Day Six (Friday, July 2, 1971)

Morning broke damp and misty. My mind felt jumbled. I had to think for a moment: Where were we? Francis’ back yard? The Mississippi River? Oh yeah, that’s right—Omaha, somewhere in the outskirts.

Everything was wet. My nose was runny. Was my watch, tucked inside my shoes, still running? The sameness of the nearby housing development was frightening. They were all white, one story pre-fabs with tinny white sidings and silver shingles, each probably worth no more than $15,000.

I picked up, hoping to rouse Otto. He was immovable. I even tried to thumb us a ride. He was still immovable. I cursed a hundred comatose businessmen. Otto slowly got up and tried crawling around coordinating his crap. He was more asleep than awake. I got furious at those priggish, insecure male drivers, institutionalized by fear, branded by routine, as they passed by shamelessly with their arms strung across the back of their seats, surprised to come across our enterprise.

When drizzle began to fall, I was ready to cry.

“I don’t even know what you’re doin’ out there tryin’ to catch a ride.” Otto sat in a pile of wrinkles. “My clothes are dirty, and with this kind of weather I was gonna ask if it wouldn’t be a good idea for a wash-up. I remember seein’ a laundromat at a shoppin’ center down the road from the Texaco station.”

I was disappointed, but there you go again Roger Winans, being too hard on yourself. What was my problem? Where did I have to run immediately? Nowhere. Who was waiting for us? No one. Otto made sense. I lowered my thumb.

For breakfast, I bought a green pepper and ate it like an apple, one of my personal delicacies.

We finally made our sign. I bought a magic marker at a candy store and met Otto at the Texaco station, where he had scavenged a stray piece of cardboard. The rain let up, though the clouds were ominous and full of water.

Otto scratched out ‘California’ in crooked, small, uneven letters.

“Hey man, drivers aren’t going to be able to decipher that.” We started barking at each other all over again. “You call that recognizable?”

A Texaco mechanic overheard us. “Whaddiya got, boys?”

I tilted up the sign. He frowned and said, “Give me that there darn thing.”

He brought the cardboard into the office and flipped it over. In one minute he churned out an attractive sign in bright red letters with green backshading: ‘CALIF.’ A professional job.

“I never knew mechanics could be artists, did you?”
“We do now.”

We walked out. “Sorry for my bluster, O.”

In the course of a hitchhiker’s career, sometimes a long wait is worthwhile because it leads to a good ride. That was true of our next adventure, which took most of the morning to materialize. The driver was a guy who looked like singer Rick Nelson. Like most Americans, I grew up with the Nelsons watching The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. Not many people knew that Rick was a native of the Garden State, born in Teaneck, New Jersey, in 1940. The first album I ever bought was Rick Nelson’s For Your Sweet Love (beating out Beatles ’65 by a week). One song of his called “Pick Up the Pieces,” still spoke to me strongly. In fact, I had been humming it just yesterday.

This Rick was teasingly close to the real thing: clean-cut and polite, medium black hair, gleaming white teeth, a well-toned physique, perfect complexion, and wearing a sports shirt and dress slacks. As unoffensive as you can get.

“Was it our sign that made you pick us up?” Otto asked Rick after we settled in.

“I didn’t notice any sign.” He stared at Otto until they both laughed. “I just like to pick up hitchhikers.”

Rick floored it 90 m.p.h. all the way to Lincoln, Nebraska. The whole time we had a great conversation about the origins of rock ’n roll. In Lincoln, he invited us to have lunch at his girlfriend’s, because he was bringing her some forty miles further west afterward.

“You might as well have something to eat before going out into the beginning of nowhere.”

His girlfriend was a petite cheerleader-type with short, bobbed hair, and dark, pebbly eyes. You guessed it—Otto and I referred to her as “Mary Lou.” She lived in a trailer park home, which was like living in an aluminum box. But she was as friendly as Rick, and her BLT sandwiches, brownies, and Gatorade were good.

Mary Lou graced the passenger seat during our bonus period. I began to envy Rick very much for his girlfriend. She was a Girl Scout swimming instructor, a distance runner, and wanted to be a translator after she got out of college. She entertained our carload by speaking French and German phrases.
The couple treated us to orange sodas at a gas station when they turned off. For hours afterward I was singing Rick’s biggest hit, “Hello Mary Lou.”

I could see what Rick meant by saying we would be at the beginning of nowhere. The topography of the land no longer varied. The former greenfields gave way to a dry, brown, dust-blown look. There weren’t any hills or valleys; just a long, gradual uphill. Any existing towns were fifteen miles apart, and they couldn’t have been very prosperous, not judging from the battered farmhouses visible from the interstate. Ironic how Mary Lou went to college somewhere out here.

“I hope you’re prepared for your all-time roughest stretch.” Otto inspected the ground.

“It’s banal.”

The number of vehicles on the highway dropped. Bunches of tractor-trailers still roared, but we already used up our allotment back on day one since it was atypical for them to stop. I didn’t like the giant posted signs: ‘PROHIBITED: FARM VEHICLES, WALKING, BICYCLES, HITCHHIKING.’

We tried it anyway. Sure enough, two Nebraska patrol officers stopped and asked to see identification. They ordered us off the interstate and onto the entrance ramp, “in front of the sign.” I cursed them loudly after they left, but we moved. Traffic on the ramp was zero.

Not only that, we had competition. A craggy old sot with a bent face stood at the head of the ramp, lifting his thumb on the rare occasion that a car schlepped past. I tapped my pockets, double checking my wallet and traveler’s cheques (currently $143). When I saw him slowly walking toward us, my stomach twitched.

“Ya know sumtun, buddies, weesa hurtin’ each other standin’ here t’gether,” he garbled, barely discernible. “Ya knows that?”

“We’ll keep out of your way. We’ll stay down on this end of the ramp,” I said, anxious to get rid of him.

“Yeah, you can have the first shot up there.” Otto lifted his head to where the guy had been standing.

“That don’t make no diff’rence. Tain’t got no traffic on here noways, besides! I’ve standed prit’near two hours as ’tis. Pooh!”

I breathed deeply and studied the cloud formation.

“Look, whad ya says t’ this?” The guy pointed to a decrepit luncheonette which looked as if it ought to be torn down. “I’ll goes up t’ that cafe fer a cup o’ coffee. You take it fer an hour. You don’t gets a ride by then, then you lets me have it.”

“You mean take turns?” I said. “All right, we’ll do that.” He added nastily, “But then I stays ’til I gets a ride, hear?” Otto was upset with me after he left. “Say Roger, what did you tell him ‘yeah’ for? This is a free country.

He can’t throw us off here. We shoulda told that guy to go stroke it. Now he’s gonna come back in an hour and expect to take over. No way, sons. I ain’t gonna!”

I wet my lips. “I said it because I know we’ll get a ride before the hour’s up. You need faith, that’s what. Let’s out-fox him. That’s how you’d play it, right? You’ll see, nothing to it. We know more about hitchhiking than that hobo ever will. Get ready, here comes a customer now.”

An old Thunderbird with a double-chinned, pot-bellied slob growled past.

“Turd!” Fifteen minutes later, a Dodge Daytona almost ran us off the ramp. “You freaking idiot!”

“All I know is we’re gonna stand here as long as it takes to get a ride, one hour or ten.” Otto looked like a teacher running out of patience.

I paced. I belched. I stretched. I cracked my knuckles. I gobbed on the pavement. I kicked up stones and gutted out thirty push-ups on the bare earth. With five minutes to deadline, I was timorous. We solicited only about half a dozen cars. I sang “Vehicle” by the Ides of March. I was afraid to tell Otto there were only a few ticks left on the scoreboard. “Get ready, here comes that guy now.” Otto nodded toward a dowdy figure approaching from a hundred yards away. “You deal with him, Roger.”

Just as the clock hit zero, a light blue ’65 Mustang pulled over. We needed every second of that one.

Our saviors were greaser girls. Two greaser sisters, as a matter of fact, Vicky and Marti, going “a long ways . . . ways out . . . to the high plains . . . ways past North Platte, even.”

You’d think two girls would have Otto and me drooling? Hold the salaciousness. These girls were bird brains. Vicky, the driver, looked like a hawk and had stringy, bleached blond hair. Marti was shorter and plumper, with a pug nose and fabricated orange hair. Both smacked gum, swore like sailors,
smoked cigarettes, wore Halloween-quality makeup, and played a malfunctioning AM radio too loudly.

They didn’t understand when Otto said, “You saved us.”

“Yeah, the official box score doesn’t show assists. But you gave us a big one back there, girls. Thanks.”

“Ain’t they the nines,” one of them said to the other.

“You girls got a flair for the dramatic.”

“On a ramp too crowded for comfort.”

“Youse guys is cute,” the other said. “Different.”

They drove us nuts with their noise. They didn’t talk—they clacked.

It was a sideshow without an off button. Arguing over hair spray. How not to dump a pan of chicken grease. The cute neighbor who petted their dog. A girlfriend’s tattoo on her butt. An infected hangnail. Fussing over hair styles and shoes. Quibbling about parents. Plotting practical jokes. Laughing about missed connections at the mall . . . endless.

Marti broke the pattern. She decided she needed her jewelry box from the trunk. Vicky parked in the shoulder of the interstate without turning on the emergency blinkers.

“Poop,” Marti announced. “I done locked the trunk keys in the trunk.”

Vicky erupted. “You stupid farmer girl!”

“Shut your face, you boy molester!”

It was comedy until I learned they had to extract the key from the trunk so their parents wouldn’t find out. We drove the streets of North Platte, Nebraska, trying to find someone willing to rip apart the back to recover it.

After several inquiries, some burly guy at an Amoco station agreed. The four of us stood abreast at the bays, watching the guy grapple with the back seat like he was on the high school wrestling team. Marti and Vicky fretted and smoked. I read maps. Otto tugged on the ends of his hair, dangling ever longer.

Westward ho! Miles marched by, pushing further out into space and time. To think, we were still only halfway across the United States. You had to respect that. I studied avidly everything coming into view as we continued our slow, seemingly endless climb across the amber waves of grain.

The end of the line was a small town named Ogallala. Here sagebrush was more prevalent than grass. My nose pricked of manure and fertilizer from the cattle drive next to the river. Feed and grain buildings, agricultural supply warehouses, and storage barns were randomly spaced among one-story ranches. It didn’t take long to notice real life cowboys, either. Otto ordered me on full alert.

“Cowboys got their own laws and traditions, Roger. They got more push than the politicians. Give ’em plenty of room.” True, they looked ready to kick ass. They were conspicuous in their ten gallon hats, flannel shirts, boots, and Wranglers. What an existence, and in the very same country as my own!

We strolled down the wooden planks of a tourist attraction called “Front Street.” It was a rendition of how the town supposedly looked in 1875, with a general store, undertaker’s, jail, post office, saloon, apothecary, and sheriff’s office.

“How ’bout takin’ our repast at the Hungry Indian Cafe down there? Mix ’n mingle with the natives.”

“Switching from the cowboys to the Indians isn’t going to do us any good.”

“Sure it will,” Otto assured. “Indians are a civil culture. They’re the original native Americans who got bullied out by the Europeans. Be astute for once in your life, Roger. I’ve heard their food is really good for you, full of nutrition.” He led the way inside to a table near the serving line.

It was an older cafeteria with pale blue walls, overhead fans, and plain wooden tables and chairs. The clock read an hour earlier than my watch, meaning we left Central Time somewhere and slipped into Mountain Time.

Otto balanced ‘CALIF.’ on the top of his backpack. “Haven’t we made enough of a spectacle just by walking in here?” “We made the sign to get us a ride. We might at well use it.”

My dinner was potato pancakes with gravy and a cup of coffee. Otto bought a chili dog and sauerkraut with a glass of tomato juice. The more I became accustomed to the place the better I liked it; its simplicity and absence of tourists were unexpected treats. Real Indians, too, seemed to be among the employees and customers.

Two such Indian girls were sitting at a table adjacent to ours, eating beans with melted cheese over brown rice. One was strikingly pretty for someone of another culture, with wide, upturned eyes and an aura of steadiness. She seemed like some kind of twentieth-century Pocahontas; black hair collected in a long single braid, high cheekbones, soft skin, and obvious intelligence. The other was a pie face: ugly, stumpy, coarse; no match for her friend at all. Both wore layers of loose-fitting, embroidered rawhide, further adorned with handmade accessories.

Otto was just about to bite into a second chili dog when these Indian girls turned to us in unison. In perfect English, the pretty one said, “We see you have a sign out for California. Could you use a ride through Boulder? My friend and I are heading that way tonight. I don’t know what your plans are, but we can help you out if you want a ride.”

Otto asked, “Where’s Boulder?” but had to be asking as a formality only. Boulder was somewhere in Colorado, west of our present location, and this was an attractive, fascinating girl speaking. I knew my vote.

“We’re traveling around, too, like you guys.” The pie face’s husky voice smiled mischievously. “Only we got a truck.”

“We’ve got road food and plenty of supplies. We’ve got extra sleeping bags and pillows and blankets,” the pretty one said. “Right, Tash?”

“Finish that chili dog,” I directed to Otto. I swigged my water and let the rest of my coffee sit cold.

What a set up! As usual, when you came down to it, I had to hand it to my loyal partner and his ceaseless supply of ideas. Our complementary factor was at work again—while I charged straight ahead like a bison, Otto hit the edges, painted the corners. We were here because of him.

The girls directed us outside to “the truck,” a high, rectangular former Wonder Bread truck, painted over several times, with both doors removed. A thick mattress topped by a woven blanket covered the floor area. The only seat was the driver’s round black stool. Hand-built food shelves lined the walls. Its rows were crammed with cereal boxes, canned goods, jars, and bottles. Clothes of all sorts and large canvas bags were strewn about. I took off my shoes and cracked my ankles. Otto bounced on the springs of the mattress and smiled widely. This could get sweet!

Alvah, the pretty one, slipped behind the deep-ridged steering wheel. The pie face, Natasha, sat cross-legged on the edge of the mattress, gazing out the doorway. She urged us to enjoy the blazing sunset stretching out across the plain.

Alvah and Natasha were one hundred percent Navajos. They spent the first fifteen years of their lives on a reservation, attending tribal school. Since then, they had been traveling all over the country, living off the land, promoting Indian rights which they said were theirs by virtue of various ancestral treaties but never acknowledged by the “shitnosed” American government. They had toured such divergent corners as Vermont and Alabama. They even remembered getting a flat tire on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Most of my attention focused on Alvah. Unfortunately, so did Otto’s. But what could you expect? She was tall and slim with a ‘D’ cup bosom; her shadowed profile was lovely. Her voice was lyrical and cherry-sweet. She provided every comfort a hitchhiker could ask for, treated us with respect, and was friendly.

Then Otto and I discovered these girls’ livelihood. They were the biggest drug pushers in the Western Hemisphere. You know those cereal boxes and miscellaneous containers on the shelves? Every kind of “up” and “down” was in them. Pills, powder, LSD, codeine, opium—the works. All the hard stuff. Alvah sounded like a hawker at a medicine show as she ran down her list of products and their corresponding selling price. My smiles and nods to Otto changed to disbelief and alarm.

Nineteen year-old Alvah and twenty year-old Natasha were “working their way through college” by traveling around the country, going into bars, and selling dope. Apparently there was a big demand for this.

“It’s the easiest and most profitable business in the world for a girl,” Alvah said. “If a girl turns on her charm to a guy, she can get him to do anything.” As I watched her slip off her moccasin, and her shiny, fragrant braid dropped close to my face, I fretfully thought, “’Tis true, ’tis true.”

“The biggest suckers are the boys that hang out in the small town bars. They’re geared up for action and bored to death.” Alvah grinned. “I get off sitting at a bar like Miss America and having them come up to me, one guy after another, offering to buy me a drink. As soon as I’ve got them hypnotized, I tell them I’ve got the best snort they ever tasted. They want to buy it hoping they’re going to get me in bed. But as soon as I pocket their money, I disappear into the bathroom and split. I’ve shit on some pretty big spenders.”

“I drive the getaway vehicle.” Natasha horse laughed.

My right leg wouldn’t stop jiggling. I was quite stunned, or stupefied rather. A frog lodged in my throat.

“Self,” I pondered, “what the heck are you doing sitting in the dark, lost in America, in an old bread truck encased with illegal drugs?”

They had a particular bar in mind they were going to hit that night. We were off the interstate and on a bumpy, deserted, two-lane blacktop. “You see more off the federal roads,” Natasha explained. “Those superhighways shouldn’t be driven. The government spent needless money on them that should have gone to the poor. They beef up their bank accounts with fringe benefits and put our people on land that is worthless. We do it in protest.”

Otto was making me jealous, the way he was hitting on Alvah by going through a check list of whirlwind topics that made him sound so clever. They talked about drug laws, the effects of hallucinogenics, the behavior of freaks, the plight of liberalism under President “Tricky” Dick Nixon, and how pollution was screwing up the environment. I tried to jump in when I could but got spit out like tobacco. Otto could be quite forceful when it served his own needs. He kept me outside of field goal range.

“Oooo goody, a new state,” Natasha said, as we came upon ‘WELCOME TO COLORADO, THE CENTENNIAL STATE.’

“Nebraska was too long and hard.” Alvah genuinely ached. “Where do you think, Tash, right up here on the left?”

“Under that juniper will be fine.”

“Bathroom break?” I asked.

“Heritage stop,” Alvah said.

Both girls laughed. Natasha explained how they smoke weed every time they cross a
state border. “It’s a pact we have from way back to celebrate safe passage. We stop and rest, no matter how busy we are, to show our resistance to capitalistic society.”

We sat in a circle on a grassy clump, boy-girl-boy-girl. No farmhouses or lights were visible in any direction. The stars were low enough to touch. The air was nippy and the girls sat with quilts wrapped up to their necks. Natasha was already speeding on “reds” and Alvah had taken half a hit of acid. It was beyond me how someone as graceful as Alvah would want to mess herself up with drugs. Nature’s beauty didn’t need additives.

I was leery about this pow-wow. Yet I made up my mind that should Otto and I be pressured to smoke, I would do so, for the sake of Alvah and sexual favor.

They passed around a couple of bowlfuls packed in a narrow, hand- carved peacepipe with feathers hanging off the end. I didn’t know Otto’s plan until the last second when he accepted the pipe from Alvah and drew fire. It was dark enough so you could fake it if you wanted. I half smoked and half didn’t. We sat out in the cold for fifteen or twenty minutes.

“Are you guys having a good time?” Alvah said. “Please, have anything you’d like. You’re not into heroin, are you? Too bad, this grain is so well cut. What would you like? Acid? Thai stick? Whatever you want, please, let me know.”

Natasha pulled out a paperback from her canvas bag, Steal This Book, written by Abbie Hoffman. He was one of the Chicago Seven who allegedly caused that rumble at the Democratic National Convention in 1968. She thumbed through a few pages.

“Ever read this book? Damn good literature. It’s a peoples’ manual for living free. It tells how to rip off clothes, food, furniture, how to make free phone calls, how to get medical care for free, how to rip off public transportation, how to find you way around strange cities— everything you need to know how to live. It’s loaded with good tips.”

“Weird title,” I said.

Natasha giggled. “That’s what you’re supposed to do—steal this book. Get it? That’s Abbie Hoffman’s philosophy. Rip off! There’s so many goods and services in the white man’s country that you should be entitled to some of them for free. I lifted the book from a grocery mart in North Carolina and I brush up on it every day. You guys ought to steal a copy yourselves. He tells how to use stolen credit cards, how to rip off meals in restaurants, how to con the government into giving you free housing or free land—everything. Every day it seems like we try out something new. I’ll let you look over our copy.”

Alvah fired up a stick of incense and stuck it in the ground. “We’ve been living for free all year. I don’t think we’ve paid for our food or clothes once since we left the reservation. Have we, Tash?”

The two Indian girls traded positions as we reloaded into the truck. Natasha drove on, wearing a sombrero. Otto and Alvah started to schmooze again, for lengthy periods, mostly about Earth Day, created last year in 1970. I should’ve butted in, “Otto Brackston George, you’ve never picked up a piece of litter in your life, you lazy bum!” But I was too polite.

Steal This Book, meanwhile, listed in my hands. That was the last thing I needed, a book to encourage my criminal activities more than what they already were. All my life I was corrupt. It started with lollipops, bubblegum, and baseball cards stolen from the neighborhood corner store when I was a kid in Plainfield. It progressed to erotic magazines and cigars as a pre-teenager. Lately (right before the trip), I started sneaking into movies, dances, and wrestling matches, mostly with Otto. I was not even above stealing a large pepperoni from Dominick’s Pizzeria when the owners had a mix-up with their two young sons whom they were breaking into the business.

