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part one of the story
Road Trip

Bill Tope

    That first day we drove for almost ten hours, from Edwardsville, Illinois, a college town just across the Mississippi from St. Louis, bound for Washington, D.C., to celebrate the Fourth of July, and to do our part for drug reform. We had a modest caravan of older model vehicles; I rode in an ancient VW bus, with its many windows and bench seats. With me was Rod, the driver; his wife Teri; Stevie, Rod’s best friend; and little Kay, who subsisted for the whole trip on amphetamines and cigarettes. She weighed about ninety sexy pounds and had propounded a dating philosophy that stipulated, “never sleep with the same person twice in a row.”
    It wasn’t a gentle ride: the bus jostled over the contraction joints in the highway, frequently tossed us high enough to bonk our heads on the ceiling of the vehicle. As we traversed states we’d never before visited, our joy was lessened somewhat, because in the back of our minds was the question of whether the old VW would successfully make the 1,600 mile round trip without breaking down.
    It must have never occurred to us that we might get stopped by the police or the Highway Patrol and be asked to account for the huge amount of marijuana that the vehicle carried. It wasn’t for sale; it was for personal use, but try explaining that to a cop. Nor would it have made a difference; we would have been busted for possession and in the light of the stringent drug laws of the day—the 1970s—we could have spent years behind bars, doing hard time. We were generally buzzed all day long. A joint after breakfast, a reefer at noon, acid or MDA along about suppertime, and a weird assortment of inhalants like amyl nitrate and other chemical oddments throughout the night.
    At length we reached Virginia—or was it West Virginia? I could never tell where one left off and the other began. We cruised along the Parkway through the Shenandoah National Forest, just as John Denver began singing “Country Roads, Take Me Home,” on the radio. We all smiled. The trees, the painted sky, the pines, and the mountains were spectacular, as was the sunset as we pulled into a camping site.
    First thing we did when we arrived was to settle in, which meant, take more drugs. As night fell, everyone sat cross-legged before a campfire and got high on psilocybin, the so-called magic mushrooms. Long and slender, they tasted really awful, like spaghetti made from shit. So we dredged the “shrooms” in honey someone had brought, and they went down much easier. When this sparked our appetites we ate marshmallows and weenies, toasted on sticks. The small talk was, of course, profound. Nobody had thought to bring a tent—we were too busy getting our illegals together—but fortunately it didn’t rain on our trip. Everybody settled back in sleeping bags—some alone, some in pairs—and drifted off. About five a.m. I awoke, sensed a presence unfamiliar to our little group. I looked up and there was a huge—or so she seemed to me— white-tail deer, a doe, nuzzling through our supplies. Armed with a bag of dried apple rings, I approached the beast and offered up a snack. She sniffed the bag suspiciously and then advanced and took a ring. I fed her half the bag and felt at one with nature. She drifted back into the underbrush.
    Looking round, I spotted a passenger from one of the other cars, an older guy—by about ten years—named Glen. He was yet at the campfire and was quietly burning twenty dollar bills in the flames. Seems his parents had recently died, leaving him twenty-five thousand dollars, and he was “mad at them” for leaving him alone. And so he was systematically incinerating his legacy. I let him be. He was in and out of mental hospitals and most people thought it best to cultivate different friends. How he rated an invitation to this trip I couldn’t fathom. Perhaps because he sold LSD for a living.
    Next day found us all in Maryland, Georgetown, in fact. We got a late start and wound up staying a night with a friend of one of the other drivers. Several of us huddled around a picnic table with a young man of about 14, who lived there with his parents. Where they were nobody knew. In the 70s the drug culture was widespread; seemingly everywhere. Even here in Georgetown, in the very shadow of the nation’s capital. His parents, as I recall hearing, worked for the federal government in some clandestine capacity, the CIA maybe. He was very voluble on the subject. So perhaps they were out peeping through keyholes or over transoms, all in dutiful service to their country. In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, secret agencies were not held in high esteem.
    The young man was holding court, a joint in his hand, and was waxing nostalgic about “the drug paraphernalia” back in “the old days.” Stevie and I smiled at each other, hearing this high school freshman “reminisce” about days gone by, about a time during which he was almost certainly in a crib. Someone produced a prodigious watermelon and we all devoured it; Glen even ate the seeds, probably in an effort to get back at his parents.
