On the Road

There turned out to be no pending warrants for my arrest, so the fine city of Santa Monica arranged for my one-way ticket to Austin, Texas, courtesy of their "Homecoming Program". Ironically, Los Angeles is probably the closest thing to a "home" for me since it's where I grew up and where my family still lives. I jokingly refer to the "Homecoming Program" as the "Get the Hell Out of Our City Program", but I am truly thankful for the blessing of being able to travel half-way across the country for free. (My caseworker at St. Joe's told me that they will call my Austin friend at approximately monthly intervals to "check up on me". I guess that's the "And Stay the Hell Out" portion of the program.)

So it was time to bid farewell to my friends, "old" and new. They're a transitory crowd (even the chess players), and I really haven't known them that long, but it still brought up some sadly sweet moments for me. I'd only barely gotten to know some of my newer friends. Sean and Rebecca are working hard to carve out their niche in the Venice boardwalk art scene. (The LA Times recently had an interesting audio-photo essay depicting the colorful ambience of the boardwalk.) And then there's cerebral Kevin with his incredibly incisive liberal blog at btcnews.com, written under the tasty pseudonym "Weldon Berger". And he's got a great new blog detailing his experiences being homeless at urbanrefugees.blogspot.com. His pseudonym on this site is the clever "P. Handling". (Golly, it makes you wonder how many of us homeless dudes are out here blogging about our experiences.) Not sure what to do with my bike, I finally left it with Ruben, an exuberant fellow with a permanent grin on his face who promised to take care of it until I returned.

Rob and I went for one last bike ride down to Palos Verdes and back, making stops for Subway sandwiches, ice cream, and women's volleyball. We even threw around a Frisbee disc on Palos Verdes beach, doing our best not to injure any of the hordes of sunbathers enjoying the gorgeous weather. As a kind parting gesture, Rob bought me packages of beef jerky and tuna for the road.

On my last day, I said goodbye to Ma Ocean and swung on the swings on the Santa Monica beach. A sign of the times: they sold the Santa Monica Pier ferris wheel on Ebay. I think they're gonna put up a new one, but it made me feel even more ready to hit the road.

So then it was time to go. My trip started off a bit inauspiciously as I took the wrong Metro bus downtown, thinking that Union Station was where the Greyhound bus station would be. Luckily, I had enough time and an extra bus token to get to the right place. Besides the usual funny looks at my gear and get-up, the folks at the ticket counter informed me that I wouldn't be able to take my broom and dustpan with me. But the bus driver didn't have a problem with them, so I was able to keep all my gear intact.

Snapshots from the one and a half day bus ride to Austin, Texas:

The bus is pretty full, stopping in dusty little towns to trickle passengers on and off. Most of my fellow travelers are lower to middle class, gruff, mainly male, of all major ethnicities. All of our transient lives are intersecting on this bus, some running away, others running to. Which am I?

At every stop, the smokers (most of the bus) herd off to puff away grumpily in (hot) outdoor smoking pens.

109 degrees in Phoenix, Arizona.

This is not the way I usually like to travel, but hey, beggars can't be choosers. (I'm still amazed at the free ticket.) But I tend to go pretty slow when I travel. My last road trip across the U.S. in 2005 took six months. But then I remember a faster trip I did in the early 90s: ten days from Miami to Los Angeles in a "drive-away" Volkswagon Jetta with two crazy Swiss women and their too-short skirts. (Thought I was gonna get killed at one Alabama truckstop...)

As usual, I haven't gotten enough sleep before the trip and I'm having trouble sleeping on the bus. I wake up from one nap with a sore neck that stays with me for most of the trip.

The guy sitting next to me is heading all the way back to Florida-----three and a half days on seven buses. That means he will spend a total of a week on buses for the round trip. He went to San Diego for his mother's funeral. His name is Scott and he used to work with the state lottery until his company lost the contract, so now he's out of a job. I mention that I think I read somewhere that studies have shown that lottery winners are not any happier than people who suffer debilitating injuries.

The vast fields of huge white windmills generating electricity in the deserts of California and Texas-----so graceful, so surreal.

We hit El Paso, Texas at 6am, but I won't get to Austin until 1am the next morning.

Appropriately enough, I'm finally digging into Jack Kerouac's On the Road. With the bus rolling across the night, I can feel myself getting the fever again as I read Kerouac's amped up prose. Despite the ironic fact that I am literally "on the road", I can feel the yearning growing in me, the yearning for the open road and the vast horizons that whisper of possibility and wonder. I remind myself that Wonder is wherever I am, in all places, at all times, but I can still feel the fever rising in me. His words pour down like late night jazz, building to sweaty frenzies and then crashing down in exhaustion. But always, the fever flows across the pages.....and into my veins.

I like to joke that I'm a "Jack of no trades, master of none", so like Kerouac, I like to put myself in interesting circumstances with interesting people, hoping that interesting things will happen around me. I'm such a chameleon that I'm not sure who I really am under this quicksilver skin. Maybe I'll peel it back and find nothing. I'm becoming more comfortable with that possibility.

I slowly begin to realize that Kerouac is writing my life more passionately and eloquently than I ever could. And then, in a sudden flash of insight, I realize that I am, quite literally, a "dharma bum".



"babe, what highway are you on now
 what direction?
 north, south, east
 how is the wind the sun the smell of earth?
 how does it feel under your shoes?
 have you eaten?"
---Wanda Coleman, engraved on the Venice Beach poetry walls

"My favorite color is yellow."
---Rob's less-than-inspiring attempt to talk to a young woman in a yellow bikini

"We're a bunch of educated fools standing in line. We don't want to work for anybody else. We want to run our own businesses. We are the leadership overflow of America!"
---Sir Charles, pontificating to the homeless crowd waiting outside of the Bread and Roses Cafe

"Will blog for Fame .....Food.....CASH!
 Immortalize your encounter with a mentally ill homeless person!
 urbanrefugees.blogspot.com"
---Kevin's idea for a panhandling sign

"You know what we should do? We should go to a strip club and keep all the receipts to claim as donations to charity on our taxes! You know how many girls we'd be putting through college?! 'Excuse me, Ma'am, can you give me a receipt for that lap dance you just gave me?!' And can you imagine all the one dollar receipts?!"
---phone conversation in the seat behind me on the bus


Jack Kerouac, from On the Road:

"But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'"

"...and as the river poured down from mid-America by starlight I knew, I knew like mad that everything I had ever known and would ever know was One."

"What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing?---it's the too-huge world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies."