The road. No, not the city street. Unless it’s the street: a crosstown street, the kind you “have” to travel on, the kind you get hung-up on. The kind you need, the one that runs out to the great highway–the open road–the road that’ll take you miles and miles away from your home to strange new towns and strange new cities.
The open road of the countryside, just one lane each way or maybe one of those rare three-lane roads: country farms sitting off to either side, drinking well in back, help yourself early in the morning, pump hard, quietly, walk past the sleeping house.
Back to the open road, so far from home and brief memories of friends. Sometimes longest yearnings for that someone you didn’t know how much you loved until you were many states away . . . but it is fair for you never would have known if you hadn’t walked and thumbed your hundred rides past a countless number of unremembered towns.
That’s part of the sweet relief and glory of the road: letting the truth roll up to you and crease your brow in sweetest sorrow. You understand, you understand so much, don’t you?
Maybe you’re young and virgin or maybe you’re tired and uncaring. Maybe you can pretend to be a friend or a wisdom-seeker when you need be.
Maybe your fantasies deserve to be made real but I don’t believe you, I the voice of millions feeling similar unspeakable longings and passions. Maybe they all deserve to have their secret worlds made flashbulb real . . . or maybe some of them couldn’t live without secret worlds, gay fantasies, and other lives.
But no, this is nonsense–you are not listening to me, my friends, the few who pick me up, the count how many who pass me by, can you begin to imagine how many? The lonely good-looking waitresses and teamsters and farmers and no-name-day-jobbers, they work and sweat and live their lives of hardness. Who are we to be offended by their kindnesses, free travelers upon the great and open highways and byways of this huge and expansive land?
The road. Miles from your home, miles from all your earlier experiences. New land, new times, new people, new motion–yes, new motion–my God, what a relief! To be walking away from the crowded houses looking forward to the gift of the widening sky. . . .
No television when you’re walking. The souls of your feet heat up. Your shoes wear out. Tennis shoes, boots, sandals: friends. On the road, they’re not lifeless objects, they’re friends. Stones are friends. Telephone poles, too, and birds and big rigs, the drivers waving as their trucks roar their mighty noise! Friends, all.
I said to her: why is it so hard to be lovers from this moment on? I saw you, I liked you, let us love: let us keep not loving each other from ruining the friendship. It is life: women, men, women and men. Kiss me, you will not die or be forsaken: or will you?
“Hell, did you see that girl!” he cried out and we laughed half the way to Fort Wayne, Indiana. Fort Wayne. End of the ride. Take Highway 24, then, to Toledo. Whoever heard of Highway 24 or Toledo, for that matter? Great rides though! A self-proclaimed right-wing extremist going ninety miles per hour (a sneaky glimpse over—is the driver sane?)
He didn’t know I was a history major as I listened to him telling lies about the Eerie Canal. He was trying to frighten me! Oh yes, black brothers, I am ready! From Hough in Cleveland, to East 14th in Oakland, I listen.
White, bearded, and thin-haired, mistaken for a hippie now and again, I sing those songs of peace but they mean less to me because of the violence that lies ahead.
Not even the best voice in the world can sing the money out of J. Paul Getty’s pockets and back into the hands of the people from whence it came.
Many voices singing in harmony: Swing low, Sweet Chariot. There’s no way to care about pain you can’t see, feel, hear, touch: far away, not you, not you….
Hartford, Connecticut. Visiting a chick in a mental hospital. She ain’t wif me no mo’.
I went to Europe. Tie to ship’s dinner. Screw that! Making it or being made the first day. What a gone little chick she was. Thought of her…where was it? Home, I guess. Some chicks you know will fade from your memory. The gal that proves you wrong, that’s when you and the road are one, that’s when you know you’ve blown it.
Next came the Olympics. I won six Gold Medals. I was terrific. The best! The announcer went crazy, his voice cried with joy.
The crowd cheered, I (chilled) ran into immortality.
So did you, sister, so did you.
