FAMOUS PEOPLE I’VE KNOWN
In 1968 Andy Warhol famously predicted that, “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Although we’re a lot closer to this being true than we were in 1968, what with the Internet and satellite communication and all the rest, I think we’re still a long ways off…which may be a good thing. But I do believe that a sort of a corollary to the ‘small world’ phenomena Warhol envisioned is true, and that’s that before too long, everyone on the planet will at least meet someone world-famous. I mean, really, who doesn’t have at least one famous person story? I have two.
In 1981 at the American Airlines baggage carousel at LaGuardia Airport I met Milton Berle. A pretty old guy, (according to Google, he’d have been about seventy-nine at the time), Berle and his wife were having trouble pulling their bags off the baggage-go-round and I stepped in to help. They both thanked me profusely and we stood and chatted for a few minutes while the couple waited for their driver; and that was it. I don’t even remember what we talked about.
My other famous person story, though, which occurred some nine years before my run-in with Uncle Milty, in the spring of 1972, is seared into my brain. The searing didn’t result from anything especially notable about my brief meeting with the Hollywood actor, whose movie career had been hurled into the stratosphere that same year by what the American Film Institute still calls forty years later the second greatest movie of all time. He and I sat and drank several scotches and swapped stories in the swanky bar of Albuquerque’s Hotel Andaluz in the wee hours of the morning. But it wasn’t the fact I sat up till nearly dawn in easy, comfortable conversation with a super star. No, I remember the chance encounter so well because of the unlikely series of events that led up to it. The powerful memory is not unlike a streaming Netflix video, one that I can upload and play back at will, every detail cinematically captured in high-definition.
In 1972 I was twenty-three years old, a graduate school drop out thanks to the 39th Congress of the United States, which, the year before, had done away with post-graduate college deferments. And I was a recently released civilian servant who, as a conscientious objector, (CO), did his alternative service as a grant writer/drug counselor/mouth piece for an all black community action program in Stockton, California. Free at last from my Selective Service obligation, I was determined to pursue my dream of making a living at writing, even if it meant churning out 500 word biographical sketches of famous and not-quite famous dead people for a publisher who’d created his own tiny but lucrative niche in the estate planning industry by producing sales materials for attorneys, life insurance salesmen and CPA’s. (“Now, Mr. Jones, let’s have a look at drugstore magnet Charles (Chuck) Walgreen. This is how he made his fortune, this is how his will was written, and these are the expenses incurred by his heirs when his estate was settled. Note the savings realized by the living trust created by Walgreen’s advisors.) And on top of that, Jack Hanley, the owner of Famous Estates Illustrated, not to mention a highly lucrative Metropolitan Life Insurance agency, had managed to find a chump willing to research and write the profiles at fifteen bucks a pop.
I’d actually been writing these things while I was in college, (I got five dollars for each sketch in those days), as a way to make a few extra bucks, but that was when Jack would feed me the source material I needed. In 1972 I convinced him to let me do the research myself, which amounted to traveling to cities throughout the U.S., visiting local libraries and going through micro-fiche back issues of newspapers to find obituaries and then hitting county courthouses to root through probate files in search of wills and estate settlement costs. I took the initiative of mapping out a six-city research trip using Jack’s wish-list of famous dead people needed for his next edition of Famous Estates Illustrated, and then costed out expenses…travel, lodging and meals. To my utter amazement, he didn’t bat an eye when he saw my proposal; in fact, he increased it by ten percent, explaining that I’d quickly learn that, when you’re on the road, EVERYTING costs more than you think it will.
The cities I chose for my first trip as a freelance researcher/writer were Phoenix, Albuquerque, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Denver and Salt Lake City. Jack had given me a list of about twenty names…bankers, real estate moguls, founders of recognizable companies like Woolworth’s and Walgreen’s, well-known sports and entertainment figures…for each city. I figured if I could get the biographical and probate material I needed for just half of the list, come back to San Jose and write it all up, I could make nearly a thousand dollars, which in 1972 was something to write home about. Using the tortured logic of a twenty-three year old who’d dreamed since the fifth grade of being a famous writer, two weeks on the road and one week of writing came out to seven dollars and fifty cents per hour, a princely sum and well above the federal minimum wage of the day.
After weighing all options I decided that, what with my ’56 VW bug being on its last leg and airline tickets at an all time national high, train travel would be the most economical way to get around the country. Armed with AMTRAK’s handy-dandy inch and a half thick Your Trip Planner I laid out an itinerary that would take me through eight states in thirteen days. Rick Cornish…who’d never traveled beyond the California-Nevada border, and then only once, whose world view was just slightly wider than that of a gopher’s and who’d never set foot in a train station, much less on a train…was going on the road. Man of man did I like the sound of that.
Claudia took me to the train station just off the Alameda in downtown San Jose on Easter Sunday, April 2, 1972. As we drove through the empty streets the sun was just peaking its head above Mount Hamilton to the east.
“You have your tickets, your AMTRAK packet?’ she asked nervously as I got out of the car.
“Check.”
“Your travelers checks?
“Check.”
“All the stuff you need from Jack?”
“Check.”
“All right then,” she said, giving me one last good-bye kiss. “Please be careful. Please. And for God’s sake keep your eyes on your suitcase and your brief case. Do not let them out of your sight. Right?”
“Right, not out of my sight. I will lose nothing. NOTHING. I can do this, Claudia.”
“I know that, I know you can,” my wife said just a bit unconvincingly, “it’s just that sometimes you…” She stopped herself. “Yes, you can do this,” Claudia said and drove away.
And here was the deal. For all of my intelligence and problem solving skills, my innate ability to see the big picture, to identify the strategic goal in any situation, for any undertaking, to fashion just the right tactical plans for bridging point A and point B, and for all of my God-given talent as an articulator of high concepts and complex intersections of perception and reality, I was a hopeless flake. I was unquestionably deft at dealing with the big stuff, but when it came to the small but wholly crucial stuff…the things we call details…I was a schmuck. Hence, it was no surprise to Claudia when I called her a few minutes before midnight from the Union Passenger Terminal in downtown L.A. to tell her I’d lost my tickets for the rest of the two-week trip. No surprise at all.
“What will you do,” she asked. Her voice sounded small and flat and without emotion, the way it did when she was fighting back tears. (Note that my wife didn’t even bother to ask how I could possibly have lost the blue plastic pouch chock full of train tickets and transfers and itinerary while seated for thirteen hours in a single club car. Also note that I won’t even bother to try to explain now, as I retell the story.)
“Can’t you explain to them, tell them what happened? Maybe they’ll give you replacement tickets. Surely there’s someone there who can help. Can’t you keep looking?”
“No, I can’t. The train’s already pulled out for Phoenix. And, yes, the conductor and even some of the passengers helped me look. But the problem was I didn’t know I’d lost the pouch until we were ready to re-board the train for the next leg of the trip. We looked frantically, but there just wasn’t enough time.”
“What? They couldn’t wait until you found your tickets?”
“No, that’s not how trains work. They wait for no one.”
“So they just threw you off?” Her voice had grown larger, indignant and angry.
“Well, they were polite about it. Even sympathetic, but, yes, they just threw me off. The conductor said that he’d keep looking for the pouch and that if he finds it, and if I can prove that I bought the tickets, I should be able to get a refund right away.”
“And if he doesn’t find it?”
“If they don’t find it I can submit a claim to AMTRAK for the eight hundred and seventy dollars, less the fare to L.A., and will probably get a refund. But he says this can take a while.”
“What’s a while? Days? Weeks? It could take WEEKS?” He voice was now approaching immense.
“Uh, well,” I hedged, “the conductor didn’t really…’
“WEEKS,” she demanded?
“No,” I finally said, “actually months. It could take several months.” Claudia started crying softly into the phone.
(Note—I did file a claim with AMTRAK immediately upon returning to San Jose and I did receive a full refund, less the fare to L.A. It came in a registered letter…in the fall of 1975.)
“Listen, it’s gonna be okay. I promise. I have a plan.”
“A plan?” she asked, “what kind of a plan? What will you do? Can you call Jack and ask him for more money?”
“Yes,” I lied, “that’s just exactly what I’ll do. I’ll call him first thing in the morning, he’ll wire me the money for another ticket, I know he will, and I’ll be on my way.”
“Do you think that he’ll really…”
“No, I KNOW he will. Now, my dear, sweet girl, you go back to bed and quit worrying. I’ve got a plan.”
And the thing is, just as well as my wife knew I was a flake who’d lose his head if it weren’t screwed on, she also knew I was an expert maker of plans, and that they worked more often than not.
“Okay,” Claudia said, a little of the counterfeit calm returning to her voice, “call Jack in the morning. Be sure to tell him what the conductor told you…that you’ll get a refund and then you can pay him back. In full.”
“That’s exactly what I’ll tell him. Now go to bed. I love you.”
“Me too…I love you too.”
At dawn, exactly twenty-four hours after Claudia had dropped me off at the train station in San Jose, I watched the desert’s flat eastern horizon quickly run through a metamorphosis completely foreign to me; from jet black to deep purple to violet to intense red and, loveliest of all, a soft peach. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
“Okay partner,” my new friend Ernie said, “almost bed time for me. This is my turn off. Ain’t much out here…Blythe’s about a hundred miles up the road…so you’d best get yourself another ride before the sun gets too high. Otherwise I reckon yer brains are gonna boil out here.”
I thanked Ernie, grabbed my suitcase and my brief case out of the bed of his pick-up and watched him drive away. I was still watching when he turned off I-10 and headed south toward his place some fifteen miles up a dusty road. The night manager at a Denny’s near the train station in L. A. who worked the long three-to-three shift, Ernie made the two hour drive to his double-wide east of Indio every day. Lucky for me, he was always looking for hitch-hikers who could help him stay awake on the one hundred and twenty-five mile drive.
Of course I hadn’t had any intention of calling my publisher and asking for another grand to buy train fare. He’d have flat-out refused, but even worse, he’d never send me out to do research again. My freelance researching/writing career would have ended as quickly as it had begun, and I wasn’t about to let that happen. When Ernie’s old white Toyota was out of sight I did a slow 360 and surveyed the vast Joshua Tree National Park. True to its name, Joshua trees dotted the landscape…Joshua trees and absolutely nothing else except the long ribbon of asphalt leading out of California and into Arizona.
Ernie had been right about the sun. Three hours after he’d dropped me off I stood in the same spot and felt the sun begin to beat down on my bare head. There weren’t many vehicles headed east on I-10, and those that were had drivers who apparently had no interest, much less need, for a passenger with whom to chat it up. Finally, just as the sun was starting to get serious, a huge, brand new F-250 Ford pick-up truck whooshed by at ninety-miles an hour but then slowed, stopped, and backed up. A cowboy-looking guy push-buttoned the passenger side window down and looked me over.
“Where you headed,” he asked flatly.
“Phoenix,” I answered. The cowboy motioned for me to get into the cab, which I did after throwing my stuff in the F-250’s bed. Once I was inside and had fastened my seat belt, the man turned his head and looked me straight in the eyes. Then, without speaking but still locked on my gaze, he reached under his seat and pulled out a massive long-barreled revolver. It was the biggest handgun I’d ever seen. The man in the cowboy hat and snake skin boots and starched white shirt placed the gun on the console between us and then pulled back onto I-10 leaving behind a think cloud of dust.
“Keep your hands where I can see them,” the cowboy said without taking his eyes off the road. I folded my hands on my lap and there they stayed for the three-hour drive to Phoenix.
What had started out the day before as one of the worst chapters in my short but calamity-packed life was by late Monday night turning around quite handsomely. The cowboy, whose name was Bob MacAvaney and who, once he was sure I wasn’t one of “them Charlie Manson characters yer always readin’ about” turned out to be a nice guy, took me straight to the old red brick YMCA building at Third and Thunderbird Avenue. After checking into a cheap but clean room and throwing on a coat and tie and wingtips I walked straight over to the Maricopa County Court House, found the Clerk of the Court’s Office and was buried in big musty bundles of probate files until closing time. Then it was three blocks over to the new and massive public library, where three hours of microfiching yielded everything I’d need to write the abysmally one-dimensional biographies of the twenty or so rich guys who were smart enough to pay someone to protect their fortunes from the IRS after the poor bastards croaked. I was now ready to report in to command central.
“No,” I lied with the ease of a telemarketer, “Jack’s out of the country. Can you believe it? Huh? Yeah, yeah, that’s right…of all the times to take a European vacation. But listen, I think this is gonna be okay. Huh? No…no, he’s just not reachable. What? Yes, yes I asked and no, they’re not authorized. I know, but listen…just listen would you. Please.” And right there, in the phone booth of the lobby of the Phoenix Young Men’s Christian Association building at Third and Thunderbird, I sketched out for my wife the business model that I’d hatched the night before at the train station and that would provide us a decent financial footing for the next almost two years while I continued to try my hand at being a writer. I’d go on collecting advances for trains and planes I’d never take…and nice hotels I’d never stay at…and Claudia and I would pocket the money and I’d hitchhike around the United States and stay in rattrap hotels and eat quarter-pounders at McDonald’s. That would essentially double my rate of pay and there was absolutely, positively nothing underhanded or shady about it. What did my publisher care about my mode of transportation or the number of stars awarded to the hotels at which I stayed? Jack was actually getting off cheap, I told Claudia…and myself.
“And, look—it’s Monday night, I’m already ahead of schedule, two more hours tops at the court house tomorrow morning and I’ll be finished in Phoenix, and once we get our refund from AMTRAK we’ll be money ahead. Huh? No…no, not at all. Only two rides and I was here, hours before the train would have arrived. What? No, both really nice guys. Dangerous? What? Are you kidding, I’m telling you both guys were really nice and really friendly. Huh? No, no, really, very sweet guys. And glad to have the company.”
And that was that. Claudia now knew the score, we had a plan and I was going to make it work, whatever it took. I was finished at the Clerk’s Office before noon, checked out of the YMCA and found a pawn shop where I made an almost even-steven trade, my brand new Samsonite suit case for a slightly battered but sturdy back pack, one big enough to hold everything, including my brief case. Two doors down from the pawnshop I found a bookstand and for two and a half bucks bought myself a spiral bound atlas of major U.S. highways. And just like that I was outfitted for life on the road. Next stop, Albuquerque.
In 1972 I was anything but an inexperienced hitcher of rides. As a kid I’d lived three or four miles outside of town and my best friend Brooks and I were using our thumbs to get around by age nine. Later, in my teens but still in my pre-motorcycle/car period, my pals and I would travel all over the San Francisco Bay Area hitchhiking; once I hitched down to L.A. to visit my sister and her husband. So, now, a grown man, and a fairly big one able to take care of himself, the prospect of hitching around the country made perfect sense and had not even a trace of risk associated with it.
Getting up to Flagstaff, where I would catch Route 66 east to Albuquerque, was a snap. I’d barely settled onto the I-17 on-ramp when a copy-machine salesman driving a rental car stopped for me. (When I first got in I thought he’d said ‘coffee machine; boy did he set me straight.) The guy was young, not much older than me, and what I remember most about him was his almost religious zeal for the Xerox Office Product, Copy and Printing Division. When I told him what I did for a living…free-lance writer, (God, I remember how exhilarating it was saying that)…he actually thought he was going to sell me one of his machines. “Fully reconditioned, a year’s supply of toner, full 12-month warranty…” Right, and I could carry it back to California in my backpack.
When the copy machine guy dropped me at the Route 66 on-ramp in Flagstaff it was around four in the afternoon and pretty hot. I headed straight for a good-sized mulberry tree alongside the roadway that would provide good shade while waiting for the next ride but discovered at once that someone else had the same idea. He looked to be in his teens, (but was actually a few years older than me), thin and tanned bronze with long sun-bleached hair and wearing a Hawaiian shirt and beachcombers he looked like a Southern California surfer dude, (but was from Ohio and hadn’t had so much as his toe in a larger body of water than Noxontown Lake in Southern Delaware) and had the peacefully bemused look of a stoner, (this one I got right). I’d learn all this later, but for now I kept my distance, parking my backpack at the very edge of the mulberry’s shade and giving just one solemn nod of acknowledgement to the stranger
As luck would have it I’d hit Flagstaff’s most heavily used Interstate 66 on-ramp just as commute traffic was beginning; I would learn in my travels over the next year and a half that commuters eager to get to work, or in this case, to get home, were the least likely of all drivers to stop. But clueless this first time out on the road, the constant, heavy flow of cars, especially compared to the relative isolation back in Joshua Tree, made me almost giddy with anticipation. Trains and planes, I thought, hah, who needs ‘em. Albuquerque here I come.
Two hours later, with the traffic just slightly thinner, the longhair walked over to where I stood.
“You hungry, dude? I’m gonna walk across the street to Der Wienerschnitzel and get me some dogs. You want anything?“
“Ah, no, no thanks,” I said automatically, and then in almost the same breath, “well, uh, maybe just a couple of kraut dogs. Three.”
“Mustard?”
“Ya.”
“Drink?”
“Coke, please.” I fished around in my pocket, pulled out a five-dollar bill and handed it to him.
“Three krauts with M and a large coke…you got it, dude,” said my fellow traveler and began across the street.
“Wait,” I stopped him, “what if a ride comes while you’re gone?”
“Well, dude, I figure we’re in a win-win situation here. If a car does stop and you catch a ride, my chances of getting a lift are at least doubled. See, people don’t wanna pick up two dudes and people don’t want to have to choose which dude goes and which dude stays. So they just drive by. So it’s a win, dig? You get a ride, I get the next AND I get three extra dogs and a coke…on you.”
“And the other win?”
“We share a nice Wienerschnitzel dinner and then flip a coin to see who’s gonna walk away from this ramp. I don’t know about you, man, but I want to get on down the road. Gallup is just over two hours away and I sure as hell wanna be way, way east of it before it gets too late ”
“Makes sense,” I said, not bothering to disguise the genuine admiration in my voice. I didn’t get the ‘Gallup’ reference but figured I could ask about that when longhair came back with the food.
We hadn’t even finished our hot dog feast when a brand new cobalt blue Camaro screeched to a halt barely three feet from where we sat under the mulberry tree.
“You guys hop in,” said the driver, “it’s okay, you can bring your food. Just don’t fuckin’ spill anything.” We heard the click of the trunk opening, threw our packs in, and then James, that was the name of my travel companion, climbed in the back seat of the shiny muscle car and I sat down in the front, and we were gone, like three bats out of hell.
Once he’d forced his way into the fast lane and was tailgating a woman in a white Chevy with an infant in the car seat next to her, our benefactor reached back and grabbed James’ hand. “Yo, man, I’m Randy,” he drawled.
“James. Thanks dude.”
“My name is Rick,” I said, now taking my turn to shake, “and, yeah, man, thanks for stopping.”
“No problem dos amigos. So, here’s the skinny…I’m headin’ up to Carthage, up in Missouri, to see my folks and if I can I’m gonna drive straight through. I can take you that far.”
“So cool, dude, I’ll go all the way with you. I’m headed to Chicago. My buddy here, we can drop him in Albuquerque.”
“So you cats ain’t together,” Randy asked?
“No,” I said, “just met on the road back there.”
“Well, how about that. Three strangers road-trippin’ down Route 66. I do declare.”
It was a few minutes before seven p.m. when James and I piled into Randy’s Cobalt-Blue. According to my Atlas, that would put me into Albuquerque by about eleven-thirty. Plenty of time to find a room, get a good night’s sleep and hit the court house the next morning. As I swallowed the last bite of my kraut dog and wiped clean the dab of mustard from a corner of my mouth with a swipe of my tongue I felt close to being as happy as I’d ever been in my life. In my mind I replayed the frantic scene as the train pulled into the terminal in Los Angeles and we…me and the conductor, an ancient Black man with salt and pepper hair peeking out from under his conductor’s hat…searched for the plastic pouch with two weeks worth of AMTRAK tickets stuffed in it. And now I was sitting back in the plush leather bucket seat of a Camaro heading straight to my next stop at ninety miles an hour. ‘I do declare’, I thought to myself and smiled.
Randy, immaculate razor cut, black loafers, black slacks, black silk shirt, and steel-gray eyes that had that certain twinkle of someone well aware that his good looks could take him pretty much anywhere he wanted to go, went first. He was thirty-one, (like James, he too looked much younger, barely out of his twenties), was based in Charleston but moved around a lot, loved big powerful muscle cars and the kind of women they attracted, and was a businessman, though after thirty minutes James and I hadn’t a clue about what that meant. It wasn’t as though Randy was secretive about what he did. In fact, he talked a blue streak about it…but exactly what the “it” was just never took on any substance. As I describe the guy some forty years later, he would seem to have all the qualities of a fast-talking, blow-hard, superficial jerk, yet I remember him as a very likable guy. James liked him, too, I could tell.
James’ back-story took far less time to tell. He was born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware, dropped out of high school in the eleventh grade, “figuring I could get a more serviceable education out in the real world, you know, on the road…and also figuring that if I hung around home much longer either my pop was gonna hurt me or I was gonna hurt him.” So James meandered westward, and “landed in San Francisco at just about the very best time you could land up there. It opened my eyes, I’ll tell you,” he said in a dreamy voice. “So that’s what I’ve been doin’, spend some time in Frisco doin’ construction, head back east to see my mom ‘n sister, then back again. This’ll be my fourth crossin’ since ’66. I love bein’ on road. But then, I like getting’ where I’m goin’, too. You know?”
