At this Interstate 40 exit in eastern California in the late morning, I only had to wait about 10 minutes before a jeep with a canvas roof that was driven by a beardless white hippie-looking freak guy with long light brown hair slowed down and stopped in the break-down lane, about 10 yards in front of the spot near the exit where I had been standing. After seeing him stopped, I quickly ran with my knapsack toward the jeep at the same time the white hippie-looking guy, who looked like he was in his late teens or early 20's, bent over and pushed the passenger side door of his jeep open.
"Hop in," the young hippie/freak driver said, before then pointing to the back of the jeep and adding, "you can just throw your backpack back there."
Then, almost as soon as I was in the car and had closed the jeep's passenger door, the white hippie long-haired youth pulled out of the break-down land and onto the right lane of the Interstate 40 highway again.
"How long you been waiting?"
"Not too long. Maybe 10 minutes."
"How far you going?"
"New York City."
The young hippie-freak driver smiled. "I can get you to Albuquerque, where I'm going.
"That helps a lot."
Still smiling, the young long-haired and beardless hippie -freak driver shoved a new cassette tape into his car's tape deck system and then passed me the joint of pot he had been in the middle of smoking before he stopped to pick me up. And, after I inhaled, I passed the joint back to him and we continued to share the joint during the next 15 or 20 minutes as he drove the jeep eastward towards Arizona and New Mexico in light traffic.
By the time it began getting dark in the evening in Arizona, I was about as stoned as the hippie brother had been when he picked me up, and he seemed to pretty much agree with the basic rap I presented, that freaks around the USA in the early 1970s were, like Abbie Hoffman had asserted, part of a separate underground nation in the USA, Woodstock Nation; and, as A.J. Weberman was then still asserting, a kind of underground counter-cultural ethnic community.
He also seemed to agree with my basic rap that just as it was absurd for the straights who controlled the U.S. government to still be into busting people for smoking or selling pot in the early 1970s, it was also still crazy for the government to still be so into militarism; and that it was still ridiculous for our generation in the USA to be expected to work at 9-to-5 jobs for 40 years, like our parents had had to do, when the advanced technology of even the early stages of computerization made it now possible to reduce the workweek for everybody to 2 days a week, yet still produce enough food and necessity goods for everybody in the USA (and eventually everybody in the whole world) and create a leisure-oriented society.
By midnight I was pretty much talked out and, still in a stoned state from the joints I had been sharing with the brother freak, felt I could just sit back with him quietly and just enjoy listening to the 1970s rock music that his car's music set-up was filling the inside of the car with, since I had by then provided enough conversation and company to "pay" for my free hitched ride to Albuquerque. So for the next few hours only music, not words, could be heard inside the jeep as it moved east before dawn on the deserted Interstate Highway 40, encountering few cars or trucks either in front of us or behind us who were heading east through Arizona and western New Mexico in the hours after midnight on a weekday.
The freak brother had apparently assumed when he picked me up that I would be able to relieve him at the steering wheel of the jeep and drive a few hours in the pre-dawn hours if he felt he needed a few hours of sleep. Because, after all, out West, especially outside New York City, the assumption in the early 1970s was that everybody in the USA over 16 years of age knew how to drive and had a license, no matter how hip or straight or how rich or poor. But, despite being surprised that a fellow hippie in his 20s like me hadn't learned to drive or hadn't ever had a license, he did not seem overly disappointed after he asked me if I wanted to relieve him as a driver for awhile, when I replied, while stoned: "Wish I could, but I don't have a license and I never learned how to drive, since you don't really need a car to get around in New York City. And everyone I know outside of Manhattan usually just gives me a lift when we need to go anywhere together by car."
The freak brother laughed. But when he reached the next Interstate 40 exit in western New Mexico with his jeep, he drove off the interstate highway and pulled his jeep into the first 24-hour restaurant that catered to long-distance truck drivers, where he ordered some breakfast and coffee and, having very little money left in my pocket, I just ordered an English muffin. We took our time eating and didn't leave the restaurant and return to the road until the sun had risen, it was no longer dark outside and the coffee caffeine had re-charged the freak brother.
The next memory I still have of this particular ride is of the jeep entering downtown Albuquerque, where I was dropped off and where I watched the jeep drive north from Albuquerque, perhaps in the direction of Santa Fe or Colorado. (end of part 13)
