked.

We had been sleeping together for almost a month.

“I never saw you before.”

“That’s because before you only looked.” She tugged off my jeans.

They fell to my knees and I kicked free of them.

I was naked.

Floe was naked.

All we wore was the wind.

“Now.”

We dove into the ocean.

It spoke every language of the sea.

I broke to surface and turned to watch my friends charging into the surf.

Millions of years ago we came from the sea.

Today we returned home.

The surfers shouted out a welcome.

Seals popped up their heads from the foam.

Pelicans skimmed the rims of waves.

“Are you feeling anything?” AK treaded water by my side.

“I’m feeling everything.”

“Everything?”

“Everything.” I was in contact with Alpha Centurai. The extraterrestrial Morse Code borrowed the bassline from Booker T and The MGS. The galaxy embraced the day and I told AK, “It will hit soon. Be prepared.”

“The Boy Scout motto.”

The sun’s dappled reflection prismed on AK’s face. I lost him in the kaleidoscope and swam to Floe.

She bobbed every surge. I joined her. The beach was getting distant.

“We’re caught in a riptide.”

She woke from the trance of eternity.

“Let’s get back to shore. It’s safer there.”

She shouted to Rockford who had been tugged farther out on the unseen stream. His eyes widened in acknowledgement of his situation and he skirted the undertow to a cresting wave. It took him closer to shore. Two seals accompanied him through the surf. Floe and I reached the beach and shook the sea from our flesh.

Beads of water hung in her hair like pearls waiting to melt in the sun.

I popped them between my thumb and index finger.

“My hands was made for this.”

The water rained on her face like tears.

Floe pulled my hands to her breasts. Her nipples were cherry pits after the swim in the cold sea. Goosebumps armored her flesh. My hands were bleached white from the Humboldt Current. Floe’s skin was the color of treasured dust.

We were one.

“Your hands were made for this.”

I couldn’t argue with her logic.

AK, Pam, Rockford, and Cuchillo straggled out of the surf like shipwreck survivors. The swell monstered to triple overhead were and the surfers fought the cruel sea with fearless determination.

Victor came to the water’s edge with eyes blinded to everything, but the young surfers.

“They are Gods.”

“They challenge the Gods.” I had read more Bullfinch’s Mythology than the Bible.

“You really are high.” Pam was right.

“But a nice high.” I kissed Floe.

Her smile fired my heart.

All the cracks melted from it.

“Floe, someone is happy to see you.” Victor pointed at my groin.

“It’s not a sexual erection, but a psychedelic erection.”

They all laughed and we danced up the sloping sand to our driftwood refuge. Helen and Victor were happy to see us.

“Welcome back to land.”

“We have returned from the sea.” Rockford picked up his guitar. He winked at me. “No Beatles.”

“Play what you want.” The LSD had washed away the rejection of a teenage girl in love with Paul McCartney.

AK and Rockford played songs from Monterrey Pop, Woodstock, and Altamont. They reincarnated the 60s.

We sang, we danced, we cried, and we touched the sky.

We stopped our revels, when a seal pup waddled onto the beach. He stared at us with big black eyes. I tried speaking in English and French.

He barked out a command.

I jumped back from his snarling teeth.

“What is he saying?”

“He’s saying the same thing every animal says.” Floe threw the pup an apple. He caught it with circus expertise. “He’s saying that he’s hungry. Sorry, seal, we don’t have any fish.”

The baby seal spit out the fruit and scampered into the surf.

Mark wrote down everything.

I went over to him and stared at his journal.

The words belonged to forgotten race.

“What do you feel?”

“Before everything and now the goodness of the day.” I hugged him. “Thanks.”

“Thank me later.” His smile was a child of the Summer of Love. “Your friends are already saying it.”

I turned my head.

Underneath the bluff Cuchillo, Helen, and Victor were locked in a menage-a-trois. Their three bodies shape-shifted between species and Floe bushwhacked me with a whisper.

“Leave them alone. Be with me.”

“Forever.” Seconds were paralyzed minutes and minutes expanded to hours.

I was peaking.

“Forget forever. I want you now.”

Our embrace carried us to the end of galaxy.

We held our course through the stars.

Our bodies formed a comet.

Its flight brought us back to now.

AK, Rockford and the rest were laughing hysterically.

Sand covered us from head to toe.

“Beach donuts.” Victor was burnt red from the sun.

My flesh felt torched.

Floe was hot to my touch.

At least none of us had stared into the sun.

It was dropping into the Pacific.

The tide was rising up the beach.

I was coming down.

“Home.”

I was exhausted and Floe said, “Not home, but not here.”

I knew where her was and also that I didn’t want this summer to end.

“You asked if I wanted to go north with you.”

“Yes.” Her eyes gleamed with expectation.

“I’m joining the circus.”

Floe threw her arms around me. I lifted her off her feet and we wheeled on the sand around and around until I set her down.

“Really?”

“Really.”

Questions are good answers on LSD.

We put on our clothes and headed for the parking lot.

