On the Road in 1980, Part 1
Mission Dolores Park on the western edge of the Mission District, San Franciso
After an exhilarating year performing with Pink Gravy and the Eggthings, I ducked out of the local rock ’n’ roll limelight to hit the road again. My plan was to return to Mexico and go farther south this time into Central America. The semester before I left, I took classes in Intensive Spanish and Ethnology of Mesoamerica to prepare myself. This trip also put on hold a slow-developing relationship with Pat and her son Sierra, who would turn two in a month. Pat and I toggled back and forth between being good friends and lovers. I would sidle up to the idea of entering a committed relationship, but then my attention would be diverted. I was smitten with a cute, quirky, blonde-haired girl[1] in our Undergraduate Poetry Workshop class, Theresa Love (yeah, hard to make up a name more apt), who would leave me handwritten notes: “Meet me at four o’clock by the nut butters at the co-op.” Pat dismissively referred to her as “Jams & Jellies.” I didn’t leave Iowa City on a drizzly overcast January day[2] to extricate myself from this messy love triangle, but I was admittedly over my head and welcomed the chance to step back a bit.
Four days later, I was in one of my favorite cities, San Francisco, on a beautiful warm Saturday morning. I was drinking coffee in Jim’s Donut Shop on the corner of Mission and 29th, all the lively street traffic brushing past my shoulder on the other side of the plate glass window. I basked in the sun, marveling at the strange and unlikely happenstances of life.
An hour earlier, I had been walking up Mission Street, smiling and digging the sunshine vibes, when I was attracted by a low whistle from a cab driver across a busy pocket park. I walked over and began talking with Karen, an attractive Black cabbie who, in a seductively husky voice, invited me to climb in and go for a ride. Without a thought – my mind as foggy as those of the Greek sailors enchanted by the sirens’ song – I did, and we did. An hour later, Karen was dropping me off at that same little park on Mission, a cab ride I’d never forget. She gave me her phone number – still legible in my travel journal in her neatly penciled handwriting – but I never did call her. Not sure why, perhaps I didn’t want to sully the serendipity of that moment with something intentional or anticipated.
In that booth at Jim’s Donut Shop, I took my first deep relaxing breaths since I’d left Iowa City. I’d been planning to head south on I-35, but when you get on the merry-go-round, you grab the ring, no matter where it takes you. I’d grabbed a two-day, 1,400-mile ride from Des Moines to Winnemucca, through the cold high Wyoming Rockies and the barren Utah and Nevada expanses. My companion for this long stretch, libertarian Dennis from Oregon, shared the sleeping accommodations of his van when we’d stop for the night. By Thursday night I had made it from Winnemucca to rainy Reno. I walked into a glitzy neon casino near the highway, sat down at the bar to have a beer, my backpack leaning against the barstool, and before long was befriended by Chuck, a middle-aged guy who offered me a warm, dry place to crash for the night. Ignoring my misgivings, I accepted his offer and, for the next seven or eight hours, held off Chuck’s relentless advances, patiently explaining that I didn’t swing that way, trying to catch a few winks in between. Afterward, I wondered whether I should’ve just let him have his way with me so I could get some decent sleep, but I don’t think I was comfortable enough with myself and my sexuality to do that.
Chuck did drive me out to the I-80 entrance ramp the next morning, my “virginity” intact, and I soon caught a ride through Donner Pass and into the verdant Promised Land of California. When I got to San Francisco, I looked up my old high school buddy Michael, who was living in the Mission District, working and student-teaching. I would end up spending nearly a week there, talking about life and literature with Michael, hanging out with him and his friend Abbe, wandering around the city, and writing in my journal. Looking through that journal, I was intrigued to read this preface of sorts on its second page:
I’m not interested in documenting the visible events of this journey as much as what’s going on inside, the interior voyage. To write when I have the time and urge, to explore my feelings and emotions, to trace that path. But also to celebrate the simplicity of life as it happens, not to lose myself down metaphysical rabbit holes. To combine musings and prose, the mundane and the spiritual. And to be honest and straightforward.
I was setting a high bar for myself, but I’d done enough traveling by this point in my life to know I needed a challenge to make this journey meaningful. Riding a streetcar to Golden Gate Park, I overheard a conversation between two young punks, decked out in leather, studs, and spikes. One said, as we passed through Haight-Ashbury, “This is where the whole flower-child thing started. My parents were here in the middle of it.” Thus, the punks as offspring of the hippie movement, both continuing it and trashing it.
Another day, I kicked back on a slope in Mission Dolores Park, waiting for the sun to warm up the city and clear the fog to reveal a far view of the towering monuments of downtown commerce, occasionally the horn blasts of container ships steaming in and out of San Francisco Bay, nearby the clacking of trolley cars. The Beaux Arts bell tower and facade of Mission High School, the gaudy rows of Victorian houses. Children playing in the park, mothers and fathers keeping an eye, joggers getting exercise, dogs walking their owners, old men with burlap sacks poking through trash, teens drinking beer from paper bags, sleepers in repose on benches, others reading or thinking or observing. Palm trees, walls covered with graffiti, Free Puerto Rico, CIA Killed Angel, a statue of Don Miguel Hidalgo, leader of the Mexican War of Independence. The intimacy of living in close contact with all this. I opened my arms to the city and embraced what it had to offer. “I’m ready to give everything for anything I take.”
I wanted to become sharp, my senses ready, prepared to react, not wasting energy trying to place myself in the center of what was happening. At that moment the earth moved, buildings rocked and rolled, reminding me of the crazy geological pressure we were sitting atop, that political fissure, that fault. I could feel the urge – it was time to move on, see something new, meet people I’d never met, feel something I’d never felt, speak something other than English – time to continue the journey.
Footnotes:
[1] See Manic Pixie Dream Girl
[2] January 15, 1980