Child of a Republican

Chapter one was pretty fucking neat. But I feel the need to mention that at the end there, you didn't get LSD, if you tripped for 3 days it was something else. Probably DOM, or a mixture of various DOX, or DOX and LSD. But not LSD alone.

 

Everything was fine till we got to Vanhorn Tx., then we couldn’t catch a ride out of that stinkin town. The next day the sheriff drove up to us and told us that there was a freight train coming through town, and if we weren’t on it when it left he was going to arrest us for vagrancy.
Lucky for us, the engineer on the train was a real good Joe. I told him that if we didn’t get a ride on the train, the sheriff was going to put us up in the Iron Bar hotel. He gave us a ride all the way to San Antonio, through the Big Bend. Man, what beautiful moon lit night that was! The engineer let us ride in the second engine. Next morning, coming in the rail yard, the engineer slowed way down so we could jump off the train. He would have got in a lot of trouble if they had found out he gave us a ride.
From San Antonio we hitched on down to Corpus Christi, where Dean got a job on a shrimp boat. The boat only needed one header (employee that pops heads off of the shrimp). So I headed down to Brownsville and got on a boat down there.
When I got to Brownsville, I went to the docks and just started asking different captains if they needed any help. I was as green as grass, didn’t know the first thing about it. Usually there is only three on a boat, a captain, a rig man (the guy that works the nets), and a header. The rig man usually helps the header, while the captain trolls the boat with the nets down. The boat I got on had a full crew, but the captain hired me on as an apprentice. He told me to meet them at this certain bar that evening. I met them at the bar and we had a real good time that night, got good and drunk too.
Next morning we met at the boat then went to the grocery store and bought two thousand dollars worth of groceries, beer and whisky. We got on the boat, went and filled her up with fuel and headed for the coast of New Orleans. The captain was a Coon-ass (slang for Cajun), so he knew the waters off New Orleans real well.
The boat we were on was a steel hull freezer boat, so we could stay out on the water for up to two months without having to come into port. Most boats were iceboats, so they could only stay out for ten to fourteen days. Man, I wished I had got on one of those kinds of boats. We were out on the water for six weeks without touching land!
Those guys were nice dudes until they ran out of booze, then they turned meaner than snakes! They finished the hooch about the second week. Then I turned into the slave of the boat. I got every nasty job there was. I thought at one point they were going to throw me overboard. It was then I realized nobody knew I was out on that boat with them.
In those six weeks, we went through three storms where the waves were twenty feet high! There was more than once, I didn’t think I was going to make it!
One night we were trolling (shrimping is done at night from sun down to sun up), and the gulf was smooth as glass. You could see the full moon on the water. We had just dumped the nets on the deck, and were starting to pop the heads off the shrimp, when the captain came back and yelled at us to get those damn nets up now! Before we could get the nets up, the waves were crashing down on the deck of the boat! The waves were twenty feet high, and rocking the boat like it was a toy. We had to dump the nets on the deck along with the stuff that was already on the deck. Then we had to shovel everything back overboard. The railing of the boat only comes up to about knee high, but there is a shoot to shovel all the dead fish back overboard when you get done separating the shrimp out of the pile that is dumped on the deck. But the storm was too severe to get the shrimp, we just shoveled it all back overboard. And as we’re shoveling all this stuff back into the sea, there are twenty or thirty sharks eating it faster than we can shovel it! They eat it so fast, they make the water foam! And the boat is rocking side to side, so that water comes over the top of the railing! And as I’m shoveling, the rig man yells at me, that if I fall out I’m just shark food cause they won’t have time to save my ass! As the boat rocks over to my side, I could actually reach out and touch the shark, that’s how close they were! There was so much water coming on the deck, we just had to give up shoveling stuff back overboard and go and drop anchor and ride out the storm. Next morning I was the one that got to clean the back of the boat. There was dead fish strung from hell to breakfast. The other guys just went to bed. I finally got done around one in the afternoon. Then I went to bed and had to get up four hours later.

 

We got up around 5pm, the rig man was the cook of the boat and made dinner. Then we would pull up anchor and start trolling. Just drop the nets overboard and troll around in big circles for about three or four hours. Then pull up the nets and dump them on the deck. Then me and the other header would sit on these three legged seats that set three inches off the deck, and start popping heads off the shrimp and putting them in laundry baskets. The rig man would put the nets back overboard and continues trolling. The rig man has a smaller sample net that he brings up every hour to see how full the nets are getting and to see how many shrimp are being caught. The nets are dumped on the deck about three times a night, and it makes a big pile on the deck that has all kinds of stuff in it. Everything from garbage, to stingrays, to sharks and fish and eels, and of course shrimp.
One morning we dumped the nets on deck just about sunrise, and it was a big haul. Some of the shrimp weighed a half a pound. Even the rig man and captain were on the deck helping pop heads, when all of a sudden a sea serpent (sea snake) slithered out from the pile. It was huge! It was longer than the boat was wide, it stretched all the way across the deck! It’s head was about the size of a football. It had fangs over an inch long! The captain grabbed a gaff (a long pole with a hook on the end) and opened a shoot on the side of the boat and the thing slid back over into the sea. The captain told me that if it had bit me I would have been dead before I took two steps. We finally got back to port in Brownsville the day before Christmas Eve. The captain paid me three hundred dollars for the six weeks. He told me I wasn’t worth even that much, and that I should be glad they hadn’t thrown me overboard.
I hitched back up to Corpus Christi and found Dean who had moved in with this other guy he had met. They let me move in, and I got a job delivering pizza. The pizza place had their own delivery cars, little Honda Civics. It was a great job till I had a wreck.
A week later I got a job on a construction crew, framing houses. It was a family of Mexicans, a father and two sons. The mother would always bring us home cooked meals for lunch. They were some of the best folks I ever met. But the job only lasted a month.
Then I had to start giving plasma to get money, cause the employment office was giving me the run around as far as getting me a job. When you give plasma, it lowers your immune system and then you end up getting sick, which is what happened to me.
So one day I was in the employment office, and they had been shuffling me from one section to another all day. I was in this one section for over an hour, when I noticed other people that hadn’t been there as long as me getting called. So I went up to the desk and asked why they hadn’t called me. The lady said, “Oh I’m sorry, I must have misplaced your file.”
I was pissed! I was also sick of giving plasma, and sick of the employment office! So I stormed out of the office through a double glass door, and as it was shutting behind me I kicked the frame of the door. The door shattered! I took off running, but before I got a block down the street, there was a cop with his gun pointed right at my head. “Freeze!” he said. Then handcuffed me and took me back to the employment office, where he loaded me in the squad car.
As I was being loaded into the cop car, there was a cameraman and a reporter shoving a microphone in my face, asking me why I did it. I showed him the needle marks on my arm, and told him that I was having to give plasma in order to get money to buy food, because the employment office wouldn’t give me a job.
I spent the night in the slammer, but I was on the news that night, and the employment office looked like they weren’t doing their job. So the next morning the employment office dropped all charges on me, and had me a job in an hour working in a youth center playing Ping-Pong and billiards all day.

