Cherry Read Free

shitty yard on the brink of what will be a vaporously hot morning waiting for the blue truck with questionable fuel pump and worn brakes to take you the fuck out of there. You look up the road. Nothing: a pink sky, the same warped curve of blacktop leading to the stop sign. The map you got in a neat rectangle at the Fina station now surges in your hands under the light wind.
    So much comes from California, and now you’re going there, to the origins of things. The LSD you call orange sunshine looks like baby aspirin and comes (in name if not in fact) from Orange County, California. It’s just one more totem of the Golden State that set you yearning for it.
    If you had your druthers, you’d all be setting out for northern California, San Francisco specifically. That’s where Haight-Ashbury is (The Hate, your right-wing sister calls it). On TV and in
Rolling Stone
magazine and in books like
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,
you’re told this place is aswarm with longhaired boys—blond and anorectic looking. These boys are not like the meat-eating, car-disemboweling, football-watching, squirrel-murdering boys you grew up dodging spitballs from. These west coast boys subsist on brown rice and ceramic bowls of clear broth in which sheer ideograms of seaweed float. Unlike the boys of your town, who (for the most part) read nothing but the football scores, or (for thesurfers anyway) the tidal charts of the newspapers in order to paddle out just before the best waves break, these California boys have rooms lined with books. They know their astrological rising signs and the names of constellations and how to weave plain old string into beaded macramé belts that you can sell outside rock concerts for some bucks apiece.
    These boys occupy more and more of your conscious thought. Lying on your Sears trundle bed with the Mexican throw you picked up on a surfing expedition, you picture their long torsos and shirtless chests above their low-slung Levis.
    San Francisco has other myths that recommend it, other draws besides the bead-bedecked boys. The only two books you own by living poets come from San Francisco’s City Lights Books—a dwarfish little pamphlet by Allen Ginsberg and its companion text by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. They fit neatly in the cardboard box you’re taking to Los Angeles.
    Meanwhile, you’re waiting for courage. You hope to marshal enough of it to go inside and say goodbye to your daddy, who has decided to deal with your final departure as he’s dealt with the past three years’ occasional departures. He ignores it. There’s nothing so dire that Daddy can’t let it slip by with a stoical stare. Before you have to meet that gaze and turn from it so the weight of it is borne on your back for all the days you live away from this house, you try to get your hope-machine pumping.
    The map usually does it, staring at it. You drag your ragged thumbnail along the trajectory you’ll follow across the state of Texas (
ear to ear,
as your daddy says), the whole yellow desert you’ll pass through ending finally in a vast wash of royal blue. The Specific Ocean, you call it, for you’ve learned there’s often a slanted truth in words you blur like this.
    You finally sit your bony ass down on the concrete porch where the night’s chill of heavy dew seeps through the butt of your jean shorts. You try for a few minutes to refold the map as it was in the wire cage at the Fina station. But it’s a dismantled mechanical bird in your hands with no Tab B or Slot C to make sense of. You mean to write a poem about that, too, but it keeps coming out all wrong in the ticker tape that clicks through your head. You very much dread saying goodbye to yourdaddy, who has, in fact, ignored your upcoming trip so well that even your emptied room and the plates you stood wrapping in
Leechfield Gazette
classifieds escaped comment.
    There Daddy sits in his straight-backed posture, all right angles on the faux leather chair in clean khakis and