Traces of the LSD flashed across the cliffs. The Mayans had carved images in the sand. I couldn’t read the hieroglyphics. No one else saw them, but as we approached our cars, Floe said, “Shit.”

I saw why.

Bill and the two lesbians were sitting in the back of the battered pickup truck. The drifter was wearing a leather vest and torn jeans. His beard was coming back. He looked like a deserter from Quantrill’s Legion ready to burn Kansas.

I had told Floe about the fight in the Haight.

She stepped closer to me.

Everyone had heard the story about Joey and Jill in Big Sur.

They stopped walking.

“Well, well.” Bill hopped from the flatbed.

The bruise from my punch had faded from his face.

“Fags, niggers, and Jews.” The southerner cracked his knuckles.

Joey and Jill recognized me.

“The redwoods.”

Their drug had been speed. It still was speed.

Bill licked his lips like a lizard.

Speed made him a brave man.

LSD made us vulnerable.

“When Joey and Jill told me about some guy they fucked in Big Sur, I thought maybe it was you. Then I thought I saw you at Black’s Beach, but Joey said you had a smaller penis, right, Joey?”

“Everyone is small compared to you.” Joey was in love.

Jill didn’t look happy.

She liked women, especially when the only man in their life was Bill.

“So fag boy, how’s fucking a nigger whore.”

I stepped forward with clenched fists.

“Don’t,” begged Floe.

My ears were blind.

Bill raised scarred knuckles.

This was one-on-one.

He bobbed and weaved with cunning.

It was Ali versus Sonny Liston.

I came from Maine.

We don’t believe in boxing.

I slipped a right under his guard and connected with his jaw.

For all this talk Bill was a pug.

He dropped on his ass.

“Do me a favor and keep your hole shut.” I turned to guide Floe past him.

She was running down the beach.

I chased her.

She ran faster.

Waves cut at her feet.

The tide was slapping against the cliff.

Voices shouted out warnings.

“Floe.”

A knee-deep surge knocked her down and sucked her into the ocean.

I grabbed her arm.

“Stay away from me.” She scrambled to her feet. “I told you I didn’t like violence. I told you more than once. I told you about my father. You’re no different than him.”

I had killed three days of Woodstock with a second of Altamont.

The surf swirled up to my thighs.

A path led up the bluff.

Surfers were shouting from above.

“Floe, we have to get out of here.”

I pointed to the cliff.

She snapped out of her trance.

We were in danger.

“Go.”

A wave thundered behind us. I pushed her up the trail. She reached back for me. The sea wanted an offering. I scratched my hands into the dirt and crabbed to safety.

A minute later we were on top of the bluff.

The surfers asked if we were okay.

Floe walked away down 3rd Street.

I wasn’t supposed to follow her.

“Floe.”

She became a shadow in the dusk.

I cried good-bye.

She never saw my tears.

This was a bummer.

“Floe.”

I raised my eyes to the night sky.

The moon rose in the east and meteorites scarred space.

“Floe.”

It was short for something and I knew that I would never know what that was.

I rubbed my knuckles and walked toward the PCH.

Alone.

135 IN THE SHADE by Peter Nolan Smith

In late-July of 1975 Andy K and I left California on a cool morning. Our summer vacation had come to an end. We hitchhiked east from Pomona at the end of the Valley. Leaving LA wasn’t easy for long-hairs. The locals were the sons of Okie rednecks, but a young Mormon girl stopped at the Rancho Cucamonga on-ramp and drove her Monza convertible over the pass into the high desert. She was cute and played the new Joni Mitchell 8-track on the stereo. AK and I both wondered why we were leaving California.

She dropped us in Victorville. It was barely 10Am.

We had made good time and thought ourselves lucky until reaching the eastbound ramp. A long row of hippies stood by the arid curbside. 

Hitchhiking on the Interstate was illegal. The State troopers arrested anyone attempting to break the law. The fine was $50. I had almost $40 in my pocket. California cops didn’t bargain with hippies. AK and I took our place in the queue.

There wasn't a speck of shade in sight. Sand, weeds, and a dented guardrail decorated the scenery. Across the interstate was a gas station and a diner.

“What do you think?” AK asked with a canteen in hand.

“I think it doesn’t look good.” I sipped some water. It tasted of Pomona.

“We’ll have to go easy on this.” AK put away the canteen. We only had one.

After an hour a van picked up three hippies and six more joined the ranks of the stranded travelers. I walked down the line speaking to the other hitchhikers. None of them had anything good to say about this onramp. A New Orleans-bound couple were fortieth in the line-up. They had been on the ramp for 20 hours. Both of them were in the throes of cold turkey.

"15 hours?" I checked up the sky. There wasn't a cloud from horizon to horizon. The temperature was in the high 80s. By late afternoon it would be in the 100s.

"Some of it was night." The rail-thin girl wore a wife-brimmed hat, but her skin had been torched a torrid red. A merciless sun bounced off the black asphalt. 

We were six people behind them. AK and I were #47 and 48. I had been a math major my first years at university. One ride per hour meant that we wouldn’t get out of here for another two days.