We arrived at the small prairie town where Alvah was set to make her drug deal. I got to my knees as we pulled in front of ‘The Garage,’ a one-story roadhouse with live music blasting from its doors.

“The guys in here bought a lot of bennies last year, so I want to stock up before I go in.” Alvah spilled out goods from a glass jar into a soft pouch.

“Do you allow spectators to watch?” Otto asked.

“Sorry, this is a one-person operation.” Alvah raised a hand mirror and wiped away a piece of lint, total business. “You haven’t seen any police around, have you, Tash?”

“No chief, the pigs are all in bed screwing their wives. Everything looks A-OK.” She guffawed, mostly toward me, with what my father would call a “shit-eating” grin.

Alvah stepped briskly out of the truck, radiating such brightness that made me wish I was the unlucky guy she would bait and hook.

I waited in anxiety with my two truckmates. Breathe in, breathe out. The silence was harrowing. What was I doing in a crime getaway car? It was insane! I wanted it thoroughly understood, for the lawyers of the Roger Winans Legal Defense Team, that I was just an innocent hitchhiker these Indian girls coerced into picking up.

“Are you guys buzzed?” Natasha asked.

“A little,” I lied.

“Ja-wow-wah. That pot gave me a Rocky Mountain bang. I’m elevated,” Otto said.

“By the way, where are the mountains? We haven’t hit an uphill yet.”

“Oh, they’re coming. Don’t wish your life away.” Natasha lit a cigarette. She pounded the steering wheel and began humming to the house music which you could plainly hear. “You should meet my brother sometime. He’s a crazy bandito, but I love him. He gives us an excellent price on all our dope and has good connections down in Mexico.”

“Euu.” I invented a word on the spot. I ferociously picked my cuticles until my right pinky drew blood.
Natasha smiled with her gross rotten teeth. I despised her for her crass attitude, this whole drug business, and the immorality of living off everyone else’s labors. I rubbed sweat from my palms onto my pants. Otto sat in the doorway, ready to act as Alvah’s guardian angel if called upon.

“Hurry up, let’s get out of here.” Alvah came trotting back. “Some guy bought a gram of hash, but he was so drunk that I took the twenty that he had on the bar.” She stuffed her bills in a coat lying on the floor.

“She’s a phenom.” Natasha cranked the ignition. “Just so happens we need a new case of motor oil. We’ll use tonight’s haul and buy it tomorrow.”

To my relief no one tailed us, and we got rolling again. I was even more pleased to notice Alvah yawning and rubbing her eyes. Maybe we were coming to the payoff from this awful ordeal.

“Do you guys want to catch some rest with me? I’m bushed. There’s room for all three of us in the back. We can lie lengthwise.” She picked up a few articles of clothes on the mattress, wobbling by the truck’s movement.

“Why don’t I get in the middle?” she said.

Holy crackers, was I about to participate in a ménage-a-trois? My hormones were ricocheting. My mind was bouncing off the shelves.

All three of us laid our backs to the mattress, our heads pointing toward the rear door. Alvah looked precious, lying with eyes closed, breasts vibrating atop her chest, her pretty head filled with drugs. Beyond her, on the far side, lay Otto, blocked and silent, hopefully in no-man’s land.

My hands were stiff and cold. The engine noise and gentle rocking of the axles offered a soothing cadence. I stared at the dark gray roof with my heart thumping. A lump rose in my throat.

Two seconds later Alvah turned on her side toward Otto!

His arm shot around her. Alvah squirmed in closer with her well- sculpted bottom. He buried his head in her hair, purring.

God. I never saw love at such close range. Otto and Alvah began French kissing, reaching around, caressing limbs. But why Otto? Was my company that revolting?

In the middle of a slurp, Otto opened his eyes and glared at me. He extended his thumb in a hitchhiking gesture, and raised his arm off Alvah’s back, snapping, “Out!”

I was mad. First he swipes a girl we had been sharing. Now he wanted to unearth my resting spot.

He wasn’t going to oust me as fast as he wanted. I decided to heckle him for awhile.

I propped my body on an elbow, and tapped him on the shoulder. His body was rocking in some kind of lover’s rhythm with Alvah. I pressed my fingers against his shoulder, hard, until he opened his eyes.
I shot him the finger. He wasn’t going to steal a girl from me and get away with it! His eyes flared. I flipped him the bird in a variety of forms: straight on, angles, upside down, using both hands.

He tried ignoring me, but I stayed poised. Sure enough, in due time he opened his eyes to see if I was still around. I shot him the finger, again and again, going right up to his nose.

I sat up and conceded. It was weird. Otto always acted vague with girls the same way he did with drugs. He always bent my ear with kinky sexual exploits of him and his girl, Laurie Daub. But you hardly saw them together. And whenever you did, they acted like they didn’t know each other. This current action, though, with Alvah, live in the present tense, couldn’t be disputed. Their legs entangled. Otto circled his hand slowly across Alvah’s stomach, inching uphill toward bare delight.

I sat cross-legged in the dark cringing at Natasha’s lard, as she guided us deeper into the Colorado night. I sauntered up front and carefully sat by the open doorway, holding my stomach.

“Ugh, those potato pancakes and gravy I ate for dinner didn’t mix too well. I’m nauseous. I thought I’d better come up here for some fresh air.”

“Would you like to smoke a joint? That would numb your body, and relax you.”

“No thanks.” I said with a small laugh, “I’m still stoned from before.”

She jabbered on through the wee hours, telling me about the “naked cleansing ritual in the mud and rain” she had with her Navajo tribemates; about her abortion, and more about the girls’ support for the rights of Indians. All the while Led Zeppelin music played at maximum volume in my head. I drowned her out and dozed off.

I awoke to uphill climbing and shifting gears and the gassing of the pedal. Finally we hit the Rocky Mountains, home of the 14,000-foot peaks. The inside of the truck was cast in an eerie yellow, accompanied by blinking red and amber traffic lights.

“Boulder,” Natasha announced.

Alvah, her face sleepy, clothes tussled, emerged from the back. “How’s everything on this side?”

“Just fine,” Natasha said.

“I’m feeling sick.” I explained my illness. I looked back at Otto the Oaf. “Hey Lover Boy.”

Alvah directed us to park at the foot of a tall mountain, where we would sleep for the night. The romantic duo set out for the hills with sleeping bags, pillows, and Otto’s rain slicker under his arm.
Natasha slumped her head against the steering wheel, smiling. I put on a disoriented look and wrapped my arms tightly around my legs.

“I think I’ll sleep right here in the truck, where I won’t be disturbed.”

A trace of hurt dashed across her face. “All right,” she whispered, “I understand. See you in the morning.” She rooted out a blanket from the back and disappeared up the mountain, too.

Day Seven (Saturday, July 3, 1971)

Awet film of moisture clung to the windshield as I wriggled out the chills. Through the doorway, if I squinted, I barely made out a sign, ‘NO OVERNIGHT CAMPING.’ We were at a roadside park, tucked at the foot of a steep, thinly vegetated mountain peppered with scrubs and black, pointy rocks. My body felt sore, but I had gone through the process enough to know the aches would wear off as the day progressed.

The morning sun got quite high and bright before Alvah, then Otto, then Natasha, came down off the mountain. Hellos were free and unaccusing. I announced that my slumber did me a world of good, and felt healthy. A big smile was plastered across Otto’s mug. His headband was on, and I thought I noticed a dash of red makeup brushed across his cheeks.

Alvah drove to the University of Colorado campus, parked, and set out alone for a grassy knoll in front of the student union to get more sleep. Natasha did their laundry. Otto and I stationed ourselves on an adjacent lawn in front of a classroom, facing Alvah’s curvaceous form lying face down on her blanket in the distance.

“All you need is a feather for your headband and a bow and arrow across your shoulder.” I tried to sound cranky but my laughter betrayed me. “How’d you sleep, Tonto? Deep? I bet you got as much sleep as she did.”

Otto laughed his high-pitched vampire laugh. A squirrel ran up a tree.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“How was it?”

“How was what?” Otto’s poker face acted as if he didn’t know what I was talking about.

“How was your ballgame?”

He sighed and smiled, reminiscing, greatly enjoying that I had asked. “Pretty good, pretty good.”

“No kidding!” Otto’s evasion of personal questions was famous.

I scanned the campus. “Let me ask you point blank. Did you get laid?”

“He-he-he! He-he-he!”

“Come on, man. Tell me!”

The pitch rose higher and higher, with enough frequency to shatter a glass. “Let the world hear. Did you insert your wanger into that beautiful body over there, or didn’t you?”

“I’ll neither deny nor confirm it.” Otto laughed with glee. “She’s darn nice, I’ll tell you that.”

Any further persistence on my part was greeted by a chain of laughter. I finally gave up.

Boulder was a well-kept, upscale community. Its sturdy stone houses were set geometrically across neat, trimmed lawns. Its streets were scrubbed clean, and there were lots of young, fit, outdoorsy people. People seemed alive and active.

Ahead stood “the truck;” its back doors flung open. Natasha air- dried the wash. Otto and I scoped out the scene from a stone wall.

“Say Roger? What plans do we got for the next couple of days? You’re not pressin’ for nothin’ specific, are you? What do you say we stick with these girls and check out Montana and Idaho? I bet there’s some beautiful country up there, Rog. We ain’t in no rush to get to San Francisco, are we? Why don’t we just take some time off, like that day in Indiana, and follow the girls around? We’re due for another vacation.”

“You want me to run down the list? Number one, I don’t like being paired with Natasha. Number two, that truck lined with drugs is dangerous and corrupt. Number three, I don’t like the thought of surrendering our control to strangers for so long.”

“It wouldn’t be bad,” Otto coaxed. “I was talkin’ with Alvah last night—”

“—Yeah, I bet you were yakking up a storm!”

Otto laughed. “It ain’t nothin’ for them to have hitchhikers stay with them for a couple days at a time, because of all the travelin’ they do. They’re gonna take care of some business in Boulder, then they’re shootin’ straight up north. I say let’s go. It won’t be no skin off our backs.”

“You rat fink. Maybe you don’t remember, but I was there when Alvah turned over to your side!”

Otto laughed. “I been tryin’ to tell you, sons, you can’t mess with ‘The Kid’ when he goes after a woman, because you ain’t gonna be nowhere. The lady showed you last night who she liked best, and it wasn’t you.”