Just as the baton was being passed to me Randy reached over, popped open the glove box and pulled out a hash pipe and a tin-foiled ball about the size of a masher, not the biggest sized marble, but just one step down from it. Randy held out his hand to me, “You wanna do the honors, amigo?”
“No, thanks though,” I said. “In familiar territory I’d generally say yes but I’m thinking I should keep my wits about me.”
“Good,” said James reaching between the bucket seats for the pipe and hash ball, “you keep ‘em for all of us.”
I spent even less time telling my new pals about me than James did with his story. Both Randy and James had gone out of their way to say how unimportant formal education had been in their lives and since getting one for myself was how I’d spent most of the past eighteen years, I didn’t spend much time on any real life stuff. I did let them know what I was doing out on the road, did let them know that my ambition in life was, and had always been, to be a writer of novels and short stories. But once I covered that, I just made stuff up…as much for Randy and James’ enjoyment, (the hash had completely blitzed them), than any self-aggrandizement. For example, I told them about my brief minor league baseball career and my failed shot at a mid-year contract with the Minnesota Twins due entirely to their batting coach, Jimmy Landry, an all-star Yankee in his day who had a crush on my competition and sabotaged my try out by throwing spit balls during batting practice…a complete fabrication. I’d never even played little league. “Pretty much took the wind out of my sails,” I said gravely, “gave up the baseball dream after returning from the Twin Cities.” “Bummer, dude,” said James. “What an a-hole that Landry fag was.” Randy chimed in. “Never could stand that guy.” I’d made him up, too.
After each of us had his turn, the conversation veered off into free-form yarn swapping, mostly between the two stoned guys. I sat looking out the window and couldn’t have been happier. Just two days before, I’d seen my very first desert back in California and now, as the much larger, more expansive Chihuahuan Desert sped by I was spellbound. There was something about the parched and arid landscape that seemed to make all of the colors more vivid…the tans and beiges and crimson reds and pinkish blues, all were new to me. I’d never really traveled in my life, never really had any strong desire to. Now, as we roared down one of the best-known and striking routes on the continent, I felt like the entire country was about to open up to me. I was certain that this spectacular journey, my maiden voyage, would be the first of many. I just had to make sure that it was a success. No more screw-ups, no more losing things. Stay focused and, most important, stay on schedule. I had a lot of ground to cover and only enough travelers checks for a finite number of days.
I dozed off at the eighty miles to Gallup marker and was awakened an hour later by the sensation of the car slowing down.
“Getting’ off here in Gallup to fill up,” Randy said. The sun had just disappeared behind the Sera Madre Mountains to the south but was still bright enough to bathe the desert in soft pastel yellows and oranges and pinks.
At the truck stop Randy got the gas pump going and then went inside to make a “business” call. James and I got out, stretched and took turns using the men’s bathroom. When he came out I remembered what I’d meant to ask him in the car.
“So, back in Flagstaff, just before Randy stopped, you were saying something about Gallup New Mexico, something about wanting to get past it before it got late. What was that all about?”
“Just that Gallup is one wild and bad-ass place when the sun goes down if you’re not one of them. It’s a town, a pretty big one, but it’s an Indian Reservation too, with Tribal cops and the whole deal. Them Navahos, they got it major rough on the reservation, dig? Thing is, they don’t got much use for white folks, or at least that was the feeling I got the one time I was here. And when they get to drinkin’, which they do plenty of, well, Gallup New Mexico just is not a place white boys wanna be when the son goes down and the cantinas fire up, if you know what I mean.”
“When were you here? What happened?”
“It was my second time headed out to Frisco and a guy dropped me off in town. Shit, like the minute I got out of the guy’s truck I knew I was in trouble. Everybody on the streets, and I’m sayin’ EVERY BODY, was a Indian and they didn’t seem all that happy about seein’ this long-haired, skinny-assed hippy strollin’ down Main Street.”
“So what happened?”
“What happened was that three guys jumped me, right there on the sidewalk, and would have messed me up good if one of the Tribal cops hadn’t showed up and saved my butt. He drove me back out to 66 and all the way to the next county before dropping me off. Saved my damned butt is what that big old Injun cop did.”
Just then Randy returned.
“Vamos ya’ll Amigos,” he said with a cartoonish Hispanic accent, made all the more comical by his thick drawl. A moment later we were all piled in and buckled up and ready for the last leg to Albuquerque, but when Randy pulled out of the truck stop he we