 

The rest of the winter wasn’t too bad. I spent a lot of time on the beach on Padre Island with this sweetheart who lived with these guys that played music. She was gorgeous, but she had legs hairier than mine and she didn’t shave. Dean went with me and her to a Willy Nelson concert one night. Man that was fun! The whole basketball court was cleared for dancing. And everyone was allowed to bring their own bottle of whiskey. We brought a fifth of Tequila. Dean drank till he puked. Me and the sweetheart danced it off. We danced almost every song. She was like figure skater the way she liked me to spin her. We did the Texas two step all night. Wish I could remember her name.
May 1st, Dean and I hitched back up to Santa Fe to the youth hostel. After a few days Dean headed out for parts unknown, and I spent the summer with the brotherhood. I ended up going to my first Rainbow Gathering that July, down on the east fork of the Gila River in Southern New Mexico. God that was awesome! A bunch of us from the hostel had gotten a ride from these hippies that owned a bus. We arrived at the parking area just about sunset, so we camped at the bus and hiked down the canyon the next morning.
At the bottom of the canyon, the Gila River wound lazily through the gathering. They were dumping crate loads of oranges and grapefruits in the river that were floating down for everyone to grab and eat. There were all these teepees and tents, and campfires. There was what they called the main circle, where there were hundreds of people doing all kinds of things like chanting, and ohm prayer circles, drum circles, yoga circles, beading circles, you name it, it was going on. There was an info center with a map of the camp so you could locate various different groups that had a camp set up. There was a MASH tent for folks that got sick or hurt. There were kitchens along the trail every hundred yards or so. The gathering was about a couple of miles square. People camped all over the place.
At the main circle, I joined in one of the ohm circles. It sounded so beautiful! I had my eyes closed while we were ohming, like being in a transcendental state of bliss. I had an infection in one of my eyes before we had left for the gathering, that I had gone to the emergency room for in Santa Fe. But it was still all pussie and swelled shut when we had got down to the camp. But as we were ohming, all of a sudden I heard the whole camp start yelling and cheering. So I opened my eyes to see why, and there was this double rainbow arching across the whole camp! And when I opened my eyes, my infection was gone! Big Magic!
Later on, I was sitting beside the river with a group burning some buds. And there were some of them that were naked. In fact there were a lot of folks walking around naked. I’d never been to anything like this before and I wanted to get naked too. But I felt like if I did get naked, I’d pop a boner and get all embarrassed. But the honey sitting next to me while we were smoking was naked, and told me I ought to get free of my threads. So I got down to my birthday suit, and sure enough I popped a doozie. She thought it was sweet, and treated it like a lollipop. I never had a problem after that. I could walk around all day and never loose my cool.
After that rejuvenator, her and I went to where she had her tent set up. I set my tent up, but sent a lot of time in hers, a lot of time.
We met this hippie that was camping in a cave. And when he moved into it, there was a bird that had made a nest in the ceiling of the cave. And there were two baby birds in the nest. The mother bird was amazing! She didn’t abandon the babies when he moved in, I guess because he was so cool. The mother bird would even land on his finger. She would fly out of the cave, and then a few minutes later would fly back in with a bug of some sort. She’d land on his finger and show him what she had caught, and then fly over to the nest and feed it to her babies. She wasn’t even worried when we came in the cave to visit. She’d hop around the cave and show us what she had caught for her babies, then fly up to the nest and feed them, then fly out and catch something else.
The Rainbow Gathering lasted a week, then I went back to the hostel with a bad case of the hirshey squirts. It was my first gathering, as it was for a lot of others. And we hadn’t learned to purify the water correctly, so all of us got sick. Another lesson learned.
Stay tuned...

 

I had a girlfriend in Santa Fe that was an artist that lived up Artist road. She was the first one to turn me on to Peyote. One day she broke out with a whole grocery bag full of dried buttons. At least ten pounds, which is a lot of dang buttons. Her and I went down to Sandia Peak the back way through Cerrillos and Madrid. Sandia Peak is the mountain that over looks Albuquerque. There is two ways to get to the top, either take the tramway or drive up the back side, which is what we did. We eat some buttons on the way, and by the time we got to the top the Peyote had kicked in. It seemed like I could see the curvature of the earth from up there, and the sunset was the best one I’ve ever seen.
After it got dark, we went back down the mountain to Golden. Back then Golden wasn’t really a town, it was a bar. But it was a really cool bar. There was a stage for well known bands, and a big dance floor. It was right out of an old western movie. The bar isn’t there any more, I heard it burnt down.
When we walked in we were tripping pretty hard. And there was this cowboy at the bar that had a perfect dent in his forehead in the shape of a horse’s foot. The dent was almost a half-inch deep.
They say that when you do Peyote, there is a spirit guide that shows you the lesson you’re supposed to learn. The lesson I learned was that Peyote is the nastiest taste you will ever put in your mouth. Most people can’t keep it down, and end up throwing it back up. I’ve heard that puking makes it work better, I managed to keep it down and that works well too.
A few weeks later I was hanging out at the River Park in Santa Fe, when this dude from California came up to me and asked if I knew where he could get some pot. I asked him how much he was looking for, and he told me he had ten thousand dollars. I said that I knew a girl down in El Paso that could take care of him. He said he was up for the road trip, so we borrowed a car from my artist girlfriend and drove down to Texas.
When we got there, Diane (that was her name) only had ten kilos at her house, but she told us that she could get another fifty keys by the next day.
Well, those ten kilos were only fourteen hundred dollars, a hundred and forty a key. But this guy couldn’t believe that he got that much high grade Mexican pot for that cheap. He was used to paying eight hundred to a thousand dollars a pound in California. And what they called “The Kind Bud”, pot grown hydroponicly was two thousand a pound. So said he couldn’t wait and had to go back to Santa Fe to catch a flight back to Cal.
On the way back, we had to go through the checkpoint at Truth or Consequences. That scared the [excrement] out of me! I don’t know how I kept my cool when the border patrol agent asked me if we had any fruits or vegetables that we were bringing back from Mexico. But I told him no, and he just waved us through without checking the car. Whew!
Then the alternator gave out in the car and we had to stop every hundred miles and recharge the battery.
We made it back to Santa Fe, and he gave my girlfriend a half a kilo for letting us use the car, and to have the alternator fixed. And he gave me a kilo and a half for doing the deal for him. Then he hopped on a flight back to San Francisco. I hope he made it. But back then airport security wasn’t what it is today.
The next day I stuck out my thumb on I-25 headed for Colorado to sell my stash. The dude that picked me up had twelve pounds in the door of his pick-up that he had smuggled back from Mexico, and he was looking for buyers. So we rode up to Canon City where I had some friends that I had met, because my grandparents had moved there when I was in Hairstyling School. I sold every pound he had for eighty dollars a pound, and he gave me ten bucks a pound for selling it for him.
I ended up selling about a pound of my stash in ounces. But I spent the summer with these hippies that lived in Coal Creek, just outside of Canon City, and we ended up smoking the other kilo.

