Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir (16 page)

"Hell," I told the group before
they voted to approve it, "he might even be so grateful he just
spends the whole six hundred dollars throwing a party for
everybody."

When Ken emerged as the only
applicant in a dormitory of forty men, Chuck smelled a rat and set
about frantically working to derail the scholarship. But there was
little he could do. We even convinced the director of scholarships
to make a special presentation after the start of the second
semester in January when Ken would get his check. Reading the fine
print, however, Chuck discovered a loophole. I had specified that
the recipient also had to reside in Francis House when receiving
the award. So, just before the semester's end, during final
examination week, he busted us having a shaving cream fight in the
bathroom, blowing off a little steam. And the next day, just three
days before the deadline for Ken to get the money, I found myself
standing once again before the dean of housing, who, this time, had
a genuine smile on his lips.

"Can't this wait until next
semester?" I asked. "I have two finals tomorrow."

Unimpressed, he ordered us split up and moved
to opposite ends of the Missouri campus. And we had to vacate
Francis House that night.

TWENTY-TWO

August 1967

"WE WON'T ROB YOU"

I had written those words in
psychedelic block letters across an old, brown paper grocery sack
so I could tape it to the side of a suitcase. The words were
printed large enough to be visible from a considerable distance. I
filled in the colors. Black for the "W" and the "B;" red for the
"E" and the "Os" in "WON'T" and "ROB;" yellow for the "T" and the
"U;" green for the "R;" and, purple for the "W," the "N," the
apostrophe and the "O" in "YOU."

Professional Gary had worked
eighteen-hour days during June and July in a hell hole, galvanizing
chain link fences to save money for his impending junior year at
Mizzou. The rogue had allowed it because he knew August belonged to
him. Actually, the rogue had owned the whole last year, sacrificing
my sophomore grade point average and granting the professional just
enough room to survive. The Francis House feces case and our
subsequent expulsion from the dorm had just been one of the rogue's
many accomplishments the past year. We'd had fun, and I had no
regrets about letting him run the show for a while. We had planned
an ultimate shenanigan as an exclamation point on the summer,
scheduling August to hitchhike from St. Louis to Los Angeles, up to
San Francisco, and back across the west just in time for the start
of school. Of course, Ken would serve as traveling companion for
this adventure that would be our last road trip of life together.
His rogue had flunked him out of Mizzou the past year, and all that
lay ahead for Ken was Vietnam. He never should have chosen
chemistry as his major.

I'm still not sure how or why my
rogue had emerged so savagely in the fall of 1966, as I began my
sophomore year at Mizzou. Maybe he came out because the
professional had caged him so successfully the year before. As a
freshman without a car, and, inspired by the intellectual offerings
of college classes, I had transformed into a hermit. I had left
high school behind and settled in to get an education, driving my
grade point to honors college status. My budding domestic had
pledged our love to my high school sweetheart, still in her junior
year back in St. Louis. She wrote us a letter every single day,
confessing her love and always misspelling "sweet" as "sweat." The
domestic thought it cute. The professional grunted. The rogue
nearly puked. But the professional remained in charge, reading the
books, writing the papers, and dominating those freshmen
days.

Suddenly, however, as the new school year
dawned in September of 1966, my old high school running buddy Ken
had joined me at Mizzou after spending his freshman year at a
junior college in St. Louis. The rogue had always liked him. We
became roommates in the dormitory and I felt something stirring in
my gut. Secure in the honors college, where an F equaled only a C,
I had brought my 1962 white, convertible Chevy to campus and things
started to change. Before I knew what was happening, the rogue had
dialed my girlfriend and dumped her long-distance, sending the
domestic sniveling for a standing ten-count in the corner of the
ring where my three personalities did battle.

I did enjoy watching the rogue that
year, as he nearly forced the professional into early retirement.
Of course, the heartbroken domestic was still crying in the corner,
unable to protest the rogue's reign of revelry. One week the rogue
watched quietly as the professional worked hard to get us the
highest grade on the first of three tests in our honors math class.
The rogue had not said a word until we visited the professor for
the results and learned the score had positioned me for a final
grade no lower than C.