Somebody stole my satchel in Washington Square in New York City where I slept after writing a letter to the red-hair girl while sitting on the toilet in a bathroom stall of the Port Authority, ink dripping on my previous funny organ, pants down to fool the harsh cats leering in through the crack of the door, killing the time of the hot night, walking the thirty blocks to sleep 4:00 A.M. in the morning in Washington Square.
Satchel gone: shaving stuff, beautiful new shirt, beautiful letters from the red-haired girl, I could have killed the mother who took those. Ship at 6:00 A.M. after breakfast of hamburger and an onion thick, thicker, and bigger than the hamburger! No more “Rapid Shave” (stolen with the satchel) so I grew a beard and looked quite handsome.
Christ, where am I, I ran the mile race years ago, I was slow.
Hiding behind a motel, sleeping in the grass. Trucks roared by, a few dozen yards away. Around 3:00 A.M. the heat of the July day wore off; the slight chill woke me. I fumbled with my green suitcase (another friend) fooling with the combination lock.
I have lousy sleepy eyes in the middle of a dark star-jeweled night. Got the suitcase opened, put on a sweater and spread some a paper map for a pillow and went back to sleep.
Face against the sharp, strong blades of grass can be painful, cheek mosaic from indentations, bug ambushes . . . map is much better, perhaps the best pillow in the world!2
A lot of people don’t know why hitch-hikers love the road so. They don’t understand. I won’t say they don’t try. We’re not lost. Are we looking for a meaning to life on the road, is that why we travel? No, no, no! When you’re traveling, you’ve found your meaning.
You’re free. Free? Motion. All kinds of cars. Faces, weird to sublime. No ordinary faces. Never saw an ordinary face unless it’s mine but then I’m fairly ugly. Well, let’s just say, definitely not handsome. It slays me that anyone can think I’m nice-looking. I mean, they must be on a real stony-stone trip, if you see what I mean? Like they aren’t seeing me; they’re seeing colors and feeling brain waves of gentle good-naturedness.
Myself, I’m not a “head,” you understand. Hippies are as far from me as the Bad Guys. They’re poor. Very keen on the hallucinogen “acid.” They’re for communalism.
I’ve touched down in all three places in my time, but it’s not just that.
I guess I object to their attitude toward learning, towards ideas of morality and reality. I figure you ought to hold on to some basic point of view even if you are drug-oriented.
Otherwise, you’re letting yourself in for some mighty big “downers.” I guess what really bugs me, though, is their attitude towards politics. Like some of them think the protect and defend liberty of the left is the same sort of animal as the shut up and salute the flag posture of the right. They don’t even see the difference!
Of course, some hippies are “leftniks” too but they take to demonstrations like they’re extras in a movie. With rocks they fight. Rocks! Oh my- oh my.
3
I gave a speech in Madison, Wisconsin. A groovy little town. The speech was against the war, the march and speechifying was. Thousands of students turned out in a massive show of support for the celebrated march in the Bay Area of G.I.s against the Vietnam War. The report from Berkeley, California said tens of thousands were turning out, despite rainy weather. I started off with:
“You heard earlier that it was raining in Berkeley. Well, that’s wrong. The sun is shining in Berkeley, it is shining forth from the brave hearts and souls of all those men who are marching against the war, even as the sun is shining here…” and went on from there.
It was a good enough speech and the old-timer complimented me when it was over. I didn’t want to stop and listen to him, though. My voice got a quaver in it as I concluded and then nearly disappeared and a few of my ideas weren’t very clear. Still, it was my first time.
I’m a politically concerned person but I don’t ever do much, it seems. Last summer I lived in an Oakland ghetto at 20th and Linden in West Oakland and I got to meet some Black Panther Party leaders. One time Huey Newton called me a “racist.” (Actually, he said he could consider a certain statement I made a racist statement).
Thinking back on that evening, maybe he was right although I still believe in what I said. I worded it wrong and I didn’t really understand much in those days. I didn’t mean to say blacks couldn’t develop their own leadership, if that’s what he thought he heard.
I meant to say I didn’t want to see a racial “separatist movement” splitting the movement for equal rights. I meant to say leadership calls for the best, white or black, and it would be a shame for blacks to ignore valuable white experience in fighting repression.
I meant to say, good leadership and a meaningful movement would necessarily include white people. If Blacks drift off toward a “reverse racism” stance, then they ought to know there are whites and blacks dedicated to racial friendship who will never support that trend. I’d fight against the emergence of a racist black leadership, to tell the truth.
I guess what I meant to say was, Blacks shouldn’t try to develop their own anti-white racist leadership because they will drive millions of white people away from the civil rights movement. Don’t they know that?
That was in the summer of 1967. A can of cold baked beans for dinner. A small, dirty apartment. A little trouble with the toilet. But a luxury ghetto apartment, compared to others.
No cockroaches. Hot and cold running water. Nice tenants in the other apartments. Downstairs, an old man named Sam Starkey, you might feel a chill as you remember him, a wise eighty-eight, a cyst in one eye, a people-loving man who spoke up and defended us, three white boys, on two separate occasions; he didn’t care if we were white, he looked for the color and purity of our souls. Our old landlady, who was black, was a lot worse.
When I got the word a year or two later that Sam died, something broke in me. He was one of the best men who ever lived in his own way; I loved him more than anyone else. It made me feel like crying but the tears wouldn’t flow. Keep in the tears to remember him.
What a pure and blessed soul! Think of the poverty and hatred and racism he put up with his whole life. His memory, enveloping his parents’ and grandparents’, included stories from the generations that knew slavery and the days thereafter.
One of my roommates talked to Sam several more times more than I had. I always regretted being a stupid kid running off here or there, or writing crappy poetry, rather than sitting and listening to the wise words of one of this country’s finest, if unknown, men.
He wasn’t unknown by the people he lived with- he wasn’t unknown to me. I see him there still, sitting on the stoop, or watering, or hearing of how he had saved us from being kicked out, three poor white souls in a black ghetto. I see his firm full belly, his suspenders, his white and gray hair, his glasses, his cysted-eye and you know black people suffer often from lack of simple medical attention from not being able to afford it.
How I loved that old man! Eighty-eight years of blackness in this country and still not hating whites but judging each man by his worth: an everlasting tribute to the human spirit.
Yea, feel a chill through your soul when you remember the name Sam Starkey!
4
Well, like many on-the-roaders of the young and carefree sort, I enjoy the experience. For some, they can’t afford any better. I guess I can’t either but I’m a-traveling for fun, too. Not so many hoboes as there used to be. Or maybe I been chicken-shitting it too long to know what I’m talking about. Somebody has to keep Woody Guthrie’s spirit alive and to know another man’s spirit, it helps to go through what he went through.
I guess Woody was this country’s best-known on-the-roader. I meant to try and visit him in his New York hospital where he lay dying for so many years but I never did. And I ain’t got nothin’ to account for missing out so poorly, oh Lord.
New York, of course, is a crazy town. Tear it down, cart away the cement, grow grass and trees and give it back to the Indians. Oakes and Brightman [Indian leaders] they’re right; this was, and is, their country. Their ancestors were willing to share with Pale-Faces. But the maternal ancestors of the D.A.R. (Daughters of the American Revolution) said no, we want it all! and they killed the Indians and treated them like they were no better than animals.
The Pale-Faces began an ugly chapter in the history of this fine land. Four hundred years of them, weighed against thousands of years of Native American culture. Cement cities, as an effort at permanence, as a way of over-populating the earth. White America: forgetting that white is a minority in the world. They ought to beg for forgiveness after all of their sins!
One of these days, they are going to be reminded of all the sins of their white-skinned ancestors in a way they’ll never forget. It’s not just jive, a channel of fantasies to take off the heat. Something’s coming and if we don’t make amends and let it come gradually, it’s gonna come some other way but it’s gonna come.
5
I’m living in San José, California now: Mexican-Americans, blacks (aka Negroes or African-Americans), Indians from India, Puerto Ricans, poor people, decent whites, they’re going to start talking to one another: someday. Yes, Whitey, someday.