I got furious at Otto for treating me like a child. Likewise, he accused me of lacking spontaneity and being unable to take a risk. He petitioned doggedly to stay with these girls. He emphasized that we’d get into a lot of new states. The girls would supply food in exchange for us cooking and keeping things tidy. It would be like the YMCA. We could listen to Indian stories and learn native culture. He promised not to flaunt Alvah when I was around, nor to always leave me struggling with Natasha.

“Ah shit, all right. Let’s go. But no more than a few days. Please. Alvah’s beauty is evil.”

To kill time I went to the truck and read Natasha’s copy of Steal This Book. The inside front cover touted how Abbie, a political revolutionary, submitted the manuscript to over thirty publishers, all of whom rejected it, until the present “Pirate Editions” agreed. I was shocked at some of the capers he advocated for plundering the depths of “Amerika.” But strange, a lot of it was plausible.

Pretty Alvah came padding down the steep sidewalk, breasts jiggling under her turquoise blouse and necklaces. A team of three male students, carrying backpacks and travel gear, strutted behind. Otto stood up and stared. Alvah began conducting a tour of the truck.

It turned out that these three guys were going to be part of the expedition up north. I wiped excess oil from my nose. Three extra guys!

That made the male-female ratio even worse. From their fraternity teeshirts to their conservative demeanor, these guys were neither my type nor Otto’s. They sure didn’t seem like Alvah’s taste, either. Something was afoot.

Meanwhile, Steal This Book lay at my side. In a sudden moment of inspiration, I buried it inside my red duffel bag. Yes, I stole it! I quickly opened my diary as Otto peered around the corner of the truck.

“There’s been a change of plans around here.” He hip-hopped toward me affably. “I decided to scrap goin’ up north. It would be too lousy hitchhikin’ up there after we got back out on our own. No cars. One of those guys said it once took him seven hours to get out of this one national forest in Montana. I ain’t in favor of that, not in this heat. Plus we don’t know about the bears up there, or the cops. The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know. One of them guys has got some cabin on a lake they’re gonna stay at. Let’s just head on; get back to 80.”

“Well well well.” I smiled with sunlight breaking across my face. “That’s a change in your tune. Too much competition?”

“Nah, it ain’t that. Those guys are blockheads. It’s just I wanna get to California before we start branchin’ off to all these other places. You’re gung ho about gettin’ to California, ain’t that so?”

“Yes, you’ve known that out of the starting gate. California needs to be framed in our sight. I want to touch California soil. I want California’s vibe to run through my veins. That’s what I’m aiming for.”

Otto broke the news to Alvah. Everyone was puzzled. “I said you were invited,” she kept insisting, to which Otto turned her down all the more. Once his mind was set, Otto the Ox was tough to budge.

The girls discarded us like Kleenex. Goodbyes were curt; Otto didn’t even share a private farewell with his purebred Navajo babe. The reinforcement jock crew puttered down the street in the truck and turned a corner, declining even to wave.

“That’s life.” Otto took off his headband. “They used us for their own amusement.”

“From now on I guess we gotta stand clear of the Indians as well as the cowboys.”

“Neither group is our demographic.”

“It boils my blood, Roger, to think about those three dolts showin’ up when they did.”

“Cheer up. You got your licks in. Besides, you’re on your way to San Francisco.” I spoke from a Hardee’s Hamburger stand across the street from the Crossroads Mall.

“I ain’t never been as exhausted as I am now. I feel like Rip VanWinkle getting’ ready for twenty years of slumber.” His normal luminous hazel eyes were glazed with red.

Despite his melancholy, Otto spawned yet another idea involving “time off.” Being the cusp of Independence Day, why not cut through lots of small towns on our way to Wyoming, using back roads? Little towns were always having parades, community gatherings, and celebrations in honor of the Fourth. Otto’s plan was to arrive in one of these towns and anchor for the night. That would position us for a full day of patriotic fun tomorrow, attending a festival, filling up on free food, watching a parade and fireworks display, and hopefully spending the night telling a couple of girls hitchhiking adventures.

“Ingenious,” I admitted. “We’ll be out-of-town celebrities.”

“We’ll be signing autographs.”

“Another Paula will put us up for the night.”

“They’ll have us in front of the microphones.”

Even though the minutes piled up to two full hours, I couldn’t quarrel with my elevation at 5,400 feet; nor with the snow-capped Eldora Mountain range to the west, cast in deep, purple hues; nor with the broad Rocky Mountain breeze. This, my friends, was “west.” My tan was deepening by the hour. I liked the simple green and white design of Colorado license plates, subtly depicting mountains.

A pretty girl—prettier than Alvah and a whole lot more honest—gave us a ride. I had dibs on the front and climbed aboard as if I owned the situation. The girl was an outdoors natural, slim and well-exercised, with long blond hair, no make up, and wore durable clothes and heavy hiking boots.

“I’m driving around with a full tank of gas,” she said with smiling freckles. “I’ve got a whole weekend with nothing to do.”

Her family was originally from back East and moved to Colorado to run a ski business. She was enthusiastic about finding a community celebration. “You just might get lucky. Tell me where to go. I’ll follow your instructions. I’m game.”

Otto tumbled into the back and was dead asleep after two minutes.

The wilderness was thick, green, and lush. Yellow and orange wildflowers dotted the roadside. The girl pointed out various mountain peaks and species of trees. I reminisced with her about my 1966 camping trip to New England. That was with my father, William Winans; my Uncle Merv, and brother. It always seemed like a wasted opportunity because it was too short and we never engaged nature much. The girl convinced me that any travel was worth it no matter what the specifics. Her optimism and generous nature turned me around.

“Don’t bust on your father too much. He’s trying his best.”

“He’s the ultimate hands-off dad. He offers only criticism, never support or advice.”

“Even so, you responded by being a leader. So it all worked out anyway, didn’t it?”

But—there were no banners strung across the highway announcing Uncle Sam celebrations. In fact, we barely passed through anything qualifying as a town.

The girl drove on, cheerfully thinking we might stumble onto something, until she said her parents were expecting her home for dinner. Even then, she drove an extra ten miles, debating where to let us out. The ride ended at an ice cream stand on a winding stretch of road in a deep grove of trees, isolated from everything.

“Thank You Girl” by the Beatles.

Much as I liked our peaceful, shady spot from a picnic table near a rushing creek, I ate my vanilla twirl ice cream cone with rainbow sprinkles in anxiety. We seemed tucked away, concealed from civilization, on an orbit removed even from “off the beaten path.”

“Talk about isolation, man.”

“As long as I see cars, I see hope.”

“Our options, Our Otto, look limited.” I peered across the treetops.

“One way in, one way out.”

“We can beat this, Roger.”

“I’m willing to stand on my head if that’s what it takes.”

Thumbing was excruciating. Our presence surprised drivers. We were a roadside attraction, nothing more than a diversion, a point of interest for dad, mom, and the kids on their way to the nearest KOA.

“Right here, mister dope, right here!”

“Say folks—where you goin’ so fast?”

“Vacation cars suck.”

“We got no other choice.”

“Up yours, too!”

“That guy belonged to the anti-hitchhiker’s club.”

“Scheist, Otto. I thought that last couple was in the bag. They were in their twenties.”

“The girlfriend was itchin’ to stop, but the boyfriend said no.”

“Damn it, George. All I want is a ride. Come on, Colorado! We’re not going to assault you! Take a chance, take a chance.”

Travel By Thumb attempted everything to bring about a change in its luck—new clothes, adjusting our location, rearranging our gear, switching positions, putting away ‘CALIF.’, taking it out again. It brought false alarms: phantom decelerations, fake blinker lights, deceitful change of gears, unrelated horn honking.

“Two hours, five minutes is a lot of thumb time.”

“We might as well be a couple of trees.”

I used ‘CALIF.’ like a matador. I held it over the asphalt as each car drove past, dangling it in temptation. I withdrew it at the last second. Otto, without his shirt, thumbed twenty yards ahead.

A bleeping, cherry-topped car ended the spree.

“You guys are breaking three laws,” barked the two cops after examining our i.d.’s. “Hitchhiking on a public highway, obstructing traffic, and being in the state without a parent or guardian. If we catch you soliciting again, we’re going to drive you to Stapleton Airport, put you on a plane back home, and send the bill to your parents. Understand? You guys want an airplane ride back to New Jersey?”

“No.” I lowered my head.

As ordered, Otto and I moved to the left side of the roadway, off the pavement, single file, and began tramping, thumbs down, toward I-25, which lie an indeterminable distance to the east. Had Alvah and Natasha fleeced those fraternity guys yet? Did that outdoors girl make it back home for dinner? How was Amy faring in Flemington without my companionship? My bad left knee, which I injured the previous year in a football game, ached and swelled.

“We’re in tourist heaven and hitchhiker’s hell.” Dirt etched across Otto’s forehead.

“My next letter to my brother Willis will say, ‘Yeah bro, I walked a hundred miles to Wyoming.’”

Was I dreaming? After a mile or so, one of those very same vacation cars, pointed in the same direction, a station wagon with a family inside and suitcases strapped onto the luggage rack, stopped. A guy rolled down the window. In a British accent he said, “’Allo chaps! It appears you need a lift.”

“That is so jolly well correct!” We hustled over in humble appreciation. The network was still alive.

Our new focal point was the Golden Grille Canteen, a standard, modern restaurant grouped in with a gas station and convenience store on top of a hill overlooking I-25. Was this what they called the Continental Divide? We were exactly between the mountains and the great prairie. I was pooped. We may have dodged a bullet with the cops, but our situation was no picnic.

Fourth of July Eve was spent sitting on the curb all night talking with two older hitchhikers who had just come in off the interstate. They were brothers in their thirties, born in Delaware, but coming via South Carolina, and they had Southern accents. Both were filthy, smelled like grease, and appeared delirious. One guy had the shakes. The other guy’s eyeballs rolled loosely in his head. They didn’t carry baggage, just the shirts on their backs. My heart leapt out to them as I realized our differences.
They were heading to North Dakota, to start a new life for themselves.

“How long you guys been traveling?” I asked innocently.

“Since the first of May.” One of them pulled up his dirty pant cuffs. “Times’d be I never thought we’d get to Dakota, but she’s seeming purty close tonight.”

They were flabbergasted when I told them Otto and I covered the same distance—about two thousand miles—in one week.

“Gawddamn Stanley, how’d they do that?” one of them exclaimed. “Shoot, if we’d gotten to North Dakota that fast, I’d a had me my cabin built by now. How’d ya do it?”

I was thankful how much more we had going for ourselves than these characters. Still, they weren’t complainers and possessed a sense of self-sufficiency I hadn’t seen much in other people.

