by W.H. Harrod
~~ Chapter Five
Notwithstanding the fact that she was hundreds of miles from home heading for an uncertain rendezvous with the wreckage of her youth and angry that her government proposed to lay waste to another generation of young men and now women, Allison guided her loyal VW bus down the interstate highway stretching between Memphis and Little Rock during the pitch black early morning hours of Monday, March 17, 2003. Her partner, Ernest, with his head resting against the passenger side window, snoozed quietly following his half-dozen donut meal. He had directed Allison to stop so he could pick up some snacks not five minutes after they departed his home at straight-up midnight.
She did not stop willingly. Rosa Lee had specifically warned her of his affinity towards those tasty little round morsels with the holes in the middle. Ernest said he would guide her to the interstate, and he eventually did, but not before passing by his favorite all night donut shop. Still elated that he consented to accompany her on her venture, she couldn’t say no. She had promised Rosa Lee to try and hold him in check, so the next time he went donut foraging, she intended to put up a fight.
Directing her attention to the present, she estimated their arrival time at Bobby’s farm, 20 miles west of Muskogee, Oklahoma. Allison vaguely recalled how to get there, having stopped by to visit with Bobby and his family many years ago. She remembered being surprised when she saw that it was a real farm. He really was a farmer. He grew wheat, raised cattle, owned a tractor and a horse he loved to ride around his farm, and had all the other equipment and paraphernalia that goes with being a full-time farmer. He and his wife, Cheryl, had one child, a son named Fogerty. Although Allison disliked the name, she felt relief from knowing she wasn’t the only person dumb enough to name a child after a rock musician. He must have been serious when he told them he didn’t much care for his own name, Robert Floyd Owens, Jr.
She had not heard from Bobby in many years and not because she didn’t try. She dropped notes to him for several years even after he stopped responding. Neither had Ernest heard from him in the last ten years. Hopefully, he was alive and well, but they would not know for sure for another five hours. As she thought about the amount of time that had passed since she last heard from him, she chastised herself for not being more persistent. She really didn’t know if the guy was alive, dead, destitute, or starving. She should have found out before now. She owed it to Bobby. Bobby picked her up out of that ditch in Berkeley and carried her to safety. He fought off her attacker and saved her life.
Allison cringed at the memory of that day. May 15, 1969, started out for her no differently than hundreds of others since she arrived in the bay area in the same month a year before. During that time she lived a life far removed from anything she had experienced before. She made it her goal to try anything or everything at least once. For the most part, and for most things, once was enough, although she did enjoy smoking pot. It mellowed her out and helped her to dump her Midwestern, middle-class inhibitions. But, the truth of the matter was that the Summer of Love image was but a distant memory in the bay area by the spring of 1969. Haight-Asburry, the epicenter of the free love movement, had degenerated into a haven for drug addicts, runaway teens, and panhandlers who were robbed, molested, and rousted by the police with regularity. Eventually, the flower children, such as Allison, drifted away to other places. That’s how Allison ended up sleeping in her bus parked in back of a UC Berkeley professor’s house located in the hills above the city. Still, the psychedelic experience didn’t die out. Across the bay in Berkeley, there were hippies and happenings galore. There they felt safe to continue their free love existence without the fear of being robbed and beaten by thugs and hustlers or being rousted by the police. They were wrong.
Allison appreciated Ernest’s insistence that she rest before they started out for Muskogee. Nothing would be accomplished by arriving at Bobby’s in the middle of the night. The trip required at least seven hours, and he figured they could rest until midnight and then head out without the hassle of a lot of traffic. They should be pulling up to Bobby’s house early Monday morning. If that were the case, it’s possible they could be back on the road by mid-morning, leaving another seventeen hundred miles to cover in the next two days.
It would mean a lot to Allison if Bobby could make this trip with them. If not for him, she wouldn’t be here today. The first time she met Bobby was in April 1969 when hundreds of people came together to convert an unsightly piece of ground located close to the Berkeley campus into a public park. The People’s Park, as it was known, started out as an eyesore, a muddy parking lot. When the volunteers finished, the little park included a sod lawn, a community garden, a play area for children, and places where people could sit and talk.
Bobby and Allison stood next to each other in a long line formed for the purpose of removing broken pieces of asphalt from the park, fire brigade style. During breaks from moving the tons of asphalt, she engaged the young ex-soldier recently returned from combat in Vietnam in conversation. It wasn’t only the worn and faded jungle fatigue jacket he wore that suggested to her that the thinly built young man standing nervously beside her was a veteran of the war. His freshly scarred face drew her attention the first time she glanced at him. The next time she noticed his eyes – dark, sunken pits. She met a number of veterans that returned from Vietnam via the Oakland Army Terminal since she arrived in the bay area. Bobby’s face displayed the symptoms of a young man who had experienced long periods of violent, inhuman activity before returning to the world and released to the streets as if it were but another day on the job. For the rest of that day as well as several times over the coming weeks, she made a point of talking with Bobby whenever they saw each other in the park or elsewhere in the community. Even that far back her empathy towards her fellow human beings who were suffering was well advanced. Although Bobby said very little during their conversations and never complained, she knew beyond a doubt that this young man suffered much.
Her reveries were ultimately disturbed by the sound of Ernest’s harrumphing. His little post adrenalin-rush nap caused by the sudden ingestion of copious amounts of sugar had come to an end. That was probably a good thing because the droning of the tires against the concrete surface of the road had become monotonous, and Ernest’s company would help ensure her staying awake for the remaining few hours of their trip to Bobby’s.
Ernest awoke and felt his lap as if looking for something.
“No use looking for those donuts. You ate the whole half dozen in one sitting,” said Allison as her passenger looked inquisitively in her direction. “And for the record, I intend to tell Rosa Lee how you tricked me as soon as we get back.”
“Huh! I might not even go back. I told you that mean old woman will sell my stuff. She’s been waiting for a chance like this for 20 years. She will have a treadmill sitting where my chair is now. Somebody else will be watching my new TV at their home by this time tomorrow, I’ll bet you.” He chuckled then as he located the thermos of coffee Rosa Lee sent along. “Coffee?” he asked as he finished pouring a cup of the hot, aromatic liquid.
“Thanks, you big liar,” responded Allison as she reached for the cup. “I can’t believe you would say something so horrible about that wonderful wife of yours. I’m going to tell her about that, also. You better be on your best behavior from here on or you surely will be getting a whipping when you get back.”
Ernest chuckled again as he poured himself a cup of the hot brew. “Are we about there?” he inquired. “Seems like we’ve been driving all night.”
“Nope! We still have about three and a half hours to go. But you can keep me company since you’re awake. You haven’t told me about your son yet. How’s that fine young man doing?”
“Humph!” said Ernest. “Did I tell you he went to med school? Same school I went to -- U.T. Memphis. He graduated at the top of his class and came into the clinic with me. And you know what? I apparently have gotten stupider every single day since his arrival. I tell you
, these young people today think they know everything. I operated that clinic for years by myself, and now, everything has to be changed. New equipment, new computers and billing systems, new furniture, remodeling, you name it and we have it. Every day I go there I have to learn how to do something new.”
Allison realized that she had struck a nerve. “You must be so proud of him. Aren’t you happy to have him involved in the clinic so he can learn the job and take your place someday?”
“Someday! He took it over the second day he was there. I mostly stay out of the way and do the pro bono patients now. Anymore it requires so much billing and scheduling that I don’t know what the heck is going on. I tell you, I don’t know what’s happening with these young people today, they want to change everything right now.”
Allison could not help but laugh at what she heard. “I don’t suppose you can remember another young man who was in a hurry at one time to make some changes, can you?”
“Oh now, I knew you were going to say that,” replied Ernest. “Things were different back then. We were in the middle of a revolution.”
“And you think this isn’t?” responded Allison hurriedly. “I tell you what, some days I am almost swallowed up by the never-ending flood of technological changes. It’s constant. There is no time to get comfortable with the changes in the equipment or the procedures before they are outdated and need to be changed again. If a young professional person today takes a break to kick back and see what’s going on, they will either be run over or pushed aside. I’m not sure, but I sometimes think that we have reached a point where much of the change is purely for the sake of change. ‘Growth for the sake of growth,’ said someone I can’t remember, ‘is the philosophy of the cancer cell.’ These young people may be working within a diseased environment and don’t even know it. I feel sorry for them.”
This quieted Ernest as he pondered what Allison said. “Are you trying to make me feel good? Because you are,” said Ernest with a giggle.
“Why you evil man! I can’t believe a person could be so insensitive. I am going to tell Rosa Lee about this!”
Then they both laughed heartily, mostly for the relief to again be in the good company of a kindred spirit.
“Do you ever think about those times?” Allison asked not bothering to turn and look at her friend. “Do you ever think about the excitement, the energy, and, of course, the fear? I sure do. I probably think about it too much. I can’t seem to help myself; it’s just there with me at times.”
“Sure I do, from time to time,” said Ernest.
Realizing this terse comment represented the totality of his response, Allison sought to draw him out. That way she could compare notes to ensure that her memories were not the distorted product of an active imagination. She read one time that what a person really remembers is not the actual event, but their last recollection of the event. Overtime what you end up with varies significantly from the original if each succeeding recollection isn’t exact to the smallest detail.
“What was it that originally brought you to the bay area? How did you end up there? I don’t believe you ever actually said?” asked Allison, attempting to draw him out.
Ernest’s eyes narrowed as the speaker finished her question, not quite certain he had heard her correctly. “I beg your pardon?” he replied.
“Why did you go to the bay area?”
“I went to the bay area to kill white people,” Ernest stated calmly. “I thought you knew that.”
Allison felt like an idiot. She knew of his affiliation with the Black Panthers and their proclivity towards violence, especially, against their oppressors, the white race. What a stupid question to ask this man. She needed to engage her brain before she opened her mouth.
“Of course, I did. I was just checking your memory,” she replied with a forced laugh. “And I want you to know right now that if I see any of them when we get out there I’m going to let you know. But what I actually meant was, were there any particular events that pushed you out the door or finally got you moving? I know for myself there were.”
“The answer to your question is yes. There were specific events that made me get up and do something,” said Ernest. “There were many reasons, but two events in particular very close together put me on my way in a hurry. I expect now you want to know what they were. If you think for a moment I’m sure you know the main reason. It happened on April 4, 1968.”
“Yes, I do. That was the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. That day stands out vividly. My roommate told me about it when I returned home from a forensics team practice. I couldn’t believe it happened. I remember I felt so ashamed when I found out a white man did it. I felt almost like I did it. I hated the man who killed him.”
They both sat for a moment refreshing their memories regarding that tragic occasion. Although it happened over a lifetime ago, it seemed like yesterday.
“What else?” asked Allison, after an appropriate interval.
“It happened two days later in Oakland. The police ambushed several Black Panthers driving down the street. After a gunfight, Bobby Hutton was killed, and Eldridge Cleaver was wounded while trying to surrender after having laid down his weapon. Witnesses claimed the police shot Bobby twelve times as he lay on the ground.” Ernest took a deep breath. “The next day I dropped out of school and caught a bus to California to join the Black Panther party.”
Only the constant hum of tires rolling on pavement made any sound until Ernest spoke again. “And you, what happened to get you up and moving?”
“For me, Martin Luther King’s death was the last straw, too, but the other two catastrophes that made me mad had to do with the war. First was the Tet Offensive in January of 1968 that proved outright that we were being lied to about winning the war. Next came the My Lai Massacre. I couldn’t believe American soldiers were capable of such atrocities. Right then I knew something was terribly wrong when young people like me could be taken off the street and sent to some far away place and caused to murder women and children. I was halfway out the door, and when James Earl Ray murdered Martin, I hit the road. The whole sterile middle class life I was headed for no longer made any sense. Everywhere I looked around this country or the world we were beating, killing, or bombing somebody. I had to get some air and make some sense out of what my life was about. And you know what really troubles me? Right now, I’m hoping there are young people who are beginning to feel exactly the same way I did back then -- feel it so strongly that they will get up and do something about it and not wait until it’s too late, like so many of us did the last time.”
That’s as far as either one of them wanted to go for the moment on this subject. Maybe it did happen over thirty years ago, but the site still registered radioactive to those who witnessed the explosion. In the back of Allison’s mind another question went begging. Ernest’s immediate consent to accompany her on this journey came as a surprise to her. Why is he so eager to go back? Had he accomplished his original mission? Does my traveling companion have his own demons to vanquish somewhere along the path of this journey?