    At length, next day, we arrived in the nation’s capital. “Yeah,” exhorted Bob, another driver, “We’re going to Carter’s house!” And so we did. We walked the length and breadth of D.C., stopping at the Capitol and admiring Statuary Hall. Bob showed us how, if you stand on a certain spot, you can hear everything being said in the room, even whispers: an acoustic phenomenon. The first thing I noticed about Washington D.C. was the proliferation of cops. At the landmarks they stood about five feet apart, forming a kind of human wall. They were all nice, invariably polite, mostly very young, but there were so many of them! Being the ignorant, Midwestern savages that we were, we offered to get one of the young cops high. What else would a ragtag agglomeration of humanity like us do? He took it all in stride, politely declined. “Okay, man, that’s cool,” croaked the other Bob, who was a college Sociology Professor and a group leader and so, presumably, should have known better.
    We visited the White House, stood outside and grasped the bars of the black metal fence that surrounds the estate, stared in at the grounds and shouted for “Jimmy” to show himself. As we toured some of the other, older edifices, we saw enormous, medieval-looking buttresses reinforcing the walls, as you might find at an old cathedral. Professor Bob shook his head sadly, said what a poor reflection on our country the sight of that was. We were awed by the Lincoln Memorial, but couldn’t get within a hundred feet of it. It was barricaded with a rope with little flags on it that were flapping in the breeze. As always, there was an army of police, guarding the Memorial, lest any citizen get too close. In the movies, the actors always get to climb the stairs, to practically touch Lincoln’s hand, like in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” “I’ll bet that Jimmy Stewart could have gotten in,” I heard someone behind me mutter.
    One of our group’s stated aims and the nominal reason for this trip, was to declare for the legalization of marijuana, and we therefore intended to visit the office of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML). There was considerable resistance across America to this effort at the time; this was before states realized they could make billions off the pot industry. Remember, most gambling was illegal back then, too. Today you can buy your lottery tickets at Quick Trip and get your gambling fix on your cell phone.
    Someone gave us directions to the “Yippie House,” located in some backwater neighborhood in D.C., and we thought we should pay our respects, as one group of freaks to the freaks-in-residence. It was reportedly an old, ramshackle, disreputable building, so what could go wrong? After driving circuitously for an hour, we found the place. We stepped in. The first one we met was a yip named Mousie, who had just taken a shower in a bathroom that had no door and no shower curtain. He gave us a tour, wrapped in a blue, threadbare towel, while dripping on the uncarpeted floor. I was getting sort of hungry so just out of curiosity I opened a huge refrigerator, an enormous, upright, coffin-like white box. The only thing inside was a ten gallon stock pot of boiled cabbage. My appetite quickly fled.
    The walls of the Yippie House were battered and none too stable. Plaster and other debris littered the floor. Kay, walking as in a daze, lit a cigarette, gobbled more speed. “I don’t know,” she said, just to be nice, “I kind of like it here.” Next she placed a hand on the nearest wall, leaned into it a little and instantly the wall disintegrated, raining plaster, lath, you name it, down onto us. Someone—I don’t remember who—reached out and drew Kay clear of the catastrophe. “Gosh,” she squeaked, “I think I need another cigarette!”
    We were eventually directed to the NORML office, somewhere on one of the alphabet streets: K Street, B Street, whatever. The Director of NORML proved to be an insufferably straight suit who wouldn’t allow marijuana in the office. We stood in wonder and blinked at him. He told us about some rallies and demonstrations the organization was sponsoring over the Fourth. Professorr Bob, the only one amongst us that had any real money, gave NORML a generous donation. We left, a little baffled, and way too straight.
    Sometime later that day, sexy Beth, from one of the other cars, and I wandered off from the group, a harbinger of our undoing. We promptly visited a dimly-lighted bar, replete with lots of walnut trim and plush leather seats. Sitting at the bar on this hot July morning, we ordered up mugs of beer. We drank gratefully, then took turns buying each other rounds. We hadn’t eaten, so in seeming no time we were comfortably buzzed. A stocky, very young cop joined us at the bar, began entertaining us. I can’t recall what he was talking about, but whenever we disagreed with him, he’d stop talking and then ask us pointedly, “Do you know everything?” We had to admit we did not, and he’d say, “Well, there you go!” winning the argument by default. We drank a lot of beer, but that cop got really snookered, consuming glass after glass after glass. As he drank he began to speak of the “Black underbelly of government.” I remember that although we didn’t know what the hell he was talking about we nodded earnestly at his remarks. At length we left the bar, leaving the young cop behind, stumbling drunk and ominously pointing his pistol at passersby.
