The Last Supper

    Completely absorbed in the pleasure of eating, my naivety didn’t allow the idea to enter my mind that I was on a “date”. Mario was in love… or probably just lust. But I could have cared less at that point. I didn’t even know I was leading him on… I was eating and that was good.

     Sensing my financial situation, he slipped a twenty across the table, “Take it, I think you need it." Then he smoothly tagged on an offer, "If you want to, I’ve got some more beer up in my room a few blocks away.”

     The fucker knew I thirsted for more beer and, just when I was about to say, no thanks, he added. “Don’t worry, Red, I’m not gonna hit on ya again.”

      We entered his hotel… it had a small lobby with a few easy chairs and a couple of what looked like to me to be prostitutes. They looked us over… “Hi, Mario, ya gotta hot one?”

     I truly thought they were complimenting me. You know, like they were wanting to do business with us. We were halfway up the stairs before I asked, “Mario, are those girls available?”
  
     “Oh sure; they’re available alright… if ya got two-bits.” Mario had parted with enough cash and wasn’t about to pay for them. At least, that is what I thought his rejection of the floozies' offer was about. Besides, two bits was way low, even in those days. As naive as I was, I knew what he meant by it. They were just cheap whores; far beneath his estimation of what was a good lay. Cheap or not, I was a nineteen year old horn dog and I didn't care what they were.

     We got to his room… I should say a suite. It had a living room, kitchenette, bed and bath rooms. I was surprised because I expected it to be another low-rent room from the looks of the lobby. “How much you pay for this.”

     He came back with a couple of beers, “I keep this place while I’m out at sea. It costs me plenty but I can afford it.”

    “Great place, I was looking for an art studio when I first got here but I need to get a job to pay for one now. It’s a lot more expensive than I thought.”

     “Get a card and ship out…” he sat down next to me on the couch, “I been around for a while and have some say at the hall.”

     “Sure, you can do that? Great, I’d love it.” I couldn’t believe my luck.

     Mario was elated. I told him about the doors on Grace Cathedral. We drank beer and he babbled on about the art in the Cathedrals of Italy. Dropping names like  Raphael, Michelangelo, and de Vinci  he spat and spewed about Bernini and his Medusa. Then he wept alligator tears for a young Italian boy who was his companion in Florence.

     I guessed what that relationship was about and asked, "Was the boy  your lover?" I felt pity for him but, envisioning snakes coming out of his head, I just wanted to get my coveted ass out of there. He wept some more about missing the boy and how he’d betrayed the boy’s trust by proposing they steal an unguarded painting.

     Mario's body was on a collision course with the coffee table as he staggered over and crashed onto the couch next to me, “I didn’t understand the Italians had such love for their art until the boy reacted to my idea with so much contempt."

     I pulled and wriggled away from under his arm but he acted as though this was only a minor distraction and was not deterred, "So much contempt!" he blubbered.

     He continued, exclaiming loudly, “He spit on my face!” and louder, “My face…” then calmly, “he told me I was a beast and that I had no culture…”the picking up on the volume he stood in front of me… falling on his knees, “I was a barbarian!” then he leaned towards my lap and in soft tones, as though he were taking the sacrifice to a priest, he confessed, “I acted as though I were a Vandal or Hun… you are an artiste… please forgive me.”

    He reached forward ... a strategic move to to advance on my zipper… I jumped… yes, jumped up. “What the fuck are you trying to do, Mario?”

    His face turned red… not from embarrassment but it was the red of rage. Whoever thinks of homosexuals as wimps are very mistaken. I hadn’t considered it before but I realized then that I was in great peril. He grabbed at me as I backed off and I broke away from his very strong arms. I feared escalating the struggle by punching him… it would be hard to beat this fucker… I clinched my fists in a threatening posture. Hardened by years on the decks of freighters, he would probably make easy work of my half starved body. It was a good thing I’d some nourishment… thanks to his generosity.

     “You are the artiste! I’m asking forgiveness and you want to fight me?” he protested and backed off.

     I’ve heard that, if ever you have an unexpected confrontation with a bear in the woods; you should never run but stand your ground instead and do all you can make yourself large. It worked in this case. I hit him with words instead of my fists, “I hate that word ‘artiste’, Mario … it’s so pretentious.”

     Mario sat on a stool from the kitchenette. I don’t think he’d given up yet but as desperately combing his one-track mind for another ruse. I cold almost see the gears turning. “Will you forgive me though?”
     What could I do? “Sure,” I made a priestly sign of the cross I the air I between us, “I forgive you, Mario, for all your sins…. Now I’ll go.”

     I walked out the door and down through the lobby. The girls were sill sitting there watching me exit the stairs unaccompanied. One of them chimed, “D’jou have a good time, Red?”

     “Sure,” I wasn’t sure what she meant.

     “If you ever want a date, I can give you a better time than that old queen.”

     It was then I noticed an Adam's apple and a five-o’clock shadow under the thick make-up, “No thanks… some other time.” I got the hell out of there.

    A few days later I was on Geary Street, not so far from Mario's hotel. I thought I heard some one yelling, Red!”

     I looked around and up to the windows and roofs of nearby buildings and heard it again, “Red!”
People passing stopped to see what I was staring at without asking when another clear yell came from nowhere, “Red, come back!”

     “Did you hear that?” I asked the woman gazing up next to me.

    Craning her neck skyward she asked, “Yes, its calling someone… is it you?”

     “It must be… but from where?” I wondered... scanning the windows and friezes along the rooftops

     I never did see him or find where the call was coming from… just a mystery. But I did get a kick out of how so many people stopped to find out what I was looking at thinking, what a good way to meet people in a big city... but said aloud instead, "Maybe its God calling me?"
  
She walked away spritely and never looked back.

Untethered and Alone

     Other days I enjoyed the buses. They only cost a quarter… with transfers and all the wholes city could be explored. Once I fell asleep and woke up deep inside of Fort Mason. Fort Mason was an active military base back then. Clean with tended lawns and anything that wasn’t moving was painted. Every tree and telephone pole was painted white a couple of feet up from the ground. I’d been on military bases before and wasn’t sure whether or not civilians were allowed… I felt like I was sneaking out expecting MPs to arrest me. Maybe they’d check me for a draft card… I had one but threw it away in a drunken rage. In fact, I had no I.D. at all.

     There was a time, my children, when a man could go from one end of the country to the other on buses, trains and airplanes with no I.D. at all. A Social Security Card wasn’t necessary if you knew your number when applying for a job. A draft card was required if you were of draft age or a drivers license if you drove a car. None of these were picture identification. Social Security Numbers were considered highly private and it was considered by most to be an unconstitutional invasion of privacy to put it on any other I.D.

