During a brief lull in the storm, while you were just sitting on the couch glowering, I said weakly, without much hope, “How’d you like to go to a movie?”
The absurdity of my invitation was compounded by the fact that it was about nine-thirty at night. You just looked at me. Your look seemed to soften a bit, from hate to gentle contempt. I guess the humor of it got to you some. “Shit, I don’t know,” I started again. “I just thought you might want to get out of here for a bit. Maybe there’s an all-night movie in Philly or maybe we could just go out for a hamburger or something.”
“Ya,” you said, or words to that effect indicating a bare minimum of acceptance.
“Well,” said I, feeling not at all sure you’d accepted or what you’d accepted, “we’ll go to my place and pick up some money.”
“OK,” said you, and we went out and got into trusty old Car Car.
On the way, Car Car was filled with dead silence. “Do you really want to go to a movie?” I finally ventured.
“No,” you said, “not really.”
“OK, how about a hamburger?”
“That’s all right, I’m really not hungry.”
“OK, I’ve got some beer at the house. It’s really a pretty pleasant place to sit around. At least you’ll get out of your house for a while.” Silence.
“Well, here we are,” I said, trying to be cheerful. You didn’t say a word. You just got out of the car and walked in with precision and dignity. Well, I thought to myself, feeling more and more like an ass, is she really that pissed off about unwashed dishes? Does she want to be here at all? You gave me so little to go on.
“Want a beer?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m going to have one,” as I opened the fridge. “Some milk? Maybe some tea?”
Just a shake of your head. You just sat there looking at me. The contempt had pretty much left your eyes, thank God. But it was replaced with an aloof penetration that was equally if not more disconcerting.
With so few clues, I was on my own. Maybe I just imagined it, but I started to see something else in your eyes, a plea: Try to understand why I can’t give you more clues.
Then you seemed to be bordering on tears. I put my arm around you and tried to kiss you softly, trying to tell you there was nothing to be afraid of, that you were safe from whatever was haunting you, that I liked you, that I wanted you to relax.
You avoided my kiss, half buried your face in my chest, and hugged me softly, not moving, not breathing. I stopped breathing too. We stayed like that for what seemed like forever. I tried again to kiss you. Our mouths just brushed and you buried your head again and hugged me a little tighter. Almost afraid you might break, I gently moved your head back from my chest, stroking your hair. I smiled and you smiled back.
In your eyes, I thought I saw a promise that some day, but not now and not to be pushed, you would make it all make sense to me. The same promise was in your hugs. My eyes must have promised something back. You took my head in your hands and kissed me. We became lovers.
Feminine ardor made me suspicious. The fact is, I couldn’t take it. It was lots of different things. If a woman panted and moaned when I made love to her, I felt uncomfortable, sort of lonely. Maybe I was just jealous because I couldn’t lose my head like that. Maybe I thought women were faking something that was supposed to make me feel good. Maybe I thought that they were fantasizing about an old lover or maybe Mick Jagger. All I knew was that I felt left out. With Virge there wasn’t much trouble that way.
About a week after we had started living together, we were taking a walk by an old abandoned mill, a very romantic place. It was evening. She had been even more quiet than usual that day. But it was that silence that I was supposed to get used to, that I was supposed to understand and not worry about. Worrying about it proved something bad about me.
“I’ve been thinking about what’s going on between us.” Said very meaningfully.
“Huh?” Maybe I would have eventually got the hang of her silence if it had not so often been broken so ominously.
“I’ve been thinking maybe it’s screwed up.” She always got to bring the news, or at least write the headlines. The columns were my work. That was one of our unwritten rules from the very start.
I got the “Uh-oh” feeling in the pit of my stomach. Jig’s up, she’s figured out my game.
“You’re just lonely and want someone to sleep with.”
It was all I could do to keep a straight face. Could she really be that far off base? Did she really think it was that tough for me to get laid? If only it was true, I thought. It would be so much easier, so much more understandable.
I don’t remember how I actually answered the charge. It doesn’t really matter. Nothing much changed between us. I just got a little lonelier.
JUNE 1970. By the time of Virginia’s graduation I had beat the draft with an uncanny schizophrenic act at my physical and put in six months as a nine-to-five, work-within-the-system do-gooder. I had spent the next six wandering up and down the East Coast looking for friends and land to get a commune going and hanging around Swarthmore with Virginia trying to figure out what we’d do after she graduated.
During spring vacation we went down to her parents’ summer place in the mountains of North Carolina. Vincent and seven other people came with us. A lot of grass got smoked. Most of the people did some tripping. We went to a Blue Grass music festival. Zeke, the beautiful half-Labrador, half-Gordon-setter puppy Virginia had given me for Christmas, got hit and nearly killed by a motorcycle and had to be rushed to a Chapel Hill vet about a hundred miles away. It was a strange, jumbled week. Somewhere in there Virginia and I decided to head for British Columbia to look for land, as soon as she graduated.