"You two should split up. No one picks up two guys." Her strung-out old man had hair to his ass. The skinny girlfriend could have passed for his twin. They made a cute lesbian couple for anyone not looking too closely. 

"Except for perverts." His girlfriend was fuming mad, hungry for a fix. She wanted out of this desert  limbo.

"Yeah, I've had a couple of offers from some sick fucks."

"Wanted me to watch." Her face screwed up with disgust. Sex was as distasteful to junkies as it was to nuns.

"Nothing wrong with being queer." I danced with gays at the 1270 Club in Boston. They pawned me off to fag hags. It was a good deal for me. "Especially if it gets us out of here."

I tried to look bisexual. Andy didn't play that game and the cowboys weren't buying my solo act. The sun was fast approaching high noon. The temperature was in the high 80s.

By noon the sun would be melting the asphalt under our feet. A Greyhound bus exited from the Interstate and pulled into the forlorn gas station.

“Bus?” The heat had stolen AK’s tongue.

“Now?”

“Now.” AK and I grabbed our bags and ran across the cloverleaf to the diner. The Greyhound was billowing diesel fumes. Its driver was exiting from the station's diner. $8.50 bought escape for both of us. The two tickets were worth every penny. We sat in the back and stared out the window at the marooned hippies. Three minutes ago we had been them.

“Good move.” AK sucked down water from the canteen. He saved me half.

“You boys look hot.” An old black woman was peeling an orange.

“We were stuck back there for a few hours.” AK Wiped the sweat off his face.

“Hitchhiking?” She passed half the orange to us.

“Yep.”

“You’da have a lot more luck, if you cut your hair. You like girls and not pretty girls either.” The old black woman laughed with a simple wickedness, because she was telling the truth. “But these peckerwoods out here ain’t too particular about pretty.”

“Thanks.” It had been a long time since I had been called ‘ugly.

AK and I pored our the map, as the bus sped down I-10. The desert was even more desert. The window was warm to the touch, but the bus interior was ACed to Alaska. A few rangy cowboys and the old black woman got off in Barstow. She gave us each an orange. They were sweet and we sucked on the fruit as if we might not taste another for a long time.

The bus pulled out of Barstow. The driver announced that the next stop was Needles. It was a 170 mile ride.

Two and a half hours later the bus pulled into the desert town. I looked at the map. Needles was on the west bank of the Colorado River.

“The Joad family's first stop in THE GRAPES OF WRATH was Needles.” AK loved John Steinbeck. “They drove through the night to avoid the oppressive Arizona heat and they arrived here.”
“The California dream.” I looked out the window. Nobody was on the sidewalks. The heat was too much for man or beast. Needles was a funny place to enter paradise and not funny ha-ha.

“The beginning or the end.” AK held his bag in both hands. He didn’t want to get off the bus. AK had the money for a ticket to Boston. His eyes asked me what to do.

"You want to go, go." In this heat it was every man for himself. My lack of funds meant that Needles was the last stop for me.

"No, I'll stick with you."

"Really?" I would have bet my last money on his ditching out on me.

"Did you ever doubt I would?"

"Not for one second."

The bus braked at the small terminal and the driver announced a thirty-minute break.

We were the last passengers to exit from the bus. I stopped at the bottom of the steps for a second. A wall of heat stuck me and I thought that I had walked into the exhaust of a thousand buses, except our Greyhound was the only one in the sweltering parking lot. The other travelers hurried into the station. AK pushed me off the bus. The sun beat on my skin, as if its rays were ironing my flesh.

Needles was much worse than Victorville. My sandals sunk into the molten asphalt. Across the street a large thermometer displayed the temperature.

135F. 

"That can't be right." AK was gasping for breath. We were from the East Coast. New Englanders wilted whenever the mercury lifted north of 85.

"No one else is outside." I felt like I was breathing off the end of a hair-dryer.

The highway was in the distance. Cars and trucks sped through a shimmering mirage. It was less than a mile away. In this heat that walk was a test of survival. 

"There's a Dairy Queen." AK headed toward the promise of cold ice cream and AC. I followed the New Yorker without question. The heat was so dry that the sweat was seared off our skin. We ran across the parched grass verge. The time was 3pm. High noon lasted long in Needles.

Our entrance into the ice cream parlor was loud. Doors opened easy.

“Shut the damn doors.” The counterman shouted from the cash register. “I’m not cooling the outdoors.”

“Yes, sir,” I answered with respect, as AK shut the glass door. The other customers appreciated the gesture. They were farmers, teenage boys and girls. Hippies were not a common sight in the Mojave, but they directed their attention to spooning sundaes and floats into their mouths. The AC was 68. Everyone looked comfortable.

"Two vanilla ice cream sodas." My mother had given the sweet slurry of cold comfort to me when I had strep throat.

"I want chocolate." Andy stepped up to the counter. "Two too."

After the 3rd ice cream soda our core temperature had dropped to 98.6. 