 

In August I headed back down to the youth hostel to see if the brotherhood would take me back. At Raton, I was at the truck stop when who did I see gassing his eighteen wheeler but good old Norm from Gunnison. Norm had just got out of the army and was learning to be a trucker from Curtis, a cowboy whose dad owned a ranch that we grew up with. They were hauling a load of cattle down to Texas. They gave me a ride on down to Santa Fe.
When I got to the youth hostel, they told me I couldn’t stay there any more because I hadn’t finished the pilgrimage to Crater Lake. They said I was banned from the Brotherhood. Elvis died that day.
So I headed up to Cortez Colorado and got on another seismic crew. I met another cutie that had a small pickup truck with a camper shell on the bed. The crew I was on transferred down to Lubbock Texas and my new girlfriend came along.
Driving down through the panhandle of Texas we went through a storm like nothing I’ve ever witnessed. It was around two in the afternoon when all of a sudden it went from a sunny day to pitch black. It was darker than the darkest moonless night I've ever seen, because there weren’t any stars. You couldn’t see your hand if it was an inch from your face. It clouded up and got that dark in less than fifteen minutes. Then the thunder and lightning started. The lightning would go from the ground up into the sky! And when the lightning hit it lit up the surroundings like a negative of a picture. And the lightning was happening all around us, hundreds of bolts hitting more than one every second. And when it lit up, we could see a tornado off to the west that must have been at least a half mile wide! We couldn’t tell which way it was going, whether it was coming at us or not. But all we could do is just keep going and hope it didn’t catch us. We must have driven fifty miles before the darkness lifted to where we could see anything. The rain came down so hard it was like being in one of those drive through car washes. Even with the wipers on high, we couldn’t see the road in front of us more than twenty feet away. The hail was so big in spots it looked like the road was covered in snowballs. Some how the big ones missed our truck, but we still got some pretty good dents. I bet we weren’t going more than ten miles an hour, for an hour.
The dust bowl country of Texas is butt ugly. The wind blows so much that sand gets in everything from the food, to sheets in the bed, and in your eyes, hair and mouth. The water smells and tastes like the oil from the oil fields.
So my girlfriend was ready to get the hell out of there within a month, and so was I. We headed to Carlsbad N.M., and then broke up a few days later. She went back home to California, and I hitched back to Colorado.
Hitchhiking can be hard if you have a bad frame of mind, like being bummed out over losing a girlfriend. It took me two days to catch a ride out of Las Cruses. Finally a big fat girl picked me up in a VW beetle. When she picked me up, she told me she was only going about twenty miles up I. 25 and then turning off to go up in the mountains. And she said where she was turning off there wasn’t even a store or gas station. But after two days in the same spot I thought anything was better than that spot, so I hopped in. When we got to her turn off she asked if I wanted to come with her and drink a beer and burn one. That sounded better than standing on the side of the road again, so I said sure.
She took me about fifteen miles up in the mountains to the old ghost town. She told me to wait in the car while she went in to this bar to talk to her roommate. She came out a minute later and drove to her house. Again she told me to sit tight, and went in the house and came back a minute later with a case of beer and some stash. We then drove back to the bar and picked up her roommate. We drove out on a dirt road to a windmill that draws water into a tank for cattle to drink. The tank was fifteen feet in diameter and almost five feet deep.
We got out of the car and the girls spread out a blanket, and we all got naked and went skinny-dipping in the tank. Both of these girls weighed over two hundred and fifty pounds. The one that picked me up was taller, almost six feet tall. Her roommate was only about five foot four. Me, I was still as skinny as a rail. I was six foot tall, but still weight less than a hundred and twenty pounds.
The water in the tank was nice and clean, but there were little minnows in it that would nibble on you if you didn’t keep moving. They didn’t hurt, but it felt weird.
It was a nice warm day, especially for November.
We played in the tank for a little while, then got out and drank some beer and burned a couple of doobies. Then things got frisky and I thought we were going to have my third three way. But just then a car came up on us. It was a carload of Mexicans. They drove up and got out of their car and started laughing at us. I guess it looked like I was the filling in a blubber sandwich. So we got dressed and drove back to their place. They fixed dinner and we drank more beer, but the three way never happened. They let me sleep on the couch and the next morning drove me back to I-25. My attitude was much better and I didn’t have any problem getting up to Colorado.

 

I got to Canon City and found some friends that wanted me to take them back down to my girlfriend in El Paso to get ten keys of pot. It was a week before Thanksgiving and it was snowing in Canon when we left that evening. It snowed all the way to El Paso! When we got there the next morning, there was almost a foot of snow on the ground. Now that is really freaky, to have that much snow in El Paso. Especially that early in the year, but it had all melted by noon. Diane had the ten keys on hand, and we were on our way back to Canon City. We got back at midnight, and they only gave me a pound for all that trouble.
I spent the winter in Boulder, working in a hair salon. I bought a 72’ Ford station wagon and put a bed in the back of it, and curtains in the windows.
In March I went down to Penrose and hung out with my grandparents for a couple of months. My friends in Canon City had a party at their house that I went to one night. I got so drunk I couldn’t drive back to Penrose. So I went back to the bedroom where everyone had thrown their coats on the bed and passed out. I figured they’d wake me up when the party was over and they got the coats. But I woke up the next morning, under the sheets naked! And there was a naked girl on each side of me! I woke them up and told them that I didn’t remember what had happened that night and they would have to refresh my memory, and they did! That was my second menage et trois. Two on one in my favor is much better.
In the spring I got on another seismograph crew. This one hired me on as a surveyor’s helper, the rodman. We were working in Wyoming, up by the Little BigHorn. Very cool country. Then we got done with those lines and moved to Cody, which it even cooler. We were doing lines near this refuge for the Black Footed Ferret. They’re some cute little critters.
But like I said, these seismic crews just worked you till you dropped. So I got sick of working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, after a couple of months. So I quit that job and went back down to Craig Colorado and got a job setting concrete forms. That job was only ten hours a day, five days a week. It was nice having weekends off.
I’d go to Steamboat Springs to the Bluegrass festival, or to the natural hot springs on my days off. One time when I was at the hot springs, my friend had gone back to the car to get some stash when this beautiful blond came out of the woods naked. She just came in the hot pot and sat right down on my manhood. I pulled off my swim trunks and we got busy. It was so exciting that I was done in less than ten minutes, and she just got up and walked back into the woods without us saying a word to each other. A few minutes later my friend came back from the car, and I told him what had happened. He didn’t believe a word of it, but didn’t like the idea that I was still naked in the pool.
I lived in a boarding house in Craig. The lady that ran it was a sweetheart. There were ten guys that lived there. It was $60.00 a week, with breakfast, dinner and sack lunches. We each had our own room, but only three bathrooms.
One of the guys that also lived there was a coke freak. One night he asked me if I wanted to shoot up with him. I told him I didn’t use needles to get high. He asked me if I’d ever tried it, and I said no. He said, “Well don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.” So I did. We went to his room and he shot up about a half a gram all at once. Then he loaded up almost a quarter gram for me in the same syringe. I was so ignorant I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to use the same works. Thank God this was before AIDS. The moment he plunged it into my vein, I was so high I was scrapping my brain off the ceiling. Ok, I’ve tried it, that enough for me. That was my one and only time.
another episode tomorrow...

 

One weekend I drove down to Colorado Springs to try to score a pound of weed. When I got down there, I was driving through this neighborhood looking for an old friend’s house, when I saw a car hit a dog. I pulled over and asked the people who were standing around, who the dog belonged to. One person said it was a stray, so I picked the poor thing up and took it to the vet.
The dog was a beautiful silver Weimaraner, a German hunting dog. The veterinarian said she had gone through distemper. The vet did what he could for her, but said she probably wouldn’t make it. She got some internal injuries when the car hit her. But I took her back to Craig with me, and the lady that owned the boarding house let her stay in my room while I was at work. She even took care of the dog, cause the thing couldn’t even stand up for at least two weeks. But she pulled through and I named her Beth. She was my best friend for the next ten years.
The first of September, Beth and I headed for Arizona for the winter. I had my station wagon, and figured I could camp in it down in Bisbee, which is just south of Tombstone. Bisbee is an old copper mining town that was taken over by hippies after the mine closed down.
One night I met a hippie chic at the Saint Elmo’s bar, which is up Brewery Gulch, a few blocks up from The Copper Queen Hotel. She had a room in another hotel farther up the canyon past the post office. I spent the night with her, and the next morning she couldn’t find her panties that she had dropped beside the bed. Two days later Beth puked them up. She had swallowed them whole, and wouldn’t go all the way through her system.
After a few weeks I started running low on cash, so I went up to Tucson to try to find something to make a few dollars. When I got to town I met another little cutie that was to the University of Arizona. She was a real hottie, but she chewed tobacco, Copenhagen. She was a little rich kid from New York City, whose parents were putting her through school. She had her own place and let me move in with her.
I wasn’t having any luck finding work, and my station wagon was in need of some repairs. So I ended up selling my car to this other girl for three hundred dollars. I ended up regretting that.
A week later was Halloween, and I went to a party over by the college. These college kids had a reggae Band in the back yard of their frat house. I was dressed in a loin cloth and a crown of thorns. Some little devil sold me an ounce of shrooms, and in a little while the singer of the reggae band said, “Hey we’ve got Jesus with us tonight! C’mon up here Jesus!” So I stumbled up on the stage and grabbed the mic and said, “Dad says to have a good time.”
Right after that this other dude comes up to me with his girlfriend and says that he wants me to take care of her tonight, and he goes off with this other chic. So she takes me to their home and we had trippy sex all night. Shrooms are like Viagra.
Next morning the dude comes in and says that he hopes I had a good time, but don’t come back, and kicks me out of the house.
I left their place and headed back to my tobacco-chewing sweethearts’ house. On the way, I saw this native American working on his car. He had long hair, so I asked him if he wanted to buy some shrooms. He asked me what shrooms were, and I told him they were like the Peyote that his people ate. Without warning, he just cold cocked me. Knocked me back ten feet, and I landed on my ass! I got up begging him not to hit me again. This dude was huge! I have no doubt, he could have broke me in half if he had the notion. The sucker broke my nose again. I was bleeding like a stuck pig. If he would have used his left fist it wouldn’t have been so bad, maybe straighten it out from the first time I got it busted. He handed me a rag, and told me he was sorry, but I was making fun of his religion. I apologized and told him that I had nothing but respect for his people. In fact, I’m part Blackfoot and part Cherokee myself. But damn, that sure ruined my day, but it got worse.
I went back to the house and told my girlfriend what happened, and she got all pissed off, because a friend of hers had come by and told her that I had spent the night with that other girl. So she kicked me out, and that was the end of that. I wonder if God was trying to tell me something.
So being homeless and without a car, I hitched back up to Craig Colorado with my dog, to try to get back on the concrete form setting crew. But they were shut down for the winter, so I stuck out my thumb the next day in Steamboat Springs to head back to Manassas. It was the second week of November and the snow was starting to pile up. When I got out on the road that morning there was already a guy hitching on the entrance ramp. I asked how long he’d been out there, and he said about an hour. I told him that the next car would pick him up, and I walked on past about a hundred feet or so. Sure enough, the next car pulled up to him and picked him up, then pulled up and picked me up too. They were in a big ol’ Suburban Carryall. They took him all the way to Kansas and then took me all the way to my mothers’ front doorstep in Manassas, in twenty hours! Two thousand miles in twenty hours! I wonder if I’ve got more than one guardian angel.

 

I spent another Thanksgiving with my mom, and another winter with the boys at the bachelor pad. I got a job working with Greenpeace soliciting door to door, and then got promoted to working on the phones.
I met a Catholic girl at Greg’s church that winter, she was a virgin. I think she loved me, but not enough to give me her virtue. So It wasn’t long before I was headed back out west.
I got out to Santa Fe in April of 79’ and stopped in the youth hostel to see if they’d take me back, but the place was closed down. Seems the fire department had decided that the house was only big enough for fifty people a night. So rather than just letting fifty in a night, and turning away another fifty or one hundred, the brotherhood closed the hostel down. Within a week the city was begging the brotherhood to open back up, because the homeless were out on the street causing trouble. But instead, they turned the place into a hospice taking care of old people. Soon after that the founder got busted for being a pedophile. Everything fell apart after that.
I got on another seismic crew in Colorado and ended up in the bad lands of eastern Montana that summer, over by the border of North Dakota. Beth got pregnant while I was at work, and had a litter of twelve pups. I was living in a house with two other guys on the crew. It had a dog pen in the back yard that Beth had to stay in during the day while I was at work, because the owner of the house wouldn’t let her stay in the house with all those pups. Somehow Beth got a hold of something she ate that soured her milk. The pups’ throats swelled up from it, and they scratched cuts in their throats with their claws, and flies got in the cuts and laid eggs. When I got home that evening, maggots were eating the pups alive. I spent the whole night pulling maggots out of their throats with tweezers. Four of the pups died anyway. I ended up having to give the other eight pups to the humane society because I couldn’t take care of them working 16 hours a day seven days a week.
I was on the survey crew as a rodman. But the head surveyor didn’t know shi’t from shinola. One day were on the line, when we saw a big bird perched on a dead tree lying on the ground. We got closer and closer to it, but it didn’t fly away. We got right up to it and found it was a fledgling bald eagle that had fell out of the nest some fifty feet up in another tree. We pet it for a minute, and then left it because we know the parents would be back for it. I found a feather under the tree where the nest was, and put it in my hat.
Later that day the surveyor discovered he had lost the box that the survey instrument was supposed to be put in. So we spent the rest of the day driving up and down the line looking for the damn box. Never did find it, and by dark the surveyor was pissed off! He was driving like a mad man on these dirt roads, with three of us in the bed of the truck. We were holding on for dear life! He hit a pot hole coming around a bend, and I fell over the side, holding on to the roll bar that kept me from falling all the way off. That phuckwit skidded sideways to a stop, and I let go and hit the ground. Then he just took off and left me to walk fifteen miles back to town. I lost me eagle feather. The surveyor got fired the next day and I quit.
It was getting to be late summer and I had never been to California. I decided winter was a good time to check it out. So I stuck out my thumb and headed for San Diego with Beth by my side.
The travels continue in chapter three.....

 

It’s amazing the stuff that happens when hitchhiking. I was on Interstate 8, just west of Tucson, headed through Arizona when my grandparents and my aunt and uncle drove by. After they passed they realized it was me, because of my dog Beth. They never would have picked up any other hitchhiker. They were on their way to Yuma in their RV’s for the winter. They’re officially called snowbirds.
After visiting with them for a couple of days I headed out for San Diego. Just west of El Centro Interstate 8 starts up the mountains. When you get to the top, it’s a long decent down the other side to the Pacific Ocean. At Alpine, which is the far west suburb of San Diego, you can start to smell the ocean. Ten miles later you can see it, and the scenery starts to change from wooded evergreen trees to a lush almost tropical vegetation.
I hitched straight down to Mission Beach, to the old wooden roller coaster, which is between Mission bay and Pacific Beach. I got a room in a flophouse a few blocks north of the roller coaster for $50.00 a week.
I enjoyed a few days on the boardwalk, and then finally found a job working as a phone solicitor for a company that made and sold filters for cigarettes that helped people quit smoking. It was an easy job because we sold them on consignment to drug stores nation wide. I made $5.00 an hour plus commission. I worked from 7am till two in the afternoon.
Then Beth and I would spend the rest of the day on the beach playing Frisbee. That dog was a real beach bunny catcher. The chic’s loved her. We spent the whole winter on the beach. The temperature was 60 to 65 degrees every day. Then when spring came around the prices at the flophouse went up to $120.00 a week, so Beth and I headed back to Colorado and got on another seismograph crew.
When I got back to Colorado, my grandparents were already back in Penrose after spending the winter in Yuma. I wished I would have been able to catch a ride back with them, but didn’t know when they headed back. Plus I didn’t know at the time that the flophouse was going to raise the rent in the spring.
I spent about a week with them until I got on another crew, which was back up in Craig. They hired me on as a junior surveyor and then trained me on the computer processing the data the head surveyor collected. It was kind of a new way of doing things. In times past, everything was done on calculators and written by hand. This was much easier and faster. The computer did most of the work, all I had to do was put it in files. And the survey instrument had evolved too. We were using a Theatalite instead of a transit or plane table. And it had a distance meter on it too, a lot easier than reading distance from a rod, and far more accurate. The computer even plotted out the mylar map. We did the x, y and z coordinates of every hundred and twenty feet, for up to forty miles, and stayed within a half foot. Nowadays they use GPS satellites.
That was probably the best crew I ever worked on. The Party manager really took care of the crew. He even let us take a day off every once in a while to do laundry or cash a check. And luckily it rained a few times that summer. Can’t work while it’s raining. Usually out west rain only lasts thirty minutes or so, and then it’s over. But every once in a blue moon it will be an all day event.
I worked on that crew all summer, until the party manager was forced into retirement. Then the crew was called back to Texas.

 

I got on another crew a week later down in Utah. We only worked for a week before we got some lines down in Oklahoma. So being it was fall and turning cool, I traveled down to Oklahoma with the crew. It was the first time I ever worked down there. It’s a lot different, lots more trees and different kinds of trees. Leafy trees instead of evergreens. Lots more poison oak and Chiggers too.
Again I was on the survey crew, which always is ahead of the rest of the crew. We have to lay out the lines so they know where to go. We got into this little town we were going to working out of, and the other guys went in to a restaurant to eat lunch. I can’t eat much after riding in a vehicle, stops me up. So I decided to walk around town and check it out.
I was walking down the street, when this honey pulls up beside me in a Mustang convertible and asks if I want a ride. I said sure and hopped in. She asked where I was going, and I told her that I was just checking out the town and asked her to show me around. She said she didn’t mind, but wanted to go to her place and burn one first. I thought that was a great idea.
We get to the house, she twists one up and takes me back to the bedroom, lights it up and starts taking her clothes off. I thought that was a great idea too. I get naked and we get in the sack. Before we get done burning the number, her roommate walks in, and she gets naked and hops in with us. Man I love women!
I ended up staying with them the whole time the crew was there, only a few weeks though. Then we got some lines in east Texas. It was a dry county, full of religious fanatics. So I quit that crew because I had about three grand saved up from working all summer and I headed back out to California for the winter again.
Instead of heading back to San Diego, I decided to try San Francisco. The old Haite and Ashberry hippie scene. I hitched I. 10 to Interstate 5 in L.A., then headed north. I stopped in Monterey, but it was full of rich people that didn’t want hippies around. Went up to the Santa Cruse Beaches for a day, then headed up highway nine to San Jose. I got to a small town called Boulder Creek in the Redwood trees in the mountains. Stopped in a restaurant for lunch, where I met this guy that cut firewood for a living. He cut Oak and Madrone trees out of the Redwood Forests, so the Redwoods would have more room to grow. The trees he cut was on peoples private land, and they let him have the wood free just for getting rid of it out of the redwood forest. He’d drive to Frisco and Oakland and sell split firewood for $200 a cord. His truck held three cords. I went to work for him splitting the wood as he cut it and bucked it up. Then we’d stack it on the truck and haul it into the city. I got a hundred dollars a day and he got two hundred, cause it was his truck and he paid for the gas.
I met a little twenty year old sweetie that still lived with her mother. Her mom was dating a dentist that always had pharmaceutical grade coke. She borrowed his Beemer one time and we found a three gram vile rolling around in the floor of the back seat. Her mom let me move in with them.
I was in Boulder Creek for about a month. Just before Christmas I found out by calling my grandma that my mom and her husband had moved to California, between Oakland and Sacramento, a place called Fairfield. So I got my moms’ phone number from grandma and called her. I told her I was living in Boulder Creek which was only about eighty miles from where she was. She asked me to come and visit for Christmas. She said my sister Rhonda and her kids would be there, and my half brother that she had had when I was in the army. He was almost ten years old by then. So I bought all the kids presents and hitched up to Fairfield, in the rain.
When I got up there, Rhonda took me over to one of her friends house that lived down the street from my mom. Rhonda was two years younger than me, she was twenty four. She had her first kid at sixteen, and divorced the kids’ dad at eighteen. She was a single mother living with my mom, after spending a couple of years on her own in St. Louis Mo., which hadn’t worked out. Anyway we get to her friends house and we smoke a little Christmas cheer with them. A few minutes later, my little half brother comes and knocks on the door. He says mom wants to see me. So I go over to the house, and she asks if I’m smoking pot over there. I was honest and said yes. Well she tells me she doesn’t want me in her house, and kicks me out on Christmas Eve, in a rainstorm. I had to hitch all the way back to Boulder Creek in the rain. Christmas was a real bummer that year.
c'ya tomorrow....

 

But it got worse. My girlfriends’ mom had a falling out with her dentist boyfriend, so they moved to Oakland. And I lost my job, because the boss ran out of work for a while.
I remember going to a New Years party just before I left Boulder Creek. It was really weird. There were a bunch of republicans at the party that were all happy about Reagan becoming president. I didn’t like the idea of it at all.
I headed down the coast back towards San Diego, but got stuck in Santa Barbara because it rained like hell that year and washed out the roads. Nobody could get in or out of Santa Barbara for two weeks.
I was all but broke. But luckily the cops were on strike in Santa Barbara. It rained so much the town was flooded. I was sleeping in the city park, on a band stand stage. It had a half shell roof. As long as the wind didn’t blow the rain, I stayed dry. There was another homeless dude camping on the stage with me. We had to wade through six inches of water through the park to get to the street, which was also flooded. Six blocks down the street was a soup kitchen where we got to eat once a day. Man I was glad when I was able to get the hell out of that town.

