TRICKY DICK'S COFFEE HOUSE: 5) SUMMER ROAD-TRIPPING
A Throwback Thursday Serial About Living in London (and Cape Cod) in the '70s
It was early August 1974 and somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean the Air Canada 707 flying me to Montreal blew a widget and knocked out the hydraulic system. This is what the pilot announced, and there was a hint of alarm in his distant, absorbed voice.
I didn't know what this hydraulic business meant, but the flight attendants rushed around nervously instructing everyone how to land in an emergency position: hunched over a pillow, left arm under your chin, right arm protecting your head, shoes off. It sounded serious.
As the aircraft landed, faster than usual, we passengers were amazed to see fire engines and ambulances lining both sides of the runway. It took me a few seconds to realize they were there for us.
Barney, my most regular customer at Tricky Dick’s, was also awaiting the flight, with his new girlfriend.
We drove to downtown Montreal, a funky quarter called St. Laurent where Barney grew up. I witnessed the most amazing sunset I've ever seen; so unusual, I wasn't sure at first if I was looking at the sun or the moon. It was a big round orange in a dusky sky.
We ducked into a deli for "smoked meat" sandwiches, a local specialty, and I reveled at eating North American food again.
Barney told me that he and his girlfriend were driving to Muncie, Indiana next day for some kind of family event. I was disappointed; we were supposed to hang together. But what the hell, it was early August, I had a whole month to bum around, do whatever I wanted until school began in September. I was free! But I was suddenly tired. I'd been flying all day, it was late (the five-hour time change) and my body needed a recharge.
Barney said he couldn't put me up but he had some friends where I could bunk overnight. He was sheepish, knew he was letting me down. He buzzed the Greyhound bus station and we got out to check schedules. I noted a 10 a.m. to Boston next morning. Then he took me to his friends' place, a small apartment not far from the bus station. I staked a sofa and fell asleep while Barney and his friends partied into the small hours.
I awoke early next morning rejuvenated, eager to embark on my journey. No one was around; Barney's friends asleep in other rooms. I quietly brushed my teeth, left a short note of thanks, slung my army-green duffel bag over my shoulder and trudged down to the Greyhound bus station, filling my lungs with sweet summer air.
I bought a ticket then breakfasted in the coffee shop, watching the early morning hustle-bustle around me, reveling in people going this way and that, all with different destinations, families they're going to see, families they're running from…
Me? On my way to a city that had always whistled my name; an appointment with destiny.
With travel, you can do absolutely nothing yet you're still doing something. Motion has a purpose and, like mopping a floor, provides instant results.
You can see the landscape pass before you as you whiz along the highway getting somewhere, anywhere. And when you leave a place, say goodbye, you may one day come back, maybe soon, but it'll never be the same, nor the friends you left behind.
Most people don't understand time beyond the hours on a clock, using it to regiment their lives. Time is a healer; time is a divergent. And there's not enough of it.
Oh, when we're 19 we think there's plenty of time for everything, because we have only 18 other years to compare it to, and those were the longest years of our lives. Not because we were growing up, but because time is relative. When you're three, it takes half your life to reach six. When you're 20, your 21st year is 1/20th of your life. And so on.
Young people doubt the reality of this natural phenomenon. Older folks don't doubt time for a minute. And they don’t take it for granted either.
These are the things I ponder when I sit on a bus, racing toward fate at 70 miles an hour, new sights whistling past, the advancing road inducing my mind to muse.
The bus stopped in Burlington, Vermont. I wandered out of the station and grabbed a hoagie at a place called The Real American Hero, feasted upon it, awed by a view of Lake Champlain in the distance.
The long ride to Boston turned tedious. An elderly gent next to me talked at length about the importance of putting lights and reflectors on bicycles when you cycle at night; he said something about an accident he'd been in and I got the impression he'd killed a bicycler the previous summer and the memory wouldn't let him go; that he had to tell everyone he met how important is was to light your bicycle. A penance, perhaps.
I had written Harold Fish a couple of months earlier to announce my intended arrival in Boston in early August. Harold was an early friend at the American School in London, a member of the first of three cliques and part of the first migration of friends who disappeared annually back to the States. Last I heard, Harold was in Boston, but I had no way of knowing whether he'd moved again or even received my letter as I had not heard back from him.
My contingency was to check into a cheap hotel, but this proved unnecessary. Harold answered the phone and said he'd be right down.
I sat on my duffel outside the bus station, watching the sights and hearing the sounds for the first time of east coast USA in summer, summed up by a helmeted cop astride a monstrous motorcycle, decked to the hilt in full police paraphernalia.
Harold's family graciously put me up at their house in Brookline, a suburb whose suburban streets and colonial houses with quaint porches looked just how I'd imagined the east coast to be, and took me out to dinner.
Harold and I spent a few days hanging in Boston eating roast beef hoagies with his boyhood chum who believed he was a horse, my first brush with lycanthropy, now very trendy. At night we'd visit a park, Boston's version of London’s Primrose Hill, watching a skyline dominated by the Prudential building. That's where I was when Tricky Dick Nixon finally resigned.
One morning Harold's mother packed us lunch and we drove south to Cape Cod and Hyannisport. On impulse, we dumped Harold's Beetle and took the two-hour ferry to Nantucket. There was nowhere to for us stay on this busy resort island; we looked up Jeff P, another ASL buddy, working at a fancy hotel called White Elephant.
Jeff couldn't put us up; he was billeted in the hotel's staff quarters, six to a room. So he kindly raided a linen closet and grabbed us some blankets for camping on the beach.