"Is that thermometer right?" I asked an Okie rancher.

"Sun got to it. Ain't right by 15 degrees. Makes it 120. Hot, but ain't half as hot as July 2, 1967. That was 122. The two degrees don’t sound like much until you been in 122." He spoke with pride. Not many humans can handle that heat. "Felt like the Devil was burning my bones. You boys, headed east?"

He offered a ride to Topock. Some 20 miles from here. The other side of the Colorado. Okie was driving a Ford pick-up. His dog was in the front seat. 

"He don't mind the heat. Don't like strangers though. You gotta sit in the back."

At 3:22 the temperature was hovering at 110.

"We're ready when you're ready."

Needles was the type of town to suck a day from your travels. I had $33 in my pocket. I gave the driver two of them. Gas was 40 cents a gallon. He was grateful for the donation. Twenty minutes later he pulled off the highway. The town was two miles away. We were on the wrong side of the Colorado. The sun was four hours from setting. The only shade was a bullet-holed billboard some 300 feet off the highway.

I stuck out my thumbs. Cars and trucks were coming our way. I pretended to be Jack Kerouac's illegitimate son. He had to have one somewhere.

"Look like you're harmless." AK put on his best smile. The Berkeley School of Music graduate had perfect teeth and excelled at looking harmless. He pushed me to the side and the second car stopped for us.

“We’re out of here.”

The retired couple was heading for Kingman in their Delta 88.

“Nice car.” My father had a gray version.

“Good AC.” AK was settling into the leather seat. “Where you going?”

“Lake Haves. We used to be from Chicago, but the winters got too much for my bones.”

“Isn’t Lake Havasu where they put the London Bridge?” I had read about the move in LIFE magazine.

“Yes and no.” The husband was a full head of hair. He drove with both hands on the wheel. “The developer bought the old London Bridge, thinking it was the Tower Bridge.”

“But it wasn’t.” His white-haired wife had a pleasant chuckle.

“Still they reconstructed the London Bridge and people come from all around to see it.”

“Bridge doesn’t really go anywhere.” His wife shook her head.

“No, but it’s better than no bridge.” This sounded like a regular discussion between them. “I wish I hadn’t moved down here. It's cooler up in the high country. Sometimes down here my head feels hot enough to fry an egg on."

The driver might have said the line maybe 100 times. The punch line was funny to us, because we knew it was true.

“It isn’t this hot all the time.” The desert sun had leathered his wife's skin. Her silver-blonde hair was a homage to Dinah Shore. “We have grandchildren. They come and visit sometimes. That's why we picked you up."

"They're hippies too." The old man smiled in the rearview mirror. The two complimented each other. "There's lemonade in the cooler. Drink as much as you want."

There were four glass screw-top bottles. 

"Don't be shy." “Don’t be shy.” The driver floored the pedal. The big V8 ate up the road. The old man was in a hurry to get out of the heat. “Drink as much as you want. "Drink as much as you want."

Andy and I drained one each in thirty seconds.

We were safe from dehydration. We were leaving the frying pan. We both slept in the back seat.

The old couple pulled off the road at Kingman for the night. This town was mentioned in Chuck Berry's ROUTE 66.

“We’re staying here for the night.” The motor lodge offered rooms for $20. 

“We’ll keep on going.”

“I’d pay for a room.” The old man had a kind heart.

“No, thanks, we’ll be fine now we’re out of that furnace.”

We waved good-bye and stood on the remainder of old Route 66.

“I can’t believe two hours ago it was 135 in the shade.” The air at 3000 feet was cool relief and I stuck out my thumb.

“The thermometer was broken.” AK sat on the guard railing.

“It was still as hot as I’ve ever been.”

“You can say that again.”

I didn’t bother to repeat the obvious. The sun was setting in the pines and a semi was throttling its diesel engine on its way through Kingman. Wherever we would be tomorrow morning was a night away.

TAKE ME by Peter Nolan Smith

The summer of 1972.

Seal Beach south of LA.

My college friend and I were staying at his cousin's beach house. We liked drinking in the dive bar on the PCH. Fish swan underneath a sheet of glass. We thought that was cool. Both of us were 19.

Two nights before out departure for San Francisco Nick and I approached the Fish Bar.

A Porsche convertible was parked in front with the keys in ignition.

Both of us thought the same thing.

"Take me."
We exchanged a glance and Nick said, "I drive."

"You got out. I drive in."

Someplace on I5 Nick hit 125.

I topped out at 115 on the return.

Twenty minutes later we parked the car in the same spot and walked into the bar.

"Anyone leave their keys in a Porsche?" Nick dangled the keys.

No one said yes, but everyone looked guilty.

We had a couple of beers and left the keys back in the ignition. It was someone else time to joyride that night.

