Woodrow. Ya Gotta Start Havin' More Fun. Gus.

"Let's get some cough medicine after school, okay?"

"Grandma, may I use your bathroom?"

"Let's look in the garage and see what we can find."

"Hey, mister, will you buy us some beer?"

Ah, spring.




Along the Russian River, up above Cloverdale, there's a wide spot between the river and Highway 101 where folks hang out and party. I spent the night there many times over the years when I was on the road. I thumbed up there one time to kill a couple days swimming and partyin' with whoever happened to be there until the next week when I had a painting gig in San Francisco. I had a few bucks, a little weed, a box of granola bars, and a couple tall Budweisers. When I got let off, I was strolling down toward some trees to get out of the sun and kick back with a beer and my book I was reading when I spotted an old twenty amongst the smooth rocks. Heh. Suddenly I could use a couple more beers. I left my stuff and took off upstream. A couple guys were cooking up near the highway with a van and camper and a motorcycle. No, they didn't have any beer. Up three more campsites, nobody had any cold brew for sale or trade. Oh well, I'd get a few more tomorrow when I went a few miles one way or the other for breakfast. I'm in sight of my stuff when the first folks I'd talked to gave a holler, said they'd found a beer I could have. When I walked into their campsite, the older of the two guys opened a cooler and there were about twenty cans of Bud on ice. I grinned, "Wanna smoke a joint?"

So that fall, several months later, I'd thumbed down to San Francisco after spending a few days at Wilbur Hot Springs deciding if I wanted to work there for the winter. (No. Nice refurbished pool table brought in by mule-back in 1910--possibly the best table I ever shot on--but the place was way too isolated for my taste.) I checked my mail service downtown by Union Square, then took a bus out to the Haight. I stepped off the bus and ran right into the guys I'd met on the river last summer. An invitation to spend a couple days at their apartment while I looked around for something to do turned into seven months after they'd had a sample of my cooking. I would take occasional three-day hitchhiking trips 200 miles north to Garberville and back for my road fix as needed, but the rest of the time I lived in a room behind the garage in their Ashbury Street building, less than a block off Haight Street. I'd go up to Happy Donuts on Haight for coffee in the morning, then about nine or ten, let myself into the apartment and fix breakfast, take some cash out of a drawer to buy dinner later, then head out for the day. About four or five o'clock, depending on what I was making, I'd pick up what I needed at Cala, walk back and cook. On only two occasions in that seven months were there not two or three street people joining us for dinner. Those guys would meet people in their daily travels, and at the very least invite them to eat, take a shower, and give them a couple packs of cigarettes if they smoked. Beside their pensions, they dealt nickel bags of weed to finance their philanthropy. I was never asked to present a receipt for the groceries or account for the change. The older guy had like thirty feet of surgery scars on his upper torso and an oxygen tank next to his bed. He said he'd been a POW in Korea at a place so flat that , "You could escape at the crack of dawn with a bicycle, and just before dark they could look out and say, 'There he goes there'." He told me that if he should collapse any time while his friend was out of town, that I should call the fire department, not an ambulance. "Like security guards are frustrated cops, ambulance drivers are frustrated doctors, and they'll want to practice on me." And if he just dropped dead, he said to just grab the cash and walk away. "They'll find me when the rent's due." (His ashes were spread over the headlands overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.)


One of my several jobs on the road was hitchhiking with girls to where they were going if they wanted. I was thumbing from Los Angeles to Portland with Cotati, my Ridgeback dog. It was January. In Santa Rosa, we got a ride with a bunch of folks in the back of an old pickup truck. It had been raining and was still threatening, but the ride was dry. When we hit Hopland, they stopped to let us off on 101 before turning east on 127 through the wine vines. Of all the folks in the back, the only other two to get out were two teenage girls. Going to Eugene they said. I asked if they wanted to thumb together, I was going to Portland. "With a dog?" "It's up to you." We got to Eureka in Northern California just as it was getting dark. They started back and forth, "You tell him." "No, you tell him." I figured I was gonna hear I was slowing them down and they wanted to get going. But they said, "We sure are glad you're with us." Then it started to rain. A teenage boy picked us up, only going a ways. Up past civilization he was going to turn into a cabin on the beach owned by his parents. He was really nervous, but he just couldn't bring himself to let us out there in the middle of nowhere. He said we could stay at the cabin, but all the way in the bumpy driveway he kept saying, "I can't believe I'm doing this. I can't believe I'm doing this." The girls and I unrolled our sleeping bags in the living room, smiling when we heard the boy sliding a heavy dresser it sounded like against the bedroom door. In the morning, watching the ocean breakers maybe fifty foggy yards away through the cabin windows, the dude emerged, a bit sheepishly, and drove us back to 101 and up to a coffee shop where we could all eat, and then the girls and I continued on our way.


I'll tell you what happened. I wrote a piece to post here--An Old Guy On MySpace--but then at the last minute I just went ahead and posted it on MySpace. (I'm 'Grinnin' Sinner'.) I figured it was fair. I've been working hard at not going off on a religious tangent because of the holiday today, so I wrote what I did. I don't want to be insensitive to folks clinging to ancient superstitions for comfort, but they do worry me a lot. 'Thou shalt not . . .' and 'Sin' and 'Hell' and 'The Only Way' and all that. Not very friendly. Anyway, I'll write something more pertinent next time. Take care.