641010 - Going West as a Young Man

      

Take the bus," mother said, "and see the country."  That sounded like a grand idea except I had no interest in "seeing the country".  I hadn't wanted to go West in the first place and was annoyed that I hadn't been accepted at St. John's eastern campus with walls of ivy and the hoary patina of tradition. 

My view of what we referred to as "the rest" of the country was somewhat like the iconic New Yorker cover by Steinberg.  Probably, it was more like Life with Father's  Clarence Day for whom "out west" meant New Jersey.  We had relatives in New Jersey -- in Union City and Hackensack, in fact -- and to be sure visiting them was always a foreign experience.

But out West it was; either that or go to sea which seemed much the same thing. 

It seems surprising, but I did not have many possessions. This was partly a question of finances but rather more of habit and circumstance.  For three years at Stockbridge I had basically lived out of a suitcase. I was not a skier or a strummer and so was not one of those who were always dragging around instruments or sports equipment. Just about everything I needed was provided for by the school.  As much to the point, my home and my room with all its junk was 3000 miles away.  It was one thing to bring back during Spring Break a haul of whatever from somewhere two hours away; it was quite another to fetch some piece of increasingly irrelevant boyhood detritus from Mexico. And so, everything I had, fit into one steamer trunk which I sent on ahead via Railway Express.  That left me with a small suitcase of clothes and my newly purchased Olivetti Lettera 72 portable typewriter.  It was, in fact, somewhat like going to sea.

Bus Leaving Port Authority

Wherever I was going, I avoided heading west. Instead of taking the bus directly to Chicago via Allentown and Harrisburg, I decided I really ought to visit my friend Rick in Princeton.  After spending a comfortable night on his floor I headed down to Philadelphia. 

Here, memory plays tricks on me.  One memory tells me that I "mistakenly" took the bus to Washington D.C. or to Baltimore -- which would have made psychological if not geographical sense.  But another memory has me staring out the bus window at  dusk as we traveled the undulating hills of central Pennsylvania and thinking to myself that it all still looked reassuringly enough like New England.  Given that Philadelphia (the next junction west) was an hour or two from Princeton, the two memories are not inconsistent.  In all events  I managed to spend spend sixteen hours hours on the eastern seaboard before swallowing hard and actually moving west.   

Whether I journeyed through southern Pennsylvania or the Cumberland Pass, I sat next to a young man with a pasty complexion and something of an inbred hillbilly look.  He wasn't from the deep south but he had a southern accent and he struck up a conversation by saying that he was glad he got to sit next to me... "...you know," he whispered tilting his head, "...rather than one of them coloreds."

It was Fall 1964 and back-bussing Negroes had just been outlawed throughout the land.  "Oh," I said non-commitally.  "Never bothered me, much."  In so saying, I drew a line between us, a line as old as the country itself.
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He didn't take offense.  For some reason he took a liking to me and he treated me rather like a lost soul who needed some kindly straightening out.  Had I ever been to the "colored" parts of town?  Couldn't say that I had.  Well, it was "disgusting," he said, to see all those "black mammies" sitting on stoop steps in front of their filthy shacks with "spread legs showing pussy. "

I wondered to myself what had brought him to that part of town in the first place, but decided not to ask and steered the conversation onto the safer territory of the upcoming election between Goldwater and Johnson which, as it turns out, wasn't that  much safer considering Johnson's role in bringing the coloureds to the front of the bus.   Eventually we left off trying to make conversation and, as I recall, I wished him well as he got off in the dark middle of nowhere.

The bus continued its nocturnal journey and when I woke up we had already pulled into the cavernous bus station in Chicago which, from what I could tell, was much like Port Authority in New York.  It was here that I had to change buses and, as I had somewhat less than an hour, there was little else to do except find the restroom, brush and shave. 

The restroom was one of those all marble and porcelain affairs and no one else was there except two tall, strapping men in their very late teens or early twenties.   My jaw dropped.  Behold Midwest Man! 

It may come as a surprise, but in those days the world was not yet globalized. Body building was still the affair of dubious cultists and the gym pumped body was not yet a universal metro-style. Men took their shape from their work or their sports.  Tall and full-bodied mesomorphs weren't that common.

It was not just their body size that struck me but a relaxed boldness in manner.  They were pulling off shirts and changing pants as if it was nothing untoward.  In the New York I knew one would hesitate to do so in public restoom.  At least I had never seen it. With these two it was perfectly natural to do so precisely because the place was public. It belonged to them as much as to anyone else. Age, class and culture all came into a jolting confluence.

It was a moment in passing and I soon moved on to other things, but it was my first encounter with what, over the next four years, would be a different manner of being.

Still, from what i could see, Chicago resembled New York and that gave me the sense that the limits of civilization still obtained this far "out".  But not for much longer.  After the flatter hills and sparser "cities" of Iowa we were soon into the Great Flat of the continent.  For a whole day I saw nothing but corn fields, and when we pulled alongside the "bus depot" in some place like York, Nebraska, it was a small red brick building with dirty windows in the middle of a non-descript four block main street.  People actually lived here?

The interstate was not entirely connected and portions of the trip consisted of pulling into towns whose Main Street was the highway by another  name or detouring into towns which the interstate bypassed but which the bus lines were required to service.

The problem with "seeing the country" I decided was that there wasn't anything to see.  It went on like this for another day. Me getting stinkier and more bored by the hour until we at last arrived in Denver.

Arriving in Denver was like pulling into a life-size model railroad lay out.  All the buildings had this new, straight-line, generic, "life-like" look. The air was crisp, the streets were clean and the concrete sidewalks gleemed.  There were traffic lights that flashed red, green and yellow but virtually no traffic.  People, like little figures on magnetized strips, came to a stop when the lights changed and moved when they changed again.  Denver was nice but unreal.  It didn't feel like the "West" or the "East" but like some "idea" of a city disconnected from anywhere.