     I walked past the guard at the gate with no hassle at all but, regardless, I never fell asleep on a bus after that. I did walk, more than once, all the way to the beach at the end of Golden Gate Park from Grant and Bush. Sometimes I’d take the bus back but other times I’d walk another route to simply check things out. It wasn’t exactly a trek but it was arduous enough. I loved Golden Gate Park… the Botanical Gardens… the two windmills down at the end of the park. And there the remnants of old and decaying Coney Island style amusement booths and fading attractions that still held off the march of time a few acres along that stretch of the beach. And, up on a point above those, I watched skaters in a magical arena at the Cliff House from an arcade that skirted the rink.

The beach was a wild rolling breakers and broad sand place where one could walk alone and untethered by people at all. Alone I sometimes spotted another soul on the beach… a young woman here or old man there. And sometimes I wanted to go up to the young women that passed and strike up a conversation in order to break up my isolation. I never did. The lonesomeness of it became heavy but I had no nerve.

     Indeed, I was alone but I wandered and wondered to places like the de Young. The museum was a San Francisco, and almost neglected, icon then that was free to anyone. I sat inside and sketched before an El Greco oil (Saint Francis knelt before a crucifix). The painting’s subject moved me as much as the brushstrokes and paint… the paint applied, dark and moody, like I’d never imagined paint to cover a canvass… oh, if ever I could! Free to come and go as I pleased and never an entrance fee. Oh, those were the days when public meant public… all the public… poor starving artists and wealthy socialites alike. So much has been lost… so little gained since the early sixties.

     People are so used to being gouged now. They get taxed and they surrender control to philanthropic enterprises that gouge them some more. The entrance fees, even parking fees at beaches and the special fees for exhibitions, are the norm everywhere and folks are used to being herded through in groups and looked at suspiciously by security if anyone ventures to stray at all. It wasn’t that way back then… the old curmudgeon in me says… it was an easy atmosphere one could enter and leave at will and feel as though we had just visited a dear friend and not as though I had been subjected to an art enterprise factory tour: post cards available in the gift shop.

     I don’t know how I spent it all but I was down to very little money before long. I bought paint and canvas… discovered acrylics… didn’t like‘em much… couldn’t get them to do what oils did… scumbbled onto the canvas… flowing, smearing across and over dark-scapes with a translucency that allows the under-paint to show through as the veil on Scheherazade.

     After the De Young I’d wander over to the conservatory: A majestic, glassed-in Victorian garden housing a jungle of wonder. Or I would cross the street to the Music Concourse… maybe sit there and rest before the colonnade of the orchestral half-shell.  Oh, how I longed for a Venus to approach from there…. But never and never was there an orchestra. A faun-like character wandered onto the stage, opened a case, taking out a flute… a solo adventurer who cared not that no one was there but a few stragglers like me to hear his flute resonating out to us in whimsical twists and turns, tremors or slurs. I wasn’t alone then.

     There was much more to the park to discover. Hidden from view on a hill…circled like a moat near the top of the hill was Stowe Lake. Then that rose in its midst… I think it was called Strawberry Hill but I’m not sure…. I would rent a rowboat and enjoy the solitude of circling the hill on the water. A hot dog stand next to the pavilion the boats were rented from provided me with the nourishment to forge my way down the hill from there where old men with grandsons floating model sailboats… some remotely controlled, out on Spreckels Lake below the Polo Grounds. I was lonely but happy to be alone.

     Other times I’d wander down Market Street, checking out the shops and all the way to the waterfront I take a break at the piers along the Embarcadero. There was a longshoreman’s type greasy-spoon where breakfast could be had for 88 cents… three eggs, and hash brown with juice and/or coffee. There wasn’t room for tables or booths… only a counter where middle aged but sharp tongued waitresses kept coffee cups full and called everyone “Dear”. There were no tourist attractions down there then; only working piers and warehouses with cursing and shouting longshoreman. San Francisco was a port city before all the containerized shipping went to Oakland. Fisherman’s Wharf was the only tourist attraction at the end of the trolley line and everything south of there was alive with ships loading, and unloading, cargo. I wanted to adventure myself on an imaginary tramp steamer but to my disappointment, tramp steamers were a thing of the past like Melville’s whaling ships and the merchant marines had it so locked down that it was impossible to get on a crew that I knew of. Besides, I wasn’t ready yet. I still had a little money and there was more to see.

     I got down to my last dollar, a jar of peanut butter and a jar of strawberry jelly with a loaf of Wonder Bread. I made it stretch while I puzzled over what I’d do. Then my Wonder Bread was gone and the jars of peanut butter and jam had been wiped clean. I had twenty-three cents left; not even enough for a trolley or bus. I knew that the market, across on the Bush Street side, where I’d bought the peanut butter and jam had a can of sardines for thirty-five cents. How easy could it be to slip the can into my pocket and buy a pack of gum as a foil… like I didn’t just wander into the store for nothing? I held the can in my hand. The Chinese clerk watched from behind the register… I felt her eyes on my back. I put the can back and purchased a pack of gum. Now I had thirteen cents. The gum did little to sate the calls from my guts.
There weren’t very many panhandlers in those days. They stayed down on Market Street for the most part. I went down there to try my hand at it. I’d spot a likely target, perhaps a business man in a suit, and prep myself with how I would approach him plotting it ahead, “Sir, if you could spare a dime or two, I’d deeply appreciate it.”

     The target would get nearer… I went for eye contact and felt shame… I couldn’t look another man in the eye and beg. He passed with any words coming from my lips. A woman approached; She might have been a secretary… in modest heals, heels supporting a pair of gorgeous San Francisco legs, dressed neatly and proper… I put my hand out, “Please help me with any change you can, Ma’am.”

     My shame increased as she flat out said, “No.”
    
     “Please Ma’am, I’m desperate.”

     “Then get a job.”

     That was it for bumming on the street. From then on I would rather starve than beg: I prayed.

     I was sitting on a park bench in the Civic Center in the mall across from City Hall; my stomach growled for want of food; I had gone a couple of days without anything to eat at all; my belt was tightened as far as it would go; I couldn’t shop-lift; I couldn’t beg; and, I had no ideas of what to do when Mario approached and sat down at the far end of the bench from me.

     He was listening with an ear plug on his transistor radio to a Giants game. Had he not seen or recognized me?