"So, let me get this straight," I
heard the rogue asking before the professional could stop him. "If
I never attend the class again or take the other two tests, I can
still get a C?"

"That's right," said the professor,
looking a little confused. "If a C is good enough, you have that
now."

"Deal," said the rogue, extending
my hand and then mumbling some more nonsense about how this would
provide me the extra time to handle other challenging course work
and get extra credit in those. The rogue knew we wouldn't be
wasting all that free time on frivolity like academics. We had
beers to drink and two coeds to juggle. The professional started to
pout. The year was looking hopeless to him. So, he just stepped out
of the way, surrendering our sophomore year to the
rogue.

Under the rogue's direction, I
started working nights in a bar, playing poker until dawn just in
time for my morning classes, and often finishing a week with no
sleep from Tuesday through Saturday. A couple of co-eds recruited
Ken and me to drive on a road trip to Fort Lauderdale for Spring
Break.

The rogue enjoyed his first taste
of forbidden love that Spring semester, too, when I established a
liaison with a coed engaged to a guy still living in St. Louis. She
visited him at home on alternate weekends while I inserted a girl
from one of Columbia's two women's colleges into her spot in the
monthly rotation, providing our first experience at relationship
juggling, and successfully skulking under the radar as an infamous
"other man."

Once that school year ended, the
rogue convinced me to spread my wings by finding a new job away
from my dad's lawnmower shop. That's how I wound up at Boyles
Galvanizing instead of St. John's Lawnmower Service for the summer.
The boss at Boyles welcomed me with a smirk and said, "You're going
to learn why you want to stay in college, boy." He taught me how to
operate some machine that reduced the gauges on long rolls of wire.
I would stand beside the machine while the wire ran through a
shaver at high speeds. Every fifteen minutes the wire would break
and start snapping around like a power cable severed in a storm,
sparks shooting from the end. Each time, I would race to stop the
machine before the flailing wire could whip around and poke me in
the eye. Then, I would fire up a torch to weld the broken strands
of wire back together and start all over again. In another part of
the building, other workers weaved the coils to make chain link
fencing. I regularly worked a second shift helping drag the
finished fences through a boiling pool of zinc galvanizing agent
designed to coat the wire against corrosion. I wondered about the
stench and the fumes as I watched a toothless old man eating Gerber
baby food for lunch. I asked him if he had worked there
long.

"Sure have," he said. "Ever since I
got out of high school about ten years ago."

So the prospect of
a cross-country trip by thumb seemed the perfect reward for my
suffering in the first two months of this summer, one that would
become known as the notorious "Summer of Love." Songwriter Scott
McKenzie provided the anthem, inviting all the hippies to San
Francisco's Haight Ashbury neighborhood where we'd wear flowers in
our hair. He could not yet appreciate the significance of Charles
Manson's parole that summer as well. But we all knew the Beatles
would make a comeback with their classic
Sergeant Pepper
album. Ken and I
weren't hippies, but we joined the migration anyhow. We just looked
like a couple of short-haired, college boys when we stood beside
the nation's iconic Route 66 outside St. Louis and stuck out our
thumbs, hoping some strangers would take us west. I thought my "We
Won't Rob You" suitcase would catch an eye.

Almost immediately, our first ride
came with a Mexican headed for…Mexico, of all places! Assured we
had driver licenses, he stopped at the first grocery store to buy a
small cooler, a bag of ice, and a case of beer. He climbed into the
back seat and ordered: "Drive to Amarillo." He obviously planned to
turn south from the famous roadway at that Texas Panhandle city,
but he passed out somewhere in Oklahoma. We hoped he might sleep
right through the stop. Something awakened him, however, and we
found ourselves standing beside the highway in the night this time,
seeking salvation at two in the morning. It arrived quickly in the
form of an old mail truck rehabilitated by a thirty-year-old
Bostonian headed west in pursuit of a girlfriend. Riding with him
was another hitchhiker, a kid about our age headed home to San
Francisco. It seemed the whole world was a-thumb that summer, and
the other hitcher, of course, invited us to look him up when we
headed north from our initial destination of Los
Angeles.

