Born to Run (17 page)

Still, it had to happen. Here’s how we did it. Once we realized it was impossible for me to start from a dead stop, Tinker would get the transmission in first gear and get the truck rolling, and then we
would switch seats in the tight cab, stepping on J. T. as she howled from the floorboards, and I would take over from second gear through fourth for as long as the highway held. We drove thousands of miles, the rest of the way, employing this method. We never saw or heard from Danny or the other vehicle again. We had no backup plan for someone getting lost. There were no cell phones, no way to communicate.
All we had was a common destination, so we headed into the sun. It was not a restful ride for Carl Virgil West. I’d be driving through the desert night during his “sleep” break, weaving all over the highway, and I’d look over to see him with fear flooding his wide-open eyes. I couldn’t blame him. My driving sucked. We were lucky I didn’t kill us.

The big truck did not get easier to manage. I
just drove, no license, no permit, no experience. When we came to a state-line crossing, a toll booth or a weigh station, I’d poke Tinker in the ribs and we’d switch seats again without coming to a stop. We got pretty good at it, but when we hit the mountain passes, terror set in. The truck was an old manual shift without particularly responsive steering. You had to clutch, shift, clutch, shift, clutch,
shift, the engine begging for mercy, racing forward and back. I was killing that thing, but by the time we got to California I knew how to drive and Tinker had spent many a sleepless hour sprouting more than a few gray hairs.

West

The country was beautiful. I felt a great elation at the wheel as we crossed the western desert at dawn, the deep blue and purple shadowed canyons, the pale yellow
morning sky with all of its color drawn out, leaving just the black silhouetted mountains behind us. With the eastern sun rising at our backs, the deep reds and browns of the plains and hills came to life. Your palms turned salty white on the wheel from the aridity. Morning woke the Earth into muted color, then came the flat light of the midday sun, and everything stood revealed as pure horizon lowering
on two lanes of blacktop and disappearing into . . . nothing—my favorite thing. Then the evening, with the sun burning red into your eyes, dropping gold into the western mountains. It all felt like home and I fell into a lasting love affair with the desert.

On we soldiered, through Texas, New Mexico and Arizona to the California border, then north to the Big Sur mountains. We were almost there
but we had one more Halloween horror show of a night. Highway 1 to Big Sur had been washed out in a coastal storm, not an unusual occurrence, so Tinker searched the map for an alternate route. We stopped at an outpost of a filling station for a little local guidance. Tinker pointed at a squiggly thin line on the map and asked, “What about this?” The attendant answered, “It’ll get you there but you
don’t want to take this truck over that road.” Tinker and every perverse can-do bone in his body only heard the first part. We took it. For the first few miles, a beautiful freshly paved highway stretched out in front of us, then in one swift mountain bend, the road transformed into sliding dust and gravel. It became a barely passable one-way hell drive with a mountain within reach out the driver’s-side
window and a guardrail-less sheer cliff and empty grave awaiting outside the passenger’s window. Tinker had gone mute at the wheel, eyes burning like a zombie’s. He bumped, slid and rolled us for thirty miles and three hours of midnight over this impossible mountain pass. J. T. lay pinned to the floor like mortar fire was threatening her short canine life. She sensed we were
hanging by the short
ones and after an hour or so, my own stomach couldn’t take it anymore. The view from the cab was way too zero sum. I lay down on the seat and closed my eyes. I did not sleep. The truck slipped and swayed, loose mountainside gravel raining on the cab roof like hail. We took one last turn and it was over. The highway opened up before us and we shortly made our way through the gates of the Esalen
Institute at Big Sur. The night was pitch-black, without a light source anywhere. I found myself hustling down a small path, searching for our accommodations, on the black side of a mountain in California.

Gopher’s Palace

We would be staying with Gopher, a friend of Tinker’s, on the “working” side of a small creek that separated Esalen’s wealthy belly-button contemplators from its service staff.
It was not easy to find. Gopher lived on the steep side of the mountain in a tree. He had built his “home” around a towering eucalyptus whose roots and trunk sprouted out of his living room floor on up through a sleeping loft and out the roof (hello, Big Sur). There was a fireplace, no facilities and no running water. You climbed the tree in the house to get to the sleeping loft. It was a place
fine for a leprechaun but its miniature “rooms” were full with Tink, myself, J. T. and soon, rustling up out of the brush, the lost platoon of Danny and the two Vinnies. They’d followed the sound of my strumming guitar to Gopher’s palace and we all had a joyful tall-tale-telling reunion.

