Impossible Vacation (32 page)

I had no idea what Sherry’s redemptive outlets were. I had no idea if she had other, more transcendent elements to her life, and I didn’t care. I had Meg and
The Sea Gull
, and I hoped Sherry had something so that we could continue our mutual rituals of sexual indulgence.

After a while I began to realize Sherry was trying to steal me away from Meg and that sex was her bait. She began to try to get me to stay overnight on the pretext that we could be better observed by the neighbors at later hours. Also, she said, her next-door neighbor, who was her best girlfriend, was home then and would like to be an ear-to-the-wall witness to our lust. I was really beginning to get frightened by this, and I longed somehow to get it all under one roof. I was also sure that by now Meg must be suspicious of my affair with Sherry. So one day, or rather one night, not being able to hold back anymore, I blurted it out to Meg. I just said, “I have to tell you, Meg, I’m having an affair.” Meg just burst into tears, and as soon as she did I knew where my heart was because I could feel it again. I could feel it melt for Meg. I knew I loved her then with all my heart, but by then my heart and head and balls had all been divided and scattered. I felt like Humpty Dumpty, who had had a very great fall, and I could not imagine who or what could put me back together again. My heart and head seemed to be floating around the room with Meg, while my cock and balls were bouncing off the ceiling and walls at Sherry’s place.

After Meg stopped crying, she gave me two weeks to break it
off with Sherry. That ultimatum only heated my lust up more, until at last the straws that were to break the camel’s back showed up as Sherry’s lusty scratch marks on my back. Sherry had left her brand on my back and shoulders to let Meg know that I no longer belonged only to her. The day Meg saw those scratch marks on me, she refused to sleep with me anymore, and then I realized that things had come to an end. It was time for a change. I knew I had to run away from it all and try to get to some abstinent and simple place of recovery. I couldn’t afford a rest home, but I knew I needed something like that.

That’s when I started to think about going to visit Wally, an old friend, in Santa Cruz, California. Wally had written me and had claimed to have found a simple, happy life there, working in a photography store. He was taking a lot of portraits of all the young hippie drifters, all those young and not-so-young people in motion, coming through town on their way up from Mexico to find work in Alaska. Their motion was the new escape, the way of relating to the world that was perishing right under their feet. To walk up and down on the earth seemed the only right way to celebrate it now, and mourn it while it was passing, all at the same time. I understood that and was drawn to it. I understood how Wally could find his center by taking still pictures of people in motion. He was trying to create a photographic book of the new American nomad.

And here I was about to make another move in my fall from the top of the world to the bottom. I decided not to tell Sherry this until I had one last fling with her, and then I would break it to her gently. That particular afternoon I decided to fuck her in all the positions we’d ever gone through, until I just couldn’t come anymore. Then I would hold that memory in my mind, of at last being satiated by Sherry, and bring up that memory when I needed it to cancel out all those sexy obsessive images that ruled me.

So we did it and we did it until she was kneeling and I was reaming her from behind. I had a full erection, but at last it was numb and I couldn’t come. After a while Sherry turned her head up and in the calmest, most centered voice I’d ever heard come out of her she said, “Are you having a good time?” I just pulled out and collapsed next to her and told her, just like that. I said, “Sherry, I’m going to California.”

And she said, “Do you want me to come?”

“No, I’ve got to get away from it all. I’ve got to go it alone.”

I was amazed at her strength. She didn’t cry or protest. She must have known all the time what was going on, that she was involved in an exercise of brutal lust.

I
CHOSE
an old hippie bus called
The American Dream
, which cost sixty-nine dollars—a very sexy ticket price, I thought, as I dreamed about the cross-country orgies that would take place on it.
The American Dream
was to be leaving, as advertised, from the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Eighth Avenue on June 30.

And on June 30, Meg went with me to see me off. It was there, just where they said it would be, an old converted Greyhound bus from the fifties, painted a chocolate brown, with its insides all converted from seats to beds.

The owners and drivers, Jacob and Floyd, had removed the seats and put in plywood platforms, which they filled with old mattresses covered with different colored patterns of paisley. With the exception of the paisley spreads, it looked like a mobile hospital. At first sight it was frightening to me, and I almost fled to the Greyhound station in search of a more conventional mode of travel. Being inside it made my head spin, made me dizzy and claustrophobic, made my eyes roll, made me grab Meg’s hand in fear, made me say to myself, “Let this cup pass from my lips.”

At last, after much procrastination, I kissed and hugged Meg and said goodbye, and I got on. Slowly the bus filled up with hippies, just as I dreamed it would. There were close to twenty-eight mattresses, and I huddled way in the back and watched, my terror mixed with curiosity. Then I had an awful heart pang as I saw Meg out the window for the last wave goodbye. Why, I wondered, was I putting myself through this? Why did I want to put myself in these constant situations of conflict? Why did I have to reject Meg to make me feel love for
her? It was as though the only feeling I could feel was the sadness of separation.

Within an hour
The American Dream
was filled with a wild, merry, carefree bunch of hippies, all choosing their mattresses and unrolling their bedrolls. They seemed so confident and without doubt. They wore their life-style like a proud badge. Single guys were already trying to couple up with single girls as I huddled in the back of the bus with the only other two nonhippies, Heidi and Hanna, two physed teachers from Norway.

Everyone cheered as Floyd and Jacob got on the bus and gave a peppy little speech about how they were our drivers and how they would be driving day and night, just under fifty-five miles an hour so as not to attract unnecessary attention. They went on to say that one of them would be sleeping in back, in what had once been the toilet when the bus belonged to Greyhound and now was a little bedroom for one of them to sleep in while the other drove. I peeked in from where I was sitting. The back of the bus was indeed a curious little boudoir. It looked like a miniature opium den or a very small Indian restaurant. The ceilings and walls and floor were all covered with paisley spreads. Because the bedroom had replaced the toilet, there was, of course, no toilet in the bus.

