October 16, 2002

• April, 1973

  
  

  My destination, when I left Stony in Colorado, was Alaska.  Alaska had been our ultimate tentative destination when we decided to spend a winter high in the Rocky Mountains.  The thought behind that was that it would let us get a sense of what the cold and snow were like, and to develop some useful skills.  A move to the wilderness was something my hippie friends and I had talked about a lot, for a long time.  Among my circle of speed freak friends in Eugene, we talked about a nomadic lifestyle in the wilderness areas of eastern Oregon.  I don’t know anyone who ever did that, though.  We just talked about it.

  
  

  I had wanted to visit Alaska ever since I was in prison.  One of my friends in there had grown up in Anchorage.  Her main selling point, when she told me I’d love it there, was the high proportion of men to women in the population.  What really sold me, however, were the slides our typing teacher brought in to show us.  Her husband had been stationed in Fairbanks with the army, and she loved Alaska.  The entire typing class had been surprised to see all the flowers in Fairbanks.  I don’t remember her showing us any slides of winter, but ice and snow were what everyone thought of when Alaska came up.  Alaska then went on my list of places to see, “someday”.

  
  

  I didn’t know how I’d get there, as I pulled out onto the highway in that old pickup truck.  It was a beat-up, noisy thing and I had no illusions of its reliability.  I decided I’d drive it as far as it would take me.  I supposed it would probably make it through the full tank of gas I had and the other tank I had enough money for.  Beyond that, what lay ahead remained to be seen.  At least I had my bicycle in the back of the truck, just in case.  I planned to go to the west coast, then head north.

  
  

  That afternoon, I stopped for a hitchhiker.  He was a college student, headed back to school from spring break.  His destination was Salt Lake City.  I said I’d take him all the way there if he would buy me some gas.  He agreed.  I’ve never been the type to need to fill empty time with talk.  When he asked questions, I answered.  In that way, he got some of my story–enough, I suppose, to intrigue him.  Dark fell before we got to SLC, and he invited me to spend the night at the place he shared with his 3 roommates.  There seemed to be no sexual subtext; I sensed no threat, no strings attached, so I accepted.

  
  

  On the outskirts of SLC, the truck developed a new noise, a rhythmic thump from somewhere underneath.  Seeing a gas station near an exit, I got off the Interstate.  The truck rolled to a stop on the frontage road.  A very helpful Salt Lake samaritan saw us stopped there and stopped to ask if we needed assistance.  He had a big pickup and a tow chain, so he hooked us up and took us the short distance to the gas station.

  
  

  I described the problem to the mechanic on duty; he scooted under the truck and said it was the universal joint.  Our curious and friendly benefactor had stuck around to find out what developed.  After my hitchhiker and I had talked things over and he said there was room behind their place to park the truck and work on it, the man hooked the chain back up and I had an interesting ride across town in tow.

  
  

  People, never tow a vehicle with a chain or strap.  Always use a towbar, a good, strong, solid towbar.  The other way is just too hard on the mind and body of the person in the towed vehicle who is trying not to get terminal whiplash from jerky starts, and to avoid running into the rear of the towing vehicle at sudden stops.  I’ve steered vehicles in tow several times.  I never want to do it again.  In most places, it’s illegal, anyway.  A sturdy cargo strap is a good thing to keep in the boot for pulling someone out (or being pulled out) of a ditch or a mire, but it’s not for the street or highway. At least, that time, the brakes were good.

  
  

  They took me to a great old house in a classy neighborhood on the southeast side of town a mile or so, fourteen blocks, from the strip of bars, pawnshops, bail bondsmen and tattoo parlors at the edge of the downtown business district.  I know how many blocks, because the first job I got in SLC was in one of those bars.  It was a big storefront with a back room where the huge dance floor was bordered on two sides by booths and on a third side by a little stage and a wall of sound equipment.  It was a part-time, night shift, weekend job.

