Alamode

In the spring of 1963 I moved down to New York for a while, sublet an apartment from an actor named Skip Weatherford and got a job with my uncle Sol Lieberman, an electrical contractor in Manhattan. I was Big Willie's assistant. Big Willie was a huge Black guy. My uncle's one other employee was Little Willie, a small Black guy who I only saw once. Big Willie and I rewired old buildings, a job which provided sights of Manhattan few ever got to enjoy. Rat and bug infested cellars and the bottoms of elevator shafts where I heard the click of the solenoids when someone up high pressed a button, then steeled myself for the clamour of engines and screaming cables as the elevator went to work. We fastened metal conduits to ceilings, then ran long wire "snakes" through them to pull cables through from the far end, Big Willie at one end and me far off at the other hooking up the wires while we yelled at each other through the echoing, dank caverns. One job we got was hanging a false ceiling in the lobby of a midtown office building. Once the struts were in place we worked up there for a week, installing fluorescent fixtures above where the frosted glass panels would go. Big Willie and I jabbered at each other all day long and among the many fascinating topics we tackled Sex was undoubtedly number one. There was a fashion photographer's studio up on the seventh floor and while Big Willie was revealing the secrets of his profound sexual wisdom to me, up there in our ceiling perch, the most beautiful women I'd ever seen, glamorous New York City models, passed continually beneath and how I kept from falling, literally and figuratively, nineteen years old and still a virgin, attending to Big Willie's views, and observing the hair, legs, and miraculous cleavages passing below, is a mystery.

Despite working, I never had money. I ate in Automats, which I loved. Then I'd go home and wash off the days dust, grime, and sweat. Later, I'd go to the Village, just west of my apartment at 5th Street and Avenue D. Each night I passed the Five Spot where Monk was playing all that summer. I never had the dough to go in, but I'd stop and lean against the plate glass window awhile and hear what I could hear and feel the glass vibrate in sympathy to Monk's perfect notes. Then on to Bleeker Street or MacDougall where I might catch a classic film, Maltese Falcon, Touch of Evil, or hang around in front of coffee houses till some proprietor would invite me in for a free coffee so that the tourists could see me there and infer this was a genuine beatnik coffee house. Or I'd go to Union Square where the best entertainment was to be had, night after night, absolutely for free. Orators, conmen, maniacs. Bolsheviks and Mensheviks carrying on their fifty-year-old quarrels. Back to Africa Negroes. Fidelistas. Zealots of every shape and hue. For two bucks I could go up to 52nd Street and get into Birdland and, also, not have to buy drinks so I went there once in a while and saw Dinah Washington, Dizzy Gillespie, Cannonball Adderley, Art Blakey, etc. I sat alone, mostly, and just had a ball.

That was the deal about New York. I was poor but had no end of great times, there was so much to see and do. One day walking around Times Square I thought about my relatives back home who'd go to New York and see Broadway shows. There I was living in the city and had never seen one. So I decided to go right there and then. It was the afternoon and I discovered that matinees were relatively cheap. The only show I knew of that interested me was Beyond the Fringe but I did not realize that these shows were sold out for months in advance. I had to wander from theatre to theatre till, finally, I found one with a show opening right then that had lots of tickets available, so for about five bucks I got to sit in the first row for an all-black play (not a musical) called Tiger Tiger Burning Bright starring Claudia McNeil. I don't recall much of the plot. It was set in the south and had something to do with getting out, a topic I could relate to. Still, it bored me (and everyone else, too, apparently, since it closed within a few days) except that, sitting as close as I was, every time Diana Sands leaned over I could view the fine swell of her bosoms.

For a long time I thought, that's my life story: I see one Broadway show and it's a bomb. Years had to pass before I recognized that it was just another in a series of episodes that confirmed what I suspected from childhood: that I was a member of a small, distinguished cadre of meta-normal persons. Well, in truth, I suspected I was completely unique but later adjusted my social milieu to include a few others, just so I'd have someone to talk to. How many thousands have seen My Fair Lady, or Brigadoon? Or The Fantastiks? Many. But only a small specialized coterie of misfits and outsiders have shared such esoteric experiences with me has having seen Tiger. We should have reunions.

My brother Larry and his friend drove down from Montréal one weekend and stayed at my place. As they were leaving I decided that with a free ride home I ought to go up for the weekend and see my pals. It was my philosophy of life back then to never pass up a free ride to anywhere. So I sat in the back of Larry's Impala for seven or eight hours staring at America through the windshield, saying nothing. In 1963 there was nothing my brother and his friend could talk to me about.

Sunday night, before catching the red-eye bus back to New York, I was hanging out at the Potpourri when three guys showed up I'd never seen before. Everyone else there knew them, so they'd obviously been around. They were talking about Alberta. Out front, on Stanley Street, they'd parked a huge, brand-new glow-in-the-dark bright yellow school bus.

Dale was from New Jersey, the step-son of a famous sideman in the Duke Ellington band. John was from Toronto, played guitar and sang folk songs. Rocky was from No Fixed Address, wore biker clothes and had hair down the back of his neck. With John, the whitest and nearest to straight-looking of the trio, as frontman they'd arranged to drive the bus from its Woodstock, Ontario factory to the school in Lethbridge, Alberta that had, in complete innocence, bought the thing to cart little Albertan school-kiddies around. I'd known people who'd answered ads in the paper looking for drivers to deliver cars to various places, often cross-country. It was a good way to get free transportation. If the destination was not popular you might even be paid. Or at least get gas paid for. Until this night in Montréal I'd never heard of school buses being delivered this way. But they were.