    We next visited Lafayette Park, where multiple rock bands were setting up for their evening performances. Beth glided drunkenly to the Reflecting Pool and peeled off her shoes and socks and soaked her feet in the dirty water. “Ahh, that’s cool, man.” She sighed. As darkness fell, I began to wonder about our traveling companions: where were they? I hadn’t seen them for at least eight hours and hoped they weren’t in any trouble. Hoped they hadn’t tried to get any more policemen high. Everywhere we went, everywhere we looked, people were getting buzzed. We drifted up to a group of women who were preparing a protest march and they were passing round huge, stainless steel bongs and small, soapstone opium pipes. We greedily accepted them in our turn. At length the women assembled and marched raucously down the avenue, in front of the White House; I looked up and was surprised to find Beth leading the march, arm in arm with the group’s leaders, shouting and dancing along. After the march ended, Beth rejoined me, remarked once again, “Man, that was cool!”
    At one end of the park, the bands were making final preparations to simultaneously play rock melodies from their respective stages. Though it was fully dark now, Lafayette Park was lit up like a Vegas hotel. Finally the bands began to play. Beth and I were standing before one of the venues, getting mellow to the beat of a Jethro Tull tribute band. They were just launching into yet another rendition of the same song, when I felt a cold frisson of energy run down my spine, a real jolt. I looked over at Beth, who was nodding to the beat and asked her, “Say, did we do any acid tonight?” She looked at me queerly, then shook her head sadly and said, “Yeah, we dropped some, about five hours ago.”
    “So that’s why they’ve been playing “Locomotive Breath” for like four hours, huh?”
    She grinned and it crinkled her nose. “I think that’s the only tune they know,” she replied, still smiling. But next they began a cosmic version of “Thick as a Brick,” which they seemed to play twenty times, and ended their set with a rollicking version of “Aqualung.” Then the guy playing the Ian Anderson part of the songs ceased playing the flute for a moment and grabbed the mic. Sweat was dripping off his face. “I want to announce that Paul McCartney died in a plane crash tonight.” He waited a beat and when that got no response, added, “And Van Morrison was killed in a motorcycle accident in Dublin.” When that still didn’t get a reaction, he said: “John Denver perished tonight at the Checkerdome in St. Louis, Missouri, when the Zamboni he was driving skidded off the ice and overturned and crushed him.” And with that, everyone clapped and cheered the purported demise of John Denver.
    Finally, at around two a.m., our buzz was wearing off and we sought a place to lay our heads.
    The grounds of Lafayette Park were filled with tents and sleeping bags and blankets. One cat even had a small mobile home sheathed in a riveted stainless steel exterior and from the smoke and the aromas, was apparently cooking weenies and burgers. Too tired to eat, we spread our blanket on the ground and quickly fell into an exhausted sleep. In the distance, the bands played on.
    But our rest didn’t last long. Some guy with long raven hair and a nose ring—rare in those days—shook me awake. “C’mon, man, wake up,” he urged. “The pigs are arresting stragglers. Hurry up, get it together, take your chick and go east.”
    Nodding my head groggily, I roused Beth, pulling her off the ground by her belt loop, and said, “We gotta go!” Mumbling incoherently, she complied. We staggered off in a direction that I hoped was east. As we quitted the park, I glanced back and, in the light of dawn, beheld a phalanx of mounted police, with bullhorns and dogs and all the rest. Suddenly an amplified voice bellowed out: “Leave the park now or we’ll turn on the hoses.” And sure enough, some of the cops had huge fire hoses tucked under their arms.
    We spent the next day in a futile search for our companions.
    “They left without us, man,” opined Beth. I was hugely skeptical.
    “They might leave me,” I pointed out, but they would never leave you 800 miles from home.” After all, Beth lived with both Bobs in a college house back in Edwardsville. It appeared to me that it would be unspeakable to abandon two of your companions—and one a housemate—with no money, no ride home, with dim prospects indeed. But, that’s exactly what they did. Beth knew them far better than I.