THE FIRST FORTY MILES by Peter Nolan Smith

May 24, 1974 was a warm morning in Boston. A pale blue swathed the sky from east to west. It was a good day to start a long trip. My friend AK, a blonde nursing school co-ed, and I traveled by the trolley to Jamaica Plains. We got off at Boynton Street and walked down to number 166. A middle-aged man stepped onto the sidewalk and tapped his watch. It was 9:10. “You’re ten minutes late.” A porcupine buzz-cut topped his erect posture and his chino trousers had been ironed to a razor sharpness. The startling whiteness of his tee-shirt shouted ex-Marine. “Sorry.” It was my standard answer to men of his age and conviction. A blonde woman sat on the porch of the three-story apartment building. Her black dress testified to a lingering period of mourning. I bowed my head in respect for her loss. She bit her lower lip and dropped her gaze to the folded hands on her lap. “I suppose ten is better than twenty. The name’s Jake Moore.” The forty year-old seized my hand. “Please to meet you.” I met his firm grip with strength. “So you’re my driving team.” His steely eyes studied my shoulder-length hair, then regarded AK’s pony tail, and warmed to Pam’s free-flowing blonde locks. “That’s us.” I released his hand and introduced us by name. AK let me do the talking. Jake and I spoke with the same Boston accent. The piano player came from Long Island and Red Sox fans hated New York. “My grandmother lived not far from here on St. Joseph’s Street.” Nana had passed away in 1968. I missed her beef stew on cold nights. “Irish?” “From the West. Nana spoke Gaelic.” My grandmother had sailed over from Galway at the age of 14. “She came off the ship and lose her shoe. Nana said she came to America like Cinderella, but she ended up working as a maid in a Marblehead mansion.” “Better than a potato patch in the Connemara. Mine came over in the Year of the Pig.” Our shared heritage erased some of the gap between our haircuts. “My Nana arrived in the year of the Crow whenever that was.” It had something to do with Chinese Astrology. “Those women liked keeping a secret.” “That they did.” Jake looked over to the driveway. “That’s the car.” I glanced at the off-white station wagon with black and gold California plates. The chrome details were polished to a high sheen and the fake wooden paneling was unblemished by dings. The spacious back could sleep two with the passenger seats folded down and it was going to be ours for the next week, if Jake gave his OK. “Looks like a good ride.” “It’s not just any car.” He walked over to the station wagon with a content glow on his face. “This is 1967 Ford Torino with a 428 FE V8 and a three-speed automatic. I was lucky to get one of the last Cobra-Jet engines.”

“Wasn’t the same engine in Steve McQueen’s ride in BULLITT?” AK interjected to demonstrate his knowledge of cars.

“Ford designed that 390 for a Mustang GT, which had a much lighter chassis than the Torino.” Jake launched into a minute-long monologue about the Torino’s selling points. Most of them dealt with speed. “This baby can do a quarter-mile in 14 seconds.”

“Cool.” I nodded my head with appreciation. “My only car was a 1964 VW bug. Its top speed was 85.”

“85?” Jake scoffed my claim.

“Downhill with a tailwind in the White Mountains.”

"You know telling someone about your speeding isn’t the best way to get them to give you a car.”

“I guess not.”

“I’ll make sure that he keeps it down.” Pam shook her head.

She thought I had a big mouth. She wasn't all that wrong.

“I had hoped for someone more like me to drive the car, but there’s not many of me around Boston these years.” Jake searched our eyes for signs of drug use.

“More than you think.” South Boston still supplied the Marines with warm bodies.

“I suppose you protested against the War.” His statement was more an accusation than a question.

“When I was 17, I tried to enlist in the Marines to get out of my town, but my mother wouldn’t sign the papers.” My mother was a devout Catholic and hated communism, but she had loved me too much to allow my fighting overseas in a deadly war. “She threw them in the trash.”

“And at 18 you were a hippie?” Long hairs were traitors in the eyes of the Silent Majority.

“Something like that.”

An older friend had returned from Viet-Nam in 1968, extolling Muhammad Ali’s creed that no VC had killed anyone in the USA and my hair grew down to my shoulders in less than six months.

“There’s a lot of ‘something like that’ going around.” Sadness tinged his words and Jake held out his hand.

His fingers twitched a request. “Let me see your driver’s licenses.”

AK and Pam gave him their out-of-state driving permits. Mine had been issued for a Boston address. Last autumn I had been arrested after a high-speed chase in a VW from Pam’s college, but that information was only available downtown at the Department of Motor Vehicle on Causeway Street.

“Well, the faces match the photos.” Jake returned the IDs. “We drove out here for a family visit. My wife can’t bear driving through those corn fields again.”

“It is a long ride.” The distance from coast to coast was almost 3000 miles.

“You ever gone cross-country before?”

“I’ve not driven, but I hitchhiked back and forth twice. The first time was in 1972. A Super Bee picked us up in Iowa. The driver drove 100 or better most of the way to Reno. The trip from Boston to San Francisco took me and my friend about fifty hours.”

Pam and AK dismissed this claim with matching smirks.

“Fifty hours sounds fast, but it ends up averaging 60mph.” Jake stepped away from his car.

“We didn’t stop much. The driver was in a hurry to reach LA.” I had nothing to gain from an explanation about steering from the passenger seat whenever Lucky nodded out from his Methedrine jag.

