On The Road In The 1970's: Part 19

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. 

   

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. 

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 17

Less than ten minutes after the jovial Oklahoma City Hells Angels Club member dropped me off on the breakdown lane near the exit in Oklahoma City, where he was leaving the Interstate 44 highway with his car, a pick-up truck, driven by a white teenage guy, stopped. The passenger sitting next to the pick-up truck driver, another white teenage guy, then called out to me through the open passenger side window: "We're driving up to Illinois through St. Louis, if you think that might help you."

"It sure would, since I'm trying to get to Indianapolis," I replied.

"Then just hop-in outside in the back. And we can drop you off when we turn off in St. Louis," the white teenage passenger said.

After thanking the two teenage guys for offering me the ride, I quickly climbed up onto the back of their pick-up truck with my knapsack and sat outside there, watching the Oklahoma countryside before and after the pick-up truck drove rapidly through Tulsa; and, after the pick-up truck crossed the Oklahoma-Missouri border, watched the rural Missouri landscape alongside Interstate 44 from the pick-up truck, as it moved northeast towards St. Louis, until we finally reached that city in the early evening darkness.

Being outside in the back of the pick-up truck, which stopped neither for refueling at a gas station or at any fast food joint or restaurant before it reached St. Louis, I did not converse at all with either the teenage guy who was driving the pick-up truck or with the teenage guy who was his passenger. So I didn't learn much about where they were at philosophically or exactly where in Illinois they were heading up to.

Both of the white teenage guys looked pretty straight culturally, were beardless and had short-hair. So they apparently were the teenage sons of some white farmers in some rural Illinois area north of St. Louis, who were driving back from either making some delivery they had made in Oklahoma, Arkansas or Texas or from some vacation or weekend trip to ones of these three states.

Since they didn't look like hippies or freaks themselves, in the same way that I looked like a hippie or freak, and didn't appear to be smoking pot when they picked me up, the main reason they probably felt it was their natural role to offer hitchhikers like me who were on the road a free lift was that, in the 1970s, most white people in the USA who grew up or lived on farms in rural areas were generally still socialized to always pick up white hitchhikers they saw on the road.

In rural areas of states like Oklahoma, Missouri and Oklahoma, nearly all teenage guys who grew up on farms in rural areas were driving at 15 or 16 and had their own cars (or access to a car) by that age; and people who grew up on farms in rural areasa of the USA in the 1970s were still generally friendlier, less suspicious and more helpful in relationship to each other than those teenagers who had grown up in urban or suburban areas and not on farms. 

In addition, since living without a car in Midwestern rural farming communities was probably still considered to be almost as much of a misfortune as if a person had no access to food, in the 1970s, the teenage white guys who drove me northeast to St. Louis in the early 1970s probably felt that only neurotically cruel or weird teenage drivers who had empty space outside in the back of their pick-up trucks would drive by any individual white hitchhiker on the road, without offering him or her a lift. Because of the racist way the institutionally racist U.S. corporate media newspapers and tv stations stilll generally portrayed African-American people in the 1970s, however, culturally-straight teenage white guys, like the ones who picked me up in Oklahoma, likely would still tend not pick up  any individual African-American hitchhiker on the road in the same way in the 1970s; unless the individual African-American hitchhiker on the road was wearing a U.S. military uniform.

By the time we reached St. Louis, the pick-up truck also needed to have its tank filled-up with more gasoline. So before heading further towards Illinois in a more northeastern direction from St. Louis, the teenage guys got off Interstate Highway 44 and drove a few miles east on the St. Louis city streets until they reached the nearest St. Louis gas station. And at the St. Louis gas station, I jumped out of the rear of their pick-up truck, thanked them again for the ride and wished them luck and said "goodbye" to them, just before they started driving their pick-up truck back out of the gas station and resumed their journey back to rural Illinois. 

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.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 14

How I spent the remainder of the day in Albuquerque is now a completely faded memory, although, since I had been awake all night as the jeep in which I had been given a ride drove eastward, I probably found some deserted spot on the University of New Mexico's campus space, after using a bathroom in one of its campus buildings, and slept there for a few hours; and then blended into the campus scene and streets and neighborhood in the afternoon. And it could be that I spent the late afternoon and most of the evening browsing inside Albuquerque bookstores or checking out whether there was much of a visible 1970s freak counter-cultural off-campus or on-campus scene.