We got up early, the only people wandering the cobblestoned streets of Nantucket Village at six a.m. looking like we'd drunk too much beer and slept the night on a beach. Nothing was open. At a restaurant near the port some guy offered us breakfast if we'd unstack chairs and set tables. We did, and all we got for our trouble was a corn muffin.
Back in Hyannis, we couldn't find any kind of motel or bed & breakfast with a vacancy and somehow wound up at Cape Cod Mall where, traipsing through Sears in a zombie-like trance, I bumped into Derek Berlew, yet another ASL pal. He was having the same problem and suggested Falmouth for lodging.
That didn't pan out (why would I take advice from someone with the same unsolved problem?) but before nightfall Harold ran into a school friend who was working the summer as a bouncer for a Hyannis nightclub. He invited us to sleep on the floor of the apartment he shared with his friend, who was in bed moaning and groaning with the clap.
And the sight of that guy, doubled up in pain, cursing his one-night stand, did nothing to tranquilize my frazzled state of mind… people walking over me at all hours as clap-man groaned in pain across the room. And someone puking in the bathroom around three a.m.
Next day I managed to find a room for three weeks at cottage rental complex on Sea Street, and Harold returned to Boston.
I unpacked the few possessions I had brought with me, feeling low, wondering what I was doing in Cape Cod by myself. I had no car, and my funds were so limited it didn't occur to me to buy one.
Tricky Dick's was paying for this, and it wasn't paying much. I did a lot of walking. A lot of thinking. And, finally, a lot of reading: The Politics of Lying by David Wise; Johnny we Hardly Knew Ye by Dave Powers, about my new neighbors, the Kennedys.
Harold returned to Cape Cod a weekend later and on impulse again we embarked on a road trip that landed us in Middletown, Connecticut, in search of our ASL buddy Bob Miller.
We knew only that Bob's brother Chip attended Wesleyan College. Several leads produced Bob's voice at the end of a phone and he was shocked as hell to hear I was in Middletown with Harold. He met us on Main Street and we went to an army-navy surplus store where I bought an imperfect duck-down coat for 20 bucks.
We stayed at Chip's house, a run-down rental, sleeping on the floor, a black & white TV set playing Kojak and hundreds of crickets chirping in the overgrowth outside.
Then the three of us hit the road to Westport, home to two other ASL friends. There was something about ASL that instilled a brotherhood that never quit.
We got into town late evening, had trouble finding our friends and, as I stood in a phone booth, Harold tried to massage it with his Beetle and shattered the glass into a thousand pieces and we skedaddled fast, hit a few bars, drank Jack Daniels on the rocks and, near midnight, became concerned about where to sleep.
We aimed for a beach but couldn't find one, drove in circles getting nowhere—and finally pulled into Burger King for a snack and directions.
A sweet girl behind the counter said, "The beach? Why are you going to the beach this time of night?"
We told her to sleep, and she invited us to her house to camp out on the back porch. And ever since I've held a soft spot in my heart for Westport.
Next morning we found our ASL chum Rick Tresise and he told us how to find Anna Rogers, no longer his girlfriend. They'd gone back to the States and split up. Everything was changing, everything, and I just wanted to go back to the autumn of 1971 and have a party in Hyde Park, drink apple wine and kiss pretty girls.
And then we found Anna, clerking in a drug store, and she was amazed to see Bob and me; Harold, she did not know. Anna took a break and walked us to a coffee shop and James Taylor came on the sound system singing Long Ago and Far Away, and when I pointed out the significance of that song and how much they and it meant to me, wrapped together in my psyche, no one knew what the hell I was yakking about.
And that's the biggest problem looking up people from your past. Your perception of reality back then was not their perception.
We got as far as Scarsdale, a one-time girlfriend.
It was a sad road trip, seeing so many faces out of context, disorienting. But that was my life at this stage, between Tricky Dick’s and my first crack at college.
I didn't give much thought to Tricky Dick's. I didn't think of it in terms of being part of my future. It was something I'd done to kill time, and it was behind me. It was Mike's place now, to learn his own lessons.
And when I mentioned to new acquaintances that I had run my own coffee house in London, England they looked at me like I was nuts. Me, a scrawny kid of 19—c'mon, gimme a break! It was barely believable that I’d lived in London.
"Why don't you have an accent?" people asked suspiciously.
I'd try to explain that the Americans with English accents are inevitably those who lived there not more than six months—an affectation—and people would just nod and say, uh-huh.
Back in Middletown, we saw a couple of forgettable movies at a drive-in, got eaten alive by mosquitoes, and Harold and I drove silently back to Cape Cod. He dropped me in Hyannis and scrammed home to Boston.
I went through a bad patch, somewhat lonely and homesick, wondering what the heck I was doing so far away from family, from Tricky Dick’s, my comfort zone. I recall popping quarters into a pizzeria on Main Street and listening to Baby I’m-a Want You and feel my eyes tear up.
Thinking about it now, writing about it now, I should have repacked my bags and flown home to London and Tricky Dick's. But when you’re 19, the streets are seemingly all one-way and society makes you believe college is the only route.
The only thing to do was get a grip, grow up—and see what comes next.
So next day, at Keyes Memorial Beach, bottom of Sea Street, alone in nature, I spoke with God or The Force or whatever you want to call the unity that connects us all into oneness, and we made a pact, memorialized by a pebble from the sand I’ve kept close to me ever since. And I knew from that point on everything would be all right.