I finally got to San Diego the middle of January. I went to Ocean Beach when I got there because ocean Beach had a dog beach where dogs could run without being on a leash. And for a change of luck, I got a job right away as a cab driver for Ocean Beach Cab Company. And I met these folks on the beach that let me move in with them in this apartment building nest to dog beach. They loaned me the forty bucks to get my cab license. Thank God for good people.
A winter storm caused the ocean to flood the apartments a few weeks later, so I went back to Mission Beach to see if I could get a room at the flophouse again. But when I got over there I met a hippie named Richard whose dad let him live in a in a beach house a half block off the boardwalk in the alley. I suspect it had been on the beach in the 50’s, before the boardwalk existed. It was just a small wooden one bedroom beach shack. Rich let me move in for fifty buck a month. He got the bedroom, I tossed a mattress in the livingroom.
Rich claimed to be mentally ill, but was just crazy like a fox. Didn’t like the idea of having a job and living in the real world. He just spent his days playing on the beach. He managed to make the fifty dollars I gave him for rent last for his food for the month.
We had a great time that winter. Rich and I invented a baseball game played with cards, and a football game played with dice. We had about ten other friends that played the football game. Each person was their own team. We had a twelve game season, with playoffs and our own superbowl.
One time I found some mescaline on the beach and shared it with Richard. That was a fun trip, probably one of the best I ever took. Richard on the other hand was kind of up and down with it. He loved all the colors, but at one point thought he was going to die. But he liked the idea of dying, so he laid on the couch and waited for it to happen. But it didn’t happen so we went out on the beach and played Frisbee.
I also had these other friends, two brothers that were really into Frisbee. They taught me how to play freestyle on the beach. It was a way of playing toss and catch, and spinning the Frisbee on your fingernail and doing tricks while it spun. I also learned to play disc golf with them at Balboa Park over by the zoo. Spent a lot of time playing Hacky-sack on the beach too.
After I moved back to Mission beach with Richard, I switched cab companies from Ocean Beach Cab to Co-op Cab, because they covered the whole city with more taxis. And Co-op Cab had a bunch of owners. The guy I rented my cab from had three taxis. He charged me $29.00 a night for a twelve-hour shift. At the end of the shift at 6am, I’d fill the cab with gas drive it back to his house and slip the money under his front door in an envelope. There was another guy that had the cab for the day shift that would give me a ride home. Usually I’d pick up the other cab driver at his house at 4am because the night shift pretty much ended at 3am after driving all the drunks’ home when the bars closed at two in the morning. Between three and four I’d go to Carrows and have breakfast, before I picked up the other driver.
I’d try to make it to bed before the sun came up, and sleep till noon. Then get up, walk down the boardwalk to the roller coaster and have coffee before spending the afternoon on the beach. At 5:30 I’d catch a bus over to Ocean Beach to pick up my cab.
Work was just a party, driving sailors and tourists from one bar to another, or from one party to another. There were a lot of gays in San Diego too, going from one gay bar to another. I knew almost all the hookers, and was always driving them from on John to another.
There were eight different Navy bases in San Diego. On a payday night, I could pick up a hooker and put her in the back seat and drive around picking up sailors all night. I could pick up three or four at a time, and drive around town while she slobbed their knobs. I’d make thirty dollars for the ride, plus she’d give me five bucks per trick. I’d make $300.00 a night easy.

 

One night I picked up a chef at a bar by the submarine base. When he got in the cab he said to turn off the meter, and gave me a hundred dollar bill. He said we were going partying. I told him I had to leave the meter on, because it was against the law to have someone in the cab without it being on. But I drove him down to Broad Street where we hit every titty bar. This guy had been on a submarine for six months without seeing land, let alone a woman! He was handing out money to the dancers like he had his own printing press. 5’s, 10’s, and 20’s! He was buying me drinks every five or ten minutes, and giving me twenty fifty dollar bills, telling me to have some fun. I just kept stuffing them in my pocket. By two o’clock he’d given me another three hundred buck besides the hundred he gave me when he got in the cab.
When the bars closed, he wanted me to drive up Broad Street to look for some hookers. He spotted this fine looking black chic (not really), and wanted me to pull over. He asked how much, and the response was in a real low voice, “I don’t think I’m what you’re looking for. I swear, that transvestite had me fooled too!
We found a couple of black hookers and took them to a cheap motel. He had one and gave me the other. Then when we finished, I took him back to the sub base and dropped him off. I made four hundred dollars that night, got laid, and only drove seventeen miles.
The sailors and tourists were always looking for pot. I usually had some under my front seat, or knew where to get some. I picked up these two sailors at the anti-submarine warfare base once, that wanted some killer. I just happened to know a guy who had some Tye-stick, it was $80 a quarter ounce. They smoked two joints out of the bag while I drove them down Sunset Cliffs. Then I drove them back to the base, and they gave me the rest of the bag, because they couldn’t take it back on the base.
I pretty much knew all the titty dancers too, because they always took cabs to and from work. The dancers weren’t like the hookers though, couldn’t get anywhere with them. But the hookers were always trading slob jobs for rides. I had one hooker that was high dollar. She worked at Hotel Circle, at the ritzy hotels. She was $500.00 a night. Any time I brought her a client, I got a quickie. Life was wild and crazy back in those days.
All that craziness was taking a toll on me, so one weekend I hitchhiked up into the mountains west of San Diego just to camp out and get away. I got picked up by a guy that was living in the rectory of a Catholic Church with a priest that took in homeless people. This guy told me that the church was in the woods up in the mountains, and that the priest would let me camp out on the property. So I went along with him and checked it out.
Sure enough, when we got up there the church was in the middle of these woods, and there was no town, not even a store, just the church and the rectory where the priest lived. The priest was and amazing person. He had Emphysema and was only given six months to live by doctors. But he out lived the prognosis for five years. And the archdiocese was really mad at him because he kept taking in all these homeless people. He told me it was no problem for me to camp out in the woods behind the church for the weekend.
On Sunday after the masses, I took a ride with the priest to a country store, where we bought a six pack of beer. We drove out in the woods and drank beer and talked theology for a couple of hours. Then he drove me back to the Interstate and I hitched back to San Diego. The very next day, I was watching the evening news and saw a picture of the priest on the tv. The news was reporting that he had picked up a hitchhiker who had kidnapped him to El Centro, tied him up in a motel room and killed him. Evil is still murdering the saints.