  
  

  Each of the four roommates had his own bedroom, and there was a friend of theirs crashing on the floor in the front parlor.  They offered me the dining room, and I laid my sleeping bag on the padded bench in the big bay window.  In the morning, I opened my eyes to birds and flowers and clear blue skies.  They had a good stereo, Blue Oyster Cult, David Bowie….  I was in heaven.  When the boys all heard about the truck and my situation, they suggested that I stay there, find a job and work not just long enough to buy a new U-joint, but to get gas and oil to get me a lot farther up the road.  After I started bringing in groceries and leaving big salads in the fridge and pots of soup, pans of pasta and such on the stove, everyone was more than happy with the arrangement.

  
  

  I loved the job.  It was a beer-only bar, frequented by young people, with good live rock and roll all night.  Like partying and getting paid for it, it exhausted me physically.  Within the first week, I had found a second job, weekdays, swing shift, as pleating machine operator and QC inspector in a drapery factory on the far southwest edge of SLC.  I rode the bike, miles and miles, to work in the afternoon and back across town to the house after midnight.  I learned to hate Salt Lake City.

  
  

  I have run with bikers in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, hung out in the rough neighborhoods of Wichita, Amarillo, Tacoma, Cheyenne and Sacramento.  I’ve ridden freight trains and hitchhiked all across the western USA.  No other place even comes close to creeping me out and scaring me as much as Salt Lake City.  Men in their cars accosted me wherever I rode my bike, night or day.  They followed me, leaning out their windows, making offers and suggestions.  One even nosed his car in at the curb in front of me, cutting me off.

  
  

  To evade him, I jumped the curb, did a quick U-turn, and slipped into an alley and across a series of backyards.  All those years as a child, just me and my bike, inventing greater and greater challenges of speed and agility, paid off in SLC.  I worked out a pervert-avoidance strategy.  Daytimes, I rode the main streets where there was plenty of vehicle and foot traffic.  At night, I slipped through alleys and back streets, Ninja-style, invisible.
  It was cool.  All went smoothly until someone at the factory accused me of taking something from her locker in the break room.  She was either lying, or there was another thief in there.  She accused me of a felony, but the most I ever did in that factory was a wee misdemeanor, I swear.

  
  

  I lost that job and some of my savings went to pay a bail bondsman.  With plenty of spare time then to do the mechanical work, I went ahead and bought my new U-joint.  Ordinarily, I don’t enjoy wrench work much.  It is usually in some difficult to access part of the machine, in foul weather, and in a hurry.  This was different.  I had plenty of time, all the tools I needed, a smooth, dry surface to lie down on and even a big flattened cardboard box to soften it some.  The weather was fair and warm, the air was full of flower scents and bird songs.

  
  

  I finished the job and took her around the block to see if I’d done it right.  No prob there, but when I pulled back in, one of the boys said I had a phone call waiting.  It was Stony.  I’d written to Celeste, Zeke and a few other friends with my story and my current whereabouts.  Stony was in a bind and needed my help.  He’d gotten the number from one of my friends.

  
  

  His problem was this:  he never had gotten the title to that red chick-magnet car.  When he made the trade for the blue truck, the deal was that the other guy would hold the truck’s title until Stony brought him the other one.  Then the man got tired of waiting and demanded that Stony return the truck.  When I talked to Stony, he still had five days left until the man was going to report the truck stolen.  He begged me to just stay put and let him come get the truck and return it, to avoid being charged with grand theft auto.

  
  

  Until that moment, I hadn’t thought about the truck title.  I’m not an idiot, really.  My IQ is impressive, on paper.  The only way I can explain it, rationally, is that in the stress of our breakup following on a series of other crises, I just wasn’t thinking straight.  I’m fairly certain when Stony “gave” me the truck to leave in, that he was aware he didn’t have a title to it.   The subject didn’t come up at the time.  But it was right out there in the middle of the table now.  Seeing no better alternative, I agreed to what he asked.  What good, really, would the truck do me if it was hot?  It had gotten me this far, to a comfortable place and the prospect of more progress on my journey.