“We’re going to British Columbia to get some land.” A bit vague, to be sure, but it seemed much more satisfying than most of my previous answers to the question “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to college” or “I’m working in Boston” just didn’t make it either for me or for whoever was asking. It didn’t lead to conversations either of us cared much about. Looking for land in B.C. was another matter entirely. Just about everyone, young and old, straights and freaks, wanted to stay up long into the night talking about that one.
Looking back on it now, what I find most amazing is how little argument we got from parents, professors, or anyone else. What few misgivings there were were vague, apologetic, and usually mumbled. I think the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, and war and assorted other goodies had so badly blown everybody’s mind that sending the children naked into the woods to build a new society seemed worth a try.
FAREWELL, CAPE COD AND FAMILY. I spent a few weeks working around the Barnstable yard before heading to hook up with Virginia. The family was in lousy shape, but the yard I could do something about—cutting vines away from fruit trees, making minimal order out of the wild grapes, just generally cleaning up. And I put in a vegetable garden. It wasn’t a very functional vegetable garden. It was more decorative. I made it in the shape of a teardrop, which no one figured out till later.
The day I left Barnstable to go down to Philadelphia, I took my old boat, whose floating days were about over anyway, down to the end of Scudder Lane and left it on the beach just above the high-water mark, facing out into Barnstable Harbor.
CAR CAR. My trusty ’65 Beetle. Dead now. Sold for parts when I was in the nut house. It served me well. People said that it was only my faith that kept it running. It was the only car I’ve ever felt any affection for and I was the only one it would let drive it. Others would try from time to time, but it usually broke down within a mile or two and wouldn’t budge until I’d come and talk to it.
I didn’t always love Car Car. It was given to me brand-new by my parents at my prep school graduation. It floored me. I wasn’t the son of a struggling writer anymore, an image I had clung to long after it was appropriate. I looked at the car and decided that it would render me good dependable servic
e but that it was utterly devoid of personality.
My conversion crept up on me slowly. It wasn’t until around 75,000 miles and three years later that we realized we were in love. Shortly after that its odometer broke, so how many miles of service Car Car actually gave is anyone’s guess. When you’re in love, numbers don’t matter.
It was at around 80,000 miles that I drastically altered the interior. I took out all the seats but the driver’s and made some plywood and foam rubber cushions to fit the void left by the seats. I upholstered them with some old curtains. This increased Car Car’s carrying capacity and versatility immeasurably. Ten people weren’t comfortable but it was possible. Two people could sleep in it. Two people and a dog was pushing it.
The primary reason I did it was carrying capacity. In its career Car Car carried a full-size refrigerator, a BSA 650, which I had to take apart some to get it all in, and lots of other stuff. If someone somewhere is keeping records of things carried in a VW bug, they should know about Car Car.
Waiting for Virge to graduate, in early June, I spent a couple of hours a day the week before heading west talking to Car Car and fitting it with an ice chest, drawers for silverware, a plastic sink, a water jug. I made use of every conceivable bit of space. It was Car Car’s job to take Virginia, Zeke, and me and all our worldlies to the promised land. Car Car was going to be our home for a while.
“Car Car, I know I’ve asked a lot of you and you’re tired. There’s just one last favor. Take me home. I don’t know where that is but together we can find it. Take me to Eden and when we get there you can spend the rest of your days turning to dust sheltering geese on their way to dust.” From studying designs for different farm buildings I had decided that Car Car was more a goose shelter than anything else. That was where its aptitude lay. It seemed to like the idea. I envisioned it as sort of a memorial in Eden. A reminder of times past when we used to need cars, and a symbol that all cars weren’t all bad. But as it turned out, Car Car took us to a farm that had no road access, so it never got to be a goose shelter. Maybe it was trying to say something. I renamed it “Moses.”
Two of Zeke’s playmates got killed by cars zipping around our block the week before we finally got going. I kept him inside or took him on walks in the fields. After a while it seemed as if the interminable farewells were part of a plot to get my dog killed.
Good-by, good-by, good-by for days, and then finally Virge and I were on our way to the promised land and whatever else came up.
One of the first things that came up was we got busted just outside of Pittsburgh. It was bound to happen sooner or later. My long hair and beard, my beat-up old VW, and the spirit of the times had all conspired to make me a cop magnet. I couldn’t travel anywhere without getting stopped, questioned, and usually searched. I was usually clean. It was a little game I actually started to enjoy.
I knew a little about the laws of arrest and search and seizure. Once I asked, “Officer, would you mind telling me a little about your probable cause for this search?” “So you want to know about my probable cause, do you? Well, just look in the mirror, that’s my probable cause.” I wasn’t always dopeless. Holding tended to wreck whatever pleasure there was to be derived from these little vignettes.
I had been stopped for some pretty flimsy excuses before and Trooper Suchadolski was no exception, but at least he had a new line.
“I thought you might be having some trouble with your vehicle.”
“No, Officer, not really.” Car Car was doing beautifully, cruising with an incredible load between fifty-five and sixty. I had slowed down some when I saw the trooper because I didn’t have that much faith in my jury-rigged speedometer and didn’t want to give him any excuse. My muffler did something a little funny over fifty-five, but he never mentioned it so that wasn’t the problem.