At some point during the early evening before our arrival, Gopher had thought he heard a perpetrator amongst
the bushes, unloaded his shotgun into the night and knocked out the electrical power for the entire side of the mountain. We sat by firelight, like Neanderthals huddled together in the heart of an unseeable new world. Finally, exhausted, we drifted off to sleep. When we woke at dawn and stepped out of Gopher’s front door, we stood speechless before what we saw. Giant old-growth trees, vegetation
so lush you’d
get lost a few feet in off the walking path, color, winter blooming flowers all set on a verdant mountainside that looked out high over the sun-fired emerald-green Pacific. If you watched for a while, you could see whales spouting in the distance. I’d never stood in the midst of nature like this and you could feel its humbling and intoxicating power. I approached a tree the likes
of which I’d never seen before, covered with what appeared to be strange multicolored leaves. As I walked toward its base, thousands of butterflies exploded off its branches and shot into the hard blue sky. This was another world.

We quickly got the lay of the land. We were in the workers’ quarters and that was basically where we were supposed to stay. It would be a few years before I would start
gazing into my own wealthy belly button, and so across the creek at the institute there were things going on we simply could not comprehend. The first thing Mad Dog and I witnessed was a group of people curled up on a green lawn in white sheets returning to their “amoeba stage.” This struck Vini and me as uproariously funny and we quickly came to believe, rightly or not, that the place, while
gorgeous, was home to some good old first-rate Jersey carny quackery all dressed up in some new-age doublespeak. They did have great hot springs tucked into the side of a cliff overlooking the sea. There were the springs, a cold bath and everybody naked. This greatly appealed to unworldly Jersey folk such as ourselves and we spent what time we could there charming the rich ladies and bathing in nature’s
sweet revivifier. A few of the fellows made “friends” with paying guests, leading to midnight creeps around the mountainside. For food, the staff would slip us some breakfast out the back door of the kitchen in the morning and we’d spend the day exploring, watching the dog and pony show at the lodge or practicing in a little shed by the sea for our big New Year’s Eve stand.

One afternoon I took
a long walk deep into the forest. I stayed on the path so as not to get lost and began to follow the sound of a distant conga drum. About ten minutes in, deep in a wooded clearing I came upon a tall
thin black man dressed in a dashiki hunched over a conga drum entertaining the wildlife. He looked up and I found myself face-to-face with Richard Blackwell, my homie from Freehold, whom I’d grown
up with. What are the odds! We had a “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” moment, couldn’t believe the two of us had ended up there thousands of miles from home at this exact place and time, decided it was destiny, and I asked him if he wanted to sit in with Steel Mill for the rest of our West Coast stretch. First stop, New Year’s Eve.

When the night came, it all broke loose West Coast–style. Out of
the nearby mountains came tattooed earth mamas, old grizzled mountain men, nubile young hippie girls fueled by acid, talking in tongues and ready to fuck. There were a lot of drugs and the show took off accordingly into the nether lands of California acid culture. Trance-dancing, the locals mixed merrily with the paying guests, and we played the crowd into a frenzy, with Richard Blackwell from the
block, joined by Tinker, creating an unending pulse with their conga drums. It went on for a long time, and as a straight-edge Jersey boy it was about all the fun I could take. Everybody wanted to give you drugs all the time. I was a stubborn young man and set in my fearful ways. I wasn’t going there, so I played and played, and they went, the mountain hippies, their bonfires blazing, ancient faces
with eyes rolling back alongside well-off middle Americans trying to find a new light who’d come west and were paying big for what we’d have done for ’em in New Jersey for two bucks.

Finally around dawn it quieted. Folks drifted back up into the hills and we sat exhausted. We’d entertained them and had been thoroughly entertained, but it was different from back home. Here music was a part of
some larger tribal “consciousness-raising” event. The musician was more shaman and psychic facilitator. More mystic man than hard rocker or soul entertainer. I had the band and the skills to pull it off but I wasn’t sure it was my stock-in-trade.

