I always go too far. Those early years alone in the madrones, oaks and redwoods, not knowing the world, only the quiet summer days in the lower meadow or at the creek, rain dripping mornings laying on my bed staring out the window and listening to the storms was what I knew. One of my earliest memories is rolling a tricycle lazily back and forth, draped over the handle bars like a half asleep cat, watching the tire tread pattern replace itself in the fine tan dust. Just a moment in the warm Santa Cruz Mountain sun. No before and no after.
Well, to get on with it, remember I always go too far. Seven years of relative solitude left me a clownish act when we set up shop in suburbia. My folks wanted to get with the program. GI Loan, FHA, stucco and lawn-seeding the front yard. They wanted their kids out of the hills and on the sidewalks. Not a good scene at all. I think it was my first experience with politics. Ruthless Kid politics. I couldn't deal with it. On and on this went through school so I will leave the cliche explanations of which many have rolled out before me to well exercised imaginations. Tired stuff.
By 1963 I knew it wasn't going to work. I had fumbled and embarrassed my way through early adolescence making many incredible mistakes, leaving a trail of outrage that I can only explain as a seven year swerving car wreck of a completely uninformed kid left to "work it out for himself." Man, the 50's were great. The damage was done, the messages were all wrong, and I was headed out the door. I wasn't going to be president, if you get my implication. I spent my high school graduation practice in the school library with four or five other poor slobs twiddling my goddamn thumbs waiting for them just let me go.
Don't get me wrong, I had a fellow misfit or two counseling me on the finer side of traveling in the outer lanes. My friend John was some kind of visionary. He had a poster of Allen Ginsberg being dragged off by the cops on his bedroom door. He played me Leadbelly and Lightning Hopkins. He played me his Dick Gregory "comedy" albums and told me about Lenny Bruce. John Coltrane and Ray Charles. Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. He took me to the library and checked "On the Road" and told me to read it. That was an act of bravery and courage. Then on to Ken Kesey and James Baldwin, Camus and Kafka. He had me chewing this stuff up. We had hitchhiked the five miles to school every morning smoking Pall Malls and Camels, getting rides from guys going to work who told stories and gave advice. We were "on the road" at 7:15 every school morning.
Well, after all that, John graduated, we got drunk after school on a bottle of scotch mixed with Welch's grape juice and puked in his backyard. We rolled over his Dad's 59 Hillman on a corner in a budding Eichler home development as some rite of passage thing. But, as I said before I was headed out the door, the "old" neighborhood wasn't a cool place for me anymore. Finally John moved back to his native Louisiana to go to college. John was gone. He was an angel.
For me, I had been practicing leaving for a year or two. Grab a jacket, a few pairs of socks, a sleeping bag and good fuckin' bye. Out on the gravel shoulder lifting that symbol of freedom of choice. The mighty thumb, the liberator of the alienated and discarded. I went south and when I couldn't get a ride I would walk across the road and try going the other way. It didn't matter. I was gone.