Karen shyly asked, “Would you be my graduation partner?” “Yup,” I stammered, and suggested we talk over the details at the Ace Drive-In on Friday.

After my father died, my mother landed in the hospital with spinal meningitis and remained there six months. At 16, I might have disintegrated, except Eric Curtis held me together. Eric introduced me to J.D. Salinger, Miles Davis, the Psalms, and Friedrich Nietzsche. We challenged ourselves to become the supermen Nietzsche prophesied. Eric taught me how to wrestle, pushed me to lift heavier weights, inspired me to be kinder, more forgiving. Then he died. The story I heard from Kenny Niedermeyer was that a phantom drunk careened toward them as they coasted down Viejas Grade on the old highway from El Centro. The guy driving Kenny’s Volkswagen swerved too hard The VW leaped an embankment. On a ledge about 15 feet down, it flipped and rolled. Nobody except Eric flew out. Nobody else even broke a finger.

The Dark February, 1963

From the downtown San Diego library, one of Eric’s favorite hangouts, I borrowed an armful of records, old ballads and laments. In most every song, a young lover gets murdered or plunges, heartbroken, into the icy sea. I would drive straight home after school and lie on the carpet in front of the hearth listening for a couple of hours, if I had to work that night. If not, I might lie there all evening. My mom asked why I didn’t go visit friends anymore.

Still recuperating from meningitis, she hadn’t the will nor strength to nag, yet I snapped, “If you don’t want me around, say so.”

“Ken,” she offered mildly, “there’s a psychologist — I’d like you to talk to him, at least.” She bolted out of the room before I could yell at her.

The psychologist looked like Elmer Fudd with lousy posture. I got to lie on his couch smoking the Pall Malls he supplied. A Rogerian, he never made a peep until I blabbed whatever nonsense came to mind that day, which he then rephrased and fed back to me. Usually I rambled about Karen Flagstad, for whom I had longed the past three years. The way I told the story, I had overcome the deaths of my father and Eric, and my depression had no grounds besides Karen’s failure to reciprocate my devotion.

My mom counseled that depression is best countered by pursuing a goal. I chose baseball, hoping Karen would admire my prowess. I had quit baseball after my dad died, two seasons past. But the varsity catcher, a friend of mine, agreed to work out with me after school. I threw a couple of hundred pitches every day.

For my tryout, the coach put on a helmet and stepped into the batting cage. He resembled Elmer Fudd in a batting helmet. I slung a fastball at his feet.

Another high and outside. Every pitch sailed farther off the mark until with three straight pitches I missed the entire batting cage. I slung down my glove and kicked it into the dugout while walking off the field in shame.

Since Eric’s death, my closest friends were Cliff Torrey and his brother Billy. Cliff and I decided to flee. I had loaned Cliff Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, about the adventures of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty as they chased after life and God while running from the zombified existence that passed for normalcy in America. We could do likewise. Cliff had been blamed for a theft in the school locker room. Without a particle of evidence, a mean-spirited coach had expelled him from the track team. I wasn’t playing baseball, neither of us had a girlfriend, we didn’t care a damn about school. Eric was gone.

We decided to move to San Francisco. Cliff said his sister would buy his valuables. If we ran out of money up there before we found work, I could hock my car, a ’58 Ford two-door with custom wheels and vinyl tuck-and-roll upholstery that matched the sparkle-tone sky blue exterior. We would turn 18 within a few months. Nobody would bother to chase and bring us home, as long as we didn’t take Billy, who was younger and consequently had caused his parents less grief. Cliff and I felt expendable, after having troubled our families deeply. Though they might miss us, their relief would exceed their sorrow. Once we had decided to leave, there seemed no reason we couldn’t depart that very evening, arrive before dawn in San Francisco’s North Beach. For all we knew, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, even Neal Cassady might be prowling the alleys off Columbus and Broadway, sharing their wisdom and wine.

We stuffed an old suitcase full of underwear and sweaters, tossed hanging clothes, a portable stereo, and my guitar into the Ford’s trunk. On the way to Cliff's house, we stopped at La Mesa Junior High, where my mom taught eighth grade English and social studies.

She was correcting papers while the students hunched over an exam. I whispered a brief explanation, said good-bye, and promised to phone in a day or two. Rubbing her eyes and forehead, she followed me outside. The three of us sat on a patio bench, and she reasoned as though she wanted me to stay. Dropping out now would be foolish, she declared, when in a couple months we could graduate. Then we could attend college in San Francisco. She would pay my tuition, help with expenses. If we left now, we’d miss the prom and all the ceremonies. Besides, in March San Francisco was cold.

She might as well have been yodeling. Not a single argument impressed me. But on the way to his place, Cliff said, “Maybe she’s right, you know. A couple months is no big deal."

I said, “Crap. Look what’s changed in the last two months. Eric died. We barely escaped a nuclear war. By June, Kennedy might attack Cuba, and the Russians could retaliate by invading Hollywood. Bonanza could be in Russian in a couple months, and by then you might have cancer of the throat from smoking all those Camels.”

At Cliffs house, while he bartered with his sister over his stereo and drawing board, his mom sat me down in the kitchen. She was both despot and peacemaker, a witty, harried Catholic mother with seven kids. She gave me cookies, milk, and the same basic arguments my mother had used. Only from her, because she wasn’t my mother, they made sense.

So Cliff and I drove to Point Loma, to Fort Rosecrans cemetery where Eric lay. Watching the ocean, we speculated about the end of the world and concluded our musings by harmonizing on a verse of “Waltzing Matilda.” While pitching rocks off the cliff, attempting to reach the tide, we agreed to wait a couple of months, until the day after graduation.

Then we would be long gone.

Over Easter break, I picked up Crime and Punishment, which Eric had given me before he died. For the next few days, I emerged from my room only to use the toilet. My mother would poke her head in, ask if I wanted a sandwich, or remind me it was time for some television show. I scowled. I refused to take phone calls. I would read until my head pulsated, then lie back and ponder feverishly. The story is about Raskolnikov, a brilliant young man consumed by the ideas Eric and I had encountered in Nietzsche. Fie believes that certain humans can rise above the laws of God or society, and without these superior men — like Alexander, Galileo, Napoleon, Columbus — the human race would suffocate.

Raskolnikov needs money to continue his studies so he can follow his superior destiny and express profound new ideas. His beautiful sister has gotten engaged to a pompous brute, because the man agrees to support her brother’s education. Raskolnikov commands his sister to break the engagement. She refuses. To save his sister from making that sacrifice on his account, he bludgeons a cruel pawnbroker to death and steals a pile of money. But the heart can’t live with murder. For hundreds of pages Raskolnikov’s anguish and madness deepen, while Sonya, a prostitute who sacrifices her honor to support the children of her drunken father and frail stepmother, draws him toward salvation.

I agonized with Raskolnikov and fell for Sonya. A dozen times I reread her drunken father’s monologue about his dream in which God calls Sonya to Himself and pronounces, “Thy sins which are many are forgiven, for thou hast loved much.” I wrote that line on the back of a business card and kept it in my wallet until the paper decayed.

Over the next few weeks, I asked dozens of acquaintances if they felt guilty about some long-forgotten crime. I claimed my snooping was research for a school project. I asked teachers, freshmen, cheerleaders, pachucos. Some mused a while, others answered perfunctorily. Every one answered yeah or si.

Certain I was on the track of a great discovery, at last I phoned Karen Flagstad. “Tell me something, please. Do you always feel guilty, a little or a lot, about something you have no idea what it is? That’s part one. Part two is have you always felt that way?”

“No,” she said. “And no.” Stunned by the implications — the only person out of 30 who claimed to suffer no unexplainable guilt was the woman of my dreams — I sat there, breathless and dumb, until Karen shyly asked, “Would you be my graduation partner?” “Yup,” I stammered, and suggested we talk over the details at the Ace Drive-In on Friday.