  
  

  He hitchhiked to SLC, arriving in about 30 hours, leaving three days and change to get the truck back.  Above, I made the rather extravagant claim to being not-stupid.  Actually, as I said, on paper I do pretty well.  I’m a good test taker, I am.  But in some real life situations I am rash and irrational.  When he hugged me and then held me at arms’ length and smiled that smile and suggested that we go on to Alaska together, I went right along with it.  I melted into his embrace.  Reunion, reconciliation, chemistry, sex and insanity, on a cracker.

  
  

  “How,” I asked, “are we going to get the truck back then?”

  
  

  “I dunno,” he answered, “we could pay someone to drive it back, or just leave it here.”

  
  

  I said I’d prefer a leisurely trip to Alaska over a hurried and furtive unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.  With a wry look, he scratched his head, then his balls… a little mannerism he performed routinely when feeling pressured.

  
  

  One of the boys spoke up:  “I bet you could find someone up at the U to drive it back there for nothing.  Kids go to Breckenridge every weekend to ski.”  We drove up to the university, put a note on a bulletin board, and went home to wait for phone calls.  Three hours later, we had a driver.  He came by with a carload of friends in the morning.  They transferred a bunch of gear into the truck and left happy.  I guess they made it.  We never heard any more about the truck.

  
  

  Stony didn’t get along with my housemates.  He was a rude, unruly houseguest.  He snooped and pilfered, opening every cabinet and drawer in the place.  Not long after he got there, we moved out, into a place with two of our new friends, people I’d met at the bar where I worked.

  
  

  These two prosperous, sharp dressing young men had got my attention because they often smoked dope in the alley behind the bar.  I’d see one or the other of them go out the back door with one or two other people.  They’d all come back mellow and smelling good.  Stony picked up on them right away when he came to see where I worked.  They were Nam vets like him, with war stories and dope tales to share.  They offered us a room in their hillside house overlooking the city center, temple, and tabernacle, and they hauled all my gear from the boys’ house one night while I was at work.

  
  

  We stayed there a few weeks, and I confirmed my suspicions that the men were dealers.  It was a busy time, little rest and lots of partying, endless hours of war stories and drunken boasting.  Stony and I checked classified ads daily, looking for a “driveaway”, a repo vehicle that some bank or finance company wanted ferried back to the west coast.  We had decided to blow off my court appearance on the theft charge and split for Alaska ASAP.

  
  

  Then we spotted one.  A phone call, trip to an office to sign papers and pick up bus tickets, then we were on our way.  We took a Trailways bus to a small town in Idaho, found the office where we were to take charge of the vehicle, a little Ford Escort pickup, and went back to the bus depot for our gear.  I’d kept everything I left Colorado with, except the truck and the bike.  Sold the bike to one of the dealers.

  
  

  We had a specific window of time, several days, to get to Seattle and turn the car in at a place near Sea-Tac Airport.  We had enough cash that we weren’t going hungry, but not enough, once we got to the airport and checked fares, to get us to Alaska.  Stuck in a city neither of us knew, we found a friendly little social service agency: S.H.A.R.E.  Seattle Housing and Referral something… to assist transients such as we were.

  
  

  Our first night in Seattle, a lawyer stopped off at SHARE on his way home from the office and picked us up.  We rode with him to his house out on an island, super neighborhood, and spent the night in his guesthouse.  Next morning we had breakfast with him and his wife and rode back in to SHARE with him.

  
  

  I spent that day in the SHARE thrift shop, volunteer labor in turn for their services, while Stony went to the harbor.  He talked to the harbormaster, as SHARE had suggested, and learned which boats were headed to Alaska.  Then he talked to their captains.  He struck out on day one and day two, and SHARE provided us with another volunteer host each night, but on day three, he came back and said we would leave the next morning on the M V Chief to Kodiak.

  
  

  To be continued….

  • 12:23 am
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