What I next remember is being approached by a  uniformed Albuquerque white cop or uniformed white campus cop in his late 20s or early 30s, in the late evening, as I was sitting on the University of Albuquerque lawn with my large knapsack (that I had used for overnight hikes during my years as a boy scout), preparing to sleep that night on the campus lawn, before waking up early the next morning and walking back downtown to hitch another ride and continue further east towards Indianapolis; where I had decided, by then, I had wanted to revisit, since I had lived there in the early 1960s and hadn't returned to in a decade, on my way back to New York City.

"Let me see your student I.D.!," the uniformed white cop ordered.

"I don't have a student I.D., but I've just been hanging around the campus," I replied.

"Well, let me see some other kind of I.D.," the white cop ordered.

After I handed him a copy of my New York Public Library borrowing card, the cop walked back to where he had parked his cop car, checked out my name with whatever data access system he used in his car to see if there was some kind of warrant for the arrest of me that might require him to stop me from being on the road. Then he walked back to me and warned me not to still be hanging out on the campus later in the night when he returned to patrol that part of the campus grounds again.

But right after the white cop again walked back to his patrol car, a hippie-looking, University of New Mexico white woman student who, while walking back to her dormitory had noticed that a hippie-looking guy with a large knapsack, like me, was being harassed by the cop, approached me, laughed and said to me:  "You can crash in my dorm room floor for the night, if you need to get away from that pig."

"That would be greatly appreciated," I replied with a smile.

"Then follow me. My dorm is over there."

By the 1970s, there were co-ed dorms on most state university campuses and it was no longer prohibited for women or men or to invite people of a different gender to their dorm rooms at night. And, in most hippie or freak youth student campus circles, the fear didn't then exist among most hippy women that if you invited a hippie or freak long-haired or bearded man in his 20s to crash in your apartment or dorm room, who was drifting around the country, that there was any particular risk that the guy would see it as some kind of rape opportunity, or automatically assume that he was being invited to your room or apartment for a sexual encounter.

So once we entered her dorm and walked up the stairs to her dorm room, she, matter-of-factly, pointed to some empty space on the floor and said, "You can sleep there" in a friendly way; not too long before she turned off the lights in her dorm room and stretched out alone on the sole single bed in the dorm room.

I don't remember now what we discussed on our short walk from the campus lawn where the cop had been harassing me to her dorm room. But, since I didn't feel any vibes from her which indicated that she was interested in me particularly on a sexual level and was just letting me crash in her dorm room for the night as an act of hippie kindness and freak solidarity, I probably mentioned to her that I would be going back on the road to continue hitching east early in the morning, before she woke up; and I probably said "goodbye" to her and thanked her again right before she turned of the lights for the night in her dorm room. And after awaking early the next morning, while she was still asleep, I quietly picked up my knapsack, after having slept in my clothes on the dorm room floor, quietly opened the dorm dorm room door, and quietly walked out of the dorm room to walk back to downtown Albuquerque and try to get another ride further east.

As I've noted previously, one thing you'll generally discover, if you hitchhike across the United States on the road from coast to coast with not much money in your pocket,  is that, although the political and corporate leaders of the U.S.A. might be a corrupt and selfish group of people, the vast majority of the people who live within the U.S.A. who aren't in positions of power are, individually, friendly and good-natured; and generally willing to help out other people most of the time.

Occasionally, you'll bump into drivers on the road who might have a cut-throat personality or who will try to exploit you in some way. And, occasionally, you might bump into someone who--unlike this University of New Mexico woman student in the 1970s--offers you a place to crash only in order to either push their religious beliefs on you or take advantage of you in some way. But, at least in the 1970s, whenever you might need a helping hand at any point on the road from one coast to the other, you usually would always find some friendly, kind soul in the U.S.A., like the University of New Mexico woman student who let me crash in her dorm room, to both help you and remind you why--despite the horrible political and economic system and corrupt elite rulers that exploit them--the majority of people living in the U.S.A. are friendly people who, individually, deserve your individual love whenever you relate to them.

On The Road In The 1970's: Part 13

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)