Getting into Indianapolis, Indiana in the late afternoon in late December 1962, I spent my first night in that city in a Holiday Inn motel room, near north 38th Street, on the east side of Indianapolis's Meridian Street, with my family. It was the first time either my father, my mother, my older sister or I had ever spent a night in a Holiday Inn; in a decade when the Holiday Inn Corporation's motels seemed more modern and newer than most of the other motels that drivers, who found the big city U.S. hotel rates either too expensive or too lacking in parking spaces, had generally stayed at while on the road during the 1950's.
The reason my father could lodge his family in this large Holiday Inn room, before moving his family in early January 1963 into the half of a two-family house near Northeast 52nd Street, that he and my mother had agreed to rent when they had flown out to Indianapolis alone a few weeks earlier, was because the firm he worked for provided him with an expense account to cover the cost of moving.
What I didn't realize, until after I had lived in Indianapolis for a few months, was that Indianapolis's white racist real estate firm executives and local bank executives had apparently decided before 1963 that no houses would be sold or rented, and also no apartments would be rented, to any African-Americans who wished to buy or rent a house or rent an apartment above Northeast 38th Street in Indianapolis. So in the early 1960's, the neighborhoods north of 38th Street on the east side of Indianapolis were as lily-white as South Boston in Massachusetts still would be during the 1970's.
Having only lived in just a South Bronx apartment building, a Whitestone, Queens apartment building and a Douglaston-Little Neck, Queens garden apartment development complex prior to moving to Indianapolis, I was excited to now be living in half of a two-family private house that my parents had rented. The private house was probably built in the early 1920's.
The house had no grass backyard or garden, but only a front porch , which my family shared with the Griffith family that rented and lived in the part of the duplex that was attached to where my family lived. Renting our side of the house, however, gave my family a private, unfurnished basement, a first floor living room, dining room and kitchen, a second floor of three bedrooms and a bathroom without a shower, and a large attic on the third floor. So the amount of indoor space I had access to at home in Indianapolis was much larger than what the 5 and 1/2-room second-floor garden apartment my family had lived in during the previous 9 1/2 years in the Beech Hills apartment complex development in Douglaston-Little Neck, Queens had provided me with.
Much of the space in the rented house's unfurnished basement was taken up by the oil heating furnace that provided the needed winter heating for all the rooms in the house and for its hot water. Because the monthly rents or limited equity co-op maintenance fees of apartments that my father had always lived in after World War II always included the cost of heating, my father had not previously realized that the rent for a private house in the Midwest did not also include a hefty cost to heat the house. So that, besides paying a monthly rent, you also would end up spending a lot of money paying off your rented house's heating bill.
So when, after the first few months of living in Indianapolis during the winter of 1963, the bill from the Indianapolis utility company that provided oil for our rented house's heating fuel arrived, my father was surprised at how much it was, on top of the monthly rent, costing to heat the house. And he and my mother then became very cautious about turning on and up the thermostat on the basement heater, during the rest of the time my family lived in this rented house.
In the 1950's and early 1960's it was still not common for most apartments in Queens or the Bronx to have air-conditioning units in their living rooms. So on hot and humid summer evenings, many apartment residents in the Bronx and Queens would try to escape the heat and humidity in the evening by sitting outside on benches in local parks or in front of their garden apartments or apartment buildings. The private house my family rented in Indianapolis, however, provided an air-conditioning unit in its living room. So whenever I watched TV shows on summer evenings, while living in Indianapolis, the hot and humid summer temperatures never caused me any discomfort while watching television (like the evening television addict I was until my last few years of high school, after I read a politically liberal critique of corporate commercial television programming, that had a title like "The Great Time Killer").
Tuesday, May 14, 2019
Thursday, May 9, 2019
On The Road In The 1970's: Part 20
Being dropped off near Broad Ripple Avenue in Indianapolis, many years after I had lived in Indianapolis in the early 1960s, naturally brought back many memories of my time living there. And since I've never really written down my memories of what it was like for me living in "Naptown" in the early 1960s, I suppose now's a good time in the 21st-century for me, many decades later, to pause somewhat now, from recalling my life on the road in the 1970s hitching back to the East Coast experiences, to sharing my memories of living in Indianapolis as a teenager in the early 1960s.
For, after all, were it not for the fact that I lived in Indianapolis and happened, by chance, to attend Broad Ripple High School for a year and a half, I think there would have been little chance that I would have ended up as the Columbia Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] sophomore student activist who first discovered, in early March 1967, that Columbia University was an institutional member of the Pentagon's Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] weapons research think-tank, during the 1960s Vietnam War era.
And it's then likely that I would have just ended up attending CCNY between 1965 and 1969, not been politically involved in Columbia SDS chapter anti-war campus activism as an organizer and not shared an Upper West Manhattan apartment for three months with 1960s New Left Movement "heavies" like Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert, during the Fall 1966 to Fall 1968 New Left Movement historical period in New York City.
Before being driven, along with my mother and sister, by my father out to Indianapolis from New York City in his 1959 Pontiac car, during Christmas vacation in December 1962, the only part of Indiana I had ever been driven through was the area in northern Indiana adjacent to the Indiana Toll Road, that passed by Gary, Indiana and led to the city of Chicago. My mother had been born and raised in Chicago; and that's where her parents still lived in the late 1950s and 1960s in a slum apartment near Humboldt Park and Division Street. So leaving the Pennsylvania Turnpike in western Pennsylvania in late December 1962, and entering West Virginia on the U.S. 40 road which led westward to Cambridge, Ohio, Columbus, Ohio and my family's ultimate destination, Indianapolis, meant driving through an area of the United States that I had never seen before.