More Mexican-Americans in California than Blacks. Oakland should have black leaders. Leave ex-mayor Houlihan in jail, let Elijah Turner and John George run the city. Watch out for the Oakland police. Sen. Knowland and Mr. Kaiser, they own the city, I guess.
Lake Merritt is fine. Jack London Square. Oakland City College. East 14th Street. Rapid transit and a “new downtown”. An inter-racial city with diversity! Oakland is fine. My home for many a year: Oak Tech, ’65! Where the only thing I learned worth learning was that black people and white people can talk to each other if they so desire.
That’s where I ran track. The mile. First time, turned in a blazing 5:23:0 flat. A mere ninety-two seconds off the world’s record. I’ll get there. John Carlos and Tommy Evans at the 1968 Olympics in their historic, black-gloved, lowered-head salute. They won the medal for me. “Did you run in the Olympics?” “Yes, didn’t you see me? I was there, there in the black glove of two of America’s greatest athletes.”
6
Summer of ’67: again. Yosemite. With the crazy red-haired girl (now deceased). Five days of bliss, brothers. Hiking to Glacier Point from the valley floor in four hours. The chick had staying power!
Two rides back down, one with a Park Ranger. He stopped the car once and took me over to a marshy meadow, marshy from the melting snows. It was the vernal equinox but the snows were heavy and persistent that year. Sun and shirt-sleeves with ten-foot snowbanks guarding the road.
A little nippy; roll that fuckin’ window up, Holden (name of my red-haired friend). The Ranger told me about the mating habits of some kind of red-legged frog or something. A real great time. He explained moss, too, and variants of it and fungi and everything.
He took us halfway down the mountain (thirty miles by road: six or seven miles hiking straight up) where we immediately got a ride with an elderly married couple. I talked to and made out fine with their big gray French poodle in the back. Everyone was amazed to hear me and the poodle talk to each other. Low growls, little whines, moves of affection, moves calling for affection, everything.
As a matter of fact, it was one of the best conversations I had with anyone in years! You think I’m terrible, you ought to dig the way my sister and other similarly-wigged out blond chicks talk to horses. Yes yes, whatever happened to Liz Sheffield and her love of some crazy fucked-up long-sentencing psychologizing female English author? (Jane Austen or somebody). Liz was cool. Married now.
Never would have stood by a snow-melted Yosemite meadow listening to frogs during their mating season if I hadn’t learned to hitchhike. (Don’t say “So what!” because it means a lot to me.) Yosemite: the first time Holden ever heard nuns referred to as penguins. We were walking away from one of the scary lookout points and ahead were two nuns and I said “Look at the penguins” and that nearly slew her, she really liked it, and she could like or dig something real well, finer than anyone else I ever knew.
I recognized sheer joy of life in her, the madness of a wild, vibrating genius that loved to freak itself out. She was really gone. Over her bed hung a Latin motto: Post coitum omne anime triste est. (“After intercourse, all animals are sad.”) Three o’clock in the morning, she lets out a spring, bounds out of bed, yells “Corn bread!” and runs to the kitchen.
I never liked corn bread myself, even homemade. Something to do with seeds in teeth. I guess not liking corn bread was what convinced her I was mad, too–that, and my insistence I was sane. Anytime you meet a cat who doesn’t like corn bread and claims he needs to be sane, you know that cat is a long time gone. Majority opinion, carry me away.
7
I never thumbed until I was seventeen. I was going back to Cleveland for a vacation, the year of the air strike. Flew into Chicago at 6:02 A.M. on July 8. Two minutes earlier at 6:00 A.M. the mechanics walked out; they thought me strange, a plane traveler, waving my wave of sympathy to them even though my next flight was grounded.
I had a simple breakfast: pancake or waffle, egg, and juice: 99¢. No tip. I felt poor enough to be penny-pinching. Time to hit the road and try my luck. Three times I’ve done a day-and-a-half trip on five hundred mile runs, spending the night on the road, not eating except when treated. Spent 20¢ the first time- then 15¢- then a nickel!