“You’re inviting me to the Passion Pit?”

“Yeah, to talk and watch, um, Lilies of the Field.”

“The Ace Drive-In is showing Lilies of the Field?”

“Something like that, or we could ride the ferry to Coronado. How about dinner at the Mexican Village?”

“I have to study,” she said. Still, I took heart, dwelling on the fact that even though Karen rarely accepted my invitations, she dated anybody else just as rarely. I asked her to the prom and she agreed. For the next several weeks, I listened to upbeat jazz, ironed my shirts, swept my room, parted my hair. At last.

Karen accompanied me to a drive-in for West Side Story. When the switchblade sliced Bernardo, she wiped her eyes with her wrist. She sat at attention while Tony and Maria ran the streets calling for each other. Through the credits, she rested her head on my shoulder, and on the way home, we talked about Romeo and Juliet. We kissed goodnight. Her kiss was slow and delicate.

Karen was lovely and wise and romantic, I dreamed. We could rent a little house beside the golf course where I had walked by still waters and clobbered balls while absorbing the death of my father. There, all alone and at peace, we could pool our resources in the search for Truth and Beauty and save each other from Raskolnikov’s fate. No Siberia for Karen or me.

For prom night, Cliff and I made dinner reservations at the U.S. Grant Hotel and borrowed a convertible, a ’48 Ford, from our friend Bob Williams. But we never rolled the top down. The evening was chilly. Cliff s date Kris and Karen both wore strapless gowns and had fixed their hair up elegantly, and Karen was suffering from a cold. Every sentence anybody spoke got punctuated by a sniffle, cough, or sneeze, and all the conversation she offered in the car, through dinner, in the car again, or at the dance were polite remarks, one-line compliments on somebody’s dress, thanks for the dance.

The last dance was to “Good Night, My Love.” By then, my dismay had tweaked into resentment, and I recognized that the Karen of my dreams and the stiff in my arms were different creatures.

I suspected she would beg out of the after-prom and considered that good riddance. Only she didn’t beg out. We stopped at the apartment where she lived with her mother. While she changed, I walked to the nearby liquor store and bought a pint of Jim Beam, which I smuggled into the after-prom at University Lanes. Since Karen didn’t drink or shoot pool, we bowled with her friend Vicky. After one boring frame, I went looking for Cliff. He and I removed to the snack bar for Cokes laced with Jim Beam.

Watching Karen gabbing with her pal, when the longest phrase she had spoken to me all evening was “achoo,” I gave up on her forever. To seal the vow, I poured Cliff and myself another drink and toasted our future in San Francisco. One more lousy week and we’d leave this sorry burg to the navy and nursing homes.

From the after-prom, we drove the convertible in silence to Karen’s apartment, where she and I pecked goodnight. We delivered Cliff's date home, then picked up our friends Tom and Carol and several cases of beer we’d secured for this occasion. Soon after dawn. Cliff pointed the convertible toward Black's Beach, where a gang of us planned to convene for an after-after-prom.

Carol was a pretty, casual blonde. Tom was a big, rowdy surfer. She lay with her head on his lap, and before we reached the freeway, she was snoozing.

A mile or so later, Tom slumped forward.

We turned onto Murphy Canyon Road, a wide, two-lane shortcut through barren hills all the way to Miramar. A couple of miles north of Mission Valley, I nodded off. Judging by the distance. Cliff remained conscious about two minutes longer than I had. All four of us dozed, including the driver. There was a bank about ten feet high at an angle of 90 degrees along that stretch of Murphy Canyon Road. At any other place within five miles, when Cliff lost control, we would have run up the bank, flipped the convertible, and probably been crushed. But Cliff chose to release the wheel at a spot that let us crash broadside into a disabled Mercury.

