This part-time arrangement was supposed to let me also focus on research and writing my dissertation. Close to thirty new pages were in the cardboard box labelled school in the Volksie’s trunk, but I had intended to accomplish twice that number.
My shifts for the city desk were the night trick — 6:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. After work a bunch of us invariably would go over to the all-night Sportsman Café on Dunsmuir Street for coffee and pie and a good yak. Most mornings I wouldn’t get back to the house until dawn, which pretty well screwed up the next day for making progress on the thesis. I considered yet again what to tell Dr. Bulgy, my thesis supervisor, about my retarded progress. Plus, on Friday, during my last shift of the summer, the night city editor had beckoned me over and conveyed the message that management — which meant Herman the German, the managing editor known more for his temper than his talents — felt strongly that if I wanted a career at the Sun I better return in the spring, degree in hand or not, prepared to work full-time. In short, they weren’t going to carry me with this summer part-time gig another year.
I assured myself I was used to deadlines. Yet I couldn’t help brooding on how I better tuck down and complete the damn degree. I attempted to snap myself out of my preoccupation with my occupational future — and prevent myself slipping into an equally absorbing, though just as unproductive, calculation about where I might stand with Janey — by breaking into the Kingston Trio’s “Buddy, Better Get on Down the Line.” Since I was in that groove, despite manoeuvring through a stretch of heavy traffic approaching Stockton, I warbled the boys’ plaintive “Colorado Trail.” Noting mileage signs for Salinas and Monterey, I let loose with their “San Miguel,” followed by “South Coast.” At a rest stop between Modesto and Merced, I hauled my cooler over to a picnic table and ate lunch. Then it was on once more through the steamy valley day. About when I decided I was doomed to parboil on the freeway before arriving anywhere, a line of distant clouds resolved themselves into mountains — first tinted a faint azure, but after another twenty minutes displaying the dry summertime brown of the un-irrigated California hills.
An extra lane abruptly materialized on the right. Now the road began to be crowded with clusters of cars and trucks as we raced toward the ascent marking the gateway to the fabled L.A. Basin, to the Southland. An additional lane, and another, merged onto the roadway. We were eight lanes abreast as we lost the big rigs for a few minutes while they docilely exited for an inspection station. Then the files of tractor trailers rejoined our pack of accelerating cars, vans, and pickups as we began to rise toward paradise.
Earlier, I had become a little bored with my own voice and with my brain churning over the war, the year ahead, and Janey. As I pounded past Bakersfield, I had shifted the radio dial through Buck Owens and Merle Haggard until I hit the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Woman,” which had been number one in the Frozen North when I’d left. At the start of the climb toward Tejon, grooves in the pavement after the Grapevine exit caused my tires to throb loudly and rhythmically. The Bakersfield DJ announced another golden gasser from three years ago, the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love.” Their four-four drumbeat matched perfectly the tempo of the track my tires were laying down — dum-dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum-dum:
I need love, love,
To ease my mind.
I need to find, find,
Someone to call mine.
A chill of awe and excitement swept up the back of my arms and neck. I was in the thick of it now, pedal to the floor, gunning sixty-five miles per hour up amid a forest of huge trucks on every side while maniac sedans and sports cars screamed by me left and right, or loomed behind, jockeying through the dense flow of other vehicles for a shot at an open expanse of blacktop.
But mama said:
“You can’t hurry love.
No, you just have to wait.”
She said: “Love don’t come easy,
It’s a game of give and take.”
A tractor hauling a train of two semi-trailers lurched unexpectedly into my lane inches in front of me to avoid a slow-moving van pulling a large boat. I braked hard to save my life, glanced in my mirror en route to a lightning-quick shoulder check, then swayed around the rig. The Supremes were confessing:
Right now the only thing
That keeps me hanging on
When I feel my strength,
Yeah, it’s al-most gone,
I remember mama said:
“You can’t hurry love.
No, you just have to wait.”
She said: “Love don’t come easy,
It’s a game of give and take.”
A gaudily coloured Volkswagen microbus chugged alongside to my left, a mass of flowers depicted on its side as it swept upward with the rest of us toward the summit. The bus momentarily held station beside me. Through its open passenger window, I watched the long-haired driver take a deep pull on a hand-rolled cigarette or joint. From how he held the smoke in, no question it was a doobie. The driver handed the number across to his equally long-haired and bearded buddy beside him. The passenger held up the joint in front of him to contemplate its pleasures while he struggled to retain smoke. For some reason he glanced at me.
When I registered with the passenger, his face broke into a huge grin. Maybe he recognized a fellow freak, though I’d had my hair trimmed and had cut back my beard to ease my transition across the border at Blaine, where I had to produce my student visa papers. Or maybe as the microbus had overtaken me he had read my rear bumper stickers.
END CANADIAN COMPLICITY IN THE VIETNAM WAR was one I had affixed there. The Frozen North was a member of the International Control Commission that supposedly monitored violations of the 1954 Indochina ceasefire. That arrangement had established the two Vietnams on either side of the Seventeenth Parallel when the French were kicked out. The current war was unquestionably one big violation of the peace agreement, yet Canada never squawked.
My other bumper adornment had been purchased by Thad, probably the gutsiest member of our SDS chapter at UC Irvine. He had obtained twenty copies from the local John Birch Society and handed them out at the first of our weekly meetings last semester. The sticker featured a drawing of the UC Berkeley campanile and the advice: GO TO COLLEGE. LEARN TO RIOT. The Birchers intended the slogan as satire, but I had no problem with the literal meaning. Given that the Birchers’ message was situated next to the anti-war statement, my endorsement of what the Birchers meant as a complaint was evident. I was once pulled over by a California Highway Patrol black-and-white outside Corona del Mar, and the cop seemed plenty choked, even though I hadn’t been speeding or anything. He was probably a Bircher himself, who took a dim view of the display of their material by some hippie radical. He ticketed me for not having a passenger-side outside mirror, mandatory — according to him — under California law. The citation didn’t make sense, since I had B.C. plates and a B.C. driver’s licence, and I knew California didn’t impose its vehicular regulations on every tourist visiting the Golden State. I threw the ticket away and nothing happened.
The Supremes were assuring one another:
No love, love,
Don’t come easy.
But I keep waiting,
Anticipating,
For that soft voice
To