It’s a great feeling, sharing something of a harder side of life. You feel “cool,” you feel real. Only your feet and you and the road; yes, you feel very real and something of the man in you comes forth, not to be messed up by whoring middle class chicks or the like.
I was carrying a suitcase in those days, long before I bought a groovy back-pack in the Army Surplus Store at Waverley Station in Edinburgh, Scotland. Talk about a friend; I loved that old back pack with the red cross on a white field, you know the kind!
A truckdriver who hadn’t bothered to have his broken jaw fixed yet picked me up, drove me clear through to Fort Wayne, Indiana from the O’Hare Airport in Chicago. I could understand the poodle better than I understood him. He was traveling light, without a load, and I bounced around a lot, up and down and sideways, all over the seat.
He offered to let me drive but I chickened out. I know Holden’s dark brown eyes would have fired up at the chance! He treated me to a chocolate milkshake. Everywhere I went in those days I ordered a chocolate milkshake- ever since I was a kid. Was trying for top billing: “America’s leading expert on chocolate milkshakes”.
You hip road bums, do Fenton’s in Oakland on Piedmont Avenue or the Rock Springs, Colorado bus station. Let me know if you find a better chocolate milkshake!
Toledo was a dream, passing over a beautiful tree-lined river. Town of my father’s birth. I, Roger, the son of Leon Beethoven, passed on through. Who can say when you should have stopped or when you shouldn’t have?
Shakedown by cop near dusk. He confiscated firecrackers and cherry bombs. Onward I traveled. Discovered Woodville, Ohio: “Crossroads of the Nation,” the sign says. Who am I to bid them nay? That’s where I slept outside a motel with a paper-map pillow. (I walked a long ways to get to that motel and then changed my mind. Hell, I could have conked out in the fields six miles back!) Up at 5:00 a.m. A little old lady was sweeping off her sidewalk the first few autumnal leaves that had drifted sleepily downward during a warm July night.
I got stopped by a young cop. Born December 1947 (me) and the year was 1966. I would turn 19 in December. He adds it up and says, “You’re sixteen?” Dumb cop! He took me to a little pole out along the highway, the pole of the city limits. I almost flipped out over this “doing-my-duty” routine of his since he removed me from a safe hitchhiking spot to a dangerous, thin-shouldered strip alongside fast-moving-traffic.
Stuck my thumb on the west side of the pole once and again (I was going east) just for the hell of it, putting me technically within Woodville city limits. Walking, throwing stones at telephone poles, suitcase banging against the leg. I hit each pole with a rock. Came to one pole I couldn’t hit for nothin’. Put the green suitcase down and stood there half a day throwing stones.
Made a sign during my next ride: C L E V E – L A N D with different colors. The sign helped. Made another sign saying “W E S T” coming back from New York, vague dreams of going all the way . . . “All the way”, what a dream! Never hitched across the whole country. As far as I’m concerned I’m still a road virgin until the day I do.
You can learn a lot, being by yourself. I come by it naturally; nobody had to teach me how to be alone, nobody had to teach me how to like myself. That’s where our Black brothers and sisters were made to suffer for years and years. They picked up skills best as they could, working on cars, playing jazz, shooting pool, playing sports but they had a hard time gaining a free unfettered look at their own class-oppressed souls.
Maybe they have something of a racial harmony that we Caucasians are missing. Slavery erased much- but not all- of their African heritage. And in the land of their origins, a certain spirit of harmonious togetherness pervaded their social life.
Perhaps all this is hogwash and a black scholar or a white one will have to put it down. In any case, rich businessmen tried to mis-educate them, kept them in ghettoes. The owners of property hoped to keep manhood from the men, womanhood from the women. We tried, and succeeded, for far too long in keeping them from liking themselves.
But it’s no longer working. They came to their adulthood, despite us! And, truth to tell, rough as this country is, it’s still a lot worse being black-and-alone than white-and-alone. You go through rural America with a black skin and you may never be seen again.