I landed under the dashboard, my head tangled into a cluster of wires between the heater and the sidewall. Cliff yelped, “Hey, move your foot. Come on. You’re stepping on my eyes.”

After a minute of squirming, I freed my head. Tom’s fingertips, skull, and eyes appeared over the seat, rising slowly as the moon.

We got out and stood by the wreck, rubbing our sores and marveling about the luck or whatever had saved our lives. Soon the place resembled a police convention. Every cop remarked on our good fortune. The one who first discovered our trunk full of beer radioed for a juvenile detective, who came and wrote us all notices to appear in juvenile court. He delivered Carol and Tom to their homes. Cliff and me to my house, where we slept until late afternoon when the detective returned. Having located and bargained with the owner of the Mercury, he gave us a choice. Either Cliff got prosecuted for reckless driving and insurance companies sued his folks, or we agreed to pay the Mercury’s owner $200 a month for the next six months.

San Francisco looked as far away as the stars.

In June of 1963, while behind the wheel of my ’58 Ford, I chose not to share my heart anymore.

It wasn’t only grief on account of Karen that prompted my vow to evermore guard my affections. Over the past few years I had lost two grandfathers, one grandmother, a great-grandmother, two uncles, one aunt, my father, and Eric.

I started dating Liz, a beauty too self-absorbed to love but a challenge to conquer. Cliff and I landed full-time jobs at a restaurant, and all that summer I worked six days a week, a split-shift that occupied the whole day and evening. Liz would pick me up from work at 11:00 p.m. We would park somewhere, and I pursued whatever liberties she allowed.

My mom’s health and cheer were recovering. She appeared pleased with me and liberated from the deepest of her parental fears — that in a mood of drunken desperation I would high dive off Sunset Cliffs onto the rocks at low tide, or that I would fail to graduate from high school and sink until I became a hobo. She was proud that I had enrolled for fall at San Diego State University. After a year or so, she suggested, I might transfer to Pepperdine, about which she had heard good reports. She offered to mortgage our house and front the tuition. She was proud of my holding a full-time job, and she enjoyed our conversations. We talked about the Padres’ latest blunders and Vietnam. Once I even confided my vow to withhold my heart from everybody.

She said, “Well, the key is moderation. Like Kipling advised — ‘If all men count with you but none too much,’ you’re in business. If you invest in one person before you know her, like you did with Karen, then you’re going to get hurt.”

I said, “Forget Kipling. I’m not investing in anybody.”

“That’s dangerous.”

“Not as dangerous as the other option.”

On Sunday evenings, my only night off, though Liz wanted us to go out alone, I insisted we attend the dance at the community center in Spring Valley, where our friends gathered. A few sodas blended with smuggled whiskey banished my inhibitions. I danced with a variety of girls. Liz disapproved.

One Saturday she announced that her mother would leave tomorrow morning to visit her father. A month before, he had lost his job as a postal clerk in San Diego and gone to deal cards in Las Vegas. The house would be ours alone, for one night. Liz wanted to make it special, cook me dinner, and then...”

“And then what?”

She batted her eyes. “You know.”

“Oh yeah? Finally?”

“Uh huh,” she murmured sweetly.

So I had to choose between (you know) and the Spring Valley dance. When I called and told Liz we could go to the dance, then to her place, she snapped, “No! One or the other.” Agreeing to a battle of wills, I announced my decision to go to the dance; if she didn’t change her mind and decide to join me, I would come to her place afterward. The phone banged in my ear.

With its willows, cottonwoods, pickup trucks, and cowboys, Spring Valley could have passed for Texas. The band was my favorite, with brash saxophones and a trio of black girl singers, and every few minutes a fight broke loose in the parking lot. Still, I considered leaving the dance an hour early and bringing Liz a flower or something. But my friend Les spent most of the evening dancing with a chunky girl who had a sidekick named Serena, tall and lithe, my image of a country girl. The two had arrived together and weren’t going to leave except together. So Les invited me along, and I accepted, figuring that all I might get at Liz’s house was a scolding. We caught a late movie at a drive-in. Serena was friendly but didn’t want to kiss, probably because of a circumstance she failed to mention — she and Liz sat next to each other in summer school.

