The driver who picked me up in St. Louis on the Interstate 70 break-down lane, just before it crossed the Mississippi River and entered Illinois, was a young, culturally straight-looking white guy with short hair, who was dressed in a suit and tie. He was in his mid-to-late 20's and was apparently driving from St. Louis to Indianapolis for some kind of corporate sales-related meeting.
Despite seeming to be fairly straight culturally, he apparently was the kind of guy who, when having to drive on straight job-related long highway trips, preferred to have some company in the car with him; rather than having to drive the whole way all alone in his car to his final destination. He had already picked up two other hitchhikers in St. Louis, a hippie-looking teenage white woman and her hippie-looking teenage white boyfriend (whose parents lived in a St. Louis suburb), only a short distance away from where I was holding out my thumb, just before he also picked me up.
So when he invited me to hop in the car's front passenger seat, the hippie teenage woman and her teenage hippie boyfriend, who were also heading for Indianapolis, apparently to visit some friends or relatives who lived there, were already sitting in the car's backseat.
The culturally straight-looking, but good-natured, young driver who took me and the hippie teenage couple to Indianapolis didn't smoke any pot as he drove down the highway. But during the whole ride on Interstate 70, until we reached the Downtown Greyhound station in Indianapolis, near where he dropped all three of us off, he had his car radio turned on loudly to one of the current 1970s hit radio FM rock stations.
So, during the less than 4 hours it took us to get from St. Louis to Indianapolis while surrounded by light early morning 1970's highway traffic, nearly the whole time in the car was pretty much spent just listening to the 1970s rock music hits at the time, rather than conversing with each other about any philosophical issues.
After the two other hitchhikers and I were all dropped off a block or two from Indy's Downtown Greyhound station and, together, walked to the Greyhound bus station to use their public restrooms, I wished them both luck and started walking east towards Monument Circle, towards College Avenue; to see, if I could hitch a lift north, up to Broad Ripple Avenue, near where the Broad Ripple High School, that I had attended for a year and a half in the early 1960s, was located.
By this time on my trip back from the West Coast on the road in the 1970s, I was nearly so totally penniless that I felt I couldn't even afford the price of the fare on a city bus that would take me from downtown Indianapolis up north to Broad Ripple Avenue.
Like I've indicated before, on a certain level at this point in my life, I doubted that I was going to figure out a way to survive many years and live a very long life within the U.S. capitalist system, unless there was some kind of 1970's anti-capitalist Revolution in the USA. So by this time in the 1970's, with the probability of a 1970's Revolution in the USA now appearing to be less likely, I was beginning to expect that I was going to die at a young age.
Without having a white middle-class or white upper-middle-class background to retreat to (and no longer even having my less class-privileged affluent white working-class family background anymore to retreat to), I felt that, as a person still having politically dissident leftist politics in the USA, I was now destined for an early death. But, just like I had ended up going out to the West Coast, because I wanted to see California in person before I died, I also wanted to, before I died, revisit at least once in the 1970s the neighborhood around the Indianapolis high school I had attended in the early 1960s.
Not too long after I stuck my thumb out near College Avenue in downtown Indianapolis, an old car from the 1960s, driven by a friendly, long blond-haired teenage white woman that most men would regard as physically attractive, whose white teenage boyfriend was seated next to her in the car's passenger seat, stopped and offered to give me a lift in the direction I was going; and, smiling, I quickly jumped into the back seat of their car with my large knapsack and started chatting a bit with the two teenagers.
The white teenage couple who picked me up were both children of some impoverished small farm owners near one of the towns south of Indianapolis, in southern Indiana; and, apparently, they had both decided to leave their homes on farms and drive to some city in northern Indiana, where they intended to live and get married. Since both of the teenagers seemed bored with life in rural Indiana and uninterested in spending their days sitting in school classrooms anymore or going to college, I didn't feel like saying anything that might make them feel that they should wait until they were a few years older before splitting from their parents' impoverished farms.
Yet after I wished them both luck and said goodbye to them, when they dropped me off on Broad Ripple Avenue on Indianapolis's north side, I felt that their expectation of how easy it might be to live independently of their parents' support in the 1970s, as a married teenage couple, seemed somewhat unrealistic.
Wednesday, March 6, 2019
Monday, March 4, 2019
On The Road In The 1970's: Part 18
The St. Louis, Missouri gasoline station where I was dropped off at was still one of the 1970s Mid-West gas stations in which a gas station attendant had been hired to fill-up the car tanks of drivers who needed to purchase gas for their cars. But what was interesting about the white male gas station attendant, in his late teens or early 20's, who was filling up customer gas tanks, was that he also was apparently selling psychedelic drugs of some sort and/or bags of pot to some of the drivers who drove in front of the gasoline pumps, at the same time he filled up their tanks.