 

I stayed with Rich till June that year. Then I talked him into a road trip up the coast, just for the adventure and to get him out of San Diego for a change. I don’t know if that boy had ever been out of that town before I met him. We hitched all the way up to Paso Robbles and got a job working at a winery picking grapes. Rich lasted one day before he’d had enough and headed back to Mission Beach. I lasted three days before I got fired because I couldn’t keep up with the Mexican workers. Those suckers were fast! They’d fill three baskets before I could fill one, and I was busting my ass!
So I hitched on up to Boulder Creek, but I didn’t find any of the people I’d met the year before. But I found out that the Rainbow Gathering was going to be in Washington, just north of Spokane. The gathering is always on the 1st of July, so I hitched up to Seattle for a few days because I’d never been there before. Didn’t like it, it rained the whole time I was there.
Spokane was my second Rainbow gathering, and it was there that I realized that this was going to be my family for the rest of my life. These were my kind of people, free spirits. There was this one dude whose old lady had a kid at the gathering. That day he gave away ten thousand hits of LSD to celebrate the birth of his son. I don’t know how many hits he did that day, but he was out there. He sat around all day telling stories that didn’t make any sense at all. Every fifteen minutes or so, he’d break out another hundred hits and pass them out to whoever was listening to his story. I think I ate eight or ten hits that day myself. He was still passing them out at midnight. That was the most acid I ever did in one day, I was still high when I left the gathering.
After the gathering I headed for Montana to get on another seismic crew. I got on with a crew in Billings. They were having trouble with the head surveyor. He was a lazy ass, and didn’t know [excrement] about putting everything in the computer. They had to bring up what they called a tiger team from the regional office in Denver to straighten out his mess. I was promoted to junior. surveyor and put in charge of data entry on the computer. But the dink was so lazy, he’d get other helpers to collect the data on the instrument while he slept in the truck. And these helpers would end up busting the line, then I’d have to go out in the field and correct their screw-ups. Then the crew would end up falling behind, so the district manager for the survey department would come up from the Denver office. And that guy wasn’t much help either, because he’d bring up an ounce of coke with him. He’d give half of it to the crew and sell them the other half. Everybody on the crew would catch up on the work and do good till they ran out a week later. Then they’d fall behind again, and he’d have to come back up with more coke.
After eight weeks of this, we were all crispy critters, me included. I spent $1500.00 on coke that summer, and worked 90 days straight, 16 hours a day. I was burnt out. So I told the party manager I was taking time off in three days, and that he needed to get someone else trained to cover for me while I was gone.
I went on down to see my grandparents in Penrose for ten days and get straight. Then I called the regional office and Denver and told them I was ready to go back to work. They said I was fired because I’d walked off the job. I told them it was the managers fault for getting us all toasted on coke, and said they could shove their job up their ass. I promised myself I’d never ever spend another penny on cocaine.
It was getting to be late October, and I was broke. So I headed down to west Texas to try to get on a crew down there for the winter. I stopped in a bar in Odessa for a beer and a sandwich with my last five bucks. This big guy came up to me while I was eating and said that he knew that I was broke and that he’d give me a hundred bucks for my dog. He told me it wasn’t fair to make the dog suffer, and that he would give her a good home. He said he’d even put me up for the night. So I went to his house and met his wife, and I could tell that they were going to be good to Beth.
I was down in the dumps, because I had called my mom to see if she would loan me fifty bucks till I got a job, but she turned me down and I was feeling kind of destitute. So I took the guys hundred dollars and headed for Big Spring where I got on a crew for two weeks. I was heart broken for selling my best friend. I couldn’t eat or sleep, I was miserable. So as soon as a got a check I quit and went back to Odessa to buy her back. Lucky for me, when I got to the guys house he was at work, and his wife was kind hearted enough to sell the dog back to me. I don’t know if he would have.

 

From there I went down to Austin to see a guy I had worked with on the crew in Montana that summer. He let me stay at his place for thanksgiving. Then I hitched over to Tombstone to see my ex-in-laws, but they had gone to Chicago to see Manuel, a guy I was in the army with that had married one of my ex-wife’s sisters. So I went on down to Bisbee and hung out in an abandoned house up in Brewery Gulch. I stayed there until I was flat broke again, then decided to head back to San Diego.
I got to Yuma Christmas Eve and tried to find my grandparents, but no luck. They had moved to my moms because my pa was about to kick the bucket. My aunt and uncle had moved there too. They were living in Vallejo, just west of Fairfield. So I spent that night at the hobo camp down by the railroad tracks. I was the only one there, even the hobos had gone home for Christmas.
Christmas morning I headed into downtown Yuma to do some dumpster diving to try to find something to eat. In a change of fortune, a lady picked me up and took me to her house. She fed me Christmas dinner, gave me a shower and a clean set of clothes that belonged to her husband. He was in the military and was on a mission over seas somewhere, so she was as lonely as I was. We made love to each other that night.
I made it to San Diego the next day and spent the night in the dugout at a baseball field in Ocean Beach. I was going to see the guy that owned the cab I drove, so I could start work. In the morning though, cops woke me up. There was another guy that had spent the night in the other dugout. The cops rousted both of us and checked our I.D.s. The cops arrested me because I had got a ticket for not having my dog on a leash the year before in Mission Beach. They told me that I could give my dog to the other guy they had rousted if I didn’t want them to put her in the dog pound. Luckily the guy was good enough to take her. I didn’t know the guy from Adam, but figured it was better than letting her go to the pound and get put to sleep. Hell, I didn’t have any idea how long I was going to be in jail, cause I didn’t have any money to bail out.
I spent three days in the county jail, and then got time served by the judge. When I got out, I went back to the baseball field to see if I could find the guy that I gave Beth to. By some miracle, somebody told me he had gone to a mission up in Oceanside, about fifty miles up the coast. I hitched up there and found the guy and he gave me my dog back. Sometimes I really think there is a God.
I got back to San Diego and got my cab job back, and Richard let me move back in with him. Rich decided he wanted to try to be a cab driver, so I got him on with the guy that I drove for. After we finished our first shift that night, we went to Carrows for Breakfast at two o’clock in the morning. When we went in the restaurant, Rich went to the bathroom and I went to grab a table. At one of the tables was a guy that I knew from the Ocean Beach Cab Company that was a drag queen. He wasn’t gay, he liked women but liked dressing like them too. He was sitting at one of the semi-circle tables with two girls. The girls were on the liberal side side of the table and the drag queen was sitting in the center of the table. I went over and sat with them on the right side of the table and started shooting the breeze. Richard came out of the bathroom, and I stood up so he could slide in next to the drag queen. Richard had never met the guy before, and didn’t have a clue. He thought he was sitting nest to a cutie till he started talking in a mans voice. Richard freaked out! He about knocked me on the floor getting out of that table. I met him back at the house an hour later, and he wasn’t happy with me at all. He quit driving cab less than a week later.
I ended up giving Howard Cosell a ride to airport in my cab that year. That was the year the Chargers lost to Cincinnati in the AFC championship game. The dispatcher sent me to the hotel to pick up a fare, and it turned out to be Cosell. When I picked him up I told the dispatcher who my fare was, and he told me to ask Howard how he thought the chargers were going to do. Cosell said they didn’t have the defence to go very far. I told the dispatcher what Cosell said, and he told me to tell Cosell that he sucked. Cosell tipped me five bucks when we got to the airport.
I met a girl on the beach that fall from Minnesota. She wasn’t bad, but had no tits to speak of. Richard let her move in with me, on my mattress in the livingroom.
Me, her and Rich went down to Tijuana once for the day, just to mess around and play tourist. I had bought a car that had the left quarter panel crunched, and I was also getting that fixed at a body shop down there. It was a tan Gremlin. I think the bodywork only cost me fifty bucks to get fixed down there. We went to a bar while we were waiting for the car and had a beer. We were sitting at a table next to the stage. A Mexican titty dancer came out on the stage and started dancing. Then she came down and dragged me up on the stage and started dancing with me. While dancing, she undid my pants and yanked them down to my knees. I wasn’t wearing underwear so I was hanging out in all my glory. My girlfriend and Richard had their arms covering their heads on the table. After the dance I pulled up my pants and went and sat back down at the table. A minute later an old lady that was watching the show came over to me, smiled and patted my crotch and said, “Mucho Bueno!” I think my housemates were more embarrassed than I was.

