The Last Great Road Bum

by Héctor Tobar

  Fall came and the U of I students returned to town in a cavalcade of automobiles and station wagons stuffed with their belongings. They shuffled about the city with their unbuttoned shirts and pillow-heads of hair. The well-groomed Beat was extinct, and America was loosening up, becoming dreamier. One afternoon Joe walked onto campus and saw a group of undergrads sitting in a circle on the quad lawn, holding hands, eyes closed, as if in group prayer. The huge Illinois sky flickered above them. A cloud screen drifted across the sun, and its shadow raced across the wide lawn, like a pool of ink spilling across the grass, or like a specter in a horror film, or like a metaphor for a disease or an alien invasion.

  Joe’s first published novel was still waiting for him out on the road someplace. “Action” was the missing ingredient. When he sent Rebecca a letter with the money he owed her, she wrote back to ask if he’d be interested in hitting the road again. You never did finish your trip around the world. Because of me. Joe proposed East Asia to her, and Vietnam, and to his surprise the future Professor Olmsted agreed. He imagined writing a playboy-bum-visits-the-Vietnam-War novel, and shared this idea with Jim Adams, who told him it was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard, and dangerous too. Joe’s friends in Urbana were unanimous in this opinion, which made him more determined to go. In early February 1968, with central Illinois still winter gray, he said goodbye to his mother again. His plan was to drive Old Yeller to Louisiana and Texas and paint flagpoles and earn more money and slowly make his way westward toward California, where he’d meet Rebecca in San Francisco for the trip to the Far East. He parked his truck in the driveway of the new home his mother and Calhoun had moved into, on Slayback Road, and had a farewell breakfast with them.

  “Great oatmeal, Mom. This sure ain’t instant,” he said.

  “No, it isn’t,” she said. “Make sure you write home, son. We really enjoy your letters. Granny especially.”

  * * *

  STARTING IN THE TOWN OF MONROE, Joe worked his way through Louisiana, and by late February, he was in Lafayette. Worked the whole day of Mardi Gras. From his flagpole perch, he listened to the trumpets and vomiting of the celebrants below. Jesus, can these Cajuns drink. Let ’em stagger home on their own. In Lake Charles, he caught the attention of local law enforcement. “Son, we had a little robbery over at the school where you were working.” Joe was a young, long-haired carpetbagger sleeping in his truck, so of course he fell under suspicion. “Come into the station at two p.m., if you could,” an officer told him. It happened again on the other side of the state border, in Orange, Texas. A local grocery store got robbed and I’m to report again tomorrow to see if the owner can identify me. Something happens in town, so they raid the gypsy camp.

  The Texas schools were too poor to pay him much, so he headed into New Mexico and got work here and there. He blew out a muffler climbing through Arizona, and when he entered California his truck sounded like a Kentucky moonshine runner. Real class. In the southernmost reaches of the Golden State, near the Mexican border, he made $395. Not bad pay for getting a suntan (sorry) and a beautiful view of the Pacific. Joe followed the freeways toward Los Angeles, and on a smoggy night he reached that city, turning off on Sunset Boulevard while listening to the voice of the president of the United States on the transistor radio on his seat: with the Vietnam War going poorly, Lyndon Johnson was announcing he would not run for reelection. Evening newspapers hit the Hollywood streets at 11:00 p.m. with hardly an eyelash flutter from the drag queens, Joe wrote home. Nary a weepy tear spilled for LBJ. Feather boas and Stingrays, carnal transactions on the street corners and outside the nightclubs. The Whisky a Go Go. Is that Peter Fonda? The actor? It is! Surrounded by a cool tribe of men in polka-dot silk shirts and striped pants, and women in long corduroy jackets and high leather boots taking sultry drags from their Virginia Slims and king-size Kools, blowing unfriendly smoke at the Illinois polecat when he deigns to say “Howdy!”

  After getting hassled by the LAPD for sleeping in his truck, he tore up his climbing ropes and left Los Angeles, driving north on the Pacific Coast Highway, toward the famous cliffs of Big Sur, and the big bay and the cities beyond.

  * * *

  HE PICKED UP REBECCA at Oakland Airport and they met up with her friends, a racially integrated group of Berkeley graduate students and activists, including a Black Panther supporter named Oscar who was an undergrad at San Francisco State. Oscar was secretly carrying a gun tucked into the pocket of his jacket. Joe could sense the weight of it bouncing, unseen, mayhem waiting in a metal mass the size of a fist. They traveled to an antiwar demonstration at the Alameda County Courthouse, which included the burning of draft cards and the polite retreat of the mostly white protesters when the police arrived. The next day, Joe was less than impressed by the youth carnival to be found in San Francisco, the public pot-smoking in Golden Gate Park, hitchhikers everywhere, teenage parents carrying infants with unwiped faces. This was the bumming lifestyle taken to a farcical, trendy and static extreme.

  Sold my truck on Hippy Lane (Haight-Ashbury). $235.00 cash, Joe wrote home. Know I could have made more from the interest shown, but didn’t feel like hanging out on the street any longer. Most everybody there was hustling something. Shades of Tangier. “Opium? Hash? Speed? Acid?” And there I am half asleep in the sunshine, curled up on the hood, with Rebecca holding up the keys and whispering on the sidewalk: “Truck? Truck? Truck?”

  Joe was sitting on the curb next to Rebecca, counting his money for the third time, when they heard a gasp coming from the nearby liquor store. A young white woman of about twenty came out, tears welling in her eyes.

  “Someone shot Martin Luther King!”

  The news spread along the Haight sidewalks, and very soon many radios were tuned, as if in chorus, to the same San Francisco station. The great prophet of Negro liberation was wounded, and soon afterward he was dead, and that night the radios of the city filled with descriptions of burning cities, and the recorded speeches of the fallen leader, Southern talk-singing his way to the peroration, and Joe felt his country and its people slipping further into malevolence and unreason.

  Three days later all was placid and plastic at the San Francisco airport. Joe was traveling alone: Rebecca said she’d meet him in Hawaii a few days later. Her Black Panther friends had gone into hiding, after other Panthers had ambushed the Oakland police. Rebecca wanted to stay to see how it all played out. After two months of dirt and death on the American road, as he wrote home later, Joe stood alone among the carefree and cash-rich American vacationers at the United Airlines terminal, listening to them talk about Hawaiian luaus. He entered the great aluminum tube of a Boeing 720, and was sedated and luxurified by stewardesses with soft, efficient hands who gave him headphones to plug into the sound system, and a steaming teriyaki steak meal.

  * * *

  JOE SPENT TWO DAYS alone in Hawaii. Rebecca arrived, and they boarded a flight to Japan together. Arrived in Tokyo last Saturday night, he wrote home. Walked the town until way past midnight, Japanese goose pimples over Hawaiian sunburn. Cherry blossom spring right now. Cold at night, but hot in the daytime. The Baby and I slept in a subway station until dawn.

  Joe proposed they hitchhike to the northern tip of Japan; from there, they’d be able to catch a glimpse of the Soviet Union. Sure, Rebecca said. He likes faraway and remote places. Why is that? If he could, he’d hitchhike to the North Pole and bum a ride with a pack of polar bears over the top back down through Canada. To be alone in the big emptiness, that’s his thing. Well, not alone entirely. With me. Calls me “Baby.” I’ll take that. Only problem: I’m never alone with him. Hotels too expensive. Sleeping in rooms with people he’s charmed with his road tales and American-hobo optimism. Maybe we can sneak into the forest somewhere in Hokkaido, just me and him alone with the famous snow monkeys staring at us. A sex show for the primates. And then back south again, hitchhiking all the way across Japan for Kobe and Osaka and a ship to Pusan, Korea. I want to tell him this is sort of crazy, b
ut it’s kind of beautiful and exciting too, this geography quest, this curiosity, his hunger for the next country, the next encounter, the next family to invite us for warm soup and noodles and a mat to sleep on. Everyone says they are pleased to have us as honored guests. We are young and beautiful and boundless. Free of hang-ups and rigid thinking. Joe will write a lovely book about us. They returned to Tokyo just long enough for tall, striking, blond Rebecca to catch the eye of a wandering casting director and earn a part in a Japanese television show. Serial about gold smugglers, Joe wrote home. Filmed her in a nightclub dancing in tennis shoes, exactly one foot taller than her Japanese partner. Made $10. I had to settle on potato chips and making time with the lead actress.

  On the ship as it left ¯Osaka, between drags and puffs of cigarette smoke floating over ¯Osaka Bay, Joe outlined his plans for their Korean jaunt.

  “I think we can get close to the action. There’s a war going on there. In the DMZ.”

  “The what? I thought the Korean War had ended.”

  “The demilitarized zone. It’s a low-level-type thing.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “No, Baby. The polecat would never place you in danger. We’re just going to take in the ambience. The warlike ambience. The movement of the troops, the steely expressions of the soldiers.”1

  * * *

  IN HIS LETTERS, Joe did not tell his mother he was headed into a war zone. And when Virginia received his missives, she thought about how content Joe sounded, writing from an exotic corner of the globe where they spoke in the languages depicted on the stamps. Ideograms, indecipherable to her. Gone so long, home so briefly. She was growing into his absence and the sound of the world without his voice in it. The Joe-free routines, work hours and home with Calhoun, good man, good listener, even-tempered and attentive. Her second husband never complained on the daylong drive to Kansas for Colman family gatherings. In Lawrence, her sister and jars of preserves in the basement. See how hard I’ve been working? I am the keeper of the family legacy, Virginia, and you are the woman who counts things and calls that work. Divorced, remarried, so modern, Virginia. Women’s lib. The country changing all around us, even in Lawrence. Bobby Kennedy here, at the University of Kansas, to tell everyone he’s running for president, standing on a car, shaking hands in the rain. All the Jayhawk rabble-rousers excited for Kennedy. You going to vote for him? “Not likely,” Virginia said. “Nixon’s the one. I think this may finally be his year.”

  * * *

  JOE AND REBECCA hitchhiked north from Pusan, toward Seoul. Past rice paddies, farmers fighting beasts of burden dragging wooden plows, and then a crossroads and a town of shacks beaten down by the rain. A woman in a soaked pink dress with sleeves, carrying water, drops falling from the sky into her bucket. First impression of Korea—most of them U.S. recovery dollars must have found their way into Swiss banks. Not too prosperous, this country. Orphanages, leprosariums, and various other institutes for war-gimpy survivors. Hitchhiked into Seoul with Jeeps and Army trucks. U.S. soldiers damn friendly to us, but arrogant toward village locals. What happened to good old GI Joe passing out candy to the kids? No more. In Seoul, Joe and Rebecca dodged trams and stood beneath the old, fragile and tinder-dry wood of the city’s medieval gates, then headed north, into an unhealed, cratered landscape that was thicker with soldiers in ponchos and their weaponry.

  Joe told the GIs they met on the road that Rebecca was an actress. With her hair down, and brushed out, she looked like one. “She’s famous in the Far East and the Middle East.”

  “So why is she hitchhiking? With you?”

  “She’s incognito. Researching her next part. A drama about the Korean War. She plays a woman who’s fallen in love with a soldier who goes missing.”

  Being in the back of an army truck got them past three different checkpoints, through brushy stretches of watershed, until they crossed a river and entered a denuded land, with half-empty villages and watchtowers and barbed wire. Great walls of sandbags. One of the soldiers said North Korean artillery shells fell randomly here, now and then. They were still many kilometers from Panmunjom when they reached one last checkpoint, and everyone jumped off, startling the military policeman who found two grinning tourists among the GIs.

  “Who the hell are you people? Hitchhikers? How the hell did you get this far? Don’t you realize this is a fucking war zone!”2

  Joe wrote an amused letter home. We seem to have been the 1st unauthorized civilians to have made it through for months. Never thought I’d baffle the U.S. military. Great satisfaction. But they took us under their wing and gave us first-class treatment.

  Joe and Rebecca spent two days among the GIs, young men who were very far from home. Rebecca became a one-woman USO show, all the men suddenly shy, bashful boys in her presence. “You’re the first round-eyed girl we’ve seen in thirteen weeks!” Okay, that’s enough ogling, back to patrol, back to your post, to your normal sense of dislocation. As if plucked from Poughkeepsie and dropped into a war film without lines to read. “And the biggest drag is that nobody knows that this baloney is going on,” one of the soldiers, a Californian, told Joe. “Back home all they know is Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam. Vietnam gets all the TV coverage. The Korean War is supposed to be over, right? This will never be over.”

  Must have chatted with a hundred soldiers up there, officers right on down, Joe wrote home, after they were safely back in Seoul. Division doctor has the shakes, gets drunk, listens to Beethoven; gaudy prostitutes in every nearby village, like busted flowers scattered through the dust; the Major wears a cowboy .38 on his hip; a Gunga Din for every barracks; and each night every man not on duty drinking his brains out. Around them, cordite, acrid ammonia, the wafting aromas of warfare. Choppers sweeping the countryside for enemy infiltrators. Every once in a while, Allied artillery shells whistled overhead.

  Joe and Rebecca listened to one last American projectile, its brass head cutting through the wet air as it climbed northward, and listened for the distant, distant pop of the blast. Remember that sound, Sanderson. An explosion in another world. North Korea. They bid adieu to the GIs and headed back to Japan.

  * * *

  FROM THE PORT in Ōsaka, Joe and Rebecca traveled to Hiroshima, a city of memorials, rebuilt and spick-and-span, although there were still “A-bomb slums” along the Ota River built of wood salvaged from the fires. Here, my people dropped an exploding sun on the pedestrians and the bicyclists beginning a summer day. Today, flowers and parks. Uniformed children marching through a museum. We stayed overnight in Peace Park, sleeping on benches beside the last nuclear relic, a bombed-out building set aside as a reminder. Ironic to read the latest news from Vietnam in the morning papers. Onward to Okinawa, bumming the highways and riding ships. From there, a plane to Taiwan, where they learned Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated.

  In Hong Kong they found the British colony was a city in turmoil, filled with the tangy taste of teargas. Thousands of pro-Peking students had been rioting against British rule, running down the narrow streets, a few clubbed for their bad behavior. “The whole world is going crazy,” Rebecca said. “Maybe it is like my friends in Oakland said: ‘A revolutionary moment.’” They fell into conversation at a café with a Chinese communist who spoke English with a British accent, and Rebecca listened as Chao and Joe debated “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” and “the global uprising of youth” in Paris and Prague, and other topics that interested her less now, because she was growing tired of dogmatists and also of traveling with Joe, who wasn’t a dogmatist at all, but certainly an obsessive adventurist. He says he still wants to go to Vietnam. Not me. The bombs floating over my head in Korea, the horny soldiers. That was quite enough for this Wisconsin girl. No more wars, no way.

  * * *

  JOE TOLD REBECCA he was writing a book, or wanted to write a book. But the future Professor Olmsted did not feel there was an author in Joe. What was missing? Gravitas. That severity, that intensity you expect. He was not a tortured ar
tist, and yet he scribbled and scribbled. That night in their Hong Kong hotel room Rebecca took a peek at Joe’s notebook while he slept. Does he mention me? Yes, I see a Baby here. The Japanese men can’t stop staring at Baby. Baby still the hitchhiking magnet. Baby eats sushi. These fucking GIs can’t stop staring at Baby. Not much more than that. Mostly names of towns and times of day and snippets of stuff people say. This is not writing. These are the notes of a scientific expedition. If he ever really writes anything, I’ll just be an extra in his story. In the huge cast of his epic, amid all the facts, another girl, his blond sidekick. I can see it here, in these scribbles, and the way he talks to me. Really, I should be in the middle of the story. I am the book, Joe. We are. Me and you. But no. Instead, with each country he talks to me more about other girls. Karen: a saint, apparently. Mafalda: some connection there I don’t have. And the assorted others he’s started to mention, some whose names he can’t even remember. This is a message he’s sending. Go off to your next war alone, Joe. I’m headed somewhere more peaceful. A kingdom ruled by a chubby, happy prince. Cambodia.

  * * *

  JOE’S FIRST VIETNAM SURPRISE: the military-civilian air show at Tan Son Nhat International Airport. He watched through the window of his BOAC jet as big camouflaged C-130s and F-4 fighters taxied down the runway, past white Cathay Pacific and Pan American jets. Joe felt he’d arrived at a summer exhibition of the martial and commercial uses of air technology. Cessnas outfitted for jungle missions, old Mustangs, rejiggered from Dad’s war to fight Junior’s. Helicopters unloading way over there. Are those wounded men, on stretchers? Pilots with eyes behind shaded glasses, and green trucks loading supplies to a gleaming B-52, its wingspan as wide as a football field. Mom makes me do my taxes and pay Uncle Sam part of my flagpole wages and here my money is! At customs and immigration, a military policeman inspected his round-trip ticket: Joe wouldn’t be allowed to stay more than a week. “You don’t get many tourists here like me, do you?”