“When I was stationed in Key West I used to hitchhike to Boston. Everyone who picked me up told a different story, almost like they were trying to change their lives, if only for the time I was in their car ride and that’s the beauty of the open road. You become someone different with a new name and a new past. You get out of the car and stand on the road with your thumb out, you go back to who you are. There is no escaping the future of you.”

Jake’s unexpected insight humbled my youthful arrogance, because his words constructed a link between college students, hoboes, tramps, soldiers, beatniks, runaways, and hippies traveling the same paths across America.

“No one believes my story about making the trip in fifty hours.”

“All stories are true, if interesting.” Jake clapped my shoulder and I gave him a smile.

The War in Vietnam was coming to an end and we had lost our hatchets instead of burying them.

“Hitchhiking’s a great way to travel. People have been traveling that way since Jonah rode in the whale. As for driving cross country in fifty hours this time, I’d appreciate if you take it a little easier on my car.”

“Driving fast in America is against the law now.” Congress had established a national speed limit earlier in the year.

“These idiots in government think driving 55 will save gas and free us from the Arabs. There’s no shortage of gas.” Jake’s face turned red with anger. “But you be careful on the road. Nothing the state troopers like better than arresting hippies for driving 60.”

“Thanks for the warning.” A station wagon provided good camouflage for passage through the Midwest. “We’ll keep it to 55. I’m sure your car gets better mileage at that speed.”

“Why are you driving cross country?” Jake asked Pam.

“The farthest west I’ve ever been is Buffalo to visit my college roommate and I’ve always wanted to see the West.” The blonde in her breast-clinging paisley dress was a vision of Woodstock beauty. Like most girls her age she wasn’t wearing a bra.

“Then you’re in for a treat; the Great Plains, the Rockies, the high deserts, the Sierras, and then California.” Jake had been on the road before and more than once. “And all the people. All different. All Americans.”

“Seeing America.” Pam added to her credibility as the girl next door by saying, “My fiancée is doing his internship at a hospital north of San Francisco, and I’ll be working at the same hospital this summer. Harry and I met in high school.”

“You’re high school sweethearts like my wife and me.” Jake regarded the woman in black. Her eyes remained fixed on her hands. “Somerville High School. Class of 1950.”

“I just graduated from college with a degree in economics.” I volunteered this information to change the subject.

My high school sweetheart had married my friend. Kyla had give Happy two kids. Everyone in my hometown said that they were the ideal family.

“What about a job?” Jake asked, as if had served his stretch in the military without counting days or years.

“I drove taxi to pay for college.” Four to five nights a week had taken their toll on my grades. “I probably spent too many hours behind the wheel. I ended up at the bottom of my class.”

“His diploma read ‘sin laude’.” AK added with a smile. He had told the same joke at my graduation party

My father hadn’t appreciated the Long Islander’s humor, yet my mother had beamed with pride after the graduation ceremony. Her mother had not finished grammar school back in the Connemara.

“You graduated and that’s what’s important.” Jake ignored AK’s dig.

As a fellow Hibernian the ex-soldier admired a lengthy education. Both our grandmothers had probably not finished grammar school under the British.

“Anyone can drive taxi. What about a real job?”

“I’m starting a teaching job at South Boston High School in the fall.” It was actually a substitute teacher position. I had taken no education classes in college, but a friend of my older brother had been elected onto the Boston School Committee and my position had been a reward for working on his campaign.

“I’d rather face a banzai charge than a class filled with teenagers.” Jake shivered in shudders.

“Yeah, when AK’s friend invited us out to Encinitas for the summer, I figured to take one long last beach vacation.” 65 was mandatory retirement age for a teacher. I would be working well into the next century, but this summer was dedicated to sea and sun south of LA. “We appreciate your letting us take your car.”

“It’s a big engine and guzzles gas, so I’m giving you an extra $100 for the trip, but I want you to fill the tank up every time the gas gauge hits half and only use the highest octane from Sunoco.” He held out the keys.

“Yes, sir.” I smiled to Pam and AK. We were minutes away from hitting the road. “We’ll see you in six days.”

“Make it seven. I don’t need you breaking your old record.” Jake and I signed the matching contracts from the drive-away company. “Have a good trip and drive safe.”

“I’ll make sure they take care of your car.” Pam put her bags in the car and positioned herself in the rear. She rolled down the window, ready for the wind in her hair.

“You do that, Pam.” His eyes studied her face for a few seconds, as if she might be someone else. To me she looked like the singer from The Band Named Smith. They had hit the Top Forty with BABY IT’S YOU.

“See you in Lodi.” Pam’s major was nursing and bed manners were her strong point in TLC.

I tossed my canvas bag in the back and sat behind the wheel. AK was my co-pilot. I reversed out of the driveway, then shifted the transmission into Drive. I beeped the horn and headed onto the Jamaica Way headed toward Brighton, where we would pick up the Mass Pike at the Charles River.