     “Mario,” I interrupted, “Is that you?” I hadn’t spoken to anyone in days… the words croaked froggily out of my throat.

     He pulled the plug out of his ear grinning, “Hey Red,” adding, “You follow baseball?”

     “Not much,” the words came easier but there was still some hesitation. I didn’t want him to try to pick-up on me again but damn. At least I could try to bum some money from him.

     “Giants are behind the Dodgers… you think they will catch up?” putting the ear plug back in he acted as though he hadn’t heard me.

     “I haven’t followed baseball this year.” In fact, I hadn't followed baseball, football or basketball in two or three years leaving me with little to break the ice with most men... and that was just fine with me.

     “Yeh, well this is the greatest. They swept the Cards and now they got the Pirates. Pick ‘em all off until they kick some major butt on the Dodgers… got a shot at the Pennant!”

     “Just had a birthday the other day,” I muttered, hoping to steer the topic towards my demise.

     “Hey, I’m hungry… you want to eat?” he took the plug out of his ear.

     It was as though the sky had opened… a Cecil B, De Mille moment, “Sure, but I’m busted.”

     “Don’t worry. You like Chinese?” he was already grabbing me by the elbow, “C’mon, I know this place not too far from here where some of the Giants… even Willie Mays, have lunch when they are in town.”

     “Sure, sounds good to me.”

    The restaurant was crowded. I only knew Chinese food from the almost fast-food joints in Spokane. There was always take-out chow-mien or sweet and sour pork ribs in those places but, all the time I’d been living right next to China Town I’d never sat down for a real Chinese meal. The trays that passed out table, carried by a little man in a starched white shirt, were stacked with plates of food piled high with several servings of this or that wok-fried or otherwise cooked concoction.

     I ordered mu-goo-gai-pan because I liked the sound of it. Mario ordered a combination. I’d heard about starving people having a hard time holding down their first meal so I resisted the temptation to dive into my plate. I savored every bite and Mario ordered beer for us. I wasn’t checked for I.D. which made me feel as though I was entirely an adult.

    “What’s the matter,” Mario curiously queried, “You don’t like the food.”

    “No, I love it, Mario…” I didn’t want to let him know I hadn’t eaten anything but a few slices of white bread and peanut butter the past week. “I’m just enjoying each bite,” like I was a connoisseur.

    “Have another beer,” Mario seemed pleased.

    Completely absorbed in the pleasure of eating my naivety didn’t allow the idea to enter my mind that I was on a “date”. Mario was in love… or probably just lust. But I could have cared less at that point. I was eating and that was good.

    “If you want to, I’ve got some more beer up in my room a few blocks away."

Dreams of Fortuna

      Ahh, San Francisco! I was in my first city. I do mean “in” because I was in it. My heart went right into it as I walked through the old terminal on Seventh Street. I went first to the post office to send a few post cards I bought in the Post House… wish you were here notes… One with a typical picture of a trolley to Linda; I don’t know why. I didn’t even have a return address yet but I wrote a short bit beyond “wish you were here…” something about the ride of my life.

      Market Street, before construction of B.A.R.T tore it up in the sixties, had mom-n-pop shops and soap-box barkers for any cause…socialism… poetry… babbled curses… preaching doom and preaching salvation. It had a gritty wholesomeness about it. Craning my neck like the yokel I was, I looked up at the Bank of America building…. It was magic and I was alone and answering to no one. I could go wherever I wanted.

      I went first to a seedy South of Market hotel… Sign outside said it was five bucks a night… I went through the lobby where a couple of old winos sat on threadbare chairs arguing over the noise and static of the ballgame on a the smallest screen of a TV I’d seen since the early fifties. It was about The Giants and whether Willie Mays would hit 500 that year. The clerk put down his porn mag… Lusty Ladies…and snarled at the interruption… “Shut the fuck up you two, I have a gentleman here!”

     I had my harvest money in a wad I carried in my front pocket… it was mostly fifties and hundreds… I put a fifty on the counter through the window of the cage. The clerk’s eyes squinted as he picked it up. He leaned as close as he could and signaled with his forefinger for me to lean in too.

     He spoke in a muted… quieter than a whispered tone, “Boy, you got anything smaller?”

     “Naw, that’s the smallest I have.” I spoke loud enough for anyone to hear if it weren’t for the excitement of the announcer on the TV as Wills smashed another one over the wall at Candelstick Park.
“Damn… ya gotta watch it with a wad like that. Hide it in your room.” He shelled out the change for the fifty from a locked drawer. Three tens, three fives and five ones… “Three bucks more and y’kin have a bath and TV in your room.”

     I thought about it, “No thanks… temporary… just checking in a few days while I look for an artist studio… a permanent place…. Know what I mean?” I wanted to impress him… this keeper of the gate… this skid-row desk clerk. I wanted him to know that I was an artist… the next great artist… you’ll hear all about me and see my face on the cover of Time like Andy Warhol. I paid three days in advance without even taking a peak at my room.

    He looked disappointed but slipped me a key, “Take the lift to the sixth floor and the third room on the left from the end. It’s the furthest from the elevator I got right now.”

     I wondered if that contraption for an elevator would make so much noise until I got on it. The elevator was a cage with accordion gates that I pulled open to an ancient platform that had to be as old as Otis was by then himself. It groaned and rattled my weary two-day-bus-trip body up to the sixth floor where I made my way down the musty hall over a worn-to-the-floor carpet to my room. I slipped the key into the lock on the door that showed evidence of being kicked in and repaired several times in its day. I sat down on the creaky bed and lumpy mattress in the tiny room big enough for the bed, a dresser, a corner sink and closet. The hotel rules were posted on the door where an upper case anarchist “A” in a circle in red was inscribed on it above a declaration… a proclamation… a shortest of all manifestos…“Rules are made to be Broken!”

     I was tired and just wanted to take a nap. I lay there on the bed and watched a cockroach wander over and around and behind a peeled-back sheet of paint on the wall. The roach came out later with a couple more buddies. I wonder where they would go and how many more would show themselves before I drifted off to sleep. I did finally dozed off for about an hour and got up to see the view... I pulled the blinds on the window to the vista of a brick wall less than ten feet away. I had to lean out the window to see the street at one end and a wall with little windows on each floor where the community toilets and showers were. The building went up about four more floors to a line of pigeons posted along the frieze. Down in the causeway between buildings was carpeted with debris, broken bottles and possibly the shadows of broken men curled up under cardboard blankets even though it was mid day.

