Why I Can't Go Back To Denver

Summertime came at last and, finals all finished, I turned my grades in to the O.S.U. Dean's office, breathed a sigh of freedom, grabbed Sharon the dog and lit out for Denver, traveling north from Corvallis in Bill's yellow Fairlane, to pick up the Interstate at Portland. My old pickup truck stayed with Bill, on Char’s farm outside Sweet Home, where he could spend time tinkering with it. He promised me a whole new truck, which didn't pan out—few of Bill's projects ever did. 'Course I didn't bring back the same Ford, either; but then we never end up where we plan to go, and in those days the road ahead seemed endless.

Niko, in Denver, was missing me with lush thighs and a cascade of auburn hair.

I'd been reading Jack Kerouac, and, as an antidote to that wonderful American energy, I read Bill's copy of stuffy Sir James George Frazier's 1890 Golden Bough, which he'd absorbed in prison. As a reformed altar boy turned bank robber, Bill was caught up in Frazier's windy and poetic explanations of the origins of religion in primitive "superstition": rituals to celebrate the changing seasons, the dying of the light in winter, the birth of new crops – not really superstitions at all but termed so by holy Church which buried belief in nature rituals with their own superstitions based on blood sacrifice (harrumph!). While both Mark Twain and Rousseau had remarked on the innate sagacity of First Nations cultures, Frazier did it from the background of a Cambridge don, his influence all over the works of TS Eliot.

But I'm rattling on.

Bill rattled on a lot, too. In fact he had put Niko and I to sleep one night driving home from Eugene, after which he went to sleep himself and drove into a cornfield, busting his radiator hose. We woke about 3 AM to high school kids' flashlights come to see who was driving a Studebaker through their corn field. They woke Bill at the wheel and he just started the steaming wreck and drove it like a quick brown fogbank into Eugene where we abandoned it and took a cab home.

Sharon the Dog and Niko and I lived in a two-bedroom house with Bill for a while after I pushed her through her last year of school. She had take two years off to work as a “stewardess” and travel all over the world. I met her when she came back to school after her adventuring. I was teaching English at Oregon State, and when my wife and daughter moved back to Philadelphia, I was pretty low in spirits until this fresh young thing came knocking at the door of the big house I was sharing with Jim O’Neill and Sharon the Dog.

Sure, I said, you can rent the back bedroom.

Then when the landlord threw us out we stayed in a hotel for some months, where we ran into Bill, just up from Eugene and working as a mechanic at the Toyota place. When Bill found a small house to rent, we moved in there.

After dinner, which Bill usually cooked, he would rattle on and on about his early life, about being a miner in Victor, Colorado, up above Cripple Creek, and about running from the law. He had escaped from Canyon City Prison only to pass out in a drug store calling his sweetheart, just like in a prison B movie. One afternoon he told us the whole story of his bank-robbing days and we listened spellbound as the day went from dusk to dark – he was talker. I traveled later with Bill to Canyon City where we visited the prison psychologist who confirmed the whole mess. In Oregon he had taken a new name. In the Seventies – before computers and out in Oregon – this was pretty easy. He became Bill Gabriel, after the archangel.

Niko graduated in January, and when spring heated up the Willamette Valley, she took a waitress job, soon growing pensive and restless. There was no way to use her education in Corvallis, and she didn't want to return to flying. It had made her weepy, since the boys they were flying in to Vietnam were so apple-cheeked and optimistic, and the plane rides out so quiet and sad and so much emptier.

So she wrote her brother in Denver, who invited her to stay with him, and took off one morning after a nice round of carpet sex which started when she knelt in her tight skirt to pick up her neatly-packed bags. Great thighs.

In Denver she got a job with the city planner. I missed her like crazy, and she ended up doing the planner, so as soon as my summer school finals were over I traded vehicles with Bill and took off to Colorado to see my girl.

Bill’s Ford Fairlane was two-tone yellow and black, and the radio was okay. Heading up to Portland we had beautiful weather, so Sharon and I stopped for lunch by the Willamette and had a swim. Sharon pretty much stunk when wet, but it was Bill's car, and much worse indignities were soon to befall it.

When we hit the beltway outside Portland I saw so many signs and so many hitchikers trying to get rides to the big rock fest in Arcadia, Washington, that I told Sharon: "Slight detour here girl. Niko wants us to have fun, and you have never been to a rock festival and I'm sure there will be a lot of nice hippy dogs there with bandanas on just like you, and we can catch up on earth-tribal gossip and go out of our gourds and maybe daddy will get lucky, ahem, hak kaff," and we kept going straight north up the coastal highway rather than turning east to Colorado just yet.