As arranged, I called Lili Appelman who came to pick me up and who, jerking me back at a red light, told me that "We don't jaywalk out here, even if there aren't any cars coming." I stayed the night at her house and met her parents who were the type of adults who knew how to engage with adolescents without in the least talking down to them. I would see them regularly over the course of the next four years. 

In the morning I tagged along as Lili ran some errands.  At one point -- I can't imagine in connection with what --- I mentioned that i didn't like to make store clerks go out of their way. "Nonesense," Lili replied, "that's what they're there for."  I demurred.  "Let me show you something," Lili said as she detoured into a shoe shop where she sat down and tried on one shoe after another, each pair politely and earnestly brought to her by the salesman.  At length Lili said, "I really don't like any of them."  She thanked the salesman for his time and left him amid his shoe-boxes.  "See?"

This was a side of Lili I hadn't seen before, but she had a point. Merchants are in the business of making money; that is, taking money from you.  They don't really care if you need a shoe, if the shoe looks good on you or if you can afford it.  They want to close the sale and not closing a sale is part of their calculated overhead.  One should not confuse commerce with some sort of moral obligation to engage in it.  She was right. I had never been reluctant to haggle in Mexico there was no reason for being reticent up here.

In the afternoon, Lily drove me back to the bus station were I boarded the bus for Colorado Springs to meet up with Jerry Johnson, who had gotten accepted into his third choice, Colorado College. 

It was getting dark when we pulled into the small pueblo style depot with round vegas sticking out along the roof line and garish pinball machines in the narrow lobby. Visually, the place was not unlike dim, neon-lit, garish lower-class places in Mexico. Outside, the air was filled with an electric, desulotry tension. 

On the dusky streets dimly lit against the last glow of the setting sun, cars and motorcycles moved  back and forth going nowhere, looking for something and spewing a vaporous pungency to the air.  Straight backed, clean-cut cadets and short haired cowboys in tight jeans sauntered back and forth on the sidewalks in some  choreographed vernacular of the Montagues and Capulets.

"They like to fight," Jerry said. 

We had something to eat in the college cafeteria, which had a garish orange tiger painted on the wall behind the food counter.   Jerry said that the town was boring and that the kids at the college were brain dead hicks.  Jerry's hair descended his nape and lapped over his ears and the rumour already was (he said) that he was a commie or a faggot and in all events someone to be avoided.  He had found a decent source of pot but there wasn't a person worth talking to and he was not happy. I was welcome to stay the night but decided to move on.  We walked back to the station where I boarded an overnighter to Santa Fe.

I saw nothing of the majestic wall of Rockies that lines the route down Colorado and by the time i opened my eyes we were rolling through the scrubby arroyos and mesas of northern New Mexico. 

The bus did not come into Santa Fe directly from the north, but pulled around the Pecos National Forest from the East, stopping first in a place called Las Vegas and, just around one more bend, at a place called Glorieta where there was a stone bus station and not much else that I could see.  All around me there was nothing but a waterless, natural desolation.  As the bus drove through a canyon of immense boulders, that looked as if they had been spilled onto the ground from the sky, the driver announced that Santa Fe was "coming up" in 10 minutes.

WHERE?  Back East one can see New York "coming up" for an hour beforehand.  At 10 minutes to "coming up" the black skeleton of the Pulaski Skyway arches over a maze of steel tracks and against the heap of Manhattan skyscrapers.  Here? I looked over the aisle out the window on the other side.  Nothing there either.  The phrase "What have I done?" came to mind.

We rounded a bend and an immense valley emerged. "Ladies and gents, we are arriving in Santa Fe."  I looked out the window and saw some bougainvilla cascading over low mud walls inset with grey weather beaten wooden doors.  It was not unlike pueblitos in Mexico, although everything was low and flat,  the structures hunched into the contours of earth.  

All of a sudden we were downtown, at the depot.

It was just about high noon and everything was bright and warm and deserted. The mud houses, the depot, the two storey buildings of what was evidently downtown, indicated that humans had been here... but where were they?

I told the man at the counter that I needed to get to "St John's"  He looked at me as if he had some dim memory of the place. After a moment's doubtful hesitation, he said, "You'll have to take a cab."  "There aren't any buses?" I asked?  He looked at me and I knew he was thinking, "...the kid just got off the bus...."   "Nope" came the reply. 

As it turns out there was a black and yellow cab outside the station.  The driver hadn't been there, but he knew where the college was supposed to be and i hauled myself and my bags in for the ride back up the road we had just come in on. 

As we drove through a maze of adobe walls hiding houses that barely peeked over the top I thought to myself, that it was all kinda pretty... in a brownish, muddy way. 

At the crest of the hill, we turned onto a broad road that led into the sloping side of a mountain dotted with piñon trees.  A white sign with bold black lettering and an arrow read "<---- St. John's College."  If one believed in signs, there was a school hereabouts.

Out of nowhere, a cluster of brown buildings emerged from amid the red-brown hills dotted with bushy olive-green pines.  We pulled up to the curb in front of a large rectangular building  next to a raised plaza and as i paid the fare, an elderly man, in brown shoes and a tweed jacket, came running down the stairs.  He emphatically grabbed my hand with both of his and said "Welcome! Welcome!"  Then, over astonished protests, he took hold of  my bag and led me up the stairs and into a building where i was to register.

It was John Gaw Meems, the man who had donated the land to the college. It was as if  I was his first customer for whom he had been waiting all morning.

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