     I sighed but there was no time for grief. After all, I had a city to explore. Hoofing it down Market all the way to the Ferry Landing with its huge clock: taking the street skirting the wharfs and busy port down all the way to Fisherman’s Wharf: catching the trolley for twenty-five cents over the hill and to the top where I got off and sat in Huntington Square facing Grace Cathedral. The college boy’s words, “Once a Catholic, always a Catholic…” drew me to the doors. I stopped… they were fantastic reliefs. Who did them? Is anyone that good in San Francisco? I stood for well over an hour before I even wanted to move or think about anything but the contours and illusion of perspective in bronze before I’d pulled out my sketch book.
     I went inside. It was the first cathedral I’d ever been in. It was sparer than I would have expected from a Catholic cathedral. It had some rather austere and drab churchy murals but other than that the Gothic grace of the architecture saved. I hadn’t even thought of it being Episcopalian… one of the volunteer docents in the gift shop explained the difference to me. I don’t even think I knew that there would be any difference. I just knew that Episcopalian priests were allowed to marry and I found out that Bishop Pike had his chair there before he disappeared in a psychedelic mystic haze in some desert somewhere. I had no idea what a psychedelic haze was but I knew from newspaper accounts about Bishop Pike. Most importantly, she told me that these doors where by Ghiberti and where originally created during the Renaissance for the baptistery at the Cathedral in Florence. They were taken down during the War to protect them from bombing and one casting was done just in case the worst happened. Grace church was able to finagle the only copy made… “Whew;” I said to the woman behind the counter, “they must have had some real financial clout!” and I bought a set of post-cards with pictures of the doors.

     I had money in my pockets and dreams of grandeur in my heart. I was free to go anywhere and do anything I put my mind to. I found a hotel at the corner of Grant and Bush, The Saint Charles Hotel. It had no lobby… just up a brief set of stairs from the Bush Street side to a landing where behind a counter a friendly… kindly looking, man in his sixties awaited anyone coming or going. He showed me a room on the third floor with a window facing Grant Street. The room was only slightly larger than the one had in the Tenderloin below and on the bad side of Market. This one was clean and the bed wasn’t so bad… a picture of a sailing ship was on the wall across from my bed where I could lay in bed and imagine Jack London adventures aboard it. I paid a month advance on the room and left the room below Market with two days left on the rent… no refunds… and lugged my trunk down Market and up Grant to the Saint Charles across from the entrance to China Town at Bush Street. From there I was sure to get a studio where I could paint my way into becoming the next Van Gogh… dreaming dreams and writing poetry to be sure to be published by City Lights. I could envision myself with bohemian women on each arm, with fame and fortune as constant companions. I had no idea how far a few hundred dollars would be stretched at the time and I had no idea what it would take to be any kind of artist without pedigree or training in art academies… some kind of sponsorship or grants… there or anywhere.

     After taking the room and settling in, I cruised around town on the buses and trolleys. I walked through China Town… there was no fancy gate at the entrance in those days… there was a regular greasy spoon diner on the corner next to a crammed to the rafters mini-market on Bush. My senses were treated to the noise… the wonder-woks stir-fried-concoctions-sweet-odors as foreign to me as the people I was in the midst of. Shops with chickens hanging stripped of their feathers…. vegetables and fruit stands… delivery trucks unloading right in the middle of the street… no one honking… streets empty of gawkers and tourists… secret places… gardens behind gates … and down from Grant I sat down in a park named Saint Mary’s Square because of a modest but uncharacteristic Catholic church on the corner. I watched old and middle-aged Chinese men and women going through slo-mo exercises that I would later come to know as Tai Chi. I watched and wondered of the ancient traditions… the civilization these people came from. How did they get here? I was watching from the sides and never tried to find out what they were doing. Whatever it was, it had to be good.

     I walked alone all day. I never left my room at night out of fear mostly… my first big city. I still remember the feeling of dread when the sun set and the city lights took over. What was magical in daylight took on the appearance of sinister corners where shadowy creatures lurked. I so isolated myself that I hardly spoke to anyone and that extended to an even more dread of the city at night.
Broadway and Grant, around the corner on Columbus Avenue, was my Mecca… I went down the stairs into the basement of the City Lights Book Store; you could sit and read all day if you wanted. I tried to sit at the bar across the alley at the Vesuvius to buy a rum and coke but was carded. I looked as young as I was… Damn… I wanted so badly to hang-out there and maybe rub shoulders with Gregory Corso or Neil Cassady. I had my first espresso at the Café Trieste where I could imagine Ginsberg and Kerouac jacked-up on coffee and bennies.

      I walked through Washington Square and on down Columbus Avenue past the thick aroma of a coffee roasting company and all the way down to Fisherman’s Wharf where I ate cracked crab with a merchant marine I met and shared Tokay on a vacant pier overlooking the bay where liners, tankers and cargo ships ghostly shrouded crossing foggily.

      The merchant marine, Mario, was an Italian from San Francisco. We walked out on the Marina Park Pier. A couple of young girls in mini-skirts and go-go boots passed… I had an, okay-Tokay, buzz going: in my best fake Liverpool accent I called out, “Hey, Hey birds!”

     They turned… my hopes soared as they giggled but got real when the cutest one flipped me off.

     “Damn, I’m horny,” I complained.

      Mario perked up and I had to block an advance while we walked out on the Marina Pier after he put his hand on my butt, “Don’t fucking do that…”

     He was unabashed and unafraid of being called queer as he brought his hand back to my shoulder, “You said you were horny.” he whispered in my ear, “Don’t be afraid, Red, I won’t hurt you.”

     “I’m sorry,” I responded by shirking and throwing his arm off my shoulder, “I just was talking about the chicks… I’m not queer.”

     “So, you just want me for booze, eh?” he acted as though he was deeply offended. “You think I’m just another fairy you can take advantage of?”

     I wasn’t pissed as much as I was puzzled “I’m not taking advantage of you, fuck off!” I now just wanted to get away… this guy was going too far. Teddy had never tried to put any moves on me and he was what he termed, “a flaming fag”.

     Mario stomped away… swerved down the pier bumping into the side… grumbling undecipherable curses.

     I stayed… going out to the end of the pier where I pictured Al Capone, Mickey Cohen, Machinegun Kelly and the Birdman in shackles being loaded on a launch to be taken to Alcatraz from there. I’m not sure where they would have been loaded on a boat but it suited my imagination. The island sat out there unguarded and uninhabited… a ghost of the past… it had been closed and shuttered up two years previously.