“Jesus God, whatever ya do, don’t ever try to hitch a ride in Kentucky. Don’t matter where ya are or how much ya walk. They don’t stop fer nothin’,” the other partner, Arthur, said. “We dern near walked across that entire state without gettin’ one ride.”

“My feets knows that.”

They left to get a cup of coffee with twenty-nine cents between them. I felt affluent in comparison and pulled out my wallet. But they refused, saying they didn’t accept handouts.

“Those guys probably scare more drivers than they attract,” Otto said later.

When the restaurant shut its lights for the night, Otto and I gathered our two worlds and hiked over a hill to a dusty, private campground. Only we didn’t pay. He and I sacked out in the weeds just outside the campground’s boundary fence. It was a good spot—we could see out but nobody could see in. The only annoyance was listening to my partner fret about his two favorite topics, cops and cowboys. Then he added a third—bears. Then a fourth, snakes. Then a fifth, red ants.

Z-time was divine, once I got there.

Day Eight (Saturday, July 4, 1971)

By noon my game face was back on. My belly was full and my body felt reasonably clean. I sang “A Beautiful Morning” by the Rascals and practiced Otto’s hip-hop style of walking back to the ramp.
Between cars I clipped my fingernails and shook out my pain. Life was good no matter what. I felt sanctified, justified, atoned—whatever the terminology. I knew this was my slot in this world, my station, the role I was born to play. Its requirements were not only doable, but when conditions were right you could even flaunt it. Whose shoes would I rather be in? No one’s. I could hack it just fine as Roger Jonathan Winans.

“I yam what I yam. That’s all that I yam.” I addressed the high- flanking mountains. “I’m strong to the finish ’cause I eats me broccoli.” (I didn’t like spinach.)

Otto clapped his hands in time, snapping his fingers, trying to sing, “It don’t mean a thing / If it ain’t got no swing.”

We bid each other a good Independence Day, though after yesterday’s prolonged fiasco, I was happy not even observing it.

After ten minutes on the job, the cops came again. Luckily, it was a different set than yesterday. They wrote out an “official” warning, meaning a ticket processed like a summons, only no fine or court appearance. They, too, ordered us to hoof out of Colorado. “Don’t even consider the interstate . . . Keep strictly to the service road . . . Definitely no soliciting . . . You’re pedestrians only.”

“To think, I sat in my bedroom before the trip, wondering if I should bring identification,” I said as we dismantled.

There was no music in my soul as we took our seats in the now- familiar dining room back at the Golden Grille Canteen, eating lunch (our third meal there), grimly watching one car park and another pull out.

“We’re shot,” I said.

Otto B. George, however, sat up with conviction. “Roger, you and I got to take hitchhikin’ to a level it has never gone before. What’s stoppin’ us from gettin’ out in the parkin’ lot, and askin’ people—to their faces—if we can have a ride to Wyoming? I say we might as well do it. What do we got to lose?”
“Won’t people bite our heads off?”

“Not if we’re polite. It’s the same as thumbin’, only up close and personal. The same people who’d pass us by will tell us no, while the ones who want to help will give us a hand just like if we were standin’ on the side of the road.”

“I guess it’s come to this.” “You got the nuts, don’t you?” Otto’s latest idea, the ‘face-to-face method,’ was a remarkable success. The second person we asked, ‘Granny,’ a spry oldster wearing a jangling dress and boots, gave us a ride some forty miles north. “A Beautiful Morning” came back to my ears, clear and resounding.

Soon enough, though, I was eating out anxiety from the inside of my mouth. ‘Granny’ deposited us at the most remote of interchanges. A lonely hush swept across a forested notch, broken not by cars but the caw of hawks.

“O Otto Otherworldly. What do we do now, sir?”

He always knew what to do. He had us hike along the service road until we hit a high stretch that veered in close to the interstate below. I affixed ‘CALIF.’ to the straps of his backpack. I aligned him to keep the sign visible to traffic. I unfolded the Colorado map and put it in his hands, for show. Then, as cars went by, I waved my arms wildly as I dared.

“Play-acting is a tough business.” I fidgeted.

“So then be tough,” Otto encouraged. “Just remember those two brothers from last night.”

“True. Things can never sink that low.”

A rusty station wagon coughing exhaust glided to a stop on the shoulder. A ride or a mechanical problem? We angled down the steep incline. Two girls inside waved, “Hop aboard.” Decent! Yes, they were going north to Wyoming, where we’d be able to hook into I-80 west again and end this crazy zigzag through Colorado.

“Thank you. It feels good to be back on the offensive again.” I filled them in on the morose events of the past two days.

The girls were on a trip themselves, coming from New Mexico, where they shared an apartment. They had angular faces, baritone voices, and short, choppy hair. Let me see . . . let’s just say the boy-girl chemistry didn’t exactly work. But they were friendly, even treating Otto and me to a couple of extra ham and Swiss sandwiches they packed away.

Wyoming, U.S.A., July 4, 1971. What a pleasure to cross the state line!

Our headaches with the Colorado police were over. My inertia felt corrected as I pointed my bags westbound in the vast dustblown terrain. The different topography stuck out right away. Everything was XXLarge. The kingsized mountains were blankets of dense brown earthskin; the sky covered the ends of the horizon like a geometric dome. Big sky country. Everything was super-sized, and I was small. There wasn’t a structure in sight. Remove the cloverleaf and this could be 10,000 B.C. It was always at times like these—as I stood in awe of my surroundings, that I contrasted it with my dull family. My father, the workaholic carpenter; disconnected from every single one of my interests. My piano-lesson mother, who didn’t really like music, who only yelled at me. My allies were my fifteen year-old brother, Willis, and two younger sisters, Sally and Nancy. That’s the bunch. For the holiday Dad would’ve set up his miniature grill on the driveway, cooking burgers and dogs. An invitation from neighbors to see fireworks would be turned down as “too social.” Whoops, I was wrong—it was two hours later at this instant. Eastern time. Mom would already have her pajamas on, settling on the couch for a night of TV. Dad would be back in his room doing paperwork for the day tomorrow. My sibs—all disappeared in their rooms.

Otto and I took a gulp of water each from the canteen and hiked right down to the I-80 pavement. Traffic was paper thin. Sakes alive—on the main artery between New York and San Francisco—there was enough time to do twenty situps in the traffic lane proper!

“It’s like we’re on the set of a Western movie.”

“We’re actors without a script, working our way through. But that’s the way we like it. We make it up as we go along. I’m happy as a canary, Otto.”

He accepted the idea that I stole Steal This Book. Much of the time while I hitched he sat on his pack and skimmed through the pages, calling my attention whenever he spotted something.

A kid named Jeff picked us up after a beastly wait of one hundred fifty-five minutes. Lo and behold, he was wearing a New York Yankees cap like me. Amazing! Out of all the places to come across a hometown fan, here was one. A job transfer for Jeff’s father brought his family out here a couple of years earlier, from New York State, and Jeff never lost his affinity for the Bronx Bombers.

“It’s whatever team you rooted for when you’re a kid,” he said. “I can’t say it’s because of winning, because they haven’t won the pennant in seven years.”

“What was the score yesterday? Who pitched?”

His favorite player was Jake Gibbs, a catcher whom he thought was better than last year’s Rookie of the Year, Thurman Munson. He hated my two favorite players from the recent past, Roger Maris and Joe Pepitone.

Jeff could take a little teasing, too. At the onset of the ride he regretfully said, “I’m only going to the next town.” That turned out to be Laramie, fifty miles distant.

“Your lift to the next town is the longest on record.”

We arrived in Laramie, Wyoming, as the sun was going down, though there was still lots of swirling heat. I observed a scruffy row of one-story, low-income houses when a car shrieked to a halt a hundred yards in front of us, a green sedan.

“Keep back, Roger.”

A door opened. Either a fruitcake guy or a paunchy girl fell out of the back seat—pushed almost. The car squealed across the median illegally and zoomed past us going the other way. Three or four roughnecks inside hooted it up.

The abandoned passenger came poking our way, long-faced and crying. Two pencil bumps on her teeshirt identified her as a girl. She had glasses and no shoes. Neither did she have gear. She was small and weak. “Are y-you g-going west?”

“Yes . . . ” I answered, but thinking it best to practice Otto’s method to withhold our hand until we found out more information, said nothing more. This girl was devastated. Her whole face looked sore from crying.

“Hey, you all right?”

She nodded, though it was clear she was not. She repeated, “You are g-going west?”

“Yeah.”

She swallowed. “Can I hitch with you then? I want someone to hitch with. I want to get to San Francisco.”

“San Francisco?” Chills ran up my spine. “That’s where we’re going.”

“Hold it, Roger. We’re tryin’ to get out of this town before we do anything else. That’s what we’re tryin’ to do.”

“Oh, may I please hitch with you? I don’t want to go any farther by myself. Please. I’m scared.” She wiped a tear from under her glasses and put a dirty hand on her belly. Damn. On top of everything else, she was pregnant.

She was scared, mangled, disillusioned, and malnourished. Her clothes were threadbare and she needed a good scrubbing. Little sparkles embedded in the cheap plastic of her eyeglasses made her condition all the more ironic.

“We’d better take her on, Roger. We got an emergency here.”

“Yeah. It has to be. Let’s work it out.”

Despite all the questions shooting through my head, I knew there’d be benefits. She was female. Just to include her in our lineup would boost our chances for a ride. But could she hold her own until San Francisco?

“We’re missin’ rides just by standin’ here,” Otto said. “You’re goin’ the same way we’re goin’, so we might as well start.”

“Oh thank you.” She brightened a notch.

“What’s your name?”

“Starla.”

“I’m Roger and this is Otto.”

Three thumbs went out in a diagonal. Otto stood on the outside edge of the grass. I hugged the traffic lane. Starla worked the middle of the shoulder. While we waited she blurted out her story.

“I’m nine months pregnant . . . due any day now . . . Sometimes I get cramps real bad . . . I’m on my way to find my husband . . . He’s in California with another girl . . . He doesn’t love me, but I kept telling him when I had my baby, I wanted him to be near . . . The baby’s kicking awful today . . . He left when I wouldn’t get an abortion . . . ”

“Where you from?”

“Kansas.”

“How old?”

“Sixteen.”

“Who were those cowboys?”

“Those men?” Fright rushed back to her voice. “They picked me up outside Cheyenne. They took the money I had for the bus. They, they . . .” She started sobbing. “They said u-unless I took off all my clothes, they were g-going to b-bounce my stomach like a b-basketball. T-they gave me three hits of mescaline. They, they made me ride the w-whole way without any clothes.”

