On The Road In The 1970's: Part 16

The following day the authentically Christian hippie couple and I continued moving east on the Interstate 40 highway, until we reached the Oklahoma City highway interchange where Interstate 44 going northeast crossed the Interstate 40 highway going due east towards the Ozarks in Arkansas. Before dropping me off in the breakdown lane near the interchange ramp in Oklahome City, the authentically Christian hippie couple, individually, each expressed the hope that I would eventually join them in "living like Jesus."  And not very long after I had exited their car and thanked them for the ride and their generosity, I was then picked up by a jovial white guy in his 20's, with medium-cut hair, who lived in Oklahoma City. And, in a jovial way, he eagerly invited me to smoke some pot together in his Oklahoma City pad.

The good-natured young Oklahoma City white guy seemed to be high on marijuana when he stopped to pick me up; and, like so many other guys in their 20's in the Southwest who either worked at odd jobs, were students, were unemployed, or just in-between jobs, he liked to spend much of his day spare-time just driving around the town or city in which he lived in his car while stoned--and with the sound of rock music from his car's cassette tape deck or 8-track tape sound system filling up the car as he drove. And like similar pot-smoking guys in their 20s in the Southwest during the 1970s who spent their days driving around and listening to music in their cars while stoned, whenever he saw a long-haired hippie-looking hitchhiker, he always stopped to give that person a lift.

The stoned Oklahoma City guy in his 20s lived in a modest apartment of a few rooms that he didn't keep too neat, which had a lot of vinyl records, a stereo and a TV with a big screen in the living room, that also contained a sofa and a cushioned living room chair, but no books. It turned out out the jovial Oklahoma City white guy was a member of the Oklahoma City Hells Angels Club of stoned young guys who, besides being into driving around locally in their cars while stoned, also owned motorcycles on which they drove around the city as a group, on weekends. Unlike either the West Coast Hells Angels or the Hells Angels who hung around East 3rd Street on the Lower East Side in the early 1970s, Oklahoma City's Hells Angels Club seemed, in the 1970s at least, like it was mainly a group of pot-smoking men in their early 20s who identified more with Abbie Hoffman hippies but who, because they were also into riding motorcycles, decided to call themselves Hells Angels.

Living in Oklahoma City in the 1970s, where you could still see signs of oil drilling wells from the highway during that decade, members of the local Hells Angels Club, like the jovial stoned guy who invited me to crash in his apartment for a few days, felt they were trapped in a conservative place; and felt they were being treated as outlaws by the local Oklahoma City white police who harassed them on a daily basis.

Hence, whenever one of the 1970s "cop show" television series'weekly episodes appeared on the TV screen, the stoned Oklahoma City white guy would laugh, sneer and say:  "Yet another Pig show!"; and quickly turn off the TV and put a vinyl record on while starting to smoke another joint. But later in my evening there, the jovial Oklahoma City Hells Angels gang member turned his TV back on to watch the "Johnny Carson/ Tonight" late evening nationally-broadcast 1970s show for awhile; and claimed, as a joke, that Johnny Carson was "his brother." And being very high (and somewhat disoriented) from the pot we had been sharing together during the previous few hours, at first I actually believed him, before he laughed and admitted that he was joking when saying "That's my brother there on the screen. I'm Johnny Carson's brother;" before, soon afterwards, going into his bedroom to sleep, while I soon quickly fell asleep on the couch in his living room.

Not having to work the next morning, the jovial Hells Angels Club member was up cooking breakfast when I awoke and, after sharing a portion of the eggs he had been scrambling with me, turning on some vinyl record to listen to in the morning and smoking more pot with me, he suddenly asked: "I suppose you want to get on the road again, now?"

And after I nodded in agreement, the jovial Oklahoman soon led me and my large knapsack out of his apartment and into his car and drove me back to a break-down lane near the entrance in Oklahoma City to the Interstate 44 highway that led northward towards Missouri, where he dropped me off, after wishing me luck.  I then thanked him with a big smile and for his generosity.The jovial Oklahoma City Hells Angeles Club member, still high, seemed to be planning to spend the remaining morning hours driving his car around the streets of Oklahoma City while smoking pot in his car, until he possibly encountered yet another traveling or loal freak or hippie on the road who needed a lift.

In the 21st-century, young men in their 20's who drive around Oklahoma City during the day in their cars are probably more likely to be Uber drivers; and more into making money from giving people lifts to people they pick up on the road than into being high-on-pot drivers who give people lift to people they pick up on the road for free, just for the fun of it, I imagine. Yet some techie capitalists of the 21st-century seem to think that turning lots of young people into economically exploited Uber drivers rather than just being drivers who spontaneously give free lifts to people who need rides represents "progress" and an advance in human civilization and Western culture. (end of part 16)

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 15

I did not have to wait too long in Downtown Albuquerque with my hitchhiking thumb out before I was offered a backseat ride east by a white couple in their early or mid-20s, in a car whose male driver had a dark beard and long hair and looked like he was some kind of a freak or hippie, in the same way that I did at that time; which was one reason he probably felt safe picking me up. Sitting next to the bearded man was his young wife, a hippie-looking white woman with long brown hair, who looked slightly younger than her husband; and who was a woman that most men would have regarded as quite pretty.

I no longer recall where this young couple was from, but I do recall that they were driving east into the Ozarks in Arkansas, to spend some time camping there. Instead of spending a lot of money by staying at motels near the Interstate 40 highway exits each night on their way to Arkansas, they just stopped at some KOA campgrounds, pitched their tent and cooked their own dinner around a campfire. So after spending most of the day having long philosophical discussions with the couple as we moved east on the highway, I also ended up sleeping in the same tent with them that night, after they shared their cooked-out dinner with me at the KOA campground site where they ended up stopping for the night.

Most of the philosophical discussion in the car related to their eagerness to persuade me that I should get into the variant of Christianity that they had both been raised in and continued to live by, as a happily married young couple. Since they pretty much agreed with that portion of my rap which asserted that money-making should not be the goal of life for members of our generation, and that the materialistic and militaristic U.S. society and the government politicians and corporate business leaders who controlled U.S. society were morally backward, their main point of philosophical debate with me in their car was whether or not members of our generation should just try to live simply in a genuinely Christian anti-materialistic way. So that we only would need to hustle for some kind of not morally comprising skilled blue collar job (like carpentry, for example) when we really needed survival money; and would just focus mainly on relating to all the people in the USA we encountered in a loving Christian and non-exploitative way. And not even attempt generationally to gain control of the computer technology, so that we could use it to both liberate people in the USA from 9-to-5 slavery and quickly abolish poverty on earth.