In the early 1960s, the modern Interstate Highway 70, that eventually completely replaced U.S. Highway 40 as the fastest way to reach Indianapolis from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, had not yet been completed. And, driving through a narrow section of West Virginia on U.S. 40 in the early 1960s, what was most morally upsetting to a teenager like me, who had grown up in an affluent white working-class neighborhood of Queens, was noticing that a substantial number of the West Virginia houses we passed still seemed to lack modern conveniences, like indoor bathrooms; and many of the West Virginia towns one passed through still looked like they had never yet recovered economically, in the early 1960s, from the 1930's Great Depression.
Besides driving through the then-impoverished-looking small city of Wheeling, West Virginia, my father drove us through a West Virginia town that the AAA "Trip-tick" booklet, which we were using to guide us west to Indianapolis on U.S. 40 in a decade many years before the GPS set-up that 21st-century cars in USA generally use instead of road maps were installed in cars, described as a speed trap. And sure enough, on the outskirts of this small West Virginia's town main street, I noticed that there was a cop car with one cop inside, by the side of the road, looking like he was preparing to immediately ticket any car with an out-of-state license plate whom he might catch entering his town above the 25 mph posted speed limit on the town's partially-hidden speed-limit sign; in order to shake the out-of-state driver for some additionally-needed small town government revenue.
But because my father had been warned in advance by the AAA "Trip-tick" booklet to beware of this particular town's speed trap, he was already driving his car at the 25 mph speed limit when he entered the town. So the local town cop apparently decided he did not have even a contrived basis to turn on his car's siren, pull us over, ticket my father and shake us down for some money, despite the fact that my father's Pontiac still had an out-of-state New York license plate. Or perhaps, because there were always a lot of other out-of-state drivers entering his town, who were actually driving over 25 mph after entering his town, the local cop at his hidden speed trap waiting place felt there was really no need to pull over my father's particular car, to obtain the town's usual amount of daily speed trap ticketing revenue?
For, after all, were it not for the fact that I lived in Indianapolis and happened, by chance, to attend Broad Ripple High School for a year and a half, I think there would have been little chance that I would have ended up as the Columbia Students for a Democratic Society [SDS] sophomore student activist who first discovered, in early March 1967, that Columbia University was an institutional member of the Pentagon's Institute for Defense Analyses [IDA] weapons research think-tank, during the 1960s Vietnam War era.
And it's then likely that I would have just ended up attending CCNY between 1965 and 1969, not been politically involved in Columbia SDS chapter anti-war campus activism as an organizer and not shared an Upper West Manhattan apartment for three months with 1960s New Left Movement "heavies" like Ted Gold and Dave Gilbert, during the Fall 1966 to Fall 1968 New Left Movement historical period in New York City.
Before being driven, along with my mother and sister, by my father out to Indianapolis from New York City in his 1959 Pontiac car, during Christmas vacation in December 1962, the only part of Indiana I had ever been driven through was the area in northern Indiana adjacent to the Indiana Toll Road, that passed by Gary, Indiana and led to the city of Chicago. My mother had been born and raised in Chicago; and that's where her parents still lived in the late 1950s and 1960s in a slum apartment near Humboldt Park and Division Street. So leaving the Pennsylvania Turnpike in western Pennsylvania in late December 1962, and entering West Virginia on the U.S. 40 road which led westward to Cambridge, Ohio, Columbus, Ohio and my family's ultimate destination, Indianapolis, meant driving through an area of the United States that I had never seen before.
In the early 1960s, the modern Interstate Highway 70, that eventually completely replaced U.S. Highway 40 as the fastest way to reach Indianapolis from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, had not yet been completed. And, driving through a narrow section of West Virginia on U.S. 40 in the early 1960s, what was most morally upsetting to a teenager like me, who had grown up in an affluent white working-class neighborhood of Queens, was noticing that a substantial number of the West Virginia houses we passed still seemed to lack modern conveniences, like indoor bathrooms; and many of the West Virginia towns one passed through still looked like they had never yet recovered economically, in the early 1960s, from the 1930's Great Depression.
Besides driving through the then-impoverished-looking small city of Wheeling, West Virginia, my father drove us through a West Virginia town that the AAA "Trip-tick" booklet, which we were using to guide us west to Indianapolis on U.S. 40 in a decade many years before the GPS set-up that 21st-century cars in USA generally use instead of road maps were installed in cars, described as a speed trap. And sure enough, on the outskirts of this small West Virginia's town main street, I noticed that there was a cop car with one cop inside, by the side of the road, looking like he was preparing to immediately ticket any car with an out-of-state license plate whom he might catch entering his town above the 25 mph posted speed limit on the town's partially-hidden speed-limit sign; in order to shake the out-of-state driver for some additionally-needed small town government revenue.
But because my father had been warned in advance by the AAA "Trip-tick" booklet to beware of this particular town's speed trap, he was already driving his car at the 25 mph speed limit when he entered the town. So the local town cop apparently decided he did not have even a contrived basis to turn on his car's siren, pull us over, ticket my father and shake us down for some money, despite the fact that my father's Pontiac still had an out-of-state New York license plate. Or perhaps, because there were always a lot of other out-of-state drivers entering his town, who were actually driving over 25 mph after entering his town, the local cop at his hidden speed trap waiting place felt there was really no need to pull over my father's particular car, to obtain the town's usual amount of daily speed trap ticketing revenue?
Wednesday, March 6, 2019
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.
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.
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.
Monday, February 4, 2019
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.
"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.
Thursday, December 20, 2018
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)
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)
Tuesday, December 11, 2018
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)