The party began as I packed the car with hitchhikers who pulled out bowls, beads, and beer (the "three b's"), and sang about teaching children, something I was free of for awhile.

I would have dutifully called Niko from the car phone but they hadn't been invented. And freedom from Ma Bell isn't the only freedom we've lost. In the Seventies I could push the Ford over 100 and I did. It wouldn't cost an arm and a leg for gas; and in Oregon if we got stopped they'd just write us a ticket and take our bongs -- not the car. Ken Kesey, who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was the real Randall Patrick McMurphy and had met with the governor, whose soon had a problem with hard drugs, and convinced him to go easy on pot.

Sharon and I were absolutely sure that Niko on her end and Bill on the other would want us with all their hearts to have the best possible time we could as long as we came home safe and told them the story with no lies even if the truth sometimes hurt because we were into truth then and if you think this is going to be one of those "good old days" stories you're right.

********

Walking up the mountain to the concert site with my backpack and three bottles of Boone's Farm, smelling the honeysuckle and eating blackberries from the bushes we passed, Sharon and I fell in with a hippy who shared the last of some moonshine he'd picked up on a commune in West Virginia. At the top of the hill, two dusty miles farther on, was a roadblock with two fat rent-a-cops checking tickets and over to their left a crazed shaggy hippy in a "Staff" shirt glaring at me and poor Sharon, making warding gestures and shaking his head.

"NO WAY! No no no no. No FUCKING WAY you're sneaking in. Go over to the booth and BUY A TICKET like everybody else!" he shouted at me, then sotto voce: "Go now, quick!" and I booked inmediatmente. I was in free.

Only I’d forgot Sharon, who had her nose in some garbage. When I realized she was not with me I backtracked, calling her name. But back at the starting gate I saw her not. Oh well. She had a better nose: let her find me.

The concerts were aces. Jessie Colin Young toodled away the afternoon, and then there was a blues band, and Wishbone Ash from England was the headliner that night.

Night came on: squatting in the dirt with the rest of the pagans swilling Boones Farm, passing it along the row of outstretched and congenial palms to those who each shared whatever they had brought, identifying politely what we were sharing. A legacy, actually.

"This is Boone's Farm with DMC"

"This red wine has some RFD23 in it."

"Zees is a young beaujolais '69, fruity, wees good legs, broad shoulders, and a selection of mixed acronyms which weel keep you feeling tiptop, enabling you to see music, talk to bunnies, and fart like a Kodiac bear in a cheese shop"…

and on into the night, which after the lights went out grew rainy and windy and wild and ended up, for me, sleeping under a tarp outside somebody's van, waking in the mud of a cold grey not-even dawn, shaking out cobwebs.

Stumbling down the hill, my bedroll drying on my back, I put my stuff into the Ford's trunk and got out my sketchbook to make some signs for locating the vanished Sharon. I figured to pass them out as soon as I could get some copied, and to hang them in laundromats with Niko's Denver number and mine in Oregon.

As a last resort I hollered "Sharon!" as loud as I could, at which she sprang out from under the car and into my arms, licking my face, and people going by laughed and laughed at the crazy man and his dog dancing in the afterglow of our wild night.

Back on the highway we sped on toward Denver and my only love, my sweet-smelling dove, and Sharon's Mom. I was picking up all the pilgrims we had room for, too.

Then I did a real dumb thing. In a littlebitty town in Idaho, I got gas and decided to check my battery. Being tired, I topped off the water with a high pressure hose, and the back spray caught me in the eyes with battery acid. One of the hitchhikers drove me to the emergency room where they washed my eyes out and put bandages on them, warning me to leave the bandages on for a day.

Unfortunately the hippy who was driving had to go north in Wyoming, so I unwrapped my bandages prematurely and took the wheel myself for the last of the swing into Denver and Niko. By this time I was really frazzled, and it was hard to stay awake. Having been on the road two days with little sleep; I ate some dexedrine and perked right up.

I was able to find Niko's street when we got to town, and when I called she was home. I had one hippy left by now, having dropped all the others off, and he wanted to take a shower but I gave him two bucks and said "no way."

Niko and I devoured each other; then she tucked me in and I drifted into a fitful sleep. All the traveling, coffee, and worse the medicinals, plus my fear of falling asleep at the wheel, combined into some wild dreams, during one of which I was running from the cops across the backyards of Eugene, strung with laundry we had to duck under. Finally I was standing on a wall looking down into a yard about fifteen feet below. I balked at jumping down, and the guy with me said "Go ahead, it's only a dream."