Only a few minutes after the pick-up truck that had driven me from Oklahoma City to St. Louis left the gas station, a bearded white freak-looking man with long hair, who looked like he was in his late 20's or early 30's, drove his car into the same St. Louis gas station, purchased some gas and some drugs from the attendant and, noticing me standing in the gas station with large knapsack, drove his car towards me, pushed open the front seat passenger door, and motioned with his hand for me to hop into the car.
I can't now recall what words we exchanged with each other after he passed me the joint of pot he was smoking, which had apparently made him already high before he had arrived at the gasoline station. But after driving through some impoverished St. Louis white neighborhood for a few blocks, we arrived at the rundown, two or three-room rented, shack-like, slum house in which he lived; and he then invited me to join him inside to "have some dinner."
When we entered his shack-like house from the sidewalk that led, without any intervening steps, directly into the living room of his "house," I noticed that it looked like he lived alone and kept his living room even more messy than most 1970's freak apartments were generally kept during that decade. Clothes and papers and crumbs of unfinished meals were scattered on the floor.
Soon after we both entered his living room, the bearded and long-haired white freak put some vinyl record on his living room stereo, which played music from a rock group that I wasn't familiar with. Then, all of a sudden, he pulled out some drug-taking paraphernalia, which he then asked me to hold, before he then injected some kind of drugs, perhaps heroin, into his right arm.
Not being that eager to hang out with a freak who seemed like he might be some kind of junkie, when I was then more into continuing on the road towards Indiana, I began to feel that it might be a good idea for me to split from the bearded freak's house as soon as I could escape.
So when, about 5 minutes after he injected himself, the bearded St. Louis freak started tossing vinyl records, dishes and plates around his apartment in a crazy way, and began running around his living room and into his bedroom in a kind of crazy way, while his mind seemed to be in some kind of hallucinating world, I quickly grabbed my knapsack. Than I quickly fled out-the door of his shack-like house, before sticking around to see whether or not the noise the bearded freak's running around inside and throwing of plates might have made would cause any of his neighbors to call the cops; and thus place me at risk of being arrested there with him on some illegal drug possession-related charge.
And when I glanced back for a few seconds after putting a 20-yard distance between me and the front door of his shack-like house, I noticed that the bearded junkie had, by then, opened his front door; and he was standing in front of the door, gazing at me with a glaze-eyed and puzzled expression. But I then quickly turned my head away from him and kept again walking away from where he lived in as fast a way as I could.
At night, during the next few hours, I kept walking east, carrying my knapsack, on one of the deserted St. Louis streets that seemed to be going in the direction of the Mississippi River, without encountering either any other freaks or hippies on the street to exchange conversation with; and without being noticed, profiled, harassed or stopped by any St. Louis cops. Not having enough money in my pocket, of course, to afford to sleep anywhere but outside during the night, except on the street or in some city park, I figured my best option was to just keep walking east towards Mississippi River as far as I could get during the night; and then try to hitch a ride going east through Illinois to Indiana near an Interstate 70 or U.S. 40 interchange as early in the morning as possible.
Eventually, I arrived at the big deserted park near the Mississippi River, where I noticed this big structure that's called the "Golden Arch." In the 1970's in St.Louis there apparently were still few homeless people in that city; and so I seemed to be the only person in either the darkened park or near the Golden Arch in the very late evening who seemed to be there looking for a place to sleep for the night, without being observed by any cops who might harass or arrest me for either vagrancy or for illegally sleeping in the park.
Glancing at the area around the Golden Arch, I noticed that there was some deserted space next to one of its sides, where you could lay down to sleep and be shielded enough in the darkness, so that any cop car that might be driving around or making sure no one was around there at night would likely not see you. And that's where I lay down and slept for about 4 or 5 hours during the one night I ever spent in St. Louis during my life: in a safe park hiding place adjacent to the Golden Arch by the Mississippi River's West Bank.
During the night, I was only briefly awakened once by the distant headlights of some cop car that apparently patrolled the park a few times in the dark early morning hours. But my sleeping spot near the Golden Arch did prove to, indeed, be shielded enough so that I had been able to get some hours of sleep time there, without being noticed by any cops, prior to awakening at dawn and walking towards one of the entrance ramps to Interstate 70 , near the Mississippi River; where I was quickly able to hitch an early ride into Illinois, that took me into Indiana, and eventually dropped me off in Downtown Indianapolis. Just a few blocks from "Naptown"'s post-1964-built Greyhound bus station.
