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Gilroy
By
Mark Jacobs
I was lying on the back seat of a car, looking up through the glassless, sucking rear window, lost in the stars. Rob was driving. Tim was riding shotgun. We were each wrapped in a sleeping bag. Conversation was sparse. Around 2:00 AM, we spotted a trucker’s cafe just below Gilroy, a small town an hour and a half south of San Francisco. The LSD and the STP were still at full strength.
In the parking lot, eight or ten mammoth trucks, like sleeping chrome dinosaurs, were parked in a couple loose rows. Rob pulled up next to one and our beat old ’53 Chevy wasn’t much above the trucks’ fender level.
We got out, as if from a packing crate, unwrapped, unfolded, and stretched. Then we walked toward the café. The gravel was sharp and lights suspended from tall poles glinted off the chrome like flashbulbs. Gradually, as we approached the door, we realized where we were going. Then Rob had pulled back the screen door and I was opening the wooden one.
The Haight-Ashbury District of San Francisco was something of a frontier fortress at that time, July 1967. Tim and Rob and I had abandoned its safety and launched out into a dangerous primeval unknown. It was reflexive long ago to be on guard outside the Haight, but now, after the recent months-long global eruption of publicity about “hippies,” it was common to have people stare and point you out on the street. Rob had shoulder-length reddish hair, Tim’s dark brown hair was down to his collar, and my black hair was just short of my shoulders. Plus, after an hour and a half of lying on the back seat, my hair was armpit-scraggly.
We were accompanied into the restaurant by a gust of mild night wind that, somehow, turned eight or ten truckers into ice sculptures. Not one spoke the entire time we were in their presence.
I was on acid and Tim and Rob were on STP and it all curdled as we walked to the end of the counter closest to the door. We sat on revolving padded stools, plucked plastic menus from behind a napkin holder, and pretended to read. A shriveled old Chinese guy shuffled up and waited silently for our order.
“Uh, I’ll have a bowl of clam chowder,” I said.
“I’ll have a grilled cheese sandwich,” Tim said.
“Bowl of chowder,” Rob said.
“Coffee?” the waiter asked.
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
The waiter left. We folded and reinserted the menus. Loud silence. I was in the middle, Tim was on the end, and on the other side of Rob the rest of the counter was empty. Each of us casually shot an over-the-shoulder half-glance around the room. Experienced eyes registered mild disgust to tense outrage. Most of the truckers resumed eating, a couple though were transfixed by us. We meanwhile were studying the counter top. I was still stoned enough to drift quite a ways into the formica pattern.
One trucker with a greased whorl of brown hair and a dented nose was so bug-eyed with rage it looked as if he might shoot us with his eyeballs. Clearly, it was one thing to cluck and curse these bold new perverts when they were on TV or in the papers, but it was something else again having them right there in front of you.
The bug-eyed one left his table and joined us at the counter, turning his stool, three down from Rob, to skewer us on his glare. He looked like he was in the presence of three people who had just shitted on his mother’s grave then wiped their asses with an American flag. He was wiry and short, while each of us was over six feet, but he was tensed to spring and oblivious. There was no doubt about sympathies in the rest of the room.
Normally, I might have made a hollow show of defiance but I couldn’t on acid. Though I did surprise myself by how easily and firmly the sober driver wrested control of the wheel. There was a head-on collision anyway, ecstasy into hostility.
By the time the food and coffee arrived, I felt like someone with St. Vitus’ dance neck deep in concrete.
“I don’t think I can eat,” I said quietly, staring into my bowl of soup.
“Why?” Rob asked.
“The vibes. They’ve taken my appetite away.”
“Ignore it,” he said and shoveled in a spoonful of chowder.
He was a merchant seaman and months at sea with crews interchangeable with these truckers had hardened him to bigot hostility. Tim had faced even worse rednecks while in the Congress of Racial Equality in the South during Freedom Summer of ’64. Though I was nineteen, five or six years younger than them, I had grown up in a redneck Sierra mill town. So we weren’t novices.
Nevertheless, we ate as fast as we could. I forced myself to taste the soup and was glad of it. It felt good against the lingering chill of the car. Still, there was no enjoying it. Each spoonful had to be slow and controlled to avoid spooking the guy down the counter.
Finally we finished, got up, and walked, as if under water, to the cash register. I didn’t think about being the first, I just somehow moved faster than Tim and Rob. They stood around while I paid my bill. Then I stood by them as they paid. It was safer and I was a little embarrassed for being first to the cash register.
Rob paid last and then led us out. This was the last chance for the bug-eyed guy and the others, which made it a remarkably long thirty feet or so, but we eventually reached the door and passed through it.
“Christ…”
“Did you see that guy down the counter…”
“And that fat guy in the corner, when we first came in, with his mouth open, full of food…”
“Shit…”
“I thought for sure we were gonna get jumped…”
“Me too…”
“Fucking rednecks…”
“The chowder was good…”
We all vented at the same time, after we were safely across the parking lot and getting in the car.
I drove, Tim was in the back, and Rob at shotgun. The truckers’ cafe receded in the rear view mirror, behind the noxious black fumes of our oil-burning engine, and I felt a full-body tension-drain. Muscles momentarily fluid. As I would learn in similar encounters that summer and afterwards, the fear surfaces after the adrenalin drains. I let out a boulder-heave of a sigh.
“They didn’t know what a piece of us would cost,” Rob said.
“Yeah, their outrage wasn’t enough to risk us landing lucky punches as we went down,” I added.
We had nudged the latent lynch mob in rural California. The whole episode was like that long moment at the beginning of a car accident when you’re not yet sure how serious it is, and, if it isn’t bad, whether you can enjoy it. Except this time, instead of two or three seconds, it lasted a fast meal.