He looked at all the stuff in the car. “Going to California?”
“No, Officer, we’re headed for British Columbia.”
He never caught on.
“Seems like everyone I meet on the road is headed for California. What’s out there?”
“We’re going to British Columbia.”
Three months later. “I asked the defendant where he was going and he said he was going to California.”
“Can I see your driver’s license and registration, please?” All his concern for the condition of my vehicle was gone.
I opened the glove compartment and got my license and registration. He craned his neck, trying to see if he could see anything more interesting in there.
“What else you got in that glove compartment?”
“Not much.” I rummaged through it naming some items. “A screwdriver, some pliers, some gum, a can opener, some more papers, and our first-aid kit.” I had mentioned the first-aid kit last, sort of mumbling it. There was nothing really illegal in there but I knew he’d hassle us about it.
“Let’s see that first-aid kit. What’s in there?”
I did the same routine I had gone through with the glove compartment. It was like Twenty Questions. “Some Band-Aids, some gauze, some iodine, some adhesive tape, some scissors, a butterfly suture, and some pills.”
“What sort of pills?”
“Well it’s mostly just leftover prescriptions for one thing or another.” Which was true. “We’re going to be doing of lot of camping out and we might be pretty far from a doctor at times.”
He wasn’t impressed. “What sort of pills?”
If there had been some rule about how many questions he got I might have had a chance. But there wasn’t and I could tell that this man’s curiosity wasn’t the sort that would stop, having merely exhausted the possibilities of my glove compartment. I knew he’d get around to being interested in what was next to my battery and I knew that’s where I had stashed the tail end of my Jamaican grass, such nice stuff, and Virge’s mescaline. I knew I was going to be busted.
I opened the vial of pills and poured them into my hand. “These little white ones are penicillin. The prescription is right on the outside of the vial, with the name on it and everything. These gray-and-red ones here are Darvon for pain. Virginia’s got a prescription. These here are Bufferin. See the little B right on them? They’re easy.”
For some reason, he was attracted by the penicillin. There was more of it than anything else. He went back to his car to study his little drug identification book—which I saw later—and came back and told me that the penicillin pills were amphetamines and that they were illegal. He handed me a little piece of paper and told me to sign it. I just sort of looked at the paper and then back at him and then back at the paper. Someone had done a dreadful job of typing.
“It waives your right to a search warrant,” he explained.
“I’m not so sure I want to waive it.”
Three hours of constitutional debate and assorted other fun and games, culminating in a search that left Car Car’s contents and innards in shreds. Later I was checked for lice and crabs and clunked into jail. I blew my one phone call on a bondsman who refused to handle drug cases.
The next morning I was able to talk the warden into letting me have a second phone call. I called my father, who called an old college buddy who lived in Pittsburgh. He got me a lawyer who sprung me.
What made my brief stay in jail such a bitch was that I kept expecting to get out in just a few more minutes. I didn’t sleep. I just kept wondering what red tape was keeping Virge from getting me out. When I finally got out it was about two o’clock the next afternoon. It had been only eighteen hours, but it felt like years. Maybe I stretched it on purpose. Prison was an important part of life I hadn’t had a shot at before.
So there I was, having done twenty years in prison mostly in isolation, a lifetime of being harassed by sadistic guards. In my spare time, I was a Jew in a concentration camp.
Oh goody, a real-life experience, something to write about. Something to talk about, a good story. I wanted to be a good storyteller.
A good storyteller
is a good teacher, an entertainer. Story-tellers provide cohesion, myths, and expression for a culture. A culture was what I thought we were all trying to build. Either we didn’t have one or we wouldn’t have one much longer.
It takes a story to find out what you think, and it takes a story to be able to pass it on to others. That was something that Swarthmore by and large missed. They had some funny idea that you could communicate and teach without stories.
All hyped up on my real-life adventure, something new to digest, a new story to tell—“Out on bail” had a nice ring—I started telling Virge about what had happened in prison, what being locked up had felt like, what the guards and warden were like, some of the conversations I had had with the guys on either side of me. I started working on my story, checking audience reaction, finding out what I really felt about it. I told Virge I thought it might make a nice follow-up to the draft story. I was thinking of doing a book of generational incidents. The innocent years. The aptitude kid, disillusion, dope, the draft, dropping out of the forty-hour week—and now the dope bust.
Virginia was stony silent. At first I thought she felt guilty for being so dumb about not getting me sprung earlier. I guess it never occurred to her that they’d really only give me one phone call. I admit I never thought they’d really do that either. She had gone off with some nice folks we met outside the cop shop and got wrecked out of her mind on Cambodian dope.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I can’t help thinking of how many million times I’m going to have to listen to you tell this story.”
I thought maybe she felt that way because she was diddled out of so many real-life adventures because she was a woman. It was me, the man, who got to be the hero. I faced the draft, I got busted even though it was mostly her dope. It was significant that I decided not to work at some respectable job but no one expected her to anyway. From that angle her bitterness made a lot of sense.