Journey 1976
It was time to go. My personal love relationships had tanked. I had spent the winter with a bad cough that wouldn't go away. I felt I was drinking too much and doing more dope than I should. And I realized that the guy I worked for was madly in love with me and I couldn't/wouldn't reciprocate and I felt guilty about that. So I shipped a few things on to my mother in Los Angeles, got rid of almost everything else and packed up a pack and stuck out my thumb.
A friend said I was going off to California to be a 'bronze god' - thanks. I had also finished the first draft of an entire novel. I don't even remember getting out of New Orleans now. Somebody picked me up. There were a bunch of rides. I was reading "All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers" by Larry McMurtry and lost it somewhere along the way and never finished reading it. I sang to the traffic and practiced my whistling skills. I thought I had a pretty good rendition of Poor Wayfaring Stranger just in whistling it, but now realize it was probably pretty bad, but almost anything sounded good while being drowned out by traffic.
I was inspected by the Texas Highway Patrol at one point. I had cut off all of my hair before leaving so I resembled a clean cut kid. There had been a little pamphlet published years before entitled something like "A Hippies' Guide to The Man" or something like that. You needed to call them Sir. I did that. They checked me out for weapons and dope. And one of them wanted to take me to the Greyhound Station and make me pay for a ticket, but I told them I didn't have much money and I was going to Los Angeles for my family reunion and I wasn't ever coming back. They finally left me to my own devices.
So I got as far as Ft. Stockton and was let out on the west side of town in mid-afternoon and stood there forever. The kids cruising stopped to visit before the sun went down. I ended up just walking down from the highway into a clump of bushes and laying out my bedroll and sleeping and the long night of waking up and traffic and then no traffic and finally finding myself at dawn and putting myself back together again to go back up again to the edge of the road to try again.
A rancher gave me a lift and offered me a beer for breakfast which I accepted and then let me out fifteen miles down the road out in the middle of nowhere. He was turning off to go home.
I wrote a song a lot time afterward about that. (Actually it was a poem first, and then I made it a song thirty years later). https://open.spotify.com/album/3QnU3HQaQ1oJseae3yDnSz
The song is a scroll down "Where Are You Going?"
I made it over to a creek and refilled my canteen and went back and waited. Finally I got picked up by a moving van and rode blazing all the way across west Texas at 90 and then at 100 mph. And told the two guys about New Orleans. They didn't think I should have left the girl I had been living with the year before.
They let me off in El Paso, A sweet gay guy picked me up and took to the west side of the city all the while offering to take me home with him and he promised to treat me right. I declined. Then again standing out and a guy in a van picked me up. He wanted to drive straight through to LA, was I up for that and I said sure. He had a German Shepherd in the back. So we drove and drove and switched off. Smoke a little dope. I think I napped first. Then he crawled into to the back to nap and I drove and was stopped at the California state line. They wanted to know if I had anything to declare. I told them no, 'thinking shit, don't search the van.' They let me go. I think he relieved me again and he woke me as we pulled into downtown LA near the main bus terminal. I thanked him and walked in to get a public bus down the Carson where my Mom and Stepdad lived. And walked into their mobile home park by 10:00 in the morning. 'You should have called' they told me.
It was time to go. My personal love relationships had tanked. I had spent the winter with a bad cough that wouldn't go away. I felt I was drinking too much and doing more dope than I should. And I realized that the guy I worked for was madly in love with me and I couldn't/wouldn't reciprocate and I felt guilty about that. So I shipped a few things on to my mother in Los Angeles, got rid of almost everything else and packed up a pack and stuck out my thumb.
A friend said I was going off to California to be a 'bronze god' - thanks. I had also finished the first draft of an entire novel. I don't even remember getting out of New Orleans now. Somebody picked me up. There were a bunch of rides. I was reading "All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers" by Larry McMurtry and lost it somewhere along the way and never finished reading it. I sang to the traffic and practiced my whistling skills. I thought I had a pretty good rendition of Poor Wayfaring Stranger just in whistling it, but now realize it was probably pretty bad, but almost anything sounded good while being drowned out by traffic.
I was inspected by the Texas Highway Patrol at one point. I had cut off all of my hair before leaving so I resembled a clean cut kid. There had been a little pamphlet published years before entitled something like "A Hippies' Guide to The Man" or something like that. You needed to call them Sir. I did that. They checked me out for weapons and dope. And one of them wanted to take me to the Greyhound Station and make me pay for a ticket, but I told them I didn't have much money and I was going to Los Angeles for my family reunion and I wasn't ever coming back. They finally left me to my own devices.
So I got as far as Ft. Stockton and was let out on the west side of town in mid-afternoon and stood there forever. The kids cruising stopped to visit before the sun went down. I ended up just walking down from the highway into a clump of bushes and laying out my bedroll and sleeping and the long night of waking up and traffic and then no traffic and finally finding myself at dawn and putting myself back together again to go back up again to the edge of the road to try again.
A rancher gave me a lift and offered me a beer for breakfast which I accepted and then let me out fifteen miles down the road out in the middle of nowhere. He was turning off to go home.
I wrote a song a lot time afterward about that. (Actually it was a poem first, and then I made it a song thirty years later). https://open.spotify.com/album/3QnU3HQaQ1oJseae3yDnSz
The song is a scroll down "Where Are You Going?"
I made it over to a creek and refilled my canteen and went back and waited. Finally I got picked up by a moving van and rode blazing all the way across west Texas at 90 and then at 100 mph. And told the two guys about New Orleans. They didn't think I should have left the girl I had been living with the year before.
They let me off in El Paso, A sweet gay guy picked me up and took to the west side of the city all the while offering to take me home with him and he promised to treat me right. I declined. Then again standing out and a guy in a van picked me up. He wanted to drive straight through to LA, was I up for that and I said sure. He had a German Shepherd in the back. So we drove and drove and switched off. Smoke a little dope. I think I napped first. Then he crawled into to the back to nap and I drove and was stopped at the California state line. They wanted to know if I had anything to declare. I told them no, 'thinking shit, don't search the van.' They let me go. I think he relieved me again and he woke me as we pulled into downtown LA near the main bus terminal. I thanked him and walked in to get a public bus down the Carson where my Mom and Stepdad lived. And walked into their mobile home park by 10:00 in the morning. 'You should have called' they told me.
No comments:
Post a Comment