The next afternoon, Liz phoned and called me everything vile. I shrugged and hung up.

For weeks I heard gossip about Liz slandering me, which allowed me to feel like the noble, misunderstood outsider. If James Dean hadn’t died, he could have played me in the film, sneering all the while.

About a month after our night at the movies, Serena died in a car crash. I hardly knew her, yet once again I mourned lying beside the stereo, entranced by maudlin ballads. How, besides through stories of death and despair, could a person build immunity against sorrow, when life was so damned fragile?

Of all the girls who had loved Eric, Bobbi Murray had cherished him most shamelessly. During August, she invited me out to dinner.

Bobbi could have looked fine except she was never happy. Even while she giggled, she was a reservoir of tears. She worked hard at acting merry, but her eyes were splotched with red as though she’d gotten socked. About halfway to the Ocean Beach restaurant, she slid across the seat and snuggled against me.

The waitress at Consuelo’s might have figured nobody could be depressed who was under 21 years. She didn’t ask for ID. Over margaritas and tamales, we exchanged Eric stories. I told Bobbi about our camping trips, our weekend runs to San Francisco, and about a night in Beverly Hills, when we had roamed the Hilton and found ourselves accompanied by an elegant woman who held on to Eric as though he were Christ. We didn’t realize she was a hooker until the security guard who chased her out told us so. Bobbi talked about how deep and winsome had been Eric’s eyes.

We stopped at a liquor store, then drove to the beach near the lifeguard tower, across the road from the cottage where Eric had lived most of his first nine years. We strolled up Newport past the bait shop, dime store, and cafe, dodging the baby buggies pushed by navy wives. We bought a lime in the grocery store my aunt’s first husband had owned until he shot his girlfriend’s husband. I told Bobbi about him while we sat in an alley sipping tequila. She praised my storytelling.

Back at the beach, watching the phosphorescent breakers, as the melodrama of youth blended with the melodrama provoked by tequila, Bobbi and I comforted each other with hugs and kisses, and finally she offered a solution to our misery. She had $30. I had a car. With that, we could drive to Yuma, across the state line where you could marry in two hours. Since we might have to suffer 60 more years breathing life’s pestilent vapors, we both deserved a companion who understood that justice was a gag, truth a shadow, and beauty the pea in a shell game.

“Might as well,” I slurred.

We left Ocean Beach planning to stop at each of our homes to pack toiletries and lots of clothes, in case we decided to straight away move to Vermont or Tibet. With my vision blurred and my mind crippled, I missed a familiar turnoff, then navigated at random until we got lost, weaving down residential streets in a subdivision of shoe-box homes with converted . garages, probably in Clairemont. I needed to pee. I pulled in behind a shiny car, staggered around my Ford, leaned on the curbside rear fender, unzipped, and let go. Somebody yelled out a window. I hustled back to the driver’s seat, fired up the V-8, gunned it, and smashed into the shiny car.

“Oh God! Oh God!” Bobbi giggled.

I backed up, cranked the wheel, and fled. We zoomed through the neighborhoods. By combining our intellects, we found Highway 80. All the way home, while I kept one eye shut, trying to figure which white line was real, we debated whether or not anybody had gotten close enough to my car to read the license plates and how long it would take us to escape across the state line. Road signs and trees pulsated at me, and at my mother’s place I failed to stop in time. I flattened the rail fence and bent the chinaberry tree.

My mom came running. She helped Bobbi inside and to the couch. When she returned, I was asleep at the wheel. Though she was 56 and neither big nor strong, she managed to coax and drag me into my room. She let me sleep 12 hours. In the morning, she took Bobbi home.

That painfully bright afternoon, I rebuilt the fence and mowed the lawn for penance. My mom invited me out to dinner. At La Casa Blanca, she said, “I think you’d better find an apartment, Ken. You’re the kind of boy who needs to strike out on his own.”

