PAGAN LOVE AND WILDING HEARTS

3. The Road to Tucson

        A day or two later I was driving my dad’s car around a corner - while talking to him and all of a sudden a little old red MG convertible sportscar appeared out of nowhere and we had a small collision. It didn’t do any damage but while I was talking to the guy I commented how much I liked his old sportscar and he told me I could buy it for $30 if I liked it that much. My dad fronted me the cash and I bought the beauty right then and there.

        The MG had only a few small dents—and it ran pretty good for being as old as it was. It needed a carburetor adjustment and a starter, that’s about all. Doesn’t that smack of divine providence? I mean for a great car like a red 1960 MG convertible with wire rims to fall into my lap for only $30? And from such a chance meeting? A highway collision!  And within days of my freedom? Perhaps the angel of Providence saw the little red car as a possible way to get me out of the California malaise.  Maybe.

        All I needed other than that was some realistic female companionship—like an intelligent and passionate woman of legal age for instance. After two years of living like a monk I needed a bunch of sexual-neurological releases that would make me feel like the monkey that is more my inner nature. My sister Judy, three years younger than me, decided to do her bit to help me along my new freedom road: She fixed me up with one of her girlfriends. The nineteen year old young woman was large and heavyset—and had some real attitude problems. She went to the same beauty school as my sister. I couldn’t figure out why her girlfriend went to beauty school. Unless that young woman somehow learned to diet she was doomed to go through life looking like a brood sow no matter how much make-up she smeared on her face. But I was still so horny (in spite of my jaded success a few days earlier) that I didn’t really care much what she looked like.

        So, soon after meeting we were parked somewhere in my little red MG, kissing (and all the while I was hoping no hippies would pass by and see me with her!) and I was trying to get my hand under her wire rimmed brassiere and she was resisting all my best passion. We ended up in an argument wherein we disclosed to each other our inner natures and both of us realized we were as different from each other as cats and dogs. The counter-culture “sisters” I had known and loved were nothing like her.  They would never wear bras. She wouldn’t be without hers; probably slept in it and bathed in it too. Furthermore, she wasn’t no “dumb” vegetarian. She loved meat and didn’t care a hoot what had to die to fill her refrigerator and her belly. And don’t spare the gravy either. And lots of cookies, cake and coke. She told me she was saving herself for marriage. I wonder if anyone ever married her? Poor guy. I hope he owns a bakery...

        So the angel of providence taught me to be wary of young women who weigh three hundred pounds. I probably didn’t really need much help in that department though. Not really.

        But the experience utterly exasperated me. After one big argument with my step-father I decided I’d had enough. I wanted to get out on the road. The MG would have been an impossible burden. Sweet as it was, I couldn’t keep the machine running well and I had no money to feed it gas and oil, so I parked the car at my father’s home and stuck out my thumb for Arizona.

        The miles passed behind me, loomed ahead of me, piled up uncountable numbers in the odometer of my soul. Mountains and cactus and small towns rolled by my windows in a vivid montage of personal freedom and I felt that old feeling that I were a winged spirit flying over the earth, attached to nothing and no one: the alien, the renegade, the wayward wind...

        Highways and wide open spaces! Nothing but strangers in every direction! The nights were so lonely in my sleeping bag beneath the stars!  I keenly felt how much I needed some company at this time of my life.

        I needed some good love, fast. A permanent sister-partner would have been perfectly exquisite but that was not likely to happen in my unhairy circumstances. A few rare one night stands might provide me with some significant relief—but I knew only too well how profound would be my solitude between those celebrations of life. Besides, my soul couldn’t take any more non-sisters. I desperately needed real soulmates. But they didn’t need me till my hair and beard grew back. Absurd but true.

        So I decided to get me a dog—and shortly after I arrived in Tucson I purchased a St Bernard puppy for fifty dollars. The St Bernard sure rounded off my rough edges though. There’s nothing like a puppy to make a person forget his problems and start laughing. What a funny little fur-bag that puppy was! He trotted alongside me with a big St Bernard smile on his face, always looking for mischief, always wanting to play. Pretty girls came out of the woodwork from every direction to pet him and roll around on the grass with him. Yes, life was bound to be a whole new adventure with him by my side—and I wondered if Tucson might turn out to be the perfect place I was looking for.

        But Tucson was fucked. The police were beating up people who hung out in the park. I had spent some wonderful months hanging out in those parks with all the other wandering hippies in 1969 and 1970; some of the funnest moments of my life thus far had happened in those parks. Good brothers. Good times. Sweet desert sisters. Living our dreams.