“For a second I didn’t think Jake was going to give us the car.” AK unfolded a map of the USA.

“It was never in doubt.” I drove around Jamaica Pond in the slow lane.

“What? With your admission to being a traitor.”

“I was telling him the truth, besides Pam had him wrapped around her little finger.”

“The power of feminine wile.” Pam smiled at me in the rearview mirror.

“Something never to be underestimated.”

“This is a nice car. It even smells new.” Pam came from the suburbs. She liked things clean.

“Jake was in love with his car.” AK had the same feeling for his Firebird.

“It’s a man thing. Sometimes I think my boyfriend loves his car more than me.” Pam checked her reflection in the window and tied a scarf around her head to keep her hair from getting snarled in the wind.

“What kind of car does he drive?” AK asked with the sly interest of a jealous suitor.

“A 1974 Mustang II.” She sounded disappointed of this. “It’s red.”

“Nice.” I didn’t mean it. Ford had dumped a Pinto engine into the classic Mustang to sacrifice power for fuel efficiency. “He drive it cross country?”

“No, he put it on a train and flew to pick it up in San Francisco.”

“Good thinking.” AK rolled his eyes. His Pontiac Firebird was fast, but its low mileage and bald tires were two reasons that we were driving Jake’s Torino.

“I wish we were that smart.” I remembered that I didn’t like Harry and his choice of cars reinforced my disdain.

“Are you making fun of Harry?”

“Not at all. I don’t have a car or a girlfriend to love.”

“Funny.” She didn’t mean it and I cringed at stepping on her toes so early on a long trip.

# 1 rule of reefer was to only break one law at a time.

“Wonder what Jake listened to on the radio.” AK pushed a button and both of us were surprised to hear Wildman Steve cuing up America’s # 1 hit. The Hues Corporation had scored a huge crossover hit with ROCK THE BOAT. AK’s fingers crawled over an imaginary keyboard. For a long-haired white boy from Levittown he had a lot of soul.

Five minutes later I turned off Storrow Drive onto Cambridge Street. The sun flashed off the Charles River.

The clear sky was a good omen for our journey.

A bearded hitchhiker stood at the entrance to the Mass Pike. I veered over to the breakdown lane and braked a hundred feet before the toll booth.

“What are you doing?” Pam asked with alarm. “You don’t know this person. He could be an ax murderer.”

“I’ve hitchhiked everywhere in the States and I never ran into an ax murderer.”

The ragged longhair was waiting by the passenger door. The scent of damp earth seeped through the closed windows. He was older than I thought and I was having second thoughts about him, but karma overruled my apprehension.

“Next week I’ll be hitchhiking down the coast of California. If I don’t pick up hitchhikers now, then I will be stranded in Big Sur for days.”

“I’m not happy about this.” Pam slid over to the driver’s side. “If he starts anything, I expect you to take care of it.”

“I promise I will.” I unlocked the rear door.

“Thanks for stopping. The name is Bill. I’m Mississippi-bound.” He was weathered by the road and a thick Southern accent slithered from his chapped lips.

“We can drop you at Sturbridge. We’re going to California.” I had friends from the South. They were good people.

“Damn, California, always wanted to see the fucking weirdos out there.” He was no hippie. “I’m joining a fucking carnival for the summer. We travel from Biloxi to Texas and up into the wheat fields. I specialize in bumper cars. How people drive them says a lot about them.”

“How so?” AK had to ask.

“Cautious people play it safe. Aggressive people go for fucking head-ons. You look like in-between people.”

His barbed comments were aimed at me. “In-between people get sandwiched by aggressive people. They don’t stand a fucking chance in life.”

Bill had been in the car for less than three minutes and I was already regretting having stopped for him. I slowed down to hear him fill the sullen silence between AK, Pam, and me with a rattling monologue about the life on the road.

“I spent the winter in a fucking logging town. Them damned Yankees don’t give a fuck for crackers like me, but at least I have my fucking front teeth. Last night I was in a bar on the river. They had a live band.” His hands draped over the seat. The knuckles were scuffed with scabs. “The pansy-assed guitarist wouldn’t play FREEBIRD, but played fucking Neil Young. I taught him the chords later. Fucking Yankees.” Pam sighed loudly in disapproval of his favorite adjective and he laughed, “Sorry, Sunshine, if I offend you. I was brought up twenty miles past the fucking wrong side of the tracks."

I turned up the radio for HOLLYWOOD SWINGING by Kool and the Gang.

“Why you listening to this fucking disco shine crap?” Bill barked over my shoulder.

“Fucking disco shine crap?” I glared at him in the rearview mirror. His face was swollen from hard drinking and his nose had been flattened by well-earned lefts and rights.

“Yeah, I hate fucking disco.”

“This isn’t disco.” The song was a big hit at the 1270, where gay boys loved dancing with straight boys and the deejay spun the best dance records in Boston. “Kool and the Gang are a thousand times more hip than that BAND ON THE RUN bullshit by that loser Paul McCarthy.”