“They wanted to kill your baby? Those sons of bitches. That’s murder!”

“Easy, Roger.”

Starla staggered out of the diagonal and bent over in the grass with her hand draped across her stomach.

“You gonna be all right thumbin’ like this?” Otto asked.

She eventually straightened herself up, came back to the diagonal, and extended her thumb. “I’ll try.”
“Don’t worry with us,” Otto said.

“That’s right. You’ve joined forces with a couple of professional hitchhikers. We don’t go for sloth.”

A cream-colored Impala, hauling a medium-sized camper, lumbered to a halt as it passed. I scooped up my bags and ran.

A hairy, meaty arm rested on the window ledge. Inside was a lone, middle-aged fellow with a red balding head, bulbous nose, and a forced smile on his face. “Happy July Fourth. My name’s Bill.”

“Are you offering us a ride?”

“I guess I am.” Otto, and then Starla, appeared from behind the camper.

“You have room for three?”

“I think so. Here.” He opened the door with a grunt. “Let me open my trailer so you can throw your things inside.” He walked around the hood, revealing a hefty frame and a stomach like a kettle. No babies inside this guy’s belly. Just fat, carbohydrates, and cholesterol.

Bill stepped back while unlocking the camper door and called to Starla, “Don’t you got anything with you?” Starla looked downward and shook her head.

“How far west you going?” I asked.

Bill’s perplexed expression turned toward me. “Oh, I’m going to good ways west. You don’t have to worry about that. You’ve got a ride clear across Wyoming.”

Otto and I posted Starla in the front, which was only right. There was plenty of room wherever you sat. The interior was foamy and comfortable, though it wasn’t quite as plush or new-smelling as Archie the Drunk’s cruisemobile.

“I see all three of you are going to California,” Bill said, after we got going. He directed his comment to Starla, but she wasn’t looking. She slumped her head against the window. Bill’s eyes focused on me through the rearview mirror.

“Yes. San Francisco. We appreciate your stopping. We didn’t know if we were going to get a ride back there. It’s so desolate.”

“Oh, that’s all right. I don’t have anything to do tonight anyway, except drive. I’m from California myself. Have you ever heard of Santa Monica? It’s one of those neighboring towns to L.A. You don’t know where one stops and the next one begins. All the towns run into each other. We just call it the L.A. area. A few movie stars live in Santa Monica.”

Bill stole another glance at Starla, but her head was melted into the window mechanism and I didn’t think anyone was going to snap her out of her trance. She had all that mescaline swimming in her brain anyway.

When Bill discovered the three of us had linked up only a short time before, you could see ardor flaming up through his face. He began to gaze at Starla reverently in the dark, grip and twist the steering wheel, and pat down the long strands of his sandy-colored hair, trying to cover his bald spot as best he could. He plugged a Frank Sinatra eight-track into his tape deck. The first three songs matched Bill’s situation exactly: “Strangers in the Night,” “All or Nothing At All,” and “Yes Sir That’s My Baby.”

“Well, I can get you across Wyoming, and maybe ever farther that that,” Bill said after a long lapse. “I don’t know quite where I’m going myself yet. I got four more days of my vacation to use up.”

It was now completely dark. We rolled up and down tremendous- sized mountains. Bill’s bulky unit had a hard time tugging and jerking its way up some of the inclines. Sometimes it felt like we were swerving. The illuminated white lines painted over fresh asphalt guided us through total blackness. Headlights coming the other way were, at best, occasional. Bill kept on his high beams. I poked at my pinching underpants, picked my cuticles, and flexed my fingers. Bill yakked away, mostly about money and misery—runaway inflation, how his car only got five miles to the gallon, his poor credit rating, and about California’s ever-increasing property taxes which were eating him alive.

When Starla woke and sat up following a gas station stop, Bill extended her all courtesies: Was she too hot? Too cold? Need aspirin? Something to drink? Hungry? Otto and I weren’t asked this stuff, but it was okay. I didn’t think Bill had a clue that his prospective dream girl was on the brink of giving birth. Her shirt was loose and covered it well. I felt sorry the guy had to squeeze his pleasure in life from a penniless, mixed up, pregnant waif. Otto and I had a couple of laughs about this at another gas station stop down the road about an hour later.

“I’ve got my own floor waxing business,” Bill revealed during one of the periods when Starla was awake. “I wax a lot of the stars’ floors in Bel Air, Malibu, Beverly Hills. You’ve heard of Bob Crane, haven’t you? From Hogan’s Heroes? I’ve done his floor. How about Ann Southern? She plays a part on My Mother The Car. I do her floor, on contract, once a month.”

Starla stared at him curiously.

“Yeah, but I think I’d get out of that business all the same if I could think of something else to do. You get tired of doing the same thing after twenty-two years. I always wind up doing more than just waxing
floors. A lady over in North Hollywood had me bringing in her grocery bags the other week.”

More sadly, he said, “My wife could never accept me as a floor waxer. We got divorced two years ago. She was a beautiful lady, and I tried to provide for her the best I could, but she didn’t want me waxing no floors. She wanted me to be a movie star. I take my vacations by myself now.”

The Frank Sinatra eight-track had a malfunction. After three songs, you’d hear tape hiss. Then ka-chink, ka-chink, and the same three songs started again. “Strangers in the Night” played over and over.

Everyone got out of the car at the next gas station stop to get a breath of fresh air. The Milky Way was creamy and twinkling. The temperature dropped into the “cold” zone. Starla wandered off by herself after Bill bought her chocolate donuts and a Yoo-Hoo.

Otto and I leaned against the camper, talking and yawning. “You know, Roger, our best chance to get a longer ride is when it comes time to sleep if we coax Starla into the camper with Bill, alone.”

“You mean defer to the bench seats of the car? I’d do that in an instant. The camper sleeps only two anyway.”

“If Starla butters up Bill a little bit, who knows. Maybe we got a ride all the way to San Francisco under our noses.”

Bill came blundering past, a man welled up in failure. Almost by intuition, he said, “I’d be glad to put you boys in the back so you could get some sleep, but you’re not allowed to stay inside a moving trailer, not in this state. Every state has a different law. Don’t worry, I’m getting tired myself. I’m thinking about stopping at the next rest area, eating some dinner, and getting some sleep. I suppose you boys are hungry.

It was during this last driving spell, after Otto fell asleep and I dropped into a half-nodding twilight zone, when Bill delivered to Starla a quiet, private soliloquy.

“You know, a man gets lonely traveling around by himself . . . The mountains and the rivers mean nothing when you have no one to share them with . . . Living alone at my age is not meant to be . . . What I need is a traveling mate . . . Someone like you, Starla . . . Can you see yourself as my traveling mate?”

The reply came soft and trembling: “I d-don’t think s-so.”

“Strangers in the Night” came on for about the seventh time.

“Here’s the rest area,” boys,” was the next thing Bill said. “I guess we’ll call it a night here.”

From the kitchenette in Bill’s camper, Otto and I each ate two hot dogs—drenched in mustard and speared with a fork—over a dented pot, and drank acidy cola, the cheapest brand on the market. Starla didn’t want anything. She was back in the car with her head smeared against the window. She hadn’t said ten words the whole ride.

“Is there anything wrong with Starla that you guys know about? She’s bound to get awful cold without a jacket or anything if she stays in that car.” Bill wiped his mouth with a paper towel. “I’d sure like to do something for her, but I don’t know what to do.”

“She’s had a hard day, that’s all,” Otto said. I kept clamped. If Bill couldn’t see for himself that Starla was dangerously pregnant, I wasn’t going to break the news.

Bill roused Starla, but she refused to move. Even pleas like, “You’ll feel much better in your own bed,” and “I promise no one will bother you,” went unheeded. Finally he gave up. He pushed her a spare blanket through the window.

Otto quickly opened the back door of the car, climbing onto the rear bench seat, behind Starla. “I’ll sacrifice in the Impala.” That meant I got stuck with lonesome Bill in the musty, squeaky trailer. It irked me to spend the night with a dumpy, middle-aged guy! He snored like a lion. Otto’d better not try and claim that he slept with another girl! No way. It was null and void. No matter what he said, he was leading in our girls contest only 2-1.

Day Nine (Monday, July 5, 1971)

A sparkling blue sky shone over creation in the morning. The brown mountains winked in crisp, cool air. I stretched my limbs and yawned, creaking but still oiled well for seventeen yearly cycles. There were hardly any trees around, just spiky shrubs covering towering upheavals of land. Brown bumps slanted in the long shadows.

Otto pulled his backpack out from underneath the car in his stocking feet. Starla stood disheveled and withdrawn on the sidewalk, bundled in the blanket.

“Good morning, Starla.” She replied nothing. “Shouldn’t you ask Bill to take you to a hospital?” Still receiving nothing, I went to get a cup of coffee from a vending machine.

‘WELCOME TO UTAH’ came as a surprise, mainly because I started to accept that Wyoming was endless. But early on, the Impala came upon the border and crossed it. Here was more new territory to conquer, not to mention my state total pressed onward to nineteen.

Bill gave up on Starla. He changed during sleep. He said little to anyone after we got back in the car, and abruptly dropped the three of us off at the Utah Tourist Welcome Center. He continued alone through Idaho and Oregon.

Meanwhile, Starla looked bad. Her skin color, which wasn’t good to begin with, turned purplish. Heaving, gasping, and moaning, she drifted away from Otto and me, only to sit atop a grassy hill, away from cars and people.

Suddenly, I put it together. “Holy cripe, Otto, she’s having her baby!”

I dashed up the berm, which was covered by clumps of jagged ferns. She was drenched in sweat and loosening her pants.

I whipped off the rest of her pants without asking permission. She wore nothing underneath, but this was no time for modesty. She was bleeding and groaning like a tortured cat.

Otto ran in the direction of the welcome center, shouting, “Get an ambulance. A girl over there is havin’ a baby!”

I planted Starla’s feet in the dirt with her knees bent, and pulled her legs apart, facing right into her soiled canal. “Breathe big and steady if you can.” I couldn’t stop and observe; it was happening as I worked.

The baby’s head came first. It was bloody and covered in mucus. I cupped my hands together, guiding out the head and keeping it level. At the same time I gently wiped away slime from its eyes and mouth and ears.

The shoulders and torso came next. The arms popped up.

Starla was sweating and wailing. “Almost, Starla. You’re almost there. Push.”