 

In the spring of 82’ my girlfriend wanted me to drive her back to Minnesota to her mom. So we packed the Gremlin and headed back east. We stopped at some natural hotsprings just outside of Taos New Mexico that I had gone to while I was with the brotherhood at the youth hostel. It was down in the canyon, next to the Rio Grande river. When we got down to the hotsprings there were some Mexicans already in the pots. They seemed nice enough and we joined them. I had some buds I’d brought from San Diego, and they smoked with us and then headed out. We spent a few more hours soaking and then hiked up to the car. When we got to the car, we found that the Mexicans had broke into my Gremlin and stole everything we had, my guitar, her camera, even our clothes. I had just enough money in my wallet for gas to get to Minnesota. When I got her home, her mother gave me a hundred bucks and said, “Thanks for bringing her home, see ya, bye.” I guess that’s why I can’t remember her name. I wish I could have forgot the whole relationship.
So I had just enough to get to Rock Springs Wyoming where I got on another seismic crew, but that only lasted a couple of weeks. I ended up having to sell the Gremlin in Colorado Springs, because I was about out of money again.
I spent the summer in Canon City, working as a hairstylist. Actually the job in Canon wasn’t paying enough to even pay rent on a room, let alone food or anything else. So I moved down the road to Florence, which is between Canon City and Penrose. That’s where the Federal Max prison is. It’s where they keep all the notorious criminals like John Gottie. Now they’re keeping terrorists there too.
The shop I worked in was in the Florence Hotel. And I got a room as part of my pay.
While I was in Florence that year I met a young girl, only eighteen, whose mother owned a popular restaurant. She was crazy in love with me, or at least thought she was. But she was just too young, I was 29 and felt like a cradle robber. The job was going nowhere, just getting me by. So the 1st of September I hit the road headed back to San Diego.
I had never got to San Diego that early in the fall. The rents on the beach were still a thousand to two thousand a week! Richard had a girlfriend living with him, so that was out. So I went to Ocean Beach and found a friend that let me move in. It was a big house with three other roommates, one of which was a real doll. We hit it off right away. A week later we were on our way to Sacramento where I had got a job on another seismic crew. But in a couple of weeks she was bored. She didn’t want to work on the crew, even though they would have hired her. And she didn’t like sitting around the motel room all day while I was at work. So one day I got home after work to find a note saying she had hitched back to San Diego. I lost interest in working, got depressed and quit.
I got back to San Diego around thanksgiving again. I met another woman in Ocean Beach with three kids that let me move in with them. The little girl was five years old, and she was cute as a button. But the nine year old girl and ten year old boy were out of control. They treated their mother like dirt. They cussed at her and hit her all the time. Now I usually try not to interfere with the raising of others kids. But one day I just couldn’t take it any more. The boy slapped his mother and I lost it. I grabbed him by the arm, bent him over my knee and tanned his backside. From then on, none of the kids abused their mother in front of me.

 

Soon after that though, I met a guy a few blocks down the street that had a Weimaraner. He wanted to breed him with my dog Beth. I thought that was a good idea, besides he let me move in while they made puppies. I was afraid if I stayed with the mother and kids, I’d end up in trouble for disciplining them.
During the next three months I had a knife put to my throat and a gun put to my head while driving the cab. They didn’t rob me, they just wanted a ride. But the third time was too much. I picked up a black guy at Tower Records, a music store around 11pm. This guy could figure out where he wanted to go. I’d take him one place and as soon as we’d get there he’d change his mind and want to go somewhere else. I drove this guy from one end of the city to the other, north side, south side, east and west. Every twenty or thirty miles or so I’d tell him he had to cough up some money it he wanted me to keep driving him here and there. And he kept giving me twenty or thirty dollars. I kept driving him from one neighborhood to another. Finally, after driving over a hundred miles to at least six different suburbs of the city, he wanted to go to the airport. When we got there he wanted to go to the Embarcadairo Hotel. When we got there he finally gave me another twenty bucks and got out. He had given me over a hundred and twenty dollars. But after he went in the hotel, I looked in the back seat where he had been sitting and there was this big six inch knife laying on the seat. Guardian angel, thanks again.
The first two years of driving cab I never had any problems what so ever. But those three incidents that third year was enough of a hint for me, I quit.
It was the end of March and I had twelve puppies. Well the guy that had the male I bread Beth with took one of the pups, and I sold three more for $50.00 a piece. They didn’t have papers as AKC registered and I didn’t cut their tails off, so I couldn’t get the $600.00 they usually sold for.
I started hitching back to Colorado for the summer, with eight pups and Beth. The pups were barely six weeks old, and they all fit in a gym bag as I hitchhiked. Almost everyone that picked me up bought one of the pups for a hundred bucks each. That was a very profitable trip.
By the time I got to Albuquerque I only had four puppies left. I got picked up by an elderly man and woman in a van. They were from Las Vegas, not Nevada, New Mexico just north of Santa Fe. He was a retired Air Force Colonel, and they had just come to Albuquerque to get groceries at the PX at the air base. We were headed back up to Las Vegas, but when we got to Santa Fe it started snowing. I told them they could let me out, because I was going to head back to Albuquerque, cause I didn't want to hitch in the snow. They said it was just a spring snow and that it would be melted by morning, and that they would put me up for the night. That sounded a hell of a lot better than camping along side the road.
When we got to their house up in the mountains outside of the town of Las Vegas, when two blindingly gorgeous daughters came out the front door to greet us and help carry the groceries in the house. The old man and I (he wasn’t really that old, about 55), went in the livingroom and sat down while the ladies put away the food. He pulls out this box of stash and twists up a couple of doobies, which surprised the heck out of me. A minute later the girls came in and he hands them the doobies and tells them to take me up to the hotsprings.
The girls were eighteen and twenty years old, and God they were beautiful. The hotsprings was just a hundred yards up the hill from the back of the house. They were different than what I’d ever seen. They were in a old wooden shack, and they were like a cement shower stall. It was about five-foot square and about four feet deep. When we got in the shack, the girls just took off their clothes, lit the doobies and hopped in. The older one said, “ Don’t just stand there staring, get naked and get in.” So I did.
Thirty minutes later their mother came in and said that dinner was ready. So we got dressed and went down to the house. Mom was an awesome cook, best meal I’d had in ages. I slept on the couch that night. I was going to give them one of the pups, but they said they didn’t have the time.
Next morning the old dude gave me a ride down to Las Vegas out by the interstate. It was just like he said, the snow was almost all melted by 10am.
More adventures tomorrow....

 

Okie doky skippy, I got the word you're the big cheese, so I won't clutter your forum any more. AMF

 

Goodness I read this whole thing. Post more!
lol @ the bag of bananas as a weapon