Only a few minutes after the pick-up truck that had driven me from Oklahoma City to St. Louis left the gas station, a bearded white freak-looking man with long hair, who looked like he was in his late 20's or early 30's, drove his car into the same St. Louis gas station, purchased some gas and some drugs from the attendant and, noticing me standing in the gas station with large knapsack, drove his car towards me, pushed open the front seat passenger door, and motioned with his hand for me to hop into the car.
I can't now recall what words we exchanged with each other after he passed me the joint of pot he was smoking, which had apparently made him already high before he had arrived at the gasoline station. But after driving through some impoverished St. Louis white neighborhood for a few blocks, we arrived at the rundown, two or three-room rented, shack-like, slum house in which he lived; and he then invited me to join him inside to "have some dinner."
When we entered his shack-like house from the sidewalk that led, without any intervening steps, directly into the living room of his "house," I noticed that it looked like he lived alone and kept his living room even more messy than most 1970's freak apartments were generally kept during that decade. Clothes and papers and crumbs of unfinished meals were scattered on the floor.
Soon after we both entered his living room, the bearded and long-haired white freak put some vinyl record on his living room stereo, which played music from a rock group that I wasn't familiar with. Then, all of a sudden, he pulled out some drug-taking paraphernalia, which he then asked me to hold, before he then injected some kind of drugs, perhaps heroin, into his right arm.
Not being that eager to hang out with a freak who seemed like he might be some kind of junkie, when I was then more into continuing on the road towards Indiana, I began to feel that it might be a good idea for me to split from the bearded freak's house as soon as I could escape.
So when, about 5 minutes after he injected himself, the bearded St. Louis freak started tossing vinyl records, dishes and plates around his apartment in a crazy way, and began running around his living room and into his bedroom in a kind of crazy way, while his mind seemed to be in some kind of hallucinating world, I quickly grabbed my knapsack. Than I quickly fled out-the door of his shack-like house, before sticking around to see whether or not the noise the bearded freak's running around inside and throwing of plates might have made would cause any of his neighbors to call the cops; and thus place me at risk of being arrested there with him on some illegal drug possession-related charge.
And when I glanced back for a few seconds after putting a 20-yard distance between me and the front door of his shack-like house, I noticed that the bearded junkie had, by then, opened his front door; and he was standing in front of the door, gazing at me with a glaze-eyed and puzzled expression. But I then quickly turned my head away from him and kept again walking away from where he lived in as fast a way as I could.
At night, during the next few hours, I kept walking east, carrying my knapsack, on one of the deserted St. Louis streets that seemed to be going in the direction of the Mississippi River, without encountering either any other freaks or hippies on the street to exchange conversation with; and without being noticed, profiled, harassed or stopped by any St. Louis cops. Not having enough money in my pocket, of course, to afford to sleep anywhere but outside during the night, except on the street or in some city park, I figured my best option was to just keep walking east towards Mississippi River as far as I could get during the night; and then try to hitch a ride going east through Illinois to Indiana near an Interstate 70 or U.S. 40 interchange as early in the morning as possible.
Eventually, I arrived at the big deserted park near the Mississippi River, where I noticed this big structure that's called the "Golden Arch." In the 1970's in St.Louis there apparently were still few homeless people in that city; and so I seemed to be the only person in either the darkened park or near the Golden Arch in the very late evening who seemed to be there looking for a place to sleep for the night, without being observed by any cops who might harass or arrest me for either vagrancy or for illegally sleeping in the park.
Glancing at the area around the Golden Arch, I noticed that there was some deserted space next to one of its sides, where you could lay down to sleep and be shielded enough in the darkness, so that any cop car that might be driving around or making sure no one was around there at night would likely not see you. And that's where I lay down and slept for about 4 or 5 hours during the one night I ever spent in St. Louis during my life: in a safe park hiding place adjacent to the Golden Arch by the Mississippi River's West Bank.
During the night, I was only briefly awakened once by the distant headlights of some cop car that apparently patrolled the park a few times in the dark early morning hours. But my sleeping spot near the Golden Arch did prove to, indeed, be shielded enough so that I had been able to get some hours of sleep time there, without being noticed by any cops, prior to awakening at dawn and walking towards one of the entrance ramps to Interstate 70 , near the Mississippi River; where I was quickly able to hitch an early ride into Illinois, that took me into Indiana, and eventually dropped me off in Downtown Indianapolis. Just a few blocks from "Naptown"'s post-1964-built Greyhound bus station.
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