The baby was born breathing. It was a boy.

People gathered in a circle over my shoulder, letting me complete the task. I took off my teeshirt and used it as an undercloth. Still on my knees, I wrapped the baby in it, and handed the whole package to Starla, with the cord attached. “Congratulations Starla, you’re a mother!”

I almost laughed. Starla looked relieved and softly said, “Thank you.” The onlookers applauded.
Otto came back into view, smiling but shaking his head. After checking on the crying baby he said, “Roger, you’re the Eighth Wonder of the World. You got tricks up your sleeve that would baffle Houdini.”

The police showed up incredibly fast and took over. They smiled in appreciation once they saw mother and child were not in danger. “Job well done, son,” the chief said, shaking my stained hand. The emergency unit followed and whisked away Starla and baby to a hospital. My throat was choking. Tears flowed down tourists’ faces.

I wiped my hands with a towel and got hold of myself, still not quite cognizant. Many of those present shook my hand, expressing thanks and amazement. A guy gave me a brand new teeshirt out his suitcase. I put it on and everyone applauded again. Cameras clicked.

“We got our Fourth of July celebration, man. It came a day late, but we got it all the same,” I said to Otto, who slowly moved into the center of action with me.

He and I gave separate statements to the police. They didn’t care in the least we were cross-country hitchhikers. In fact, once that came out, it became part of the folklore. The chief radioed for a staffer. A lady in uniform showed up. She drove us a dozen or more miles west, to the next village along I-80.

“The state of Utah is proud of you,” she said, smiling and laughing about the details. “You guys are an inspiration to us mortals, both of you.”

The fanfare now over, Otto and I strolled into a tavern called the Spring Chicken Inn. We ordered a late breakfast, the biggest platter we could find. Otto fluffed out his blond hair and laughed. I swiveled back
and forth on the stool, singing, “Zippitty-do-dah, zippitty day . . . ” “Roger, that was a performance for the ages. You’re livin’ in your own universe, sons. No one can touch that. Sometimes I’m embarrassed to know you, but after seein’ that, I wouldn’t trade you for nothin’. You’re a pip.”

“We still have to pick up and keep going. We’re not even to California yet.”

“Not so fast. Your breakfast is on me. Let me enjoy this.”

The Spring Chicken Inn was a funky converted barn with cathedral windows letting in good light. We sat at the rectangular bar, underage Jersey dudes, eating ham and cheese omelets, sausage, home fries, and drinking extra large Cokes. A leather-clad gang sitting across from us looked like Ben Cartwright, Hoss, and Little Joe from Bonanza. Making Ponderosa jokes and talking more about the baby kept us occupied.

“That killed my knees.” I referred to my ligament injury I’d had last year playing JV football. “If I’d known ahead of time I was going to deliver a baby, I would’ve packed my knee pads.”

“Dr. Spock ain’t got nothin’ on you, sons.”

“It may be tougher for you and me to stay incognito after this. We’ll be hounded by the paparazzi.”

“Just as long as we arrive alive, I’m good as gold.”

Our next two rides were shorties. Talk about coming down off Cloud Nine! We had to face the reality of having to work again to move our troupe over the miles. Nothing was given in life; it was all earned, bit by bit, in accumulative fashion.

The first shorty was a singer in a barbershop quartet; the second was an Audi with two soccer players from Brazil and their sheep dog. Both drivers assumed ‘CALIF.’ meant Los Angeles, which Otto and I couldn’t understand. Wasn’t this Interstate 80, whose terminus was San Francisco?

Torment ruled our latest spot. We dipped into a hot, dry valley, where the surrounding Rockies faded into a steamy haze. Traffic was thinner than Wyoming—almost zilch on the main artery. The air was soundless. The road stretched out so far that it disappeared before it reached the horizon. Did I mention it was brutally hot? The hairs on my legs prickled. I was glad Salt Lake City wasn’t that far away. We stayed shielded from the sun by an overpass.

“You dopey jerks!” I shouted to a car with an academic-looking couple in the front and an empty seat in back.

“They were too busy contemplatin’ themselves.”

“Despicable, guys, despicable,” I yelled to its successor, two young dullards headed for conservative decades.

In my scavenging I came across an abandoned Styrofoam lid. A message was scribbled in pen: ‘Hitch Hikers Depot, Mike and Noah, Madison Wisconsin-to-Simi Valley California, May 17-18-19.’

I showed Otto. “God, we better not be here three days.”

“We might.”

A comfort bus passed by with a bearded freak driving. “You had room!” I cried.

I stripped down to the legal limit: shorts, shoes, Yankee cap. Otto donned his jungle hat. He eventually stripped down like me.

Minutes multiplied.

“Damn them!” I yelled to an air-conditioned Pontiac. “Why is the public so unwilling? Can’t they see I’m the guy who delivered a baby this morning?”

Otto sat on his rolled-up sleeping bag, not even bothering to answer. He pulled out Steal This Book and narrated ways how to stowaway on an ocean liner. A desirable van came up and zoomed by.

“All I yearn for is a ride to Salt Lake City,” I pleaded to the burning sky. “That’s all I ask.”

For the first time in my hitchhiking career, I sat down, too—except when a car approached. Then I got up. I couldn’t feel good about looking lazy in the face of people on whom you depended. Already I was topless and coated with sweat.

“Those simple-faced bastards! We could’ve fulfilled them! Why didn’t you stop? Tell me! Why? Why?”

Otto was silent and resigned. I jumped around, socking my fist into my palm. “These ignoramuses, Otto. Why do people do the opposite of what they should be doing? What, they need conflict in their lives that bad? I’ve come to the conclusion that people try to avoid their own destiny.”

Otto the Onlooker agreed. “If people ever tried doin’ the right thing, they wouldn’t know what to do. That’s why America can’t pull outta Vietnam. The politicians are afraid peace’ll break out.”

With his sharp eyes, Otto spotted a backpack lying in the weeds on the opposite side of the interstate. It belonged to a guy napping on the hilly field, a hitchhiker going to St. Louis.

“How’s it going?” I yelled over.

“I was asleep,” the guy yelled back.

“How’s it going for you?”

“Not good enough,” Otto yelled.

“You’ll be lucky to get picked up,” he yelled. “I’ve been standing here . . .” His voice trailed off in a gust of wind.

“Did you say two hours?” I yelled.

“No, I didn’t,” he yelled back. “I said ten hours.”

Woe. This three-hour wait for Otto and me was already my all-time record. It was too much—the weight of the sun, the hard pavement, the dead location, the comedown from this morning’s accolades, and the misery of no momentum. “My tan is deep enough, Lord!”

At long last, a beat-up AMC Ambassador Wagon with three guys inside pulled off. They were going to Salt Lake City.

My exhausted body collapsed in the back, despite this potpourri of new oddfellows. Sitting next to Otto and me was a midget, about 3'10" and 85 pounds. He wasn’t a jovial ham like at the Flemington Fair freak show, but a sour faced marionette, unshaven, with flabby jowls and unsociable eyes. The driver was a greaser out of the 1950’s, with sunglasses, Brill cream, and a pack of cigarettes rolled up under the sleeve of his white teeshirt. The passenger—not to be outdone—was a goofy-looking student with a gaping smile, large ears, and an overbite.

I felt better once we ascended the dry valley and got back into some green via the upper elevations. Air blew cooler as we twisted through lush, forest-laden thickets. The evergreens smelled like Christmas. Waterfalls thundered into natural pools below. Broad, rustling aspens painted the slopes. The driver sped down one crevice and up another.

I never figured out the relationship between our carmates. The guy with the large ears, who introduced himself as Phil, was the only one who did any talking. He asked the standard questions: names, hometown, and why we took this trip. I answered him honestly except to say we were from Princeton, New Jersey, instead of Whitehouse.

“Hey man, you’re a Salt Lake denizen,” I threw out. “Do you know any place where my friend and I can bunk for the night without getting caught?”

Phil rolled some thoughts around without speaking. Finally he said, “Are you Christians?”

What? Otto was Catholic and I used to attend a Presbyterian Sunday School, but how could that possibly tie in with the topic of sleeping quarters? I gave him the answer I figured he wanted to hear: “Yes.”

“Well, then I do know a place.” Phil exhaled. “It’s called Fellowship Mission. I’ll sign you up, but you’ll have to go to the Bible study tonight. If you’re Christians, you’ll have a real good time and meet tons of fellow Christians. Everyone is friendly and it’s a good chance to grow in your faith. I go every week.”

“Yeah?” I said.

Otto stuck his tongue in his cheek. Back in Whitehouse, a group called the Christian Coffee House
met at the former Grange Hall every Friday night. This past spring, whenever Otto and I had nothing else to do, we wandered over and took advantage of the free hot dogs and root beer. Born-again Christians were there, to be sure, singing, jamming with instruments, reading scripture, and telling wholesome jokes. But the local freaks—young teenagers who hung out on Main Street and whose names were synonymous with mischief—also frequented the place and gave it some flavor. It was fun except when you had to deal with the chaperon: this squat, round, candy store owner, who was always there walking around, warning you of God’s wrath “if you didn’t take the step and have yourself saved.”

From my exposure to this perspective, I couldn’t help but think: Was salvation through Jesus Christ the best way to God? Hadn’t most of the world’s population been proclaiming that for two thousand years? And by opting in, didn’t people have everything to gain and nothing to lose? After all, if Christianity was no more than a figment of the imagination, a human invention, then we’d rot in the ground after death anyway. But if it was true, if this was the way, the truth, and the life, I sure as holy heck wasn’t planning to spend eternity in hell.

I had declared my allegiance to Jesus Christ back in May, but dismissed doing it at the Coffee House, to avoid becoming “Convertee of the Evening.” Instead I went home one night, behind closed doors, and held a conversation out loud with the Almighty. “God,” I said, “I can’t handle this life without help. I know I’m unworthy, but could Jesus please forgive my sins? I would appreciate it. Thank you.” Done. To appease the fanatic chaperone, I signed and dated a statement attached to a pocket New Testament which had been given to me, “May 8, 1971.” That put it in stone. Roger Winans was a Christian. I actually felt pretty good about it.

In typical fashion, Otto never said whether he was saved or not, but acted like he had special inroads to Christ long before and didn’t need to waste time dwelling on religious matters that he took care of years ago.

“So then we’ll see you there?” Phil asked, handing me the address of the mission.

“Will we?” I turned to Otto. “We ain’t square, we’ll be there.” The vast, gleaming city of Salt Lake cradled the side of a mountain range like a magic valley. Towering shrines, monuments, and government buildings rose bright on the north slope. Commerce and industry conglomerated in the middle—featuring some of the most attractive skyscrapers I’d ever seen. Streaming out in all directions below were the residential areas. Toward the western horizon—the only side not enclosed by mountains—stretched the silvery-blue Great Salt Lake.

“Look out, Salt Lake City, Roger and Otto just hit town,” I shouted from the sidewalk.

There was no tension around anywhere in this city, nothing frantic or crazy. Cleanliness marked the wide, tree-lined boulevards. You could jaywalk without worrying that you’d get struck.

“Haven’t you heard about this place as havin’ nothin’ but Mormons in it?” Otto bit into a meatball sandwich under a polka-dotted umbrella at a takeout stand. “What’s their official name, the Church of Latter- Day Saints? Is this group part of them? Or maybe they’re against them?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Damn, maybe you and I are in the middle of a spiritual revolution.”

Fellowship Mission’s headquarters was in a turn-of-the-century Victorian house, three stories high, dilapidated, with rusted awnings and a sinking roof. An open-air porch in front was engulfed by monstrous, large-leafed plants. The yard was overgrown with grass and dandelions.

I knocked on the door. Loud sounds were buffered behind it. The door swung round and three cute girls beckoned. “Oh, you must be tonight’s guests of honor! Welcome, guys! Come on in!”

The house was crammed with teens, and I mean about two hundred. They were gabbing in the kitchen, up the stairwell, in doorways, along window sills. A vivacious brunette explained that Fellowship Mission was a nondenominational Protestant group run by a cooperative body called Interfaith Connection, not connected with the Mormons, “though we co-exist just fine.”

Before long, bunches of people packed around me, asking, “How’s your trip been?” “How’d you hear about us?” “What do you think of Salt Lake?” “What kind of people picked you up?” Otto was encircled on the far side of the room, essentially doing the same thing. Our clothes were rags compared to these kids’ neat attire. Almost no one wore dungarees. I looked around for Phil, to thank him, but never saw him again.

“Folks, are we ready?” A booming voice rose above the salutations. “Terry, pass out the hymnals. Everyone come into the living room and bring your Bibles. Have a seat, if you can find one. We want the Lord to feel our presence tonight. We want to let God know we’re around!”

The throng jammed into the living room. Bodies were stacked. Otto inched over toward me and we sat cross-legged on the carpet.

What pretty girls! If Connie Francis sang “Where The Boys Are,” in 1961, then I devised my own updated version, “Salt Lake Is Where Cute Girls Are.”

The guy doing the shouting was named Mr. Singleton. He was tall with a disproportionate small head, and whose stomach was coming out of his shirt. “It looks like we got a real good bunch of faith seekers on hand tonight.”

Mr. Singleton led us in song for what seemed like an hour, “to get warmed up for the Lord.” The arrangements were jaunty—sharp melodies like rock, but communicating their point just as well or even better than church hymns. One of the few black people, a girl with tight braids, banged on the piano as we sang. The sheer number of people jammed inside the small space made the sound thick and amplified; we sounded good. Otto publicly sang, too—a rare occurrence. Between songs, people shouted, “Praise the Lord Jesus!” or swayed their hands in the air.

Strange stirrings rumbled inside me. A physical and emotional swelling.

“Hoon?” Mr. Singleton got up with a film of sweat on his face. He introduced the guest speaker, somebody from South Korea. “Where are you hiding, Hoon?”

This short, skinny Oriental guy, with steel-rimmed glasses and a seaweed-colored leisure suit, emerged from the masses. “Hello Salt Lake City, how is gentile population?” He was a traveling evangelist who bid us in broken English not to address him by his given name. “Foreign name twist tongue. Just call me Hoon. Make me easy.” He joked about his poor singing. “Good thing my work outside native country. Korean minister without sing is shameful.”

It’s amazing how Christians will dig up somebody like this. I remembered how the candy store owner at the coffee house in Whitehouse once had an ex-con up there talking about the joys of repentance.
Hoon asked everyone open their Bibles to Romans 12:9; “Let love be genuine. Hate what is evil, rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer.”

“Many people pray, but pray for wrong thing. We ask selfish. Instead give thanks. Show grateful,” Hoon said. “We are children of God, not other way. We are creation of God, but have fallen short of glory. None of this world is ours, except Jesus Christ died on cross for sins. He made good bridge.”

Hoon quoted Romans, Timothy, Matthew, Exodus, Proverbs— half the Bible. The way he elaborated big ideas in simple, chopped-up terms had me erupting. It reinforced that faith wasn’t a game. It wasn’t something you could add on when you wanted, nor detach when convenient. It was a commitment whose prospects had me spellbound.

“Be saved. Spend eternity with Lord. Do not get left behind. No one want to go to hell, right? Jesus is answer. He will solve problems. He will protect from harm. He will stop hardship. He will deal frustration. All you need—make Jesus personal savior. Ask Jesus to forgive sins. Be humble. Be servant. Future assured. Day is coming when Lord comes again. Jesus will sit on throne, at right hand of God, and make judgment. Yes, good times can be yours, all eternal. But name must be in Book of Life.”

“My name’s written in the book,” I whispered to Otto. “Roger Jonathan Winans, Whitehouse, New Jersey.”

Otto seemed startled. “It is? When did you do that?”

Everybody in that room was ready to cry out for Jesus. The Holy Spirit trumpeted victory. You could feel it soaring and roaring.

I began to realize something. The way I had been living was so much less than my potential. I lived without morals, without ethical boundaries, without a spiritual center. Hoon was legitimate. I could see vital reasons for my being present.

Hoon asked us to pray. The group broke into more songs. Mr. Singleton laboriously rose from his position. Slightly out of breath, he said, “Has anyone come to this Bible study tonight a lost soul, and needs help from Christians who love you in accepting Jesus?”

No one responded. Not me. I was golden, via my signed proclamation two months earlier. I knew right where that statement was, safe at home in the top drawer of my clothes dresser.

Otto, though, was trembling. He was deep in prayer, head bowed and eyes closed.

“There’s nothing to be ashamed about. Being born again is the best thing that could ever happen to a person,” Mr. Singleton said. “I’d hate to see someone leave here in the same shape they came in. I want everyone to close their eyes, so the ones in the room who want to be saved can come forward and not be embarrassed.”

After a moment of silence, I heard, “Praise God! Here comes a gentleman now!” I opened my eyes and peeked. Otto!

“Son, what is your name?”

“Otto Brackston George, Junior, sir.”

“Brother Otto,” Mr. Singleton addressed, “do you accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior and ask that your sins be forgiven?”

“I do.”

“Will you love Jesus and let Him direct your life and allow Him to live within you and to work in your life as He sees fit, and for you to conduct yourself as a Christian and to uphold the Word of God?”

“I do.”

“Brother Otto, if you should die this instant, do you know where you would go?”

“Up to heaven?”

You don’t have to guess about that one, son. You’re absolutely right! Open your eyes, everyone. Meet God’s newest humble servant. Brother Otto, congratulations. You’ll never regret your decision.”

Wild applause rocked the room. The vibrating walls and chandeliers gave me goose bumps. Mr. Singleton shook Otto’s hand. Others rose with similar congratulations. Poor Otto was flushed. The way people pulled and tugged at him, saying, “Way to go, Brother Otto,” patting him on the back and shoulders, they nearly knocked my good friend over.

Everyone rose, mingling and hugging each other like after a wrestling match. I remained on the floor, tingles splashing up and down my spine. It was like I was watching the credits roll of an inspirational movie. Otto was backed into a corner, blabbing to a cute female worshipper, “If I wasn’t no good Christian before tonight, I am now.”

A lump rose to my throat for Otto. Glory be to all the times we shared together, still unfolding. If he wasn’t my best friend, who was? He was my compatriot, my pal, my mentor. All the passion of friendship I could ever devote to someone of the same sex was directed toward humble servant Otto Brackston George, Jr.

I was elevated by so much power and emotion, swept so deeply into a joyful state, I didn’t realize how quickly the room emptied. It was like emerging from a vivid dream. I helped move chairs back in place. The change in complexion was startling.

A guy pointed at me. “You’re one of them hitchhikers, right? You’ll be up on the third floor with us guys. Get your stuff, I’ll show you where it is.”

The large attic room contained eight or ten iron beds, supplemented by beat-up dressers. All of the beds were filled, mostly by Christians who were in their underpants reading the Bible from the light of their pinup lamps. I wondered . . . did any of them ever sneak down to the girls’ room on the second floor and—whoops, I checked myself—that wasn’t a very Christian thought. I unrolled my sleeping bag on a vacant hunk of floor down the broad middle aisle.

Otto came bounding through the lavatory with his hand formed into a microphone. “The Lawd is comin.’ The Lawd is comin.’”

“Congratulations, George.” I reached up and we shook.

There sure were a lot of responsibilities in being a Christian. Too many, almost. Right away I felt bogged down by questions, starting with: What is the definition of a sin? Were “virtuous” and “righteousness” synonymous? What if you didn’t believe every word of the Bible was the literal truth? Who was the historical Jesus? Where is heaven, exactly? How would a scientist explain the infinite layers of intelligence known as God?

My lying and stealing would have to stop. That was wrong. Abbie Hoffman’s book might not be the best influence. I would have to stop badmouting my parents and try to muster love and understanding toward them even if I didn’t feel like it. I would stop playing the rebel or the maverick, which my father always called “bull-headed;” and my mother, “obstinate.”

Then the really major questions hit me. What if you favored premarital intercourse? How do you prevent sexual fantasies from coming into your head? How were you supposed to control yourself over any topic you felt strongly about? And what’s the point of blocking out natural instincts? Weren’t those “God given,” too?

Otto tucked himself in on the floor next to me, in a radiant mood—I made believe I was asleep. For better or worse, this was a whole new world, to be lived by no one except me. Christianity sure made you feel lonely. I felt awash in solitude.

The last light in the room went off. For the first time in my life I changed the wording of my nightly prayer:

“Dear God, I accept you and love you. I acknowledge your power in the universe. Thank you for bringing Jesus into my life. I’ll be depending on you from now on. Okay? Don’t let me down, Lord. Please! Keep my feet moving in the direction of the good. That way I won’t have anything to complain about. Amen.”

I reached down under the blanket and flogged my log. To climax. I made no excuses for what I was doing. If I was going to be a Christian, I was going to be a freethinking one.