The car radio didn’t work, so the long ruminant silence that preceded Gilroy returned. I drifted into my thoughts, and that was made even easier when we entered a low, thick, obliterating fog. My attention was confined to the thirty yard pie-wedge of light in front of the car, and to the dipping, swerving asphalt treadmill underneath it. After enough miles of oncoming traffic shooting out of the fog and whooshing by a few feet the other side of a painted line, I realized with a shudder, in my acid clarity, the vulnerability of anyone, even a sober driver, on a freeway. It was Russian roulette and every car that didn’t hit us was an empty chamber.
Each time I adjusted myself in the seat I felt the baggy of purple acid tabs I carried in my underwear. Tim and I were roommates of convenience who became close friends and partners in a small dealing business. That meant we had a full and eclectic dope drawer and what was in it we either took ourselves, gave away, or, when we needed money, sold. The purpose of this trip was to sell our excess acid in LA.
Tim was also a hero to me. He had been driven out of the South by Klan threats and was therefore a veteran of the only war that mattered. I was just a couple years out of that redneck mill town (where there was the unmistakably communicated sense that there was something indefinably wrong with me).
Rob was the former shipmate of one of our neighbors. His most impressive accomplishment was smuggling five pounds of hash through twenty borders. He was so relaxed his arms hung down like empty sleeves. I particularly relished an expression he got as if everything he was witnessing was an unnatural phenomenon. I thought of him as a purebred existential man, resigned to the Absurd, and I liked and respected him immensely.
And that’s why I was so surprised and then hurt when he suddenly attacked me.
Though the effect of the drugs was declining, whenever three psychedelicized minds are locked together in a shooting metal box for hours at a stretch, well….
Tim was driving. Rob was at shotgun. I was in the back again but sitting up. There was no sound but gray engine drone. From the sleeping bags, we watched exit signs file through the headlight beam: Salinas, Soledad, King City, Paso Robles, Atascadero, Nipomo, Lompoc.
“Hey, did you see that?!” Rob asked, breaking the silence.
“Yeah,” I said.
Tim roused and asked, “What? What did you see?”
“A sign back there,” I said.
“Yeah, it said, ‘Correctional Facility, Keep Right,’ ” Rob added, awed.
There was a suspended moment when nobody explained or commented.
Then I said, “The right that isn’t right…that suppresses rights…that can’t get it right…right?”
They laughed. I saw it as an opportunity to vent philosophical insights roiling in my brain. I was a philosophy major and my guiding passion, second only to sex itself, was philosophical discussion. I couldn’t get enough of it after the intellectual desert of that Sierra mill town. And now I was bursting with acid insights.
“Ya know… I’ve been sitting back here thinking… and ya know what is the key insight, the bedrock insight, the rock of ages if you will, of all philosophical traditions?”
“No, what?” Tim said absently. He had limited interest in philosophy but he would put up with my babble and even listen on occasion. Rob was silent.
“The identity of opposites.”
“Mmmmm…” Tim said.
“Of course, it’s the key insight of Taoism but it’s everywhere. God and the Devil are just Yin and Yang broken out of the shell. Now Nagarjuna says…”
Rob suddenly turned around in his seat and demanded of me, “Look!” His left index finger was poking an indentation into the vinyl on the top of the front seat. “There’s you.” Then the right index finger poked an indentation a foot or so away. “And there is what
is. And ... and nothin’… you say about it… matters… man.”
Tim and I were startled. Neither of us spoke. Rob turned to face the road. I decided to shelve Nargarjuna for a while.
Then, moving us on, Tim asked me, “You didn’t tell me what happened with Natasha last night...”
He had deftly chosen a guaranteed distraction. I leaned forward, and, on the back of the front seat, crossed my arms and rested my chin on them and sighed. She was my first passion, as opposed to lust, in months. Fantasies about her would be the soundtrack to this trip.
“Not so good,” I said. “Actually… it was a disaster.”
“Oh… Didn’t you say you were ‘in love’ with her?”
“Yeah, I’m…I’m…knocked down, but I’m not out yet. We had a bizarre …misunderstanding…I still have hope to…”
Suddenly Rob turned toward me and snapped his fingers, twice, inches in front of my face. Then he turned back and watched the road.
I was shocked and intimidated. What was I doing? I had no idea. It had to be something in my voice. We didn’t even have eye contact. I leaned back and shrank into the seat and then into myself and stayed silent. But it didn’t do any good.
Within a few minutes, Rob turned around in his seat and looked me in the eyes, then loud and hard, clapped his hands, once, inches from my nose.
“Knock it off!” he growled. “You’re trying to get into my head, man. Knock it off.”
I was stunned and flustered. It was long seconds before I could mumble, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“We have to remember,” Tim interjected, “we’re all stoned and tired and we’re cooped up in this car. There’re bound to be… clashes.”
“Yeah,” Rob agreed, then turned around and faced the road again. “Yeah. I’m sorry man. It’s just… three cats in a car… on STP… I’m sorry man.”
“That’s O.K.” I said.
But it wasn’t O.K. There I was again doing something, I didn’t know what, that was causing trouble. What could it be? I took off on a jag of frenzied self-analysis. Then I remembered a monkey.
A couple weeks before, on an outing to the zoo with friends, I had just joined the crowd in front of the monkey cage when a monkey leapt from a corner and, hanging by an arm from the cage ceiling, swung low over a brimming water tub, dragged a few fingers on the surface, and with a screech, shot the foul water through the bars onto my face and mouth.
Now, in the back seat, I was free-falling through the void, not liberating one of the Zen masters but that of acid depression, and it was worse in its way than the fear in the truckers’ café. I reached out and gripped the armrests at both ends of the backseat and held on as if we were taking a sharp turn too fast, though we were on a straight away.
Copyright © 2007 Mark Jacobs
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