We had secured a couple of places
to stay in Los Angeles and planned to hang out there for a couple
of weeks before hitching north to San Francisco. My dad's sister,
Aunt Francis, had offered a place to sleep at her home in Azusa,
one of the Los Angeles suburbs. We also had an invitation from a
rich chick named Laura who lived in a mansion in Palos Verdes and
had attended one of the women's colleges in Columbia.

We needed only a couple of days to
reach LA, even after the rehabilitated postal truck broke down in
New Mexico. We caught a lift with a big trucker who carted us all
the way there. In Los Angeles, we continued hitching around town
and even slept one night along the Santa Monica Freeway when we
couldn't catch a ride back to Azusa. Laura picked us up and took us
to the beaches. But we didn't even last one night at her house
because her dad suffered a nervous breakdown while we were there.
We awakened to his screams, "Who the fuck are they? Who are they?"
Then Laura carted us back to my Aunt's, where my thirty-year-old
cousin had come to visit. She was living in San Jose, just outside
San Francisco, so we accepted an invitation to travel back to her
house and make it the base for our exploration of Flower Power
Central.

Hitching around again, we located
our friend from the postal truck and roamed around with him for a
couple of days. I recall waking up one morning in a car on a cliff
above the Pacific at Santa Cruz to the sound of sea lions roaring
above the surf. As unsophisticated rubes from the Midwest, we
didn't dabble in the drug culture there beyond sampling a little
marijuana, which didn't seem to be as interesting to me as drinking
beers. One stranger tried to recruit Ken to join his drug
manufacturing business after Ken identified himself as a chemistry
major at Mizzou. We both laughed, recalling his grade point, and
declined the invitation.

With Labor Day gone and the Fall
semester on the near horizon, we started home from San Jose much
the same as when we had left a few weeks earlier from St. Louis. My
cousin dropped us at a tangle of connector freeways that would lead
us to Interstate-80 and the northern route back home. I stuck out
my thumb and took stock of my situation. I had sixty dollars cash
in my pocket and stood two thousand miles from home, dependent on
the fortunes of the road to get me there with no
guaranties.

I realized I had never felt so free
as on that morning outside San Jose. I didn't know it then, but I
would never feel that free again.

Our only anxiety about catching a
ride occurred when we risked a detour from the interstate south to
Lake Tahoe just to see the place. The summer crowds had cleared,
and we found it nearly deserted. I still have a picture someone
snapped for the two of us, sitting on our towels on a beach by the
lake with my "We Won't Rob You" suitcase in the background, loafers
and sleeping bag off to the side. I'm wearing a gray University of
Missouri T-shirt while Ken sits shirtless with his best Marlon
Brando smirk across his face. We waited several hours for a local
in a pickup to haul us back to the highway. Then we shot back to
St. Louis, again in record time. The cops in Cheyenne escorted us
out of town there with a laugh and warning: "No hitching inside the
city." We rode down to Denver and stayed overnight in a YMCA. Then
we picked up Interstate-70 for the return through Kansas City back
to St. Louis.

At the time I thought very little
about the logistics of that trip. Mainly, I felt like a failure
because we went all that way and never got laid. I was beginning to
fear we would never make it as cocksmen. But we had traveled at
least five thousand miles all together, most of that by thumb, and
lived for a month on one hundred dollars or less. We'd seen the
Pacific and the sea lions, San Francisco and the hippies, Sunset
Strip, and the Whiskey A-Go-Go. It would only be in later years
that I could come to appreciate the magnitude of the accomplishment
itself and the precious nature of those memories.