    “So, what do you want to do?” I asked her.
    “Right now I want to get some food. I’m hungry!” I could hear her stomach growling. “You got any bread?” she asked me.
    I riffled through my jeans and turned up seven dollars and a spent book of Food Stamps. “All I got’s a pocket full of change,” Beth disclosed. “Man, we’re so screwed.” In the meantime I had finally gotten my head wrapped round the notion that the bastards had really left us; they didn’t know if we were lost, hurt, sick, or even in jail! What a bunch of pigs, I thought. But I tried to paint a brighter picture for my traveling partner. “Let’s get some food,” I said, and we repaired to some nameless and forgettable burger shack and downed nearly six dollars worth of shakes, sodas, fries and of course, hamburgers. You could buy quite a lot of fast food with six dollars back in 1977.
    Our bellies filled and our ablutions performed, we went out to the highway heading west. The cars just flew past us, giving us not a second look. Some of the drivers even laughed at our predicament or flipped us the bird. After a half hour in the torrid July sun, Beth groaned, “We aren’t going to get no ride, man.” I looked at her, at her pretty blue eyes, her tight jeans, her gorgeous face and radiant blond hair. “You get in front and face the traffic,” I said. “They’ll stop for you!” And sure enough, five minutes after reconfiguring our hitchhiking arrangement, a large, heavy car typical of those manufactured in the seventies, stopped for us. It was blue and emblazoned upon the hood was the word, “Continental.” So we’d bagged a Lincoln.
    “Where you kids headed?” asked a paunchy, balding man in his mid-fifties.
    “St. Louis,” chirped Beth, relieved by the respite.
    “I’m going as far as Dayton; that help you kids out?”
    “Yes, thank you so much,” said Beth. “That’ll be a good start.” We settled back in the Lincoln—luxury at our fingertips—and reveled in our posh surroundings. Whereas we may have preferred to sleep after our ordeal, the driver—who introduced himself as Charlie Bridger—conducted a monologue that lasted the whole 350 miles. We learned all about his four kids and his law practice—Real Estate, “None of that nasty divorce business”—and his private jet. Just outside Dayton, on the Interstate, Charlie stopped at an upscale restaurant and invited us inside. “Thanks, Charlie, but we’re not hungry,” Beth lied, not wanting to impose further on his generosity. “Baloney,” returned Charlie. “You kids are broke, now ain’t ya?” We said nothing. “Come on, it’s on me. I hate to eat alone,” he added persuasively.
    Feeling rather conspicuous in our dusty travel garb, we repaired to the restrooms and worked to regain some semblance of respectability. “Order anything you like,” enjoined Charlie, back at the table. We both modestly chose cheeseburgers, but he wouldn’t hear of it. “Balls!” he exclaimed. “Order something expensive,” he went on. “You afraid you gonna put ol’ Charlie in the poorhouse? Well, don’t worry. Some sum’bitch real estate tycoon in Akron is coverin’ this tab.” We looked at him questioningly. “Same one who paid for that Caddy out in the parking lot,” he added smugly, forgetting for the moment that we arrived, not in a Cadillac, but a Lincoln. He had, during his monologue, told us her owned a specimen of each car.
    We ordered up and ate our fill. Drank our fill, too. Charlie ordered no less than three bottles of Champagne, all on the real estate tycoon from Ohio. At length, we parted company, but not before Charlie foisted fifty bucks on each of us. Afraid for Charlie because of his questionable sobriety, we convinced him to spend the night in a nearby motel.
    By now it was nearly eight o’clock and the sun was plummeting in the west. We stood with our thumbs out and, in the gloom, even with Beth in front, garnered not an offer of a ride. Finally, a heavily-laden white van drew to a stop and the door slid open. Standing in the opening was a man I would in later years come to recognize as Vice President Dan Quayle. Or his identical twin. We hopped in without a word, we were that tired. “Where you children from?” asked Dan, who continued to stand, even after the van began moving again. We told him. “SIU—in Edwardsville?” he repeated after us. “I hear that’s a heathen school.” He tsk-tsked softly. Beth and I exchanged a glance.

 

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