“I don’t know,” she admitted.
Rock and Road
by Michael H. Hanson
The grizzled hitcher shuffled out of the cab of the red Chevy pickup and waved a thanks and goodbye to Randy and Leila, the handsome, sort-of couple who had picked him up hours ago. They and their poetry book AI had been good company over the long ride. A gregarious duo, they had a fun time teaching old folk songs to Billy as the miles flew by.
“Thanks again,” Billy said, grabbing his rucksack.
“A single act of kindness throws out roots in all directions,” Leila yelled out just before she pulled away, “and the roots spring up and make new trees!”
Billy chuckled. Their generous lift had saved him about a week’s worth of walking, subjective road time.
About another half-day on Shank’s mare and he should be able to find an off ramp for The Eagles first show in L.A. He fingered the few wrinkled one-dollar bills in his right jeans pocket knowing he’d make it in without having to spend a cent.
Decades of crawling, begging, conning, threatening, and lying had made him a Prince among concert gatecrashers.
Vehicles whipped by and he had to stay far to the right of the shoulder to keep from being messed up by tailgate-winds. That and the occasional surprise rainstorm kept him on his toes.
“Tach it up, tach it up, buddy gonna shut you down,” Billy sang.
William “Billy” Petersen, AKA “Freshness,” “The Ladies Man,” “Dude,” “Smooth Groove,” “The Riding Dutchman,” and occasionally “Bill” had been hitching the highways of America for two-thirds of his life. And at a prematurely grizzled and sun baked forty-nine years of age that was a good chunk of thumbing it.
Even now, with grey replacing his once red beard and smile lines becoming more and more visible around his eyes and mouth, he could still remember first stepping onto this endless stretch of asphalt and concrete.
*
It was 1968 and sixteen year old Billy wanted to have some fun. Most of his friends had already split their homes to check out the scene down in New York City, the old man was hassling him to get a haircut and a job, and Debbie had just ditched him for some college prick. He’d read articles about how brilliant things were in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, a place where pot grew out in the open, everyone was groovy, and hot chicks were practically giving it away.
The roads called out to him.
With a pocket full of cash ripped off from his mom’s cookie jar, a pair of his older sister’s ill-fitting Birkenstocks, his favorite pair of worn levis, and a garish tie-dyed t-shirt he’d made in art class, it took Billy a week of hitching, begging, and running away from older guys trying to feel him up to make it down to Interstate 80 in Massachusetts. Last Christmas he’d read a really cool Time Magazine article about a bunch of hippies who had a psychedelic drive from Boston to L.A. all of it on Interstate 80. That’s what Billy wanted. Four days of sex and LSD and sleep deprivation with people who could dig him.
Illegal or not Billy made his way up a long onramp to the highway just beating the morning sunrise. A couple of squares drove by ignoring him or giving him the eye. And then came the white van.
It was something out of a Greenwich Village pipe head’s dream. A 1968 Volkswagon Minibus covered in hastily painted rainbows and peace symbols. They came to a screeching halt and opened the side door. Billy barely had time to open his mouth to say hi before he was pulled inside by a mass of friendly hands.
Simultaneously, the back door was popped open and what looked like a large grey garbage bag was dumped out the back. They shut the doors just as quickly and sped off. The adventure had begun.
Billy should have known something was up the second he’d sat down in the floor of the crowded van.
“Uh.” Billy muttered. “You guys going to a Halloween party or something?”
He was answered with a chorus of laughs, giggles, and chuckles. His question, however, was not far off the mark. The four men and four women whose company he’d just joined sported a bizarre and colorful variety of clothing, headgear, footwear, body-paints, tattoos, jewelry, and what appeared to be some form of cosmetic fish scales over the very long and delectable legs of two gorgeous green-maned women.
Billy also noticed that the driver, a rather hirsute blonde who appeared to have two, three-inch-long antennae jutting out of his head, was swerving quite a bit between the lines. In short, he was higher than a kite.
