I'd just been to the centennial reenactment of the battle of Kennesaw Mountain. I was in blue. The rebels, flipping the actual event, outnumbered us five to one. They were still fighting that "woah," in more ways than one; the Feds had just dug the bodies of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner from a levy in Mississippi. Three civil rights workers murdered by the Law and the KKK; two Jews and a black kid. The white guys were shot, the black guy was beaten with an impact weapon, bones broken in three or four places, and shot.
"We won't talk about that," said my first ride, a slender, quiet, courteous local man. We must have talked about something else. He was a southern paradigm; polite, gracious, crisp, intelligent, devout, bigoted, racist, possibly violent.
A plump, congenial woman picks me up in Tennessee, and, further down the road, buys me lunch at a family cafe with smoked hams hanging from the ceiling and walls. It was crowded and we were getting a lot of disapproving looks. I didn't know why and, in all my accrued wisdom, still don't. They thought she was bonking me out of class?
Night comes, I find myself at a bend in a country road, hitchhiking in front of a shingle-side store; on duty is a blond kid about my age, son of the owner, and his buddy. I'm a little leery; here they are, the crackers who spit on little black girls. And there is a touch of the sinister in their camaraderie toward me, though I can't exactly place it. We're drinking Cokes out of the red machine in front; the real stuff, with a kick, in the curvy bottles. Insects hit against the light in the humid night.
A black kid comes by, they all know each other, and I'm watching them for signs, but they're neighborly. When he ambles off into the dark, they turn their slit eyes to me with a grin, "Stupid nigger," the son says. There it is.
No rides. I walk up the road a ways and sleep in the grass, I guess. I don't remember carrying a bedroll.
In the morning I get a ride with a family in an old sedan; wiry little man, big fat wife, two or three kids. The wife doesn't want me there and is sending off evil pheromones at the sneakily gleeful guy. There's a peppery, fetid odor coming off the woman in her mother hubbard; I think she's got gas, but I'm not sure.
Arkansas is a series of haunting tableaux - all these humid, prehistoric fields lined with windbreak trees, cutting off on long diagonals to the road - unpainted shacks - unfamiliar, Cretaceous era vegetation. They drop me off in Texarkana on the Arkansas/Texas state line. I don't remember most of Texas; sorry, whoever you were.
I'm on the west end of Amarillo; somewhere around there we picked up Highway 66. A a crew-cut guy in a candy stripe shortsleeve shirt and aftershave pulls over, he looks like he might be one of the Kingston Trio. We're riding through endless flatland, each two-lane crossroad leading to a little cluster of farm structures in a willow stand halfway to the horizon. The guy is asking me if, back home, I ever "played around." Huh? "Got a little action?" Well, I don't want to admit that I've never even held hands, never been on a date - I'm an outcast like you wouldn't believe - so I say, "A little." Then he starts to take a right up one of those roads. "Where are you going?" Turns out he's gay. I knew the word from the Time Magazine glossary. I still recall his eyebrows popping when he realizes we have no understanding, not at all. And can feel my own jumping off my forehead.
There I am, Nowhere, Texas, and thirsty. Not a car in any direction. Lonesome highway satchel at my feet. Alive! Young! Free! There is a chance - remote - but a chance - I might get laid someday.
A man in a new pickup truck lets me ride in the bed with the dog - he's on his way to San Jose, California. I take off my shirt and face into the hot dry wind our MPH generates. I get off with a windburn on my chest that leaves me picking at blisters for the next week. You ever get windburn? Know anybody who did? Rock climbers, maybe.
Memory wakes up seeing the green and white highway signs on 80; Berkeley. Oakland. I'm dropped at a gas station some damn where there and pick up a pay phone.
You know, I think I'll stop here. In a minute my bearded brother-in-law Vernon, the youngest certified chemist in the state, will pick me up and land me in their circle of pothead bohos in that twilight transition from beatnick to hippie. San Francisco Bay in nineteen sixty-four, motherfuckers, and just to stand there was a bone deep thrill.