Ever see a car swerve to try and hit a hippie? Well, if they swerve for a beard, what would they do to Blackness? Who knows, maybe they’re some black youngsters around right now who wish they could enjoy the hitchhiking experience but figure they can’t take the chance. And that probably isn’t the worst thing they have to sacrifice. I’m not black so I don’t know and it’s not easy to find out.
How many black hitchhikers do you see? I never feel too bad when a car with Negroes in it passes me by. We go our own ways with mutual respect. Maybe next year things’ll change. Hey, baseball, major league baseball, was only integrated in 1948, same year as the army. That’s just seventeen years ago!
The game’s over one hundred years old and Blacks in modern times only got the right to play in the pro leagues less than twenty years ago. Satchel Paige, he never really played for the majors except there at the end of his career when he was older than Noah.
He was the best, man- but not “good enough” for the majors while he was still in his prime. Can you believe it? Now, there’s even a black pole vaulter. And a black golfer. And a couple of black swimmers. And a black tennis player. Yes, things will change next year.
8
Cops. Two tickets for hitchhiking on a freeway. Ten dollars, one ticket. Five dollars, the other ticket. Unfair both times! Cops. Picking on you. Scared to get the real criminals.
They ought to pass new qualifying laws for police: take college graduates only–send them to college! Let them study Psychology, History, Criminology, Non-violence. And the success story of the unarmed British “Bobby” or police officer.
No guns for police. In this country? Never! Well, King George III said “Never!” to the colonists who wanted their freedom. He said it loud and strong and clear and he turned out to be dead wrong. Shouldn’t we be making every effort to take all this violence out of our lives, our social lives and our international disputes?
Killing Vietnamese and killing suspected criminals speaks of the same diseased soil. Excess violence in America: take the guns away from the police. Or, at least, educate them: at least you can agree with that. Educate them.
Anyway, the trick in talking to cops is to be very nice to them. A bellicose statement like “Pig, let go of my arm before I break your head into 23,764 pieces” is not calculated to win friends.
On the other hand, if you have a legitimate grievance–such as the cop’s stranglehold on you after you have been given an ordinary parking ticket–then you might be entitled to use a few swear words . . . but not necessarily all of them. (Again, caution is advised. Consult a dictionary of particularly obscene words before proceeding).
Be nice to your judge; his grandfather was called “Hanging Bob” nine times out of ten: a hard-won title for judges who hung defendants on the whim of the moment, regardless of crime. Judge Thayer in the 1920’s was a “Hanging Judge” when he sentenced Sacco and Vanzetti to death.
Judge Kaufman likewise in the 1950’s in ordering the deaths of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Both these judges let their vitriolic prejudices against the defendants be known before the trials. Thayer swore such judicial pearls as “I’ll get those anarchist bastards!”
This is called the distinct absence of a fair trial. Millions of people have fared this way, suffering from the absence of a fair trial. The best way to ensure getting a fair shake yourself, is to stay out of the courtroom altogether.
Why do you think cops become cops? Because it keeps them out of the courtroom as defendants and this is a very important fact to keep in mind when talking to cops or trying to educate them or debating ways to restrain their abuse of people they don’t like.
Hitch-hiking takes the traveler-by-thumbing to amazing places: unique glimpses into the lives of the people you meet . . . eyes widened by beautiful vistas “pretty as a picture” traveling the backroads of small towns and hamlets with their streams and rivers, rolling hills or flat terrain with rows of wind-breaking trees stretching as far as the eye can see.
The road that goes everywhere shows you how to fall in love with Mother Earth all over again with crop-laden fields, with blossoming apple orchards, with noisy squawking barnyards and family farms blessed with pets and kids running around wild and free.
The road introduced me to a different side of America, most precious, sacred in time and purpose and memory . . . . And the road brought me home.
Addendum
These were a few of the premises and conclusions and wide-rambling ratiocinations filtering through my sun- and rain-drenched head when I was hitch-hiking around the world while thinking out and solving some of the more complex social problems of today, including police/community relations; war or peace; prosperity or poverty; full employment or millions unemployed; where to take my next piss and/or find a good hamburger joint; and various other sundry matters like that there.