So I leaped and ended my dream crashing onto the floor of Niko's bedroom, scaring the neighbors but not fazing Sharon, since she'd had a lot more sleep than I.

***************

Niko had made big plans, as she always did. She'd put the security down on an apartment of her own where she and I could live and have “our own space.” As soon as I got a bit of rest we moved her two suitcases and my backpack over to the new place, near Larimer Square. Sharon liked it well enough, but after her adventure at the rock fest, and since she was an Oregon girl off the farm, she pretty much dogged our steps when we went anywhere. So she was standing right at my side when we stopped one afternoon to windowshop an aquarium store. Nor was I alarmed when two little feisty dogs came out of the store and began sniffing Sharon over. She'd was an old road dog, not a fighter, and would give way if she had to.

But when they jumped Sharon in tandem I got upset, especially since they continued to savage her even after she rolled over and surrendered, showing tummy. So I pulled the one little fice off with my hand and kicked the other one aside.

At which an angry bald dude burst out of the shop shouting "Don't kick my dog!"

"Well get your fucking dog off my dog, then," I replied as Niko tried to make peace. He collected his nasty little dogs and I was comforting Sharon, when he decided to apologize. Ordinarily this is a good idea, but I was still on the upswing of my anger, having found blood on my hands from Sharon's stomach.

Besides, as you might imagination, I was feeling hugely territorial after the epic trip during which I actually had to unbandage my eyes to drive, and had almost lost my pooch forever.

So I said "Look, I don't want to talk to you right now, I am getting pissed. Go away."

When the guy persisted I braced him, grabbing hid lapels, causing him to step backward, in this case through the plate glass window of the barber shop next door.

OOPS!

Niko collected Sharon and put her in the car while I told the barber to call the cops and make out a report, as I was sure his insurance would pay, and I would spring for the deductible, which was 100 bucks I didn't have. At this point the dog owner, who also owned the fish store, got his chance to be a good Samaritan and offered me a job in his store making fish tanks.

I was cooling down fast, and after we filled out the report the big Irish cop let me go, after warning me with a gimlet eye that if I ran out on this I'd better never show my face in Denver again.

So I went to making fishtanks.

Which was pretty easy, but not easy enough to keep me hanging around Denver for $3 an hour and all the guppies I could hold, so I split back to Corvallis and my real job.

And once in awhile I sneak in and out of Denver, being sure to travel on the redeye though my spoor is cold and I don't have my pony tail anymore.

I don't miss the pony tail, but I do miss being able to trust strangers in the way that you could then -- the last hitchhiker I picked up at the beach turning out to be not a college kid but a recently-released psycho with a knife.

Bill's Ford lasted all the way back to Sweethome, Oregon, where he had moved in with Charlene, his mate until he passed away on Vashon Island in Puget Sound, from whiskey for the most part, though Bill’s pharmacopeia would impress most labs and some Amazonian witch shamans.

Going around Portland Sharon and I picked up some hippies who dropped their pipe and started a fire, and we had to stop and extinguish the back seat. Bill didn't seem to mind, and actually got a kick from telling me how his brakes failed just the next week as he was going into town. It was seven miles of winding downhill road with some straightaway at the bottom, so he coasted it into the Safeway parking lot and walked away, leaving yet another hulk for the cops to puzzle over.

I never took pictures in those days, believing that stopping in the middle of a good time in order to freeze it for the future – and tomorrow never comes -- was the height of anal-retentive arrogance; cosmic clockwatching in a world of far too little time for NOW. Just discarding the car as Bill did, the Odyssey over, was a bit much, but at least it wasn't planned.

Sharon decided to live on the farm for a season then, as she had a little and I was living in town. After we’d farmed out the pups she came and lived with me; and then Niko came back too. Sharon died after a drunk hit our car on the road from Yank’s Station in to South Lake Tahoe in the Sierras. She was standing at my side, a bit farther into the roadway to protect us as good doggies will do. A second car with a REAL drunk gal, hit the cop car behind us, bounced off, and killed Sharon. The cop took off to apprehend drunk #2, and as I held Sharon and she died the first drunk’s lamentations over his driving record struck me as puling and paltry and I was strangling him when the cop came back and threatened to shoot me if I didn’t desist.

I wasn’t so loyal to Niko, who moved in with a poet after I left her in Tahoe and went to live with a Chinese teacher when he offered me a job writing his Master’s thesis, which sounded like a lot more fun than driving the Tahoe bus, which was what I did after my contract ran out at Oregon State and I moved to California and started a country-rock band which played for a season at the ski resorts and then washed up on the shoals leaving me stranded.

But that’s just work stuff. Life is in the moment, or isn’t it nice to think so?