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.
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