The Siskiyou Trail

In those days smoking was allowed in the back of the bus. I lit one up and waited for the bus to move… the driver ambled down the aisle checking our tickets and counting heads in case someone snuck aboard. I was antsy… “Come on… lets get goin’”, I grumbled beneath my breath thinking no one would hear me.

The driver eyed me up and down to check-out what kind of smart-ass he’d be dealing with before he spoke, “Don’t worry boy, we’ll get there when we get there.”

Something about his tone was soothing and I relaxed…. opened up a book I’d stolen from my high school library… It was Shakespeare, The merchant of Venice. I still have it. Maybe one day I’ll go to one of those reunions I get invitations to and throw away… at first it was the fifth years… then ten… fifteen… then twenty… what has it been now? … forty-seven… oh-oh, fifty is coming up in a few years. Okay, maybe then I’ll return it.

We transferred to Continental Trailways in Portland. Had to wait a while before that happened so I explored the skid row area down by the Union Station to score a pint. Being underage didn’t make that too much a problem. We boarded and the bus rolled off in what must have been early evening. There was no smoking on the busses in Oregon… they were ahead of the curve on that one. Nighttime turned the windows into mirrors so I had a chance to read and doze off.

The I-5 hadn’t been completed yet and Rte 99 wound its way through downtown streets of small towns and the larger cities of Salem and … stopping every now and then to load up and debark. Taking a bus through these towns in the middle of the night… picking up an occasional passenger standing there waiting… me, nodding off and awaking at each stop… hoping no one would take the seat next to me as I had spread out… spayed over the two seats… it made the ride all the more adventurous. I remembered from what I knew of history that this route was as old as the West. It was called the Siskiyou trail by the trappers of the Hudson Bay Company… then the Forty-Niners… and the General Sutter… and then the erasure of the people who had greeted them all … the genocide I barely knew of. But I imagined the ghosts of the aboriginal people standing by and watching us pass through the homeland lost long ago in the dark of night. I could hardly sleep but eventually dozed off and didn’t wake up until we rolled over Siskiyou Summit down past Yreka, approaching the sunrise that backlit Mount Shasta in the East.

We pulled into Weed California where a Greyhound awaited us to change buses at a tiny store that served as a bus station, post office and local hangout. A young woman boarded there… she came straight towards my seat. I made room for her … having a good looking girl as a companion on the trip added to the experience. She asked for the window seat and I gladly obliged.

She lit up the butt of a cigar wetter than that Grease Monkey’s back in Washington saying, “I need something to suck on.” The sign overhead the seats commanded: No Cigars or Pipes!  Okay, I thought, she doesn’t care so why should I?

The driver climbed up into his seat, smelling the cigar, shouted back… “Whoever it is that is smoking a cigar better put it out, Lady.”

“Okay… okay already… I’m putting it out!” she snorted…

Snubbing the butt, wrapping it in a piece of Saran Wrap torn from a sandwich she tucked it into a crocheted multi colored kaleidoscope of yarn bag packed with sandwiches smashed between books. She was also wearing equally kaleidoscopic knee socks, surplus Army jungle boots, and hiking shorts. I was staring at the flesh between the knee socks and shorts when she asked, “You got a smoke?”

“Yeh, sure…” I lit it and passed it to her like they do in old movies.

“I’m Wildfire. Where you headed?” she reached over to shake hands.

“Max…” I hoped she would be going all the way with me. “San Francisco.”

“Me too… Red, actually Berzerkeley. You ever been there?” the way she said Red sealed the deal. I would be called Red instead of Max.

“Berkeley? Naw…” I wanted to say I had but she looked like the kind of person that would know I was bullshitting. “San Francisco.”

“You’ll love it… what you got there?” she grabbed the Shakespeare off my lap… “Ohhh, you are a classics guy, eh?”

“I have only read a few,” I wanted to impress her but I pulled back, “Mac Beth, King Lear… Julius Caesar… the regular high school stuff.”

She took out of her bag an illustrated copy of William Blake and plopped it on her lap… “You ever read Howl?”

“I’ve heard of it… but no,” I said as my eyes pleasured on the illustrations draped across her lap.

“Awwww, you gotta read Blake first anyway.” There was something impish about her when she added… “drop acid and then read Blake.”

“Drop? Acid?...” I wondered what kind of lunatic was sitting next to me, “What’s that?”

“Ohhh, you gotta try it. Your eyes will open up to Blake’s vision and then your mind will follow into the doors of perception… dig it?”

“What is it?” I puzzled. It was 1965 and I only knew of a handful of Airforce servicemen and old beats who smoked pot back at the Red Lion.

“Lysergic Acid Diethylamide: when you get to San Francisco you will run into some pretty hip people and all you gotta do is ask one of them… you’ll find out.”

The words came out delicious as she gave the name of the acid. She didn’t mention anything about it from there on. We talked on and off relaxed the rest of the trip the way folks do on buses… or did on buses before I-pod, I-pads, Kindle, laptops and dother alienation walls of technology were invented. She had grown up in southern Idaho as a Basque sheep rancher’s daughter; then the family picked and moved to another ranch in Rio Vista as a teen. I didn’t know what a Basque was so she told me all about her father fleeing Spain under Franco and settling near Boise. They had absolutely nothing but the community pulled together and he met a nice Basque lady to marry. She was born there. There was more to history than I’d ever heard about in high school for sure.

I didn’t think I had much interesting to say about myself but she listened regardless. I chattered on about Linda and how much I loved her and how painful our last meeting was. I had a friendly ear for all that was bottled up and let it fizz like she’d opened champagne as a told her of my ambition to be a painter; to be with like minds; to see San Francisco for myself; to go to sea and so on. I felt as though I had been a mediocre sized frog in a small pond compared to her but she asked questions and listened to me tell of the hills around Spokane Valley and the lakes, Priest Lake Idaho and all that.

We rolled past a panorama of Shasta that I’d seen before my bus approached Weed. It was somewhat disappointing to me because I was used to the drama of the Cascades and the Rocky Mountains. Shasta stood alone in a semi-barren landscape of not so ancient lava flows. But, after Weed, exciting glimpses of it passed from one side or the other as the bus then took us down and away towards Redding on the curly road that wound through the wild shanks of mountains and tunnels of pine.

From Redding on, to step off the bus to stretch our legs, we were met with blast furnace winds outside the air-conditioning of the bus. Rolling along a flat straight line all the way through until we turned and went over the bump past Davis, Vacaville towards Vallejo, it was fiercely hot. The sun was setting in the West as the road hugged the mudflats of the bay all the way to the Oakland Terminal. “I get off at Oakland, Red.”

