What is remembered better is often just the wish;
not what was done,
much less what was wanted to be done.
What actually happened was mundane,
but informs much of what I did thereafter.
For instance, in 1969;
to get from Brattleboro, Vermont,
to San Diego, California—
with the two hundred dollars that I had,
required a thumb, and a rucksack.
I slept the length of the New York Turnpike
in the passenger seat of a Volkswagen bus.
I couldn’t have been good company.
Did I wash pots in a kitchen that smelt of fish,
in Cleveland or Cincinnati?
I recall the fish but I have failed
the remainder of that memory
as much as the memory has failed me, I think.
But this was my brave summer:
graduated but yet undrafted;
my adventure when other boys
were already dying in rice paddies.
I mopped the floor of a laundromat
for five dollars in Albany, New York,
when I went in to wash my clothes,
but they had had a flood.
It was raining that hard.
If I’d put my thumb out in the rain, then,
I think my cloths would have been washed for free.
But the rain stopped soon thereafter, before the sun
finally stopped my thumb, and I fainted.
The joke, I wasn’t drinking enough water,
someone in St. Louis said—a doctor, I think.
So, I bought a better hat,
with the money I had in my pocket
And worked then in an air-conditioned
warehouse that was heaven so long as it lasted;
at least until the truck was empty—
maybe two trucks. Or three.
Myself and a fellow named Eugene
who told better jokes, but I never saw again.
It was still hotter when I left,
but at least I had a hat.
I am told—was told after that,
that I went to the wrong Kansas City.
There were no jobs in the one I went to.
The leather in my shoe was losing its soul.
So, I removed the the hundred dollar bill there
and bought a pair of sneakers,
along with a dozen blisters for free.
I don’t remember diddly-squat
of the days thereafter
and I’m not too sure of the squat.
But to be fair, it’s only been about 21,000 days
since I was twenty-one.
Denver is a vague recollection
of sun, dust, and a pink-stone rail station
full of echoes without people,
where I slept on the floor below a bench,
and the train came a day after.
San Francisco was as cold as
Mark Twain warned it would be,
that one day in July,
when I wandered hills for warmth
and bought a book of poems
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
from a fellow who looked like Ferlinghetti
but I was too shy to ask.
My remembered life
is checkered by forgetfulness—
purposeful perhaps, subconsciously.
Shot with blanks of white between
the dark of forgotten events,
and some recalled for no discernible reason.
Hitching rides is like that too,
each one unique at the time,
but then lost as anchorless oddities
of face and smell and voice,
becoming the dark water beneath
a louder sky of unsure purpose,
and misbegotten possibilities.
What was I thinking?
What did I do?
The Oakland bus was cramped
and stank of my own sweat
as much as anyone else’s.
I remember that—at least,
a memory that is inescapable even now.
Near LA, I got out early at a stop,
simply because I could see the ocean,
(anxious perhaps to escape my olfactory)
and I danced first on hot grainy sand,
while toeing candy wrappers and cigarette butts,
and plunged into water colder there
than I could imagine liquid water could ever be.
Perhaps I should have noticed first
that I was swimming alone.
I hitched a ride from that beach to LA.
in a trough of traffic that left much time to talk,
but I cannot remember now what was said.
LA was treeless streets and lots and hot sun,
and walking distances without a measure of familiarity.
I know that I never got to Hollywood.
Tired then, I got on a bus again;
watched shirtless fellows do drills
in the sun at Camp Pendleton,
while the bus waited there awhile;
and reached San Diego at last
in a dark filled night with small lights,
and no more place to it than an ocean,
and waited there for my rescue.