Time Frame I.V.

[bandwraith at aol.com]

Thanks for this. If there are any grandchildren involved they
have a wonderful source of family lore- What it's all about, no?
Can't help but relate to much of what you describe. Could have
easily crossed paths hitching up the California coast after dropping
out of my first college attempt- fairly high lottery number- no
desire to continue pretending I had any sense of why I was in
school, at the time- so I hit the road, and it was packed with
an army of hippies- At all the freeway entrances, blue jeans being
the most common uniform, both (all?) sexes, hitching across America.

By mid-September, '71, my buddy Wayne and I found ourselves
stranded in Barstow, Ca.,  at about midnight. Traffic was light and
indifferent to our pleas. LA seemed along ways away. We decided
to hop a freight, told by a real hobo in the yard which tracks led to
San Bernadino. We chose an open flatbed with new car carriers
chained on top. About dawn, it started to move. By midday we
were in the middle of the Mojave, and it was hot. Little flecks of
metallic dustrose in a haze from the flatbed floor. The air burned
our noses and throats. At one point, with the train stopped at a
cross roads, Wayne jumped off to seek water. He made it back
just as we were pulling away, with a canteen of brackish agua from
the sink of the gas station rest room. It probably kept us alive.

Soon we were in the mountains- slitely cooler, but still real dry=0
D
country, and then, finally, we made San Bernadino. We were fried.
Staggering down the boulevard, I noticed headlines at the news
stand- "Hottest Day of.." at least that year, about 117 degrees.
There was part of a headline about ATTICA, the New York State
prison which had been taken over by inmates to demand an
end to truly deplorable conditions.

We found a YMCA and bought a shower. In the locker room,
putting his neatly pressed uniform back on, was a mailman. He was
a big crewcut type, and as he spoke with an aquiaintance, he was
looking at Wayne and me- bedraggled, hair at least to our shoulders,
the usual hippy regalia. He clarified the Attica headline. The troops
had finally moved in- "they should have killed them all," and then
a rant about Angela Davis and how "we'll deal with her next."

Discretion seemed appropriate on this turf, and winning a shower
was enough, so we kept quiet. After some food, we found the
freeway entrance and hitched to LA. Somebody with a coverted
pick-up, and a real big doberman in the back, picked us up and
finally dropped us off on the strip. It was dusk. There was a big
billboard advertizing "The Doors" at a local venue. Dylan's "Don't
Look Back" was being reprised at the cinema across the street.
The signs seemed right, but something had definitely begun to
change. The sixties were fading.


-----Original Message-----
From: Bekah <Bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>
To: Bekah <Bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>
Cc:20David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>; Robin Landseadel 
<robinlandseadel at comcast.net>; pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Sat, 6 Dec 2008 10:54 pm
Subject: Re: Time Frame I.V.


Okay, I watched some of those clips - my own kids (now ages 40 and 38) 
have told me they mostly had a good time in their childhoods. I really 
didn't allow the drugs around them (although I was certainly stoned in 
front of them). When we did acid we left the kids for the day or so 
with neighbors or family. One time my daughter (about age 8) came into 
the house and saw her dad dumping a large and wonderful, precious 
plant. (He was readying it for a move.) She gasped, horrified, - "What 
are you doing?" He looked at her straight in the eye and had no 
recourse but the truth - "It's marijuana," he said. "Oh," she replied 
and left the house again. We traveled a lot. We talked some politics 
but we had family around so they babysat for the protests and so on.....