“Do you have a number I can call,” I asked as she stretched to take down her back from the luggage rack above, “maybe we can get together?”

“This here’s my favorite book,” she took a small black leather-bound book from her bag.
“What’s it, a bible?” 

“Sort of, it’s Keats.” She opened it up and said, “Everyone has heard of the Ode to a Grecian Urn but this has Lamia.”

I recited from memory the last stanza of the ode to impress her:
“When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayest,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

“Oh, you know Keats after all.” She smiled.

“Just the last Stanza,” I admitted thinking humility best to impress. I then flipped
it open randomly and read a line,

 “There she stood about a young bird's flutter from a wood, fair, on a sloping green of mossy tread, by a clear pool, wherein she passioned to see herself escap'd from so sore ills, while her robes flaunted with the daffodils.”

“Interesting, what’s it about?”

“You read well. It is about a goddess, a nymph really, took human form to suffer love.” She lifted her eyes to meet mine, “Maybe you are a Satyr that had taken human form to suffer love? We are, after all, spiritual beings having a human experience.”

“Thanks. I played Puck once in high school English lit class… a scene from Midsummer’s Night Dream” I wondered if she’d like the Shakespeare. I had to give her something in return… an informal potlatch, “Can I give you this?”

“No, you keep it. Where I’m goin’ I have to travel light. I’d have given you the Blake too but I promised it to someone else.” The air-enveloped-sadness about that last bit tweaked-a-curiousness as she reached up to take down her bag.

“Good-bye… say, you didn’t give me a number!” I hollered as she strode down the aisle purposely.

She turned and waved. I never saw her again. I read in the Chronicle about a young woman leaping off the Golden Gate Bridge. I wondered whether or not that was what she meant. You never know… the finality of those last words… it might not have been her. Naw, she most likely would have chosen to go off the Oakland Bay Bridge….eh?

The End of Harvest

To San Francisco

Curly knew his workers would split towards the end of the harvest and the hottest days of July towards August. His custom was to give anyone who stayed on to the end a bonus of 500 bucks. 500 bucks in 1965 terms was a fortune to any eighteen year old so all of our group stayed on except for the college boys and a few others. That means we were short-handed.

At the start of the last week I had a fever… I came down with a bug of some sort… There was no calling in sick. Damn, I had the day shift too. My fever had to be over a hundred-three and so was the temp out in the fields. I was so weak I could hardly pull myself into the cab. Curly pulled up in his dust caked El Camino as I was starting… Ah-ha, I thought, I could ask him for the day off.

Curly just grinned, "Buck it up kid… the harvest doesn't wait until we feel like working." And he drove away. My first real job! There I was with a fever of 103… while the temperatures rose to equal that by noon. Since we were but a skeleton crew some of us had to fill-in on some extra shifts. After twelve hours Curly showed up to tell me there was no one to replace me but he’d try his damnedest to get someone. I knew that he knew there was no-one to replace me. I begged him, "Just let me off a few hours."

I hoped to get the fuck off of those damned cursed fields and scrub the dust from my sweating pores... I'd jump on the next Greyhound out of Dayton and never look back!

Curly just grinned a dusty Palouse Country grin that beamed through the terrain carved on his face from years in the sun in the fields, “Welcome to the harvest boy… you get through this and you’ll have a shot at bein’ a man.”

So weak I could barely shift or steer… I climbed back into the dust-crust of a cab as though it was the last hundred feet to the summit of Everest. I worked through on that challenge, in a damned if I will or damned if I won't give up hell... thirty-six hours straight... while hallucinating phantoms in the fields at night and sweltered in the heat of the noon day sun ‘til my fever broke during the last hours that followed. To look back on it now I know that this was exactly where… the very day... that I passed the test. I was from that day on, a man… a man of my word. I stayed in that cab because I told Curly I would and that was that. I never got a pat on my back from Curly but I had hit on something that would stick and I could look any man in the eyes after that and stand on equal grounds.

Curly treated us to a steak dinner after harvest was over at the only restaurant/steakhouse in town. I held my bonus check in my hands as though it was a prize of war. We were hosted as though we were honored veterans of the harvest... and we were! I had never had that much money before then plus I had the money from the last two weeks of work. We were paid well; $2 and hour for seven days a week…. The Braceros got minimum wage… $1.25 per hour. One day off between that hell of a thirty-six hours and one more shift came to 168 hours in two weeks… $336 before taxes.

Myron, Chuck and I planned to leave for Tacoma after one last bash. That bash ended with Chuck having a seizure. I’d never seen anyone have a seizure before. We tried to hold him down to no avail… it was wild… Chuck was strong and lithe… there would have been no holding him down under normal conditions. Someone trying to sound like he knew what he was talking about, said, “Put something in his mouth so he won’t swallow his tongue!” Thank God, no one had the strength to pry his mouth open. Hell, when I think of it, putting a stick in his mouth would seem to be worse than swallowing one’s tongue if it were at all possible to do so at all. We had the excitement of an ambulance coming to our place but, by the time they’d gotten to us, Chuck had already ridden out his tremors and wanted nothing to do with hospitals. That was just as good for us because no one wanted to stay in Dayton one day longer.

Myron was able to get his radiator replaced on the Ford and drove through and across the State through Snoqualmie Pass in the Cascades where we found a poker game in the back of a gas station. We’d originally pulled up for gas. The lights were on but no one came to the pumps. Chuck filled up the car and went inside to see if anyone was there at all. He heard the chips hitting the table in a shack in back. It was after midnight. He was invited in to sit out a few hands. We sat in the car waiting for him to come back.

Myron checked his watch and muttered, “What the fuck… he’s been gone too long to pay up.”

“What do you think happened to him?” It was a bit horror film nervous…

Chuck finally came out just as Myron opened his door. “Hey c’mon back here… there’s beers and a poker game….”

I was suspicious… “What is goin’ on Chuck?”

“Just take in no more than twenty bucks…. You’ll be okay.”

We sat at the table with two grease monkeys and some guy in a suite and tie that looked like he came out of the shadows of the room lit by one bare bulb from a dark Humphrey Bogart movie.
Grease monkey #1 was dealing. The cards were as greasy as his hands. Damned if you couldn’t read them after ten minutes. “Sit down boy, it is just a friendly game.”

Humphrey added, “Yeah, we play nickel Annie here.”

