Wisdom of the Aged by Craig Hattersley - HTML preview

If you’re in trouble or hurt or need—go to the poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help—the only ones.

—John Steinbeck

We had no idea what we were getting into, but we were ready to go. The six-day ordeal that marked our odyssey to Austin made the Joads’ seem like a Sunday drive. We quickly prepped for our grand venture, getting in-transit plates and insurance, then overloading the remaining furniture from the trailer and all our possessions and equipment into the old bread truck and van. Ricky V., Gigi, and Melon headed out in the van, Spud, Sis, and me—along with a small herd of cats—in the bread truck.

Our first indication of what Middle America held for us came in driving through Ohio, where an officious little crewcut prick of a state trooper pulled us over. He took one look inside the bread truck, piled high with furniture and crawling with cats, and didn’t want any part of it. He focused instead on the rusted-out old school van, determined to find something wrong so he could bust him some hippies. He went around examining every light, every tire, every piece of the old truck. Of course, since it had been used to ferry kids around the county by the Canandaigua school district, everything worked—though he determined the rear license-plate light wasn’t bright enough and wrote us a citation: We’d have to fix it before leaving the state or be ticketed. After he squealed imperiously away, we scraped some detritus from the light cover then forged on. Fuck you, asshole.

Unfortunately, the stop had cost us one item carried as a contingency plan: a vial of pills secreted in the glove box of the small van, some uppers to keep driving and some downers to sedate cats and help as needed with sleep. As soon as the cop flashed his lights to pull us over, Ricky V. grabbed the container and shoved half of the pills into his mouth, the other into Gigi’s. As he notes, the paranoia of being busted for “hard drugs” in Middle America called for swift action:

They’ll never take us, Alice! Oh man. I got most of the downers and couldn’t stay awake to help Melon drive. Gigi, of course, got mostly the speed. I would wake up, drive as far as humanly possible, and wake Melon up. “What the fuck, Ricky, you’ve only been driving for an hour.” Had to stab bushes while we were gassing up to kill the monsters that were hiding in them. Good thing I always carry a knife, huh? She was as far up in the stratosphere as I was low. 

Yet the effects of the drugs had not yet really kicked in, and we thought we’d left our troubles behind as we cruised into Indiana. But then it began to sink in just how badly we had overloaded the bread truck when we blew the first of four tires in a pouring rain near Terra Haute—and got the runaround from locals who didn’t cotton to the longhairs passing through. To begin with, the tires had what they call split-ring rims, and if they’re not mounted properly (within a cage), a person could be decapitated if that ring flew off when the tire inflated. We bounced around town in the van looking for a tire in numerous stores, where they either “couldn’t” help us or wanted an extortionate price to replace it. We finally located a used tire in a shop on the poor side of town and waited while an old black guy fixed us up.

And this happened again and again and again—the scariest blowout to a front tire on a high-speed downhill run in Missouri, wrestling the truck to a stop at the bottom of a hill while swaying wildly back and forth. We jacked up the truck and loaded the tire into the van and Ricky V. took off for the nearest town. As we waited, though, we noticed right away that semitrailers barreling down the hill caused the truck to shudder scarily as they careened by, so Spud and I braced ourselves against the side each time (not thinking, of course, that if it teetered over, it would land right on us). Once again, guardian angels watched over us and we managed to hit the road again many hours later.

But each time a tire blew out, it cost us a big chunk of the day taking off the tire then driving the van into a town looking for a replacement—not to mention scarce dollars. By this point, Ricky V. had gotten to where he could actually replace the tire and manhandle the split-ring rim himself, saving us hours waiting for someone to care enough to do the work, though even used tires for the truck cost a pretty penny. We had set out from Canandaigua with more than $1,000, which seemed plenty enough, but expenditures on food, gas, and tires ate away at our nest egg.

By the time we hit Tulsa, Oklahoma, we neared a breaking point. Gigi hadn’t slept in three days, courtesy of the pills, and had begun hallucinating—seeing monsters in the roiling clouds that forewarned of a thunderstorm approaching. As we made our way out of town, a torrential rain hammered us, cutting visibility down to a few yards, so we pulled over in the shelter of an overpass to wait it out. We discovered later that a twister had torn through Tulsa, and we had narrowly averted being strewn across the Oklahoma plains.

As the weather cleared, we forged on and soon came across some sort of abandoned summer camp. We were fried pies by then, so we stopped and spent the day, taking a dip in the natural pool, resting our road-ravaged minds, and eating what food we had left. We might make it after all.

Day six we straggled into Gainesville in North Texas, out of food and money and steam boiling up from the bread truck’s radiator. We had made it this far but it didn’t look good. Out of desperation, I called Mom in Tucson and talked her into wiring us $25 that she didn’t really have so we could buy enough gas to get us to Austin. Then once again, we sought advice in the poor part of town on the radiator problem, where an old Hispanic mechanic took pity on us when we admitted we had no money to fix it. He suggested we could keep going if we just cracked the radiator cap so pressure wouldn’t build up.

We crawled down the interstate the last two hundred and fifty miles to Austin with blinkers flashing, waving cars around us, until we finally pulled over near Waco. The only thing that had kept us from falling asleep were the bumps separating lanes in Texas, jolting us awake whenever we drifted too far. Exhausted, we pulled into a parking lot and fell fast asleep for several hours, waking in the late afternoon to limp into Austin.

We collapsed there on the lawn of a two-bedroom house Bro had secured for us two doors down from where he lived with Nance off 45th Street, pretty much the northern extent of the town then. Bro quickly sent out for some takeout burgers to feed us, then we slowly unloaded the trucks. We packed everything we had into the house then slept for the next twelve hours.

It wasn’t fancy, but it was in Austin and it was ours. We had arrived.

The first order of business had to be putting together our finances. The rent, though just $65 a month, came due every month, and we had a small band to feed. Our immediate needs were satisfied by selling the old bread truck for $400 (what we’d paid for it) to Mick—who, besides playing bass in Bro’s new band, Greezy Wheels, ran a bakery selling organic bread to the few stores in town selling natural foods. That tided us over for the time, a short time as it turned out.

But we quickly melded into a family of local hippies, united in mutual defense against a generally unfriendly environment. Protests at the University of Texas had not enamored Austin’s population of the tenor of the times, though we remained far removed from the hubbub. We just wanted to do our own thing, left alone to our own devise, and that didn’t include confronting authority and drawing attention to ourselves. I’d left that behind in Upstate New York.

We fell in with Bro’s extended hip family, and one—David, a full-blood American Indian—made his living roofing houses. He said we could become his crew, expanding on his one-man operation, and he could then take on more work. I had muscled up working a factory job and felt quite up to the task, so we joined on. David proved an eye-opener in a lot of ways, besides teaching us roofing rudiments. When the van began to run rough, David, who had some mechanical know-how, clambered into the engine compartment, cleaned the points, and got it running again, and we were once again mobile. So as summer inexorably bore down on us, we climbed onto the roofs of new housing in the area.

At a time before compressors and nailguns automated the process, roofing entailed some basic labor—tarpapering the plywood roof, lugging bundles of shingles up a ladder and stacking them on the crown, then crouching down driving in nails with a hammer from the bottom up. It proved rough on the knees and ankles, but we did sport great tans.

Though the job left little time or energy for playing music, this worked for a time, until we hit a stretch that August of weeks without a cloud in the sky and temperatures climbing above a hundred every afternoon. One day we bought a couple quarts of beer at lunchtime—the beginning of the end.

I hadn’t been much into drinking beer, or anything alcoholic at the point. In New York, Ricky V. would go out to the store and buy three quarts of “Old Bo”—Old Bohemian beer—for a dollar, but I never had the urge to partake. Part of that probably was the experience of growing up with an alcoholic mother. To this day, Bro has avoided drink. But the Texas heat wore on me, and I gladly joined in and guzzled my share. We soon fell asleep in the shade of the house shell. That marked the end of our career pounding nails into shingles.

Next we came up with the clever idea of selling snow cones on the Drag, the street running north-south alongside the university, filled as it was with students throughout the day. We’d load a cooler with crushed ice and set up there with some bottled fruit flavors and paper cups and had a going concern—until some guy from the Department of Health or some such showed up and said we’d need all kinds of official paperwork and licenses if we wanted to do that. So much for that idea.

Then we thought fortune smiled on us. Bass player Mick approached us about taking over his bakery. Bro’s band, Greezy Wheels, spurred on as he was by the inexorable legal grind slowly bringing him to justice for his improprieties vis-à-vis the marijuana laws, had begun to practice hard and gig regularly. They’d gotten the chance to play in a number of small clubs like the Hungry Horse, One Knite, and the Chequered Flag and had soon acquired some cachet among a hippie population starved for a local scene. On the eve of opening up for the Flying Burrito Brothers at the one big venue in town struggling to survive—the Armadillo World Headquarters—the band was joined by Mary, a classically trained violinist, and the weekly gigs took off.

Mick could no longer handle the bakery too, which entailed long hours producing whole-grain organic bread. As the band began playing around town on a regular basis, he found the need to divest, and what better people to take over than members of the extended family. We became heart and soul of the Earth Bread Bakery.

We moved out of our small house into a dilapidated two-story building on the east side—the poor part of town. The first floor held the accouterments for producing bread: an industrial mixer, cooling racks, and a stack of professional ovens. We settled in upstairs with little more than mattresses on the floor, which ultimately proved to be fortuitous. At one point someone broke into the top floor but quickly despaired of finding anything of value, neglecting to check the back of the closets where we had stowed guitars and amps.

We’d laid aside our dreams of rock stardom since the daily grind left no time for music. The job required long hours mixing the batter for several kinds of organic breads in the large commercial mixer, letting it rise, pounding it out and letting it sit again. The heat from the commercial ovens sweated us out of any clothes save shorts, and one lone fan provided only a whisper of relief. We’d take breaks out in the ninety-five-degree heat to cool off. Yet it was a going concern with some small customer base, so we threw ourselves into making it work. Two small rooms of the downstairs rented out to other entrepreneurs—one, a sandwich vendor, and the other an absent-minded professor with an elec­tronic gizmo that allegedly purified water. With what little profit derived from selling loaves, we managed to eke out enough to feed ourselves.

Melon, an affable fellow with the shortest hair and trimmed beard so also the straightest looking, became our delivery guy to the few health-food outlets that catered to hippies. Our old van, “Canandaigua ISD” emblazoned on the sides, provided transportation, as the old bread truck we’d driven down from New York lay abandoned just outside the back door, tires flattened. It ended up providing Carlito a “room” of his own when he rejoined the clan fresh off his stays first in Mexico and then in Vancouver.

We threw ourselves into cranking out all the loaves of organic bread that we could, producing as many as two hundred loaves a day through our sweat equity. But shortly we ran up against one of the basic tenets of capitalism: demand. While we had the supply side down and figured we could produce even more, we discovered that we couldn’t sell it. There weren’t enough hippies in town with the money to buy all the loaves we could crank out. This wasn’t working out on all levels. We had no time for anything but making bread, and we were, after all, bound to be rock stars.

We split into two households. Sis, Carlito, Spud, and I heard about our former neighbors getting busted then sent up the river, vacating a nice house—by our standards (carpet, by god!)—in the old neighborhood, north of 45th Street. Ricky V., Gigi, and Melon moved into a big old frame house just south of campus, which became our practice pad, Melon setting up his drums in the living area.

Right away, we faced a problem with our nice new abode. It rented for a whole $125 a month—a prodigious amount then and a strain to cover at the time—but Carlito had picked up a straight job, and I scrounged up a couple part-time gigs. Sis ended up working at Les Amis, a campus restaurant and hip hangout. My main moneymaker entailed getting up late at night once a week and making my way up to the offices of the Northside News, a printed advertising circular that ended up tossed on lawns all over Austin. (Yeah, that was me. Sorry.) I’d hike or thumb the couple miles there—carrying my ID in hand for the regular harassment from cops on the beat—to bundle up the papers and distribute to the assortment of part-timers who did the actual chucking.

One cop, though, when being immediately presented with my ID upon stopping beside me, took pity on me, saying, “This happens a lot, hunh?

“Yeah, every week.”

“Hop in. I’ll give you a lift.”

Still, with what we could scrape together through various sources, we could then pay this exorbitant rent we’d taken on. But another small problem cropped up. If we told the landlord—a notorious weasel who owned a whole swath of dilapidated houses in the area—that we were new tenants, he’d likely raise the rent on this gem of a house, making the deal untenable for us. So we had to assume the identity of the former occupants (or, rather, the alias used by our imprisoned acquaintances: Allen Wayne). But the squeeze came when we discovered that there was an outstanding electric bill of some $150 we couldn’t possibly pay, so we moved in without power.

Well, some of the local hip clan had stopped by to admire our new abode, and we lamented to them about our situation with the electrical bill. Really? That’s no biggie, one allowed. He stepped outside and snipped something and suddenly we had lights. Wow. Cool.

This worked for several months before the electric company caught on, which then required some more po’-boy creativity: Allen Wayne had to die.

We had had a slight leak in the enclosed back porch that Sis had claimed for her room. When the weasel landlord came by and responded to this complaint by clambering onto the roof and raking leaves off the porch roof, Carlito laid into him, calling him a fat-cat slumlord and all kinds of inventive countercultural buzz words. (As it turned out, that actually seemed to fix the leak.) So he’d already established this “relationship” with the weasel.

So I went to the landlord and told a sad tale of woe. That rat bastard Allen Wayne (Carlito) had been taking our money for rent and bills and stiffed us, taking off for parts unknown, leaving us bereft and in trouble with the utility company. The weasel, already predisposed to hate “Allen,” sympathized, then accompanied me to the electric company and asserted that we were new renters who weren’t responsible for the dastardly deeds done before our arrival. Problem solved. A new account was set up, zeroing out the balance owed. Poverty makes for some inventive subterfuge.

So we assimilated once again into the low-rent, albeit white, area of Austin north of the university that would one day become the fashionable Hyde Park neighborhood. At the time, though, it was home to the spreading hippie diaspora—and as such drew increased interest from the local constabulary. Squad cars made up a disproportionate part of area traffic. An encounter with a couple of them nearly cost Spud and me our freedom at one point.

We had walked a few blocks north to try to score some pot from a hippie entrepreneur in the area. He talked us into buying a lid of some particularly noxious dirt weed after plying us with a monster joint to show us you could possibly get high on it. At the time not choosy beggars, we forked over the ten bucks, I stuck it in my waistband, and we headed back south. One of Austin’s finest soon pulled up next to us as we walked and the officer got out, engaging us in conversation. Where are you going? What are you doing?

A second squad car pulled up to help in the quest for truth and justice. Without so much as a “by your leave,” the cops said they were going to search us, ordering me to sit in the back seat of his car while they proceeded to give Spud the going-over. I watched nervously as they patted him down thoroughly, then ordered him to take off his boots so they could check inside. The boots wouldn’t cooperate, fashionably tight as they were, and the harder he yanked, the more the lining pulled free. Spud started cracking up.

I took the moment to become righteously indignant, opening the door and stepping out, surreptitiously nudging the lid down into my crotch.

“What is this all about?” I demanded. “We’re just trying to go home.”

You smell like marijuana, the first cop allowed, giving them probable cause to shake us down. To which I replied that we had just come from that new hippie club, the Armadillo World Headquarters, and we couldn’t vouch for the company we had kept there. Not the best argument, but an avowal of our total innocence. They nevertheless ordered me up against the car and began patting me down, giving up on Spud’s mangled boot. At one point, the officer’s hand patted on the lid, but quickly shifted away, thinking it my junk. I was, after all, a big guy . . . Disappointed, they sent us on our way. It was only the first of several run-ins with Austin cops. I did mention that driving without a haircut was a prime traffic offense in the day.

On a couple more occasions over the next year or so, we came to feel the full brunt of the crusade against the hippie heathens in Austin. We hadn’t realized the jeopardy we had placed ourselves in by moving into a house vacated by a bust that sent the tenants to prison—dealers in hard drugs as they were (with prior arrests, we later found out). And in our quest to avoid a rent hike, we adroitly blundered into suspicion by assuming the alias used by the previous occupants.

The first happy occasion followed a poker game we hosted at the house. A member of our extended family visiting from out of town had befriended what seemed to be a casual bystander while noodling around the hippie market on the Drag at the university. This bystander seemed a bit strange in retrospect, keeping to himself during the card game, but it was in our nature to welcome all disaffected into our crowd. Well, during the course of the game, Melon asked if anybody wanted to buy a lid, which nobody did since we didn’t have any money at the time, aside from the pennies we played with. But this question was duly noted—along with a description of all those at the table—in the warrant that was served allowing law enforcement to come in and tear the house apart looking for drugs (yielding ultimately only a miserable little tin of seeds and stems).

Spud and I happened to be elsewhere for the festivities, returning to the house that evening to find a note on the door from Bro, saying the house had been busted—come over right away. Bro and Nance, who had moved a few blocks away, had cleaned up the ransacked mess and gotten in touch with a lawyer. Spud and I dutifully turned ourselves in the next day and were fingerprinted and ushered into the local jail, hearing from the booking officers remarking for our benefit how the Austin police force was eighty percent ex-Marine. We spent the afternoon in a holding cell waiting to be bailed out. Our out-of-town visitor ultimately took the rap for the “drugs” found, and we thought that the end of it.

Until one night not too long after. I don’t believe we ever learned the pretext of this “visit” to our house, but when walking home by myself that evening I happened upon a very serious group of plainclothes cops leaving the scene. They quickly surrounded me, cutting off all escape, and began firing questions at me.

“Who are you?”

“Uh . . .”

“Where do you live?”

“Uh . . . Up the street?”

“Is this you?” one snarked, holding up my ID.

“Uh, yeah . . . but I’m staying up the street with my girlfriend.”

This wasn’t going well.

“Have you ever been arrested?”

Nimbly demonstrating my knowledge of my constitutional rights, I fired back, “I thought you weren’t supposed to ask that.”

This did not sit well. They did not seem to be thrilled that they’d once again torn apart our house and found nothing but seeds and stems. So slip and slide as I might, I was headed back downtown—this time with Peter Parkinglot, a visiting friend from New York who’d been awakened and hauled off shirtless from the house.

“Hands behind your back.”

The next day, I was escorted by a cop to stand in front of Judge Reggie (who would later prove to be quite progressive). He looked at me and said, “Let me see your hands.”

I turned my hands over and looked at them. Hunh? My hands?

The cop next to me leaned over and said, sotto voce, “He wants to see if you have any tracks.”

Oh. That’s what this is about. [Extending my arms] see? No tracks.

I was never charged with anything since there wasn’t anything worth going to court over, I guess. I did manage some small satisfaction when the booking cops cut Peter and me loose. I railed on indignantly about this egregious miscarriage of justice, swearing we’d never been druggies or dealers. They endured my spume (I did have a point, af­ter all) as they dutifully filled out the paperwork, allowing finally that it probably happened because we lived in a “hot” house. My outburst probably didn’t mean a lot, but I felt better after it—and they didn’t come calling again the short time we remained in that house. We soon moved to cooler climes several blocks away next to where Bro and Nance had settled.

Sis had already moved out, joining several others of her gender in a hippie enclave occupying the better part of West 33rd Street. But we kept in touch, and one day she stopped by with word: The Armadillo had gotten a license to sell beer and wine, and they needed to get serious about security. The club had managed to get by with volunteer hippies during its first year to man the entrances, but now in order to stay right with the local law, they’d have to hire someone as a bouncer to card concert-goers.