Fuck it. Let's go.
I might have said it to McNeil. McNeil might have said it to me, forty-four years after the fact it's hard to remember exactly who said what to whom, but a couple of hours later we were standing on the south side of Interstate 91 in Springfield, Massachusetts, holding a cardboard sign – FLORIDA – trying to bum rides to Fort Lauderdale to catch up with everyone else who had left the day before on spring break. I had a small bag of clothes, shorts and t-shirts primarily, a borrowed sleeping bag, and twenty dollars in my pocket. I was a nineteen-year old, unshaven and scraggly haired kid and my friend, McNeil, a year older, was a better dressed, but not by much, black kid with hair that looked like a large round shrub in an English garden. At first glance McNeil could pass for a Black Panther. When you got to know him you came to realize that he was a gentle kid, on the shy side, who didn't like dogma or violence; a kid like me, trying to figure out who he was and what he would do in a world that was looking larger and weirder by the day. Except for hair and skin, McNeil and I could have been brothers, same height and weight, same eyes, same smile, same appreciation of stupid, same wish not to be boxed into some category. He was a black kid who didn't take over buildings but sometimes felt as if he should have, I was a white kid who did but always had doubt.