Montréal is about 400 miles the wrong way when going from Woodstock to Lethbridge, but this vagabond trio craved one final night in the civilized world before setting off for the unknown. To us, in the Big City nexus of Toronto, Montréal, and New York, Alberta was the unknown. I'd heard of the place but had no idea where, or what, it was. Nor had I ever cared. Out there, farmland, cows, cowboys. I'm not even sure, now, if I remembered the Rocky Mountains were out there. Why would I? But then we all knew deeply, and wholly, as we knew air, as we knew jazz, that "to stay is to be nowhere". We had to Go. That night at the Potpourri John took the stage and sang some of his ditties in a half-assed melancholic mood, Five Thousand Miles from my Home or some such, eyeballing the girls. Rocky mumbling disdainfully to whomever. Dale was the talker. Orator, raconteur, livewire. (Years later he became a disc jockey.) "Let's Go! We're goin' to Alberta! We got a bus here! Room for everyone!" I had to see this. Out on the street, a dozen or more of us all piled on the bus. Me and my old pal, Murray, took seats in the back. I don't remember thinking a single thought at that moment. I just said, "I'm goin'." "Me, too," said Murray.

I grabbed a city bus back to my parent's house in Snowdon, where I was staying. In my old bedroom, I grabbed my canvas backpack and stuffed a change of underwear, a sweater, my copy of Kerouac's Scripture of the Golden Eternity into it. "I'm going to Alberta". My parents, my poor eternally confounded parents stood there, dazed, watching. "Where??? What??? For how long??? When will you be back???" "I dunno. A week or two. I don't even know where Alberta is, for chrissakes. I'll write. Don' worry. I dunno."

I had a job and an apartment in New York, parents in Snowdon, and the girl of my dreams at a table in the Potpourri gulping espresso while folksingers from Toronto crooned to her arias of drifting and imaginary gloom. I gave none another thought. Within an hour I was back on The Bus. By 2 or 3 A.M. Dale, John, Rocky, Murray, and I were sleeping sprawled over two seats apiece on a gleaming yellow bus parked on Stanley Street in Downtown Montréal in front of the Potpourri Bookstore & Coffeehouse in the spring of 1963, the world having been saved from Atomic Destruction in the Caribbean by Nikita Krushchev, Bertrand Russell, a very young Bob Dylan, and Thelonious Monk.

II

Someone got a large rectangle of cardboard, maybe two by three feet, and wrote on it, in big black felt-pen letters, BOHEMIAN EXPRESS, and taped it to the back of The Bus. Then we were off. For Alberta.

When I woke up at dawn of the first day, we were several hundred miles west of Montreal. John had driven the first night shift and, having dozed off at the wheel, briefly, bequeathed our front right fender to the guard rail. Things were looking good!

Since, as far as we knew, Alberta was not only in the middle of nowhere, but was Nowhere, we all quickly decided that Vancouver, which was not only the end of the road but also a place we'd heard of, was our real destination. John knew of folk clubs there where he could make a few bucks with Thousand Miles, etc., and I'd heard jazz from Vancouver on CBC radio so I knew it had to be worthy destination. We also knew that Vancouver was the dope capital of the country.

Among the five of us there was no more than a total of about sixty dollars. Gas and oil expenses would be paid back to us by the school board in Lethbridge (that fender had us a little edgy) but we had to pay cash along the way. Sixty dollars wasn't going to do it, and we also had to eat. At the time Texaco was running a "service guaranteed" promotion. If they didn't check your oil and clean your windshield, so their billboards proclaimed, your gas was free. Our policy, at the outset, was to grant Texaco the monopoly on our fuel supply.

We passed no hitchhiker going our way without stopping. Some were headed just a few miles down the road and they got off where they said they would. But, by and large, anyone getting on the Bus would ask how far we were going and when we said, "Vancouver", they'd say, "Uh...Vancouver? Yeah...me too! That's where I'm going. Great." Most weren't carrying so much as a hankie with them. They might have been headed for the nearest gas station for a pack of smokes, or back to work on some farm. A few were headed nowhere in particular and "far" was as good a place as any, and better than most. So the fundamental reality of The Bus was: no one got off.

You will not, ordinarily, meet members of all social groups on the highway thumbing rides. But of that small class of Canadians for whom hitchhiking was a reasonable means of travel, if not the only means, we encountered, and welcomed aboard, the entire, amazing range. Fresh faced kids away from home for the first time, newlyweds on the lam, hoboes, drifters, carnies, con-men, cowboys, hicks, migrant workers, hustlers, college kids out for jobs. More than one was newly sprung from jail. But mostly these riders were mysteries. What they did, if anything, was as unfathomable as their mothers maiden names. They weren't from anywhere and were only going to Vancouver for the free ride. We hit them all up for gas money and some came across, other's didn't, or couldn't. One rider was so desperate and hungry looking we gave him money. Many traveled in pairs and I was later to also learn the advantages of having a "partner" on the road.