Hippies and beats and well-deserved hatred.

...I had no interest in dropping acid on Haight-Ashbury or stopping off at the Grateful Dead show with them in Nevada. They had forgotten which decade they lived in, all of that shit was dead now, just a ridiculous idealism behind a slick corporate image. Everything they wanted to do had long been exhausted. I sat away from the circle while they discussed the big trip. I was riding along to save money. It was Vincent’s idea to stop in Nevada and sell peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to the hippies outside of the concert. He’d made a ton of them.

We set out. I was in the back of the truck camper with my music. I liked it back there. I could sleep and look out the window from time to time. Nobody else wanted that spot. In one of their new backpacks next to me a book stuck out. I flipped it around and read the title: On the Road. I grinned bitterly. How pathetically uniform that one of them would have this book on the trip. I had never read the book, never read anything by him. I remembered once reading Capote, who said that Kerouac didn’t write, he typed. Still, I never took a stranger’s word on anything. Not that I was big on Capote, but I didn’t open the book because one of the guys owned it and I didn’t want to be involved in any way. I had tried to read some of the other “Beats” but I just couldn’t get into them. Something was phony about it. To me, it was self-serving mumble hiding behind plastic open mindedness and homosexual undertones. I could take it no longer, and I plucked the book from the backpack and read.

I didn’t like it. It was whiny, boring, and obvious. More homosexual undertones. It was like he wanted his buddy to fuck him. I thought the travel was weak and that the way he was getting money sent from home made him sound like a pussy. I reached over in the cooler and swiped one of the sandwiches. I unwrapped it and dug in. Of course. It was creamy peanut butter. Crunchy was the only way to fly.

We stopped in Lake Mead. They wanted to camp with the hippies and smoke pot with them. I wanted to remind them of the piss test less than three weeks off, but I kept my mouth shut, because I was hoping some of them would fail.

I never liked hippies or the Dead. I’ve never liked sorry history or bandwagons of any type. They were simply dirty football fans and lawyers. Every thirty seconds a hippie would walk by and try to bum food from me. I was at the truck alone, sitting on the tailgate, reading and eating oranges.

“Hey, brother, can I get an orange off you?”

“Hey brother, can you spare an orange?”

“Hey, brother, how about giving me one of those oranges.”

They were young and a little older and each full of shit. I took a walk, a long walk. Their dogs had shit everywhere. They were mangy and sick looking creatures. I thought it was cruel how the hippies took care of them. They didn’t take care of them. The standard smell of patchouli and armpits unnerved me. I was sickened by their slovenliness. The old hippies I could deal with. I respected anyone who could survive like that for 30 years, regardless of their taste in music or ignominious methods. The young ones bugged me. They walked around with their fingers in the air. A decade later the same finger would be in the air, hailing a taxi on Fifth and 48th, in a hurry to get to the office.

In the parking lot at the concert they were there, in droves, those fingers up there. I learned it was up there for a free ticket to the show. I always thought it was great how the tickets were so expensive. The free ticket was called a miracle. It was hot in Nevada. I wanted a cold wave to come through and lick me up from that place, land me behind a desk by myself with my typewriter and my music playing, a full stack of typing paper and a cold coffee. That would be a miracle.