I watched her eyes. After they darted away, I said, “You mean I should scram. Then you wouldn’t sit up worrying, and you could sleep through the night."

She nodded. “That too.”

The Friday night before my first semester in college, a few weeks before JFK’s assassination, Cliff's brother Billy came over. A year younger than Cliff and me, Billy was cheerful, short, and strong, a pole vaulter. He’d been dating Liz. We swapped Liz stories, drank, and watched TV. About 1:30 a.m., we decided to run down to Liz’s house and invite her to join us for a nightcap. She lived in a hillside place, one floor in front, two in back. Her bedroom window faced the back yard, on the upper floor. Billy climbed onto my shoulders. Barely reaching her window, he rapped on it and called out, “Yoo hoo, Liz!”

No reply. He called, “Oh, Liz! It’s Bill and Kuhlken. Come out and play!”

Had we drunk less that night, we would have sensed the troops arriving. Liz’s back yard was surrounded by a driveway, the parking lot of a dentist’s office, and a neighbor’s unfenced yard. Six cops scaled the low chain fence, two on each side. Six guns held us at bay. One cop on the east side hollered, “Reach high and walk this way!”

Billy jumped from my shoulders. As we lifted our hands, a cop from the west side shouted, “This way!” A step either direction might get us shot. We chose not to move. They approached cautiously, frisked and cuffed us while Liz’s mother stepped out the front door to meet an officer who had exchanged his weapon for a clipboard.

In the La Mesa police station there were two cages, in two rooms. We each got one. From the next room, I heard Billy’s dad cussing and leading him out.

“What about me?” I asked the cop on duty.

“He’s a juvenile. You’re 18, pal. You go to jail. Happy birthday."

He booked me for attempted breaking and entering. A different cop delivered me to county jail, where I landed in a cell with a burglar who spent most the night doing pushups and inspecting his tattooed arms, while I lay gnashing my teeth and pictured my mom’s weary eyes through which her broken heart appeared.

Two mornings later, Cliff, Kenny Niedermeyer, and I began our first semester at San Diego State College. Kenny had rented an apartment near the college, and I moved in with him, though I realized Eric’s mother might curse me for remaining friends with her son’s “murderer.”

I didn’t blame Kenny. Though the car was his, Mike Beatty had been driving. My mother helped me enlist an attorney to settle the Liz affair. On November 22, 1963, at 10:00 a.m., I arrived at the El Cajon courthouse. My attorney looked about three years out of Sigma Alpha Epsilon. His tie tack was a flag-waving elephant. We loitered out front until an assistant D.A. pulled up in an Alfa Romeo. He and my attorney were acquainted. For ten or so minutes after the D.A. noticed my attorney’s tie tack, they cordially debated the comparative integrity of John Kennedy and Barry Gold water. Then, “So, your client’s the guy up on..." The D.A. recited a list of numbers.

“Yeah, attempted breaking and entering — hell, they knocked on the girl’s window for 20 minutes. The ol’ lady’s pissed because my client two-timed her daughter, that’s why she won’t drop the charge.”

The D.A. sighed and sent us on our way. Case dismissed. I arrived at school just in time for my psychology class. The halls of the Social Science building were silent. People slumped against the walls and sat on the floor, heads on their knees. As I entered the room, I noticed a few girls weeping. The rest of the class watched the closed-circuit television broadcast scenes from Dallas, where a half-hour before a sniper had wasted our president.

When that hour’s classes let out, the college began to empty. Students wandered toward their cars, bicycles, dorms. I made my way toward the Emerald Isle apartments. As I neared our door, I heard a crash, then another.

Kenny was on the couch as usual. He looked up and flashed me his amiable, perplexed smile, then returned to glowering at the television. Since Eric’s death, most all he did was drink, laugh at jokes, and break things. In front of him on the coffee table were dozens of empty Coors bottles, most of them already splintered. He picked up another and smashed it against the rim of the table.

