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.
I think it took us five or six rides to get to New Haven. Standing on the Connecticut Turnpike in the late afternoon, feeling the wind pick up, the grey clouds low in the sky, looking like sleet was coming our way, jumping up and down to keep warm, McNeil and I agreed that maybe this wasn't such a good idea. "Gonna get dark you know? You got any money for a motel?"
I told him I had twenty bucks.
"That's it?"
"So how much you got?"
"Forty. You wanna turn around? Go back?"
"No."
"Me neither." So, we waited and in a while a professor from Yale stopped and picked us up, "I can take you to the Tappan Zee." He liked that we were going on an adventure. "Wish I could go with you." He chuckled, but declined our invitation to drive us to Florida, and let us off just before the tollbooths at the Tappan Zee Bridge. McNeil and I climbed a hill to a strip mall we could see from the road and found a Chinese restaurant.
We sat our FLORIDA sign in the seat next to us and looked at the menu. The only thing either of us could afford was a plate of noodles. As we debated whether or not we should get up and leave, a guy came over to our table and stood in front of us. McNeil and I were ready to have some sort of confrontation with the man – "Dirtbags and Niggers. Get the hell out of here." But the man leaned down and said the same thing the Yale professor had said, "Florida. Damn, I wish I could go," and he made a motion to the waiter to bring us two beers. "I got their check," he shouted. And for the next hour a line of middle aged white folks made a pilgrimage to our table saying how lucky we were to be going on this trip and how they wished they were young and could go, too. They also gave us beers and by the time we waved goodbye to everyone we had polished off two plates of noodles, some egg foo young, two orders of pork fried rice and a half dozen beers and I still hadn't broken my twenty-dollar bill.
Back on the road, giggling and well buzzed, a kid gave us a ride across the bridge and over to New Jersey, where he was headed to a going away party for a newly married couple who were moving to Florida. "They'll give you a ride for sure. Very cool people, man."
And I'm sure they were very cool people, but the idea of giving a thousand mile ride, only a few days after their wedding, to two odd looking, drunken hitchhikers was a bit much to ask. "No fucking way," they said. But the party was good, more beer was freely given, joints were passed around, and some kid at the party said he'd give us a ride back to the highway which somehow ended up being on the New York side of the Hudson but now down by the George Washington Bridge.
"Not good," said McNeil.
We had a quick discussion as the reality of the situation was dawning on us. "Look, if we don't get a ride in the next hour let's get a room and go home in the morning."
"Hell, in an hour it'll be morning," I said.
"And if we do get a ride it's gotta be all the way to Florida because I am not hitchhiking through the south."
"Me neither." I had images of Easy Rider in my head.
"We stay with my parents in DC if we don't. You OK with that?"
And then a guy in a red Ford Fairlane stopped. "I'm going to Elkton. Get in." Elkton, Maryland is about 1200 miles from Fort Lauderdale and about a hundred miles from Washington. I sat in the back and stared at his blue satin jiu jitsu jacket. Very fancy with lions and birds.
At the Clara Barton rest area, the last Howard Johnson's on the Jersey Turnpike, the driver bought us coffee. McNeil and I had a heated conversation when the driver went to the men's room.
"OK, now what?"
"We go to Elkton. Make a new sign for DC and stay with my parents."
For a second I thought about offering that we could stay with my grandparents in Baltimore but my grandfather would have gone nuts. A black guy in the neighborhood was bad, a black guy in his house, was worse. I loved the old guy more than anyone on earth, but he did have his stupidities.
"What kind of spring break is that? Your parents' house?"
"Then hitchhike by yourself. You ready for that?"
And then McNeil slowly and in a very rich southern drawl ticked off the states, "Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia …"
"OK. Stop. I get it. DC."
And at the next table we overheard two guys about our age, one as disheveled as we were, the other with a crew cut and well pressed clothes, talking about how much longer their drive to Florida was going to take. McNeil and I leaned over and asked if they had room for two more. "Sure, no problem."
One of our new best friends was a Cuban refugee, the other was AWOL from the Air Force and they were driving the sharpest car I'd ever been in; a brand new, 1970 Volvo, with air conditioning, eight track stereo, automatic transmission, and cruise control. I'd never seen cruise control. "You just hit this button right here." Amazing. After some of the beers had worn off, somewhere in North Carolina, the AWOL guy, who seemed to be the alpha of the two, asked if I wanted to drive. "Hell yes."
"No fucking speeding," he said.
"Roger that."
"I'm not kidding. No fucking cops."
Which got me thinking about how it was that the four of us, a kid fresh from Cuba, a kid who ran away from the Air Force, and me and MacNeil, managed to be driving in this ridiculously pimped out car. Stolen, I thought. When I used cruise control I set it for three miles below the speed limit.
The trip to Florida was uneventful except for one short visit to a gas station on a country road outside of Savannah, Georgia. McNeil and I used the pay phone to call our parents to tell them where we were. My parents were rightly scared and McNeil's parents were horrified. "Promise me Bobby, DO NOT WEAR YOUR SUNGLASSES. You look like Eldridge Cleaver when you do. PROMISE ME BOBBY." His mother was right. McNeil did look like Eldridge Cleaver when he wore his sunglasses, which he wore even right at that moment in the dark at a phone booth in rural Georgia.
We could see a bunch of men inside in the light, feet up on barrels, smoking cigars, eating peanuts, drinking beer, laughing and occasionally looking out at our car where the four of us sat waiting for what felt like forever.
"This isn't good," McNeil said.
"How 'bout we keep driving? Maybe find another place?" I asked.
McNeil and I both had visions of the Ku Klux Klan and how, a few years earlier, they murdered three civil rights workers from up north, guys who were about our age, Schwerner, Goodman, and Cheney.
But the Cuban kid had had enough. "I did not come to this country to be treated like this. This is America dammit." And he opened his door, slammed it shut and marched up to the attendant and said something which none of us could hear. But in a minute or two the guy came out, filled the tank, the AWOL kid paid and we left. I'd never seen such balls.
We passed through all of Florida in the dark. Our friends told us that they were headed to a relative's house in Miami and the best they could do was drop us off somewhere. In Miami Shores, we saw a sign for Barry College. "This is good," we said figuring that a college would be the best place to find someone who would take us in for a little while so we could rest. But four in the morning isn't the best time to find anyone wandering around a college campus, so we rolled out our sleeping bags and slept in the bushes until the sun came up. When we poked our heads out we saw that we had made camp at a Catholic women's college.
We caught a bus to downtown Miami and another bus to Coral Gables where a kid I vaguely knew from high school was a student at the University of Miami. And in the spirit of the '60's, that according to the calendar ended four months earlier, Steve welcomed us to his room, let us sleep for a couple of hours and then snuck us into the cafeteria for some food. "I can get you into the concert tonight. Ike and Tina Turner are playing." But we passed.
McNeil and I got back on the highway with a new sign, Fort Lauderdale, and headed north. We got a ride from a very pretty woman who dropped us off at the beach, now swarming with about a million students all of whom looked pretty much alike – white bodies burning toward red. "I guess we're here," I said and McNeil and I looked at each other with a feeling of joy that melted quickly into a sense of dread. "Jesus, now what."
"We walk," McNeil said.
"Which way?" I said
"Don't think it matters," and with our gym bags and sleeping bags we began heading north with no destination and no plan.
"Hey, Yo! Rick! McNeil!"
Five guys from my dorm, the guys I was hoping we'd somehow find, found us. "What the fuck you doing here?"
"Same as you, Spring Break." We tried to look cool, like this was a normal thing, running into friends eleven states away from home in a crowd of oiled bodies lined up one after another for miles. And we told them all about the Yale professor and the noodles and beer and the party and the guy in the jiu jitsu jacket and the crazy drive in a new Volvo with the Cuban kid and the kid on the lam. "Any chance we can stay with you?" My friends had crashed at the house of some guy one of them knew. All the space inside was taken but no one had a problem with us sleeping in the backyard and except for one night of fire hydrant rain we did.
On that first night in Fort Lauderdale, after we all drank many beers and ate pizza, someone suggested that we go to the jai alai matches. So, with the $19.25 I had left from our trip I got in the car and went along. A big sign at the entrance said NO ONE UNDER TWENTY-ONE WILL BE ADMITTED. I was ready to go back to the house but my friends, who were either twenty-one or had good fake ID, wouldn't let me. "We'll sneak you in." One of them made some sort of scene at the gate and I slipped past the guards.
Jai alai is famous for being rigged, and I knew that, but to someone like me who didn't know the first thing about the sport or how you went about betting, I couldn't see that that would make any difference. Fixed or not, it was all chance and I lost BIG, everything but a $1.25. The next morning, I wired home for twenty dollars more.
The rest of the week was a drunken blur on cheap beer. All day at the beach. Nights trying to find a party. McNeil heard from someone that his not-quite-former-girlfriend had come to Fort Lauderdale and he left for a few days. Woodsie, the crazed kid who lived across the hall from me back at school, had to be bailed out of jail for taking a right-hand turn from an inside lane. We all celebrated his release by getting drunk and staggering up the main street singing songs we had heard the black kids sing when they took over the administration building at school a few weeks before. "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around, turn me around, turn me around. Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around, gonna keep on a walkin', 'keep on a talkin', walkin' up to freedom land." A large cop pulled us off the sidewalk and told us with great seriousness, "This ain't Detroit, this ain't Cleveland and this ain't New York City. This is Fort Lauderdale, Florida and you will behave." We did.
At week's end the seven of us, and a couple of other kids who came down and needed rides back, jammed into two cars. McNeil and I sat in the back of a dented and ready to be junked Ford Falcon. McNeil was in the middle, I had the right-side window. We missed the Volvo.
The drive north was nothing special. Traffic was clear, the weather was fine, we stopped at South of the Border because for hundreds of miles we had been pestered with ads to stop. But when we got to New Jersey my stomach began to rumble, and I was desperate to find a toilet. My friends assured me that we'd stop as soon as we saw the next Howard Johnson's but I was sure I couldn't make it. Fortunately, the junker Falcon began to rattle and shimmy and a tire went flat. We stopped on the shoulder and as I was waddling up a hill with a handful of newspaper a state trooper stopped to see what was going on. I asked, well begged really, if he could take me to the next rest area and he did. He also waited to give me a ride back to my friends who had changed the tire to a one that was bald but filled with air. Good man. I thanked him. "Now you boys take care. You hear me?"
"Yes sir," we all said.
On the Connecticut turnpike, where a week before the nice professor from Yale had given us a ride, we ran into an ice storm and the traffic was backed up for hours. We sat in our car, trying to keep warm, thinking this was a rotten way to end an adventure, getting more and more irritable with each other and wishing we were home. McNeil leaned into me and said, "Roll down the window."
"No, it's too cold."
"Roll down the damned window."
And McNeil leaned across me and stuck his head out and shouted to two black guys, one VERY tall, the other not so tall, who were walking between the stalled cars.
"My brother! My brother!"
The two guys ambled over, stuck their gigantic Afro heads in the open windows – it was a hair feast – and slapped hands with McNeil. They talked for only a few seconds but McNeil made a point of telling the tall kid, "You got game bro. You got game!" McNeil and the tall kid shared an elaborate handshake and then Julius Erving and his friend headed back to school from their spring break, too.