“Yo dude.” Billy’s voice wavered. “Lets keep it on the straight and narrow eh?”
“Oh Flazzbo’s cool!” One sexy fish-girl cooed. “We just scored come C-20 Hallucinogenic Fungus. Helps him focus on the temporal exit-shift! You fetch me, flipper?”
Billy smiled, shrugged, and decided to play it cool. These were grade-A hippies and until now he’d been strictly small-town in his anti-establishment antics. He still had a lot to learn. So what if they were talking total nonsense?
And then it happened. Flazzbo suddenly jerked the steering wheel to the right. The passengers all lurched to the side and Billy felt his intestines contract as he cringed in anticipation of the inevitable head-on collision with the twenty-foot tall highway concrete barrier.
Billy suddenly felt himself immobilized as if the air in the van had just transformed into transparent jello. In a panic he realized he could barely breathe.
A few seconds, or possibly a lifetime, later Billy came back to his senses.
“Screeeelaaaaaa!!!!” Flazzbo ululated in a haunting alien voice.
The rest of the van cheered in response and Billy lamely joined in.
What the hell just happened? He thought wildly.
A few moments later the sunlight started flickering weirdly through all the windows, as if a million butterflies had appeared overhead.
For a split second Billy grew dizzy and wondered if he’d inhaled some spent hash without realizing it.
One minute later it had suddenly turned pitch dark and Billy could see thousands of stars in the night sky.
A short while after this things evened out a bit and the sky appeared a uniform dull grey.
Flazzbo maintained his steady 60 mph and the folks started chattering away in what Billy realized were at least three different foreign languages, none of them sounding the least bit familiar.
Flazzbo waved a free hand over the unusual glass cover on his van’s strange dash and suddenly an incredible live recording of The Doors Light My Fire started blasting forth from every direction, though try as he might Billy could not see any speakers anywhere. Overhead, some strange device pressed up against the ceiling started sending out multiple colored beams of light, reminding Billy of the laser blasts he’d seen in Destroy All Monsters at the local theater a few weeks ago. These proved harmless enough but were definitely adding to Billy’s realization that he had most definitely stepped through the looking glass.
A few minutes later all four of the women (the two buxom ladies with the green hair and odd skin modeling, and the two petite, gorgeous redheads that Billy suddenly realized were identical twins) simultaneously stripped off their skimpy clothing and pulled a shocked Billy into a pornographic fantasy beyond his wildest hopes and dreams. The other passengers smirked at Billy’s surprise before re-engaging in their previous conversations, as if this sort of thing happened all the time.
Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit next filled the interior of the van with pulsating power.
Billy’s amazing journey had begun.
*
The sun was shining down pretty heavy so Billy pulled a soiled bandana out of his right hip pocket and wrapped it around his head in a tight dew-rag.
He wondered if he’d bump into himself at all this trip. Thing was, lately he’d been doing that more and more. He was never one for keeping records or journals, and even though his memory had always been good, all the gigs, and concerts, and play dates had started blurring together in his mind of late.
Sometimes when he’d come face to face with a
twenty or thirty year younger Billy, he’d panic and have second thoughts and try to convince the boy to sober up and find his way home. This always scared the kid off, and ever since the Angels messed up his hip and knee at Altamont he was never in good enough shape to run after himself.
Poor little Billy must think he’s some kind of escaped lunatic.
Funny how time plays tricks on the mind, middle-aged Billy couldn’t blame teenage Billy for taking off from him every time they ever met. Heck, he remembered when he first found out about the Temporal-Exits (or Tempxits in roadspeak) how some old weirdo seemed to be tracking him every now and then, some filthy old bum with a dirty red beard. Oh well. Life and the road go on.
Billy spotted an old man dressed in a ratty, threadbare, brown U.S. Army uniform, circa C-20, maybe the forties, on the other side of the highway. The man, balding and wearing spectacles, carried a small duffle bag over one shoulder and a rusty looking trumpet in his other hand.
“Hey Glenn,” Billy shouted to be heard over the roar of traffic, “you may have a gal in Kalamazoo, but you ain’t got a snowball’s chance in hell of hitching a ride back to dubya dubya two!”
Glenn scowled at Billy and flipped him the middle finger before continuing his slow hike in the opposite direction.
A sleek metallic vehicle (probably something from C-24) shot by at about 600 miles per hour. It traveled roughly three feet above the road surface and it’s tail wind nearly knocked Glenn off his feet.
Billy laughed and shouted aloud, “Duck Dodgers in the twenty-fourth and one half Century!”
*
Young Billy’s eyes opened wide when they stopped at a nightclub just a couple of hours after his ride had started. For some bizarre reason it was evening already and the sky was full of stars. It had been morning when he’d been picked up.
The next shock came when Billy found out they were in Detroit, MI. How the hell did we get here so quick, he thought, we weren’t driving that fast.
As the party van troupe walked through the front entrance of the nightclub Billy did a double take just before entering when he saw a sign above a side door that read, Negro Entrance.
Sitting at a small table near the front stage, Billy couldn’t help but feel conspicuous as he suddenly realized that most of the small crowd consisted of squares in suit or dress. There wasn’t a dude in the bar with hair that touched his ears and Billy felt more than a little conspicuous with his shoulder length locks. Flazzbo kept the heat off, though, with non-stop drink orders and eyebrow-lifting tips.
The final slap to Billy’s rational mind occurred when he found himself sitting a mere ten feet from a very young Nat King Cole singing Smile.
*
A maroon 1975 Mercury Marquis Brougham pulled over to the side of the highway. The passenger door opened and Billy stepped out. Before shutting the door he smiled and yelled “thanks for the lift, Jimmy. You saved me a whole day.”
The grizzled driver, looking to be in his sixties, smiled back, “any friend of labor can step into my cab any time. Rock on, Billy.”
The car sped away in a spray of gravel and dirt, and the hitchhiker resumed his long walk.
Billy felt a few kinks kick in so he sat down on some brush grass and put his lanky frame through a series of yoga movements he’d mastered the Summer of ‘67 at an Ashram in Arizona.
After awhile his muscles started to loosen up and the day’s stress slowly bled away. It would be a good night. Must be five years since he’d seen and heard Glen, Don, Bernie, Randy, and Tim performing and singing that sweet four-part harmony. Billy hoped they’d open with Desperado and Take It To The Limit. Those were his faves.
Sure, Hole in The World carried a ton of existential angst Henley never showed in the majority of his popular work, but Billy was an admittedly shallow, non-intellectual music fan when it came to his lyrical tastes.
Songs gotta be felt in the gut, he thought, not ripped apart to find its hidden meanings.
After a few more calve-extensions and some deep breathing exercises Billy stood back up and moved forward. He figured half a day would do it.
*
Young Billy was tripping on time travel, and the temporal exits were his dealer.
Every day was a new adventure as Flazzbo took them on and off some road into different decades, sometime even centuries. For the most part though, the party van liked to hit events and gigs in the 50's, 60's, 70's, and 80's, 20th Century or C-20 in roadspeak.
Flazzbo was apparently from the not so distant future, and financed this incredible road trip by making bootleg 3-D holographic recordings of live music venues, and selling them on the global-net gray market in his own time track.
Billy once tried to get Flazzbo to explain to him the history of the road. Had it been built by aliens or super humans from the distant future? Flazzbo and the others just laughed and said The Road was The Road. It had always been here and always will be here. It existed throughout the width and breadth of time from the birth of the planet to its eventual demise, millions of years in both directions. Driving one direction on The Road lead you to the past, and the other direction to the future. It was as simple as that.
The suddenly appearing and disappearing exits, off ramps, side-roads, trails, and footpaths were each a doorway into a different time period.
Apparently, some folks had a natural affinity for knowing when and how to find the Exits to and from The Road, because it was something that could only be done in certain moments, as they only flared into and out of existence for no more than a single second, when the temporal exit shift occurs. Folks like Flazzbo didn’t really need this natural connection to the road, as they loaded up on mind-altering drugs to expand their consciousness and all of their senses. People from the far future didn’t need this sixth-sense either, as they had expensive technology that would tell them when and where to drive onto or off of these strange exits.
As far as Flazzbo and the gang was concerned, though, The Road was nothing more than an advantageous ticket to party hardy.
The immediate future spread before Billy as an endless party of grooving to great music, non-stop sex with wild erotic women, and multiple drug-induced highs and trips.
Billy felt like the luckiest kid on the face of the planet.
*
Billy knew he was making lousy time and pushed himself harder. Lately he was getting short of breath after only a few miles of walking at a shot.
To take his mind off his heavy-feeling chest, Billy pondered his regrets like a stack of cards. The first ten years of hitching between exits had been one long drug-induced vacation. Concert after concert, venue after venue, it was quite a run. Then one five-month stretch behind bars in Macon County Prison for possession, he sobered up.
And he realized he was no longer a teen runaway but a man well into his 20's. He suddenly felt a strong desire to return home and see his parents and little sister, and so Billy got back to hitchhiking as soon as he was paroled. Unfortunately, matters were not quite that simple.
Try as he might Billy could not find the exit or path back to his own time. He traveled the highways for years and learned from other temporal-Hitchers that the exits, onramps, roads, paths, and trails they’d all used were mutable. That is, if each and every temporal exit were not used on any kind of regular basis, they dwindled, faded, and even eventually disappeared. The few times he was lucky he found himself near his home, but several decades before he was actually born, or in a decade where he would have already been dead of old age.
And then, after fifteen more years of searching for the way home, he realized how pointless it all was. Entering middle age the gulf between him and his lost loved ones was just too big. Even if he did find his way back to his proper place in time he could never explain his absence. The Road was now his home.
It was in the middle of this sobering realization that Billy found the answer to one of the world’s greatest mysteries. Why do thousands of people disappear, annually, reportedly near t
he major highways of the world, never to be seen again by family or friends? The United States alone was home to tens of thousands of unsolved cases of road travelers never reaching their destinations, forever lost.
The Road’s time exits, the lure of fantastic adventure, the difficulty and near-impossibility of finding one’s way back to their proper time-track, and then not sounding like a lunatic needing to be institutionalized when trying to connect with or confront old friends and loved ones, appearing as much older or much younger than you should have been at that time.
Billy could easily imagine the number of psychiatric establishments flooded with irrational individuals insisting they were victims of supernatural forces beyond their comprehension, subjected en mass to butcher/neurosurgeon Walter Jackson Freeman’s transorbital lobotomies. Years later when such medical atrocities fell out of favor, such patients were merely doped to utter indifference with large quantities of Thorazine.
Billy rested for about twenty minutes then got back on his feet. He saw what looked like a turn-off just a few hundred yards in the distance. The tingling began in his belly. A portal was going to form just up ahead. He smiled.
*
Time was a rollercoaster and in a few months Billy struck out on his own.
It had been a wild ride with the party van. He’d lost his virginity, popped all manner of drugs and stimulants, and seen and heard great music performed by people old before his birth.
But he felt the urge to choose his own destiny and so bid the wild travelers goodbye. Flazzbo tried to warn Billy that going off on his own meant that he would lose the semi-safe predictability of the few dozen well-traveled pathways through time that the van driver had limited van troupe to over the past three months.
Billy, taking a long hard pull on his joint just smiled.
“I’m a big boy now Flazz,” Billy laughed, “I can take care of myself.”
Billy never saw Flazzbo or the others again.
Shadows & Reflections: A Roger Zelazny Tribute Anthology Page 20