Wherever You Go, Hey! There You Are!

     Six AM Cinema:  I saw a movie the other morning whose premise was based on two strangers driving across country together.  She had just left her husband and jumped into a taxi.  The taxi driver wasn't legitimate and neither was the taxi.  They're in downtown Manhattan and she tells him; "Just Drive".  In addition to catching her husband with another woman, she has just found out that her estranged father is in the hospital in San Diego having barely survived a massive heart attack.  She has a flying phobia so she decides she's just going to let this cabby drive her to California.  At several points during their trip they find themselves penniless and they must resort to ingenious and somewhat desperate solutions.  It reminded me of a time forty years ago when my girlfriend, Diamond Deb, and I were in a similar situation.

     Debbie had a VW camper that I had just rebuilt with bigger pistons and we were dying to try it out.  A housemate of ours had just moved out of Happy Acres and invited us to come see him at his next gig, headlining at "Club Madrigal" which was in a Roadway Inn in Juarez, Mexico.  Steve had been a minor piano player/singer in the side lounges of Las Vegas for several years and this job in Juarez was going to be one of the last in a career that had started out promising and just sort of petered out.  But he assured us that he still had plenty of "pull" at the Roadway Inn and could get us 'comped' room and board.  That was all the excuse we needed to head out on the open road.  

     In the early seventies, the VW camper was the vehicle of choice for hippy types with a yen for travel.  The car was fairly small as campers go but it was frugal.  Simple to operate and repair, it was amazingly self-contained.  A bench over a trunk in back folded out into a bed that slept two.  There was a sink, a closet and a table that folded out from the side door.  We also had an awning that rolled out on the side and we would park our deck chairs under it.  Deb had put curtains up on a piece of twine that encircled the back "living compartment".  Whenever we were tired of driving for the day, we would pull over to the side of the road, close the curtains, get food out of our ice chest and fire up the camp stove.  As the dinner was cooking either I would play my guitar or we'd turn on the radio/cassette player.  I remember John Denver, Bread and Stevie Wonder were some of the featured artists on that trip.  A scented candle and a bit of reefer and we were in Hippy Hog Heaven.

     The transition from front seat drivers/passengers to back seat dwellers always amazed me.  For short periods of time, a confining space is actually quite cozy.  The music and the curtains gave us a sense of isolation from the outside world even when we knew traffic was whizzing by us right outside.  The 'shake-down' run to Mexico went off without a hitch and we arrived in Juarez feeling pretty proud of ourselves and our little cobbled together arrangement.  The plan was to spend a few days in Juarez as Steve's guest at the Roadway Inn and then just travel in Mexico for several weeks, letting the camper take us wherever it wanted to.

     When you cross the U.S. Mexican border, everything changes.  My first trip to Mexico was to drop off a couple of college girlfriends who were going to take the train from Mexicali to Mazatlan for Christmas break.  The one who owned the car was lending it to me so I could go to a wedding in Taos, New Mexico with the proviso that I be back in Mexicali on new year's eve day to pick them up at the train station for the drive back to the Bay Area.  While they were buying their tickets, I waited for them in the rail station's restaurant.  They must have just stