The Bus Ride Home

In September 1959, seventeen years old, I said goodbye to Ma and my beatnik friends back home and left San Mateo for the carefree life of an English major at San Jose State College. I was going to be a writer when I grew up. A novelist, like Jack Kerouac. My plan was to hitchhike everywhere, love all the longhaired beatnik girls, grow up, live in Greenwich Village and write about everything that happened to me. You must admit it's not a bad plan. I'd do what I wanted to do anyway and make a living from my pen.

I never wondered if I'd be happy. Happiness was impossible. Not part of the equation.

One cold night on the Greyhound heading back up the Peninsula to San Mateo for the weekend, I was thinking about my friend Way Out Willy, who was sleeping in Bear Mattson's car because he got into a shouting match with his parents and they threw him out.

I wanted to write about stuff like that too. Where is the love? What if I was on a long bus journey – like this creeping thirty miles up the El Camino to San Mateo, but I'd been on the road for weeks and weeks and I was burnt out, gone, exhausted in heart and soul. What if I was dragging my weary ass back to my home town even though my parents were dead or something, but a heartsick homesickness compelled me across the snowy continent. I knew when I got to my best friend Way Out's house (hmm, I'd have to call him something else) I would be welcomed like a son, received into the warmth of his family, be fed and a have real bed to sleep in. I'd be home again and safe to heal.

So, in my story dream the Greyhound grumbled to a stop at the little B Street bus depot on that rainy Christmas night and I limped through darkened and shuttered downtown streets. Just the odd Santa Claus statuette in a shop window illuminating my backpack and my worn beat seventeen year old face. I stumbled up through the shuttered mansions of Hillsborough and on into the redwood subdivisions high on the jolly Christmas rainy hillside. And there were the diamond pinpoints of the Peninsula below. I hobbled up Crestview Drive and just as I approached, still hidden by the night, I hear angry voices. There's Way Out's father at the front door and he's shouting at Willy and Willy is just standing there taking it. He heaves Willy's paintings and sculptures into the rain and keeps shouting and there they lie in the wet grass with little drips from the acacia tree onto his portrait of our friend Gypsy Girl. Little rain drips on her dark cheeks. The door slams shut, leaving Way Out standing in the rain in his Levis and red windbreaker. In the rain night ice night Rebel Without A Cause night star-filled air.

“Hey man.”

“Hey Walrus.”

That was the real truth. I had to tell that story. Just the kids. Lost and loose on the suburban sorrowful Crestview Drive of time. I thought I could write stories like that.

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The only trouble with writing was you had to sit at a typewriter for a long time every day. How fun is that? And then you had to sweat and sweat until you got an idea. And then you actually had to write sentences that communicated something more than 'cats ate rats'. And then words on the page sounded stupid when you read it to yourself out loud and you had to throw the whole thing out and start over. All that work for nothing.

I wasn't really reconciled to it. Then there was the part where you walked around and wouldn't talk to anybody and people thought you were sulking but you were just trying to get it together in your mind. The right place in my head. Where is it? It was there yesterday!

Writing is still like that. When the spirit is in me, writing is the funnest thing. I make myself laugh and I work myself up into fits and I am amazed to see little scenes come to life. Wow! And then there's the part where you groan and have to chain yourself to the seat because nothing will come. At least in the days of typewriters you had to work for your distractions. Now the whole Internet is out there to distract us hapless writers.

But you know what? For better or worse, I was made and molded and formed to do this. It's in my blood. Funny. Now I'm 64. And this is still what I want to do when I grow up. I hope I get to.