We stayed on for a few days afterward enjoying the pleasures of Big
Sur. The morning we left I sat on a bench overlooking the Pacific with a very straight
middle-aged entrepreneur from Texas. He was lost in freak land and a seeker at the facility. I asked him why he was there. He said simply, “I’ve made a lot of money and I’m not happy.” It’d be years before I’d have to wrestle with that one, but there was something about him that touched me. He wanted something more than the world of commerce that his life had offered him. He’d come all this
way, laid down his cold hard cash and opened himself up to try to find it. I wished him well and hoped he was in righteous hands.

A few hours later I sat on a rocky green outcropping on the side of Highway 1. In my lap I held my travel bag; the sun was high and dry as I watched a small army of ants slipping between my boots, carrying bits of dust toward their hillside empire. I searched north
up the highway and waited. The smell of eucalyptus bark and high grasses, that uniquely California smell, surrounded me and reminded me I was a young traveler in a strange land. It felt good. A hawk circled above me in the flat blue sky as forty minutes passed, then an hour. A car slowed down and pulled to the side of the road where I was sitting. Through the sun’s glare reflecting off the front
windshield I saw two big smiles. It was my mom and pop coming to welcome their only son to their promised land.

Promised Land

My mom and dad’s land of hope and dreams was a small two-bedroom apartment up a flight of stairs in a complex in the California suburb of San Mateo. It consisted of a living room/kitchen combo, a bedroom for my folks and a smaller bedroom for my little sis. They were proud
of it. They loved California. They had jobs, they had a new life. My dad had taken up watercolor painting by numbers, and he played the home organ, its sour notes squealing beneath those mitts he called hands. He seemed to be all right. Leaving Freehold had done him some good. My mom was once again a
respected legal secretary, at a firm in the Hillsdale Shopping Center, and my pop drove a bus
at the airport.

I slept on the living room couch, ate some home cooking, shopped at the nearby St. Vincent de Paul or Salvation Army thrift stores and enjoyed being home. I was in the living room watching TV as my eight-year-old sister attempted to make me a homecoming cake. She had a big bowl of batter and an electric mixer set up on the kitchen table. The next thing I heard was a shattering
scream, like a squirrel with its tail caught in the family mower. I ran to find batter splattered all over the kitchen walls and my little sis howling with the electric mixer still running and pressed close to her scalp. At first I couldn’t figure out what I was seeing. Then I realized the mixer had run straight up a strand of her lovely long brown hair, which had drifted into the mixing bowl, and
was now vibrating like a banshee against her little skull. A pull of the plug, a pair of scissors, a few kisses, some laughs and she was okay.

Soon the entire band would be sleeping on my parents’ living room floor. It only lasted a few days. We were there to be discovered and that would take work, so we packed up and headed into San Francisco for our first audition. We pulled up to the Family
Dog, home of the Quicksilver Messenger Service and a venerable old San Francisco ballroom that was looking for some new bands to open up for their main acts. Tinker had got us a shot. I recollect there were three or four bands auditioning that sunny afternoon. The first two weren’t much, so we confidently took the stage and played well. We played about twenty minutes of the stuff that had made us
superstars back home and didn’t doubt we’d get the gig. After our set, the fourth band played. They were good. They were musically sophisticated, with several good vocalists and some very good songs. They didn’t have the show that we did but that didn’t seem to concern them. They just played . . . very, very well. They got the gig. We lost out. After the word came down, all the other guys were complaining
we’d gotten ripped off. The guy running the joint didn’t know what he was doing, blah, blah, blah . . .

That night I went back to my parents’ house and lay awake on my
couch thinking. They were better than us, and I hadn’t seen anybody, certainly anybody who was still unknown, that was better than us—better than
me
—in a long time. The guy doing the booking was right. My confidence was mildly
shaken and I had to make room for a rather unpleasant thought. We were not going to be the big dogs we were back in our little hometown. We were going to be one of many very competent, very creative musical groups fighting over a very small bone. Reality check. I was good, very good, but maybe not quite as good or as exceptional as I’d gotten used to people telling me, or as I thought. Right here,
in this city, there were guys who in their own right were as good or better. That hadn’t happened in a long while and it was going to take some mental realignment.