Even though school felt pointless, every day I wandered over to my classes, and in the evenings I read most of the texts, because the)’ bored me less than Kenny’s TV game shows and shoot-’em-ups. In December, I moved to a little house Cliff had rented, near Colina Park. Cliff still worked at Coffee Dan’s, as a cook. He usually arrived home about 11 with our dinner and a story about Hilda and Reba. Hilda was a bashful German immigrant, a churchgoer at La Mesa Assembly of God, which our old friend Crazy Henry’s family attended, where white people shouted to God and waved their hands in the air. Reba, a wry veteran who had apprenticed at truck stops, played along with Hilda’s mission to convert her. Before their shift, in the employees’ lounge, Reba would horrify Hilda with the latest installment in her ongoing tale of nightly tangles with Satan.

Cliff slapped his knee. “Reba says, ‘Aw, honey, I’m already in my nightie, see, the babydoll one Long John Tucker gave me. It’s so silky. Oh, but I’m being good, not a single wicked thought had crossed my mind in 20, maybe 30 minutes. I was drinking cocoa. I had the Bible sitting next to me, was going to read it in bed like you taught me, honey. Only there was a bang on my door. This is no knock either. I mean bang.’

“You know Hilda’s eyes — billiard balls, man. She says, ‘Oh dear, it was Satan, yes?’ And when Reba nods, Hilda’s on her knees, right there on the tile, hands folded and all ‘You kicked him out, Reba? I know you did! With Jesus’ help you kicked him out!’

“ ‘Aw, honey,’ Reba says. ‘I wanted to. But he’s such a dream-boat, and he didn’t ask much, just invited me down to the Stagecoach for a dance and a drink or two. And then...and then — ah, honey, you’re just gonna have to pray harder for me.’ And ol’ Hilda gives Reba a big hug, holds her hand, tears dripping into her coffee.”

Around midnight, Cliff would open a textbook and try reading while he sipped a beer, but the texts couldn’t hold him awake. Too many mornings, he swatted the alarm and fell back to sleep. He wanted to drop out of college or only take one class each semester. But unless he attended full-time, the draft would nail him.

Our friend Bob Williams stopped by and asked about our plans for spring semester. I said, “School, I guess. At least it’s keeping me out of the army.”

Cliff said, “Well, since I’ve got to work to support my habit of squandering every dime, or else move back home where the of man’ll give me a ration about how I can’t make it on my own, I’m either going to forget school and probably get drafted or spend next semester flunking out of school and then get drafted.”

Bob said, “As long as you’ll get drafted anyway, you ought to go with me.”

“Go where?”

“I’m hitting the road to check things out, see if there really are places like Texas, New Orleans, Omaha. You know, my ol’ man lives in Omaha. I’m going to present the bum with a bill for 20 grand back child support. A hundred a month since I was two, when he skipped out. Maybe he’ll give me a tenth of it.”

“Maybe he’ll tell you to get lost."

“Then I can punch his lights out, if I feel like it.”

We strolled to the park, played horseshoes by flashlight, and speculated about the Rocky Mountains, Great Plains, badlands, deserts, hayous. Out there, I might find an answer to the big mystery—how to contend with death when it arrived and how to occupy myself in the meantime. How did I feel about this Vietnam War? What did I think about communism? How fervently should I support civil rights?

At least I might stumble across some kicks and wild women, like Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty had. By midnight, I was as good as gone. The next day I stopped by my mom’s and retrieved my Jack Kerouac books.

Over Christmas I worked at Sears, peddling mountains of toys to grandmothers. I shopped thrift stores until I had gathered a heavy coat, fur-lined gloves, and a big, light suitcase.

When my mother asked how I planned to keep from getting drafted, I made a wisecrack about seeing the world before I got snuffed out of it, the way Eric had.

Continue to Part 2: Coast to Coast in Kerouac’s Time