Five card stud. In those days I don’t remember a poker game with all the variations the boys have now. It was five car draw and five cards stud. The most complicated it got was seven card stud. If you were to call anything else you were looked at sideways like you’d suggested Old Maid. Everyone would sit out your deal until you came around to their way of thinking. Anything like Texas No See-um would have given rise to a hoot… a call for a new sexual identity… if you know what I mean.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that these guys were just curious about who we were and had no designs to take us for a ride. Grease Monkey #2 sucked on the wettest butt of a cigar I have ever seen, “You boys comin’ from Yakima?”

“Naw, Dayton…” Chuck offered, throwing down three cards. "I'll draw three to an inside straight"

“Jazz here is the Sheriff,” he smirked past that soggy butt, “Ya’ll be tellin’ the truth now.”

Humphrey threw down his cards, “I fold. ‘Sides, I’m off duty now. You boys are at a poker table, you can lie all you want to here.”

Myron won some… enough to pay for the tank of gas, Chuck broke even and I lost about twenty bucks but it was one of those adventures on the road that is still sweet for the memory of being damned near adult. Drinking beer out of cans opened with a church key… swapping stories about our plans and the harvest… the sun came up and we drove away red-eyed but glad to be back on the road.

Chuck was meeting Beth, another one of his and Myron’s cousins, in Tacoma. She was six months pregnant with Chuck’s baby and was leaving her abusive husband for Chuck. Kissin’ cousins for sure… they were the Romeo and Juliet of the family as Chuck was a home wrecker and they were.... well, they were. The reason we were going to Tacoma is that they had a Notary Public friend there that would marry them even though they were cousins. Some had no idea of what inbreeding was all about but Chuck and Beth were in love... what the hell. We all stood before the desk of their friend’s Real Estate office… I was a witness standing next to the Notary Public’s wife who was the second witness… Myron was best man who slipped a gold wedding band to Chuck but a few minutes before and a sweet set of “I dos” were exchanged.

This happy wedding group all crammed into the Ford and Myron drove me to the Greyhound station. I got on the bus with no more that a small trunk and about eight hundred bucks in cash or traveler’s checks. I looked out at the pals I’d spent most of the last couple of months with and felt a lump rise in my throat. I was finally alone with absolutely no one to answer to. I can’t explain how liberating that feeling was but I knew it was over with this set of pals and that I was on my own. I figured that if I was ever to write a book about my adventures from that day on aboard the Greyhound bus, choking back the tears…, I would title it “Alone”.

Love Deferred

So much of my experience in Dayton has been blurred by that damned eraser of time. The first weeks previously described are akin to retrieving details of a dream and making sense of the images, people, names and the order of sequences. We made friends among the other workers… all of us were young and launching out on our first adventures away from the restrictions of our homes. Sketchy experiences recalled here can in no manner reflect all that went on in Dayton. I am sure, however, we played as hard as we worked.
    Some of my memories are only of the absurd situations I got into. We drank a lot of beer. I once had a case of beer all to myself. I decided to drink as much of that case as I could just to see how drunk I could get. It wasn't simply to get drunk… it wanted to experience how drunk I could get. But I didn't experience it because I wasn't there for it. I passed out and woke up, feeling as though I had been gypped.
    I once tried to talk philosophy with one of the college boys from the basement when we had been drinking beer. I confessed that I was once a Catholic… asserting my agnosticism or even atheism. This guy was a divinity student and would surely have a good take on what I was saying. I was dismayed at his response when he snidely remarked, "Once you are a Catholic, you are always a Catholic."
    "That can't be, what of free choice?" I tried not to sound smart and not slur.
    "By the time you reach the age of reason they have already indoctrinated you and there is no way that you can ever change that. Don't talk to me about atheism. You are a Catholic atheist… and, if you ask me, they are the second worst ones." He seemed to be trying to not only dismiss me but chiefly to get away from this conversation with an untrained, in philosophy and undisciplined, thinker.
    "The second worst ones?" I wasn't about to allow him to get away, so I asked, "Which atheists are the worst?"
    "Russian Orthodox… right after Catholics are the Zionist atheists…"
    I'd never heard anyone say these kinds of things. I was thrilled… a real discussion!
    "Think about it," he continued in a sneer, "Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin… One or the other… you're all the problem."
    "You… you mean you too when you say all of us?"
    "No, I am a Quaker." He walked back into his room, before he closed the door he added, "We don't have our minds infiltrated with authoritarian bullshit like you do."
    I hoped we would engage in an intelligent conversation like we did with the undergrads from Gonzaga at the Red Lion. After all, this guy was in college and I thought everyone in college would have to be both rich and intelligent... but we would not College was a place at that time, I believed, to be out of reach for me. My best hopes were for a sports scholarship, trade school, to go to work at a union job where my father worked at Kaisers, or to go into the military. My grades certainly came nowhere near good enough to get into a university. I’d dropped out of track and field so there was no hope for a scholarship there. Even though I had an abhorrent distaste for everything religious, I resented this man's anti-Catholic bias because he directed this bias at me personally: like I had no choice in it regardless. It was the mark of Cain embedded in my soul by the priests and nuns and that there was no hope for me to be anything… atheist or not just because my foundation is Catholic. I don't think we had more than two words beyond hello and good-bye after that.

    The rest of my experience in Dayton was about working twelve hours a day and mostly getting drunk. We made friends with other white kids from god knows where. One, Teddy, was from somewhere in Florida… a rich, flaming, out of the closet, homosexual... who’d driven a magenta, convertible, Dodge Dart all the way to Dayton. I have no idea why or how he’d chosen, of all places, Dayton to work in the fields. It was my first contact with what would become to be called Gay. He was witty, effeminate, smart, and kind soul that I could hardly help but like.
    I was still so very much in love with Linda that I took a break from the harvest after she called me to come up north for a weekend of love-making. Teddy actually took time off to drive me up there to meet with her. Like I said, the guy was a great soul. It was going to be the last time I would be intimate with Linda but I didn’t know it then. We had sex but we didn’t make love. She splayed out on the edge of her parent’s bed the first time and I pounded out an ejaculation… I might as well had been masturbating but we made it a couple more times... there was no more thrill of the romance… no poetry… not much conversation.
    “I’ve been accepted at San Francisco Art Institute.” She said, as we sat at the kitchen table where I’d learned to make German Pancakes that magical morning before this adventure... my first adventure... in love had begun.
    “I’m planning to go there after the pea harvest.” I said and sensed… was it an expression? I could feel by my con-man antennae that she wasn’t all that excited about my plans so I added, “It is either there or New York.”
    “Breaking away from Spokane… Both of us.” She was unexpectedly gentle as she smiled kindly adding, “I want to be in new territory… with new friends and new lovers.”
    “Does that mean you won’t want to be seeing me there?”
    “Oh, Max, my favorite jock artist… it is a big world out there that neither of us knows… Isn’t it better to explore it alone?”

