On The Road In The 1970's: Part 2

By the time the bus reached Omaha, Nebraska the Greyhound bus was filled with more passengers and there were now less vacant seats on the bus. In fact, the only available vacant seats were two seats near the back of the bus: the vacant seat next to me and the vacant seat  next to a taller and heavier big white guy across the aisle from me, who didn't have a beard and long hair like I then did. So, when a short, thin African-American woman, wearing slacks, who looked like she wasn't yet in her 20's like I was by the 1970's, had to choose which vacant seat to take, she, not surprisingly, decided that the vacant bus seat next to me was the better place to sit while riding the bus during the night and trying to get some sleep during the night on the bus, until the bus reached Salt Lake City, by way of Laramie, Wyoming.

Before people started using Walkman and plugging Walkman devices into their ears in order to listen to music while riding on buses in the late 1970's, it wasn't that unusual for passengers sitting next to strangers on Greyhound buses to converse with each other during a bus ride, in order to make time pass by faster when they weren't trying to sleep a little on the bus or didn't feel like reading a book on the bus (especially if reading a book on a moving bus made them feel nauseous).

So after the bus started rolling west on the highway out of Omaha, Nebraska in the night, the young woman sitting next to me and I started to quietly converse a bit on the dimly lit bus.

"How far are you going?" I asked.

"To Los Angeles. I'm meeting my boyfriend there to get married," she replied with an excited smile.

I can't recall now what else we briefly talked about before we both turned off the bulbs above our seats and each tried to fall asleep on the uncomfortable narrow seats within the now darkened bus.

By the 1970's, I had read about the Sal character in Jack Kerouac's On The Road novel becoming involved for awhile with a Latina woman he first encountered sitting near him while he was traveling on a Greyhound bus ride on the West Coast. But I was still surprised to feel the soon-to-be-married young woman from Omaha leaning closer into me from her aisle seat, and resting her head against my chest and between my arms as we both began to doze off to sleep during the night bus ride. And by the early morning hours, we were sleeping entwined, as if our two adjacent bus seats were being occupied by a couple of young lovers.

Feeling her young woman's body so physically close to mine all during the night was a pleasurable feeling for me that also made it easier for me to sleep. And the moments during the night when she awoke to shift her body's sleeping position slightly, and, still half-asleep, touched me in an affectionate way, made me, who was also half-asleep, feel that I was living in some kind of dream world with the soon-to-be-married young woman from Omaha.

By the time we reached Laramie, Wyoming, however, the sun was out, it was daylight and the young African-American woman sitting next to me and I had both awakened. Having slept in each other's arms during the night, we now looked at each other in a different way than when she had first boarded the bus in Omaha; and we now told each other what our first names were (although I long ago forgot what she said her first name was). Then, during the bus stopover in Laramie, Wyoming, she went into the women's restroom to freshen up and returned to the reboarding bus station platform with a scarf covering her hair and looking as if she was about to go on a date.

I no longer recall what we talked about after we both reboarded the bus in Laramie and sat next to each other while awake on the bus ride from Laramie, through the rest of Wyoming and onto Salt Lake City, where she was going to leave the bus for San Francisco that I was on, in order to transfer to another bus that would take her from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles. But I do remember wishing her the best of luck in her marriage, before I reboarded my bus for San Francisco at the Salt Lake City bus station while she continued to wait for the bus that had not yet arrived in Salt Lake City to take her to get married in Los Angeles..

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 1

On The Road In The 1970’s: Part 1

By the 1970’s, I realized that, for a working-class person in the United States, working in a 9-to-5 factory cage or skyscraper office cage for 50 years meant intellectual, moral, spiritual, artistic, political and emotional death during the workday for 50 years. And by the 1970’s I also realized that, for the working-class student in the United States, the kind of life that you experienced on campuses or around campuses like Columbia or Berkeley in the 1960’s was life in an ivory tower fantasy world, representing only a temporary 4-year reprieve from the real world of off-campus, enslavement, repression and alienation experienced by the majority of U.S. working-class people.

So by the 1970’s I no longer felt it mattered very much whether I lived or died, since the future for me looked completely bleak personally and completely bleak for the majority of working-class people who lived in U.S. society under the post-1970’s U.S. economic/political system of corporate totalitarianism, hip capitalism and feminized imperialism. Yet before I died in my physical form in the 1970’s, I still wanted to see the West Coast, and especially to visit Berkeley and the Bay Area, in the 1970’s.

By the end of my freshman year at Columbia in 1966, I wished that I had tried to figure out a way to afford to enroll at University of California-Berkeley in Fall 1965, rather than only applying to Columbia and CCNY, because I mistakenly assumed that living and/or studying in Manhattan near Harlem would give me the most meaningful and stimulating college undergraduate experience. And were it not for the Fall 1966 re-founding of Columbia SDS as a more mass-based campus group, my subsequent involvement in Columbia SDS as a steering committee member and participant in the 1968 Columbia Student Revolt, I would likely have totally regretted that, while applying for college, the lure of living and/or studying in Manhattan near Harlem caused me to rule out trying to figure out a way financially to enroll at U. of California-Berkeley.

Carrying only a large knapsack, from my early teenage years as a boy scout, I went to the Port Authority bus station, near 42nd Street and 8^th Avenue in Manhattan, on an early September weekday evening, to buy a $100 one-way ticket from Greyhound that would then allow me to ride from New York City to San Francisco, on a bus that would get me to the West Coast in 3 days. And, aside from the clothes I wore and the clothes in the knapsack, the only important things I brought along with me on the bus were my bus ticket that would get me to California, the keys to the basement apartment in Jamaica in which I still lived in as a tenant, and maybe about $150 in 1970’s money.

The Greyhound bus to California left around 11 p.m. or midnight from the Port Authority bus station and, because it was a night during the week and not a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday night, was not very crowded. So until the bus reached Omaha, Nebraska, early in the following evening, no other passenger was sitting next to me. And I was able to stretch out over two seats during the first night on the road of the bus, as the bus drove first down the New Jersey Turnpike to Philadelphia, then across Pennsylvania on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and then through Ohio and Indiana and Illinois.

Four decades later, I can’t recall talking to anybody  else on the bus or anything memorable happening on the bus, during the period that it traveled from New York City until the time it reached Omaha, Nebraska.