        But things had changed. Tucson’s cops were determined if they had anything to say about it those days were gone and would never return. The cops were violent with their clubs. They had no qualms about crippling a person for life… That’s what they actually did to one friend of mine—and they didn’t let his crutches stop them from beating him up again when they cornered him in the park a year later either. They took pleasure in it.  Arizona’s redneck cops were heinous.

        Dale and Barbara were still in Tucson! They were two inseparable culture-sisters whom I had gotten to know fondly in those earlier days.  They were the first people I met since I got out of prison who knew me by my old spirit name, “Pan”. A name like that would have been too hard to explain in the hard evil world of locks and bars and I had practically forgotten it, having reverted to my given name of Tom. But Dale and Barbara would have none of that “Tom” business. I would always be Pan to them and so pretty soon my ears got used to hearing it again from them and all their friends and everyone else. It was kind of a relief, sort of like one more shackle removed from my recent captivity.

        They also seemed determined to aid me in freeing my spirit from any other remaining vestiges of moribundity. One night they led me through long winding alleys not telling me where they were taking me until we arrived at a cozy motel room for which they had prepaid and snuggling together in the soft bed we all three made beautiful love together. Our three pairs of bell-bottom patch-pants and flannel shirts were flung all over the floor. Both of these sisters had beautiful long black hair, slender figures, gentle eyes. So sweet... I wish I had a video of that night so I could relive it a million times. Wouldn’t it be nice if human memory could be as vivid and never fail? Alas, twenty years have passed since that fine tryst and I know for sure that my memory is not so perfect as it should be to forever have every nuance of that evening at my beck and call. There is an example of the perfect fruit on the tree of life… Such an experience!

        I must also add one small thing to this entry: A few years later I was looking at the cover of a Maria Muldour album and it was amazing. She looked identical to Dale in so many ways. And the Arizona theme of he album! I never heard Dale sing, but her way of talking sounds like Maria Muldour's way of singing.  Oh well. Stranger things have happened. Anyway, Dale and Barbara were two of the most beautiful personalities I have ever known. I’ll love them forever. I sure wonder what they're doing these days.

        I saw them often in the “drop-in center”. The city was funding the program in a house across the street from our old favorite park meeting place. What was left of our local street family had taken to hanging out inside that building where there were soft sofas and free coffee. Supposedly it’s reason for existence had something to do with getting people off the streets and off drugs. In those days the general population of America was easily convinced that marijuanna and LSD were addictive substances. The house had some sort of social workers and even a psychologist as I remember. They were there to help the hippies “break their habits.” Street people also got their foodstamps and other government niceties in there, which kept them all coming back and sitting around—where they could be scrutinized. Compromised and eradicated. I was repulsed that so many brothers and sisters had taken so carelessly to parking themselves in those chairs all day long. It looked like classical institutionalization to me—real sneaky snaky. Even on nice warm days, there they were! I’d go in and ask them to come on outside and go do something. They’d say no, it was too cold, or some such lame excuse; sit back in their chairs, stare at the walls and wait for five o’clock to roll around when they’d be kicked out willy-nilly whatever the weather. They reminded me of mice who had started trusting cats.

        The place was open nine to five or some silly hours like that. But where were we to go in the evenings? There were one or two real swell hippy bars in town—but they were for the upper echelon of hippies, the ones who still seemed to have money, an odd and worrisome commodity that most of the rest of us almost never had. Even if we were successful at panhandling we usually couldn’t get much more than barely enough to stave off hunger—and maybe a small bottle of wine. “Straights” would almost never give us any change; only working hippies, our fringe cousins, helped us out. Oh, sweet sisters like Dale and Barbara could always get some slobbering redneck to fork over dollars—but the shit they had to endure just to accept that money is basically what broke all the sister’s brains and made them too frightened to walk our roads with us. I could do a little better pan-handling than most of the other guys—I just told people I needed some money to get my St. Bernard puppy some food.  Everyone loved that dog. All kinds of people put change and even dollars into my hand. I named him Gush-gush. Me and Gush-gush ate fairly well.

        So, as I was saying, after the drop-in center closed at five or six PM we all desperately needed somewhere to hang loose. Even though the parks were brutally off limits we still gathered in the darker areas—always keeping our eyes peeled for cops sneaking up on us with their clubs unholstered and swinging in their sweaty meaty hands. And Gush-gush proved himself valuable there too, warning us in time on more than one occasion so we could take to our heels. Other than lurking around the parks we often found ourselves walking along alleys and railroad tracks looking for a new hole we might find useful to crawl in some night. Street-people were just barely surviving; still we met often in favorite nooks and crannies, shared our bottles of Boone’s Farm wine and toked up.

        Finding somewhere to sleep wasn’t easy. Police patrolled all the old places where we used to roll out our blankets. I slept for several nights in a shed behind the drop-in house but I was discovered one morning and they called the cops, so I ran for it.