Jacob and Floyd assured us, though, that we would make numerous toilet stops. We would also make stops at health food stores that were off the main highway, where we could purchase alternative food like yogurt, sprouts, and almonds. There’d be no stops at Howard Johnson’s or Stuckey’s. Everyone cheered. There would be some stops for swimming. Everyone cheered again. At last we were off and everyone cheered a third time, twice as loud.

Then everyone started rolling joints and passing them around. I did the natural thing without thinking; I just reached up and took my first toke in almost a year, and everything went crazy. I suddenly had no idea where I was, and I propped myself up on my mattress on my elbows to try to get a sense of it all. I saw New York City from a strange, topsy-turvy, childlike view. I saw the city at wildly swinging angles as the bus made big sweeping turns and skyscrapers swung into view and then disappeared into sky. Then we plunged into the darkness
of the Lincoln Tunnel. Suddenly I relaxed. Suddenly nothing mattered. I abandoned myself to Jacob and Floyd and thought, Leave the driving to them. Thank God I’m not driving this bus across America.

By dusk
The American Dream
had passed into the rolling hills of Pennsylvania and everyone had slipped into a comfortable and convivial mood. People began breaking out their little dinner treats: their granola bars, their bean sprout sandwiches, their yogurt, their bananas, their nuts. Music was playing constantly over the two little speakers above Floyd’s head as he drove. The song that I remember most vividly, perhaps because it played over and over again like it was on a loop, was “Only the Good Die Young,” and I took that to be some sort of message for the trip.

So there I was, way in the back of the bus with the two Norwegian physed teachers. I was really terrified of taking out the nuts and cheese I’d bought in public because I noticed that anytime anything was passed around the bus, in traditional hippie sharing fashion, it never came back to the owner. Of course I had to remember there was really no “owner”; but whenever I’d see sunflower seeds go out or nuts or even joints, they would all disappear before they came full circle. I was afraid if I took out my bag of nuts, everyone would look at me until I passed them around and then I wouldn’t have enough to last me for the trip.

The whole trip was one long drone that went on day and night for four days, and the worst of it was that we were all condemned to lying down, which in its own way is just as bad as having to sit up for a whole cross-country trip. At times, particularly in the heat of the day, I felt like a child sick in bed with fever, propped up on his elbows looking out the window. Outside, everything looked like a flat diorama that was being rolled by while the bus stood still. After about three and a half days of this we were suddenly spat out of a tunnel into Oz. There it was, San Francisco, bright white, peeking through a blanket of rolling fog. The entrance over the Golden Gate was spectacular; the fog was whipping across the bridge like a white brushfire. The wind off the Pacific rocked
The American Dream
as we crossed.

Beautiful as San Francisco was, I had had enough of cities and
decided to hitchhike immediately to Santa Cruz. I had no problem getting rides.

As soon as I rolled into Santa Cruz, I knew it was the right town for me. I knew it as soon as I saw the clock in the clock tower in the center of town and was told how it had stopped years ago at ten past two, never to be started again. I knew it was the right place as soon as I saw that the town was small enough to walk around and that there was a big bookstore with a wonderful coffee shop named Purgalasi right behind it. It was the perfect place to learn to hang out, I was sure. If you didn’t know how to hang out, the town would soon teach you.

I had called Wally from San Francisco to warn him that I was hitching down, and he told me to call him as soon as I got into town and he’d come pick me up and take me to his place, where he had an extra bedroom for me. And Wally did pick me up, in an outrageous car. It was a big pink two-door ’54 Chevy, with large white polka dots all over it.

It was good to see Wally again. I hadn’t seen him since he left New York City four years before. He looked the picture of health: slim, firm legs from obsessively riding his ten-speed bike; sun-bleached hair; red shorts; Hawaiian shirt; and most of all, a great, broad, natural smile, something I never remembered him having in New York. Oh, and then of course there were the Birkenstocks.

Wally’s setup was perfect for me. He lived in an old Victorian house, not far from the center of town, which in the old days, when there were such things as large extended families, had served as a home for one. But now it was subdivided for single men like Wally, all bachelors, resisting growing up, perpetual boys of summer, all waiting to meet the right woman, and who, perhaps because there were so many available women, had not found her yet. It was as if the endless possibilities of women stunned these men into indecision.

The following day was Sunday. Sunday morning the entire communal kitchen at Wally’s house was abuzz and filled with mellow and relaxed guys, all hanging out with their dates and live-ins. People were lounging, laughing, and eating French toast with fresh fruit and sipping mimosas and even passing around an after-breakfast joint. Why, I wondered, did such a relaxed gathering leave me so anxious?
I just wanted to have a bowl of granola and get out of there, go to the beach or something. But they all wanted to welcome me and initiate me into their pleasure dome. One of them, a real sweet guy in cut-offs, who worked in a bicycle shop on weekdays, offered Wally and me a teaspoon full of powdered psilocybin, just as a Sunday-morning brunch treat. I was surprised and demonstrably thankful, but Wally seemed even more surprised and told me to be flattered. “Frank,” he said, “must have really taken to you, because he never gives his drugs away.” “Then in that case,” I said half jokingly, “do you think it’s safe to take?” He just laughed at my paranoia. I decided not to take any drugs and just get out of there, go downtown to the Purgalasi to sit in the sun, sip a cappuccino, and read a little more Norman O. Brown.