Spectator's Journal: Greyhound to San Francisco
Croke, Bill
SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL by Bill Croke Greyhound to San Francisco B ack in the Golden Age of bus travel —the early 1970's — it cost a trifling $49 to ride a Greyhound from New York to San Francisco....
...0 ne pink dawn in Evanston, Wyoming, the bus rolled into the station on Front Street, and there on the sidewalk with alpenglow-drenched Church Butte for a backdrop, stood a drunk, retching cowboy with his arm nonchalantly draped over a parking meter as if it were a dear friend with whom he shared a joke or an intimate secret...
...I'd pay her way...
...I laughed yet again...
...Head bowed, he stood denim-clad and lanky, his pointy boots pigeon-toed...
...We slept propped up, leaning through the hours of dozing and abrupt wakefulness...
...For eight dollars per night Hay in bed with the light left on to discourage the skittering cockroaches, listened to drunken brawls out in the hall, read Charlie Bukowski's bad poetry, and marveled at how I was having such a culturally significant experience...
...Insane...
...You can pass out with the hose in your mouth and your brain will calcify...
...His surname was Beecher—John or Jim I think...
...It was raining that night in San Francisco when we parted company in the station on Market Street...
...Cassady's big problem was women," he said...
...Fleeing the perceived provincialism of my hometown in upstate New York, I sought the mist-haunted culture of Columbus Avenue in North Beach, Carol Doda's Condor Club, Enrico's, and the paperback palace of City Lights...
...Otherwise, Mr...
...I committed the faux pas of calling him "Mr...
...As for me, it was overpriced draft beer drunk while watching that girl on the overhead swing in the Condor Club, followed by a late-night walk to opulent lodgings in a wino-ridden flophouse (probably now long gone to dust) called the Basque Hotel...
...Beecher's rambling monologue made me think that he had done exactly that...
...He told me of all those free concerts in the panhandle of Golden Gate Park...
...He was welcome to it...
...I was a Beat/Hippie wannabe born just a little too late, and this guy looked like someone who'd been present at the creation...
...They drove him nuts...
...They had a tank of nitrous oxide...
...He was scruffy-looking (but then, Back in the 1970's, the best part of being bi-coastal was traveling through all the spots that lay in-between...
...After the rundown junkyard look of Wyoming interstate towns, its antiseptic cleanliness immediately reminded me that I could not find a bar within hard walking distance of the station...
...The not-of-this-world Timothy Leary at the Human Be-In...
...She would, she said, only her older brothers would track us down and kill their sister's romantic kidnapper...
...They're the reason I think he was the way he was...
...At Gaye Johnson's truck stop in windswept Rawlins, Wyoming, I finally worked up the courage to ask a waitress named Charlene to skip town and come to San Francisco with me...
...The Diggers...
...Gravy had stolen my dog-eared copy of Naked Lunch...
...In front of the last, I sat on the very same bench where Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and a young woman named Natalie Jackson had had their picture taken on a rare sun-drenched day in 1956...
...As the sagebrush and snow of northern Nevada sped by, we chatted about the already historically distant sixties counterculture...
...Greyhound's nighttime sleeping accommodations were a cramped double seat shared with a stranger, who could be a person your age or an elderly lady off to visit relatives in Chicago...
...Salt Lake City made a different impression...
...Beecher was an inveterate name dropper...
...The dirty dreariness of my surroundings weighed on me...
...Then he instructed solemnly: "Never do that stuff alone...
...I shook my head and laughed aloud, attracting nervous glances from passersby in the busy station...
...Warren Hinkle drank with Bentley, his basset hound...
...Of life in the Haight-Ashbury...
...I spent long mornings in the back booth of a dingy coffee shop on Van Ness reading the Chronicle, and thought that San Francisco must be the great refuge for newspapermen gone over the edge...
...It was just the ticket for a 20-year-old dreaming of stony peaks and trackless deserts, and who had read too much Jack Kerouac...
...I fished around in my knapsack for a cigarette and discovered that Mr...
...But soon enough, I was watching the dark fields of the Republic roll past a rain-streaked window...
...McCabe worked on his famously funny twice-weekly column ("Himself') over Sloe Gin Fizzes in a bar in Sausalito...
...Once, westbound, I met Hugh Romney's (a.k.a...
...everything...
...Through Reno and on over the mountains to Sacramento he held forth...
...For a few years the bus line with its streaking canine logo was my necessary, if not preferred, mode of travel...
...Charlene was my age, but mature beyond her years...
...Wavy Gravy) brother-in-law...
...The gray dawn revealed us in all our crusty-eyed, bad-haired glory...
...The route always followed Interstate 8o, and after a few of these arduous crossings I discovered that I remembered the names of bartenders and waitresses at mealstops in bars and bus station cafeterias in North Platte, Rawlins, or Winnemucca...
...66 September 1998 • The American Spectator we all were) in ragged, greasy jeans, red matted hair and beard...
...Though it was winter, he wore low-top sneakers and no socks, and his ankles sported rings of freckled dirt...
...Backstage with the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore West sent Beecher into paroxysms of nostalgia...
...I trudged along, glancing eastward down the avenues toward the creamy peaks of the Wasatch Front...
...Charlie McCabe took a yearly gone-on-the-wagon cruise to Hong Kong, lying in a deck chair and rereading Boswell's Life of Johnson...
...I sat on a bench, stretched my legs, and thought about where to spend the night—whether to remain at the station or go to the Basque...
...Gravy...
...Pure wanderlust drove me back and forth between the coasts (when I had money...
...They wouldn't do that really," I said, and she looked at me as if that was the silliest thing that she had ever heard...
...In the Stockman Hotel in Elko, Nevada, Louis Vasquez shined glasses and said: "Oh right, the kid from New York," though he might have said that fifty times a week...
...The views were wonderful, but though milk and honey flowed freely in Zion, beer and whiskey did not...
...There was the locally omnipotent Herb Caen, who seemed to be everywhere, every minute, seeing and hearing BILL CROKE is a writer in Choteau, Montana...
...Like Saul on the road to Damascus, I was suddenly privy to a few essential truths, one of which caused me to wonder what I was doing on that bench...
...There they had smoked and smiled and squinted at the camera, seemingly at ease in Ike's America...
...SARKES TARZIAN INC Sarkes Tarzian Television Sarkes Tarzian Radio Broadcasters Making a Difference The American Spectator • September 1998 67...
Vol. 31 • September 1998 • No. 9