“Loser? The Beatles are the fucking best band in the world.” Bill looked like he hadn’t slept much in the last few days and he smelled like a disinterred corpse.

“I’ll handle this.” AK had a much cooler head and I shut my mouth rather than lose my temper. Bill was a human like the rest of us. Maybe he was a little more unlucky than us, but the same flesh and blood.

“What makes you an fucking expert, Jew Boy?”

“Jew Boy?”

“What? You’re not a Jew? I can them as I see fucking them. Sorry, I don’t mean fucking nothing by it.”

“I’m at Berkelee Music School.” AK was also auditioning for a gig as a keyboard player for an all-black R & B band from Roxbury. Jump Street wanted a white guy in the group to deal with Boston’s honkie club owners. I had called him the ‘token whitey’. He didn’t think that was funny, but it evened us for his crack about my ‘sin laude’ status.

“So you go to fucking school for music?”

“Yeah, and the one thing I learned was that there are all kinds of music. HEY JUDE might be the best song for white people, but it’s nothing in comparison to SEX MACHINE by Sly Stone.”

“Or KUNG FU FIGHTING.” I checked the speedometer. The needle was wavering on 75 and I slowed down to the new limit, which felt 15 mph in a Model T. “Or SOUL MAKOSSA. You have to open your ears or else you close your heart.”

“That’s the fucking music they play in fag bars.” The word ‘fag’ carried a long-seeded hatred.

I stomped on the brakes in time to pull over to the breakdown lane. The bridge across the Charles River was another hundred years ahead. Cars whizzed by switching lanes for 128 North or South.

“That’s it.”

Fags were not strangers. The neighbor across the street from my parents was a homosexual. Arthur let us swim in his pool. My youngest brother showed his tendencies by stripping my sisters’ Ken Doll and not Barbie.

“Why you stopping?” Bill leaned forward with menace.

“Why?” The car’s owner had a buzz-cut. Bill had long-hair. Jake was more us than our passenger. I turned around in the bucket seat and revved the big V8. The Torino was still in drive.

“I’ll tell you why. Jack Kerouac wrote in ON THE ROAD that the biggest challenge for a hitchhiker was proving that the driver didn’t make a mistake picking him up and I have to admit I made a mistake with you. Now get out of the car.”

“He really means it.” AK had seen me fight on more than one occasion.

“This isn’t fucking Sturbridge.” He hesitated opening the door.

“Doesn’t matter to me. I don’t like queer bashers.” We hadn’t even reached 128.

“I fucking knew it the second I got in the car.” Bill opened the door and pointed a finger at us.

“Knew what?” I had to ask the obvious.

“That you two were fucking queers.” His accusation had been launched at hundreds of young men who weren’t hurting anyone.

“Even if I was, I wouldn’t fuck you with an elephant’s dick.”

“You fucking fag.” He started for me and Pam shrieked with the shrillness of the music from the bathroom murder scene from Hitchcock’s PSYCHO. I blocked his hands and AK leaped out of the car and grabbed Jim’s jacket.

The pianist mightn’t have been a fighter, but he manhandled the roustabout out of the car like a mahout hooking an elephant and flung our passenger across the breakdown lane. Bill tumbled down the embankment and AK chucked the vagrant’s bag over the slope. A lucky toss hit the rising Jim in the shoulder and our evicted passenger completed his descent down the gully.

“Go.” AK jumped in the front, checking his hands.

My right foot hit the gas and the Torino accelerated from a standing stop. Pam shut the back door and then leaned over the seat to examine AK’s knuckles.

“Nothing’s broken.”

“I’m not much of a fighter.”

“Unlike some people we know.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Well, I hope you learned your lesson.” She folded her arms across her chest. “He had his hands all over me.”

“Sorry.” I checked the rearview mirror.

Pam’s eyes met mine.

No straight man will understand the everyday terror of being a woman or homosexual and the blonde smiled at me, happy that Bill had hit the dirt hard.

“Let’s pretend it didn’t happen.” She tilted her head to the side. Blonde hair covered one side of her face and the twenty-year old nursing student pushed the strands behind her ears. “No more hitchhikers. This isn’t ON THE ROAD. And one more thing?”

“What?”

“Could we keep the use of ‘fucking’ to a minimum?”

“Your wish is my command.” I gripped the wheel and AK turned up the volume. The radio station WILD was playing James Brown’s PAYBACK PART 2. The Godfather of Soul had a wicked rhythm section.

AK and I exchanged a shrug. She was right about hitchhikers, but then women were right about everything and men were always wrong.

We crossed over the Charles River and I slowed to pick up a ticket at the toll booth. I thanked the attendant and laid a light foot on the gas.

A warm wind gushed through the windows. The traffic on the Interstate was rolling at 60. The Torino had a full tank. The station wagon overtook a procession of slower cars.

Three days from now was my birthday and I was going to be 22.

I stepped on the accelerator.

Once the speedometer hit 100 AK looked at me and I maintained my pressure on the gas. At this speed the other cars on the road were standing still, but none of them were heading to California and it was a long way to the Pacific.