A Real Job

Myron and Chuck had worked for Curly a few summers before and knew all the ropes but this was all new to me. I will never forget my first day driving the spreader trucks. They were old International Harvesters. The gears had to be double-clutched. I had no real idea of what double clutching involved. I did know how to drive a stick-shift… synchromesh was the norm for autos in the fifties but these were farm trucks and farm equipment was kept running back then until they rust into obsolescence. Nothing was air-conditioned… tractors, trucks or combines… none of these had any of the conveniences taken for granted. If it couldn't be kept running with a grease gun and set of wrenches… well, I babble.

The first thing Curly did once I got there was to show me how to use the grease gun… grease every nipple under the truck before each shift… check the fluids… radiator and brake fluid.
"You ever use a five gear-shift?" he asked.
"Ya, sure."
"Do you know how to double-clutch?"
"Ya, sure."
"Okay, take a left when you get to the highway and about a half-mile you'll see the break in the fence. Follow the tracks till you get to the hoppers. Chuck will show you the rest from there."
"Ya, sure."

That was all my training so far. I climbed up behind the wheel and got it going in first gear… got it away and over a hill and outa sight from Curly. Okay, I had to shift into second gear now. I pushed in the clutch peddle twice but the grinding of the gears didn't allow me to put it in second gear. "Damn, why didn't I tell him the fuckin' truth…?"

I tried shifting out of first again and again before I got to the highway. Shit, I drove all the way to the hoppers in first gear. Myron slowed and waited for me to catch up then drove his rig... tore up the impossibly steep grade. The dusty ruts wound their way up that steep hill… I mean steep hill. First gear was good for that. Damned hill was straight up! Then, once at the top, the ruts skirted the un-harvested field on a precipice so steep I feared I would be tumbling down it if I made the slightest miscalculation. When we finally got to the hoppers Myron asked, "You fuck, where were you? You must've been crawling… what's the matter?" 

"Damned thing… I couldn't get it in second gear!"
Myron laughed at my embarrassment, "Get in my truck… I gotta show you how we run these spreaders anyhow." I was as excited much as I was embarrassed. This was a real job… a real truck… I watched carefully and listened as Myron showed me how to rev the engine in sync with the transmission. When we got to a part of the field that was level… "Here is where we do what we do. Pull this lever to engage the spreader… keep an eye on the tachometer… 1,500 rpm… you'll get used to it and will be able to tell by the sound of it after you make a few runs."

"How do I know when it is done? I can't see anything back there."
"You go by the feel of it too. The engine will race when the load is empty."
"Gotcha…"
"Just lay the rows down without overlapping. Keep it straight. After you do it a whole shift or two you can do it in your sleep."

We worked twelve hour shifts… in the daytime the thermometer rose to 104 degrees… nighttime was in the thirties… fearfully close to freezing 'til midsummer. We worked either from eight am to eight pm or eight pm to eight am. There was no clock to punch but if you were late for your shift you royally pissed off whoever you were relieving. We were all buddies but… Hell, I always showed up on time. And the dust… man… the dust in the fields… the soil on the tracks… it was driven over and pulverized into a fine power that got into every crevasse of one's body. How did it get into the crack of my ass? It did and other places too. After each shift I went straight to the shower… cleaned the dust out of my hair but wasn't done 'till my fingernails were clean... used the hair on my head as a fingernail brush. I wore a hat, but, for all of us regardless, our hair would be so full of dust that it couldn't be figured for whether we had blond, brown, red or black hair. We all had the same color of skin too. Brown, black or white… we were all the color of the dust…

The color of the dust and our fellow laborers was washed off after each shift in our own places and the division between us and the Hispanics was silently reasserted. In the fields we took breaks together and the only difference was us white boys ate sandwiches while the Braceros ate burritos they heated on the manifolds of their trucks… we couldn't see each other's skin color. But back in town it was another story, they stayed down by the processing plant and, I didn't see any at the drive-in either. It was an unspoken apartheid of sorts.

I loved the night shift out there on the high seas of the Palouse. Deer crossing the beams of my headlights… the sound of the engine purring as I laid down another row of hay… taking a break and laying in the pile of vines at midnight where the fermentation of only a few hours put out enough heat to warm us… talking about our dreams and futures while gazing up into the crystal clarity of the night sky… stars so near and bright that they touched the hills far away from the loom of the light glowing on the horizon from Waitsburg and Dayton. Sweet silence and solitude in spite of the noise from the machines of harvest… it transcended.

After sunrise and a full night that turned the harsh glare the sun on sore eyes the trucks were parked for the next shift near any road a car or pickup truck could be driven to. They were then greased and taken up what was usually a perilous trek through steep grades following deep rut winding round and to wherever the hoppers were planted. Those hoppers had to be towed up the same tracks too… amazing when I think back on it. No one was killed in the process.

We used Myron's car and one of us always had the opposite shift so we were usually able to get to work in one car. If not, Curly would pick us up and deliver us if we were in different fields. Once one field was done everything had to be hauled out and over to another. Occasionally a truck would break the chains holding it to a reaper and roll down into a gully… the driver… thrown out in a heap of broken bones to the side, would be rushed to a hospital and another would take his place. There were no seat belts… there was nothing but the price of paying attention or the shear luck of making it through that amounted to the best safety gear we had. The tedium of repetition… driving to the hoppers… waiting… laying in one of the heaps of fermenting hay… the fork-lift loaded the truck… driving to the spreading field… shifting int first… pulling the spreader lever… rolling along at fifteen hundred rpm… rhmmmm… maybe ten minutes?... disengaging… tearing back down and up over the deep, powder-dust, ruts to the hoppers.

I have worked hard since then on just about every kind of shit job… but driving those spreader trucks at breakneck speeds up and down and to the sides... sailing through the fields was work… hard, dirty, grimy, dusty work… It was also the unspoken commitment to each other. Once I had a fever… I'd caught a bug… There was no calling in sick. Damn, I had the day shift too. My fever had to be over a hundred and three and so was the temperature out in the fields. I was so weak I could hardly pull myself into the cab. Curly pulled up as I was starting… Ah-ha, I thought, I could ask him for the day off.

Curly just grinned, "Buck it up kid… the harvest doesn't wait until we feel like working." And he drove away.

Ahhh... My first real job!