Chapter 40: How did you rebel as a child?
Originally written September 22, 2021
Actually, despite my idiosyncrasies and my respect for nonconformity, I was not really a rebellious child.
Sure, I did some things when I was a kid, but little, if any was driven by a desire to fight authority. My mom and grandmother were fairly permissive and the relatively few rules they set down seemed consistent and for the most part reasonable.
I don’t think I was ever called to the principal’s office — except a few days before graduation when our principal “Papa Joe” Casados called me in because he didn’t like the part of my graduation speech where I urged the Class of 71 to go to prison instead of Vietnam.
But my biggest act of rebellion didn’t come until I was 19 years old and a sophomore in college. That was when I decided to drop out of college for at least a semester to go hitchhiking around the country.
To be tacky and quote one of my own songs for the second time: “I was 19 and getting restless, the whole world was in a lull / I was lonely, lost and horny, college life was getting dull …” (The first time I quoted this here was in Chapter 28.)
I’d been reading Jack Kerouac for more than a year by then and the romance of being “on the road” was calling.
Even more important, I’d gotten to know a few experienced hitchhikers and other cool drifters during the second semester of my sophomore year at the University of New Mexico.
The room I shared with my roommate Steve at the College Inn (the private, off-campus dorm I lived in during my first two years of college) had become a magnet for roadrats. One friend joked that some hitchhiker must have put an invisible Hobo’s “X” on our door.
The early-to-mid ’70s, of course, was the last gasp of the hippie era and the final days in which hitchhiking was considered an acceptable means of travel for adventurous young people.
So, by the end of that second sophomore semester, I decided not to re-enroll at UNM and to instead go hitchhiking around the country, visiting old friends, meeting new strangers and seeing new sites.
Plus, I’d made plans to stay in San Francisco with sweet Donna, this sexy rambling gal who’d crashed in the College Inn while passing through Albuquerque that year. Everyone thought this was a cool idea and promised to be an incredibly fun trip.
Everyone but my mother and especially my grandmother.
I remember writing a letter to Mom and Nana about my plans, telling them that I’d just recently realized that I’d spent 14 of my 19 years behind a desk and was dying to expand my horizons and gain real experience.
They were not impressed. Especially my grandmother.
First of all, they were scared for my safety. Although the few studies that have been on hitchhiking safety have produced no evidence that hitchhiking is any less safe than other means of travel (and indeed the only drivers that ever really scared me were the occasional drunks who’d stop for my thumb.)
But the media at the time always seemed to pick up on hitchhiking horror stories. And indeed, around the time I started my trip, where my first destination was Fort Worth, Texas to visit an old friend, there came screaming headlines about some monster down in Houston who was killing young guys he picked up hitchhiking.
This was the case of Dean Arnold Corll, who became known as “The Candy Man,” a murderous perv who, with the help of two teenage accomplices, raped and killed 29 known victims between 1970 and early August 1973.
This song by The Frogs might have been inspired by Corll:
I tried to calm my grandmother’s fears by pointing out a) I wasn’t going near Houston; b) the victims all were younger, smaller and not as ugly as me; c) Dean Corll was dead, shot to death about a month before I even left Albuquerque.
But I don’t think my impeccable logic quelled Nana’s fears.
But even more than their fear of me becoming a victim of some other psycho on some lonely backroad, was the fear that I was throwing away my education and, I guess, my life by dropping out of school.
I suppose they feared that experiencing the life of a happy wanderer, I’d never be able to return to college or the “real” world, and that I’d probably end up as some kind of hard-drinking carny running the spook-house ride or balloon-dart games in dusty carnival midways.
The truth is, my little excursion into the hobo life only lasted a few weeks — far less than the whole semester.
And by the time I knocked on the door of sexy, ramblin’ Donna on Geary Street in San Francisco, I found that she had moved away.
She’d written me a letter giving me her new address and a phone number, but I didn’t receive it until I got back from my trip. The ‘70s was a primitive era without cell phones or email.
As much as I loved being out on the road, my first great hitchhiking trip made me realize that I really did belong in school. Even though I still managed to party and have a great time, I got far more serious about school.
Being behind a desk was now a choice, not a sentence.
Two years later, when I went on my second (and, as it turned out, final) great hitchhiking, my folks raised far less of a fuss. For one thing, they knew I was coming back in time for school to start. [I discussed that trip in Chapter 1.]
So looking back now, I guess I’m a hypocrite. I’d probably freak out if in a few years one of my grandsons told me he was dropping out of school and going hitchhiking.
That’s o.k. I’ve lived long enough to indulge in a little hypocrisy.
But I’m so glad that I made that decision back in 1973, stood up for it, and learned what it’s like to hitch around the country, what it’s like to have to survive with very little money, to be a stranger alone in a city. That experience has colored my whole life.
For better or for worse, my little rebellion worked out.
Finally, here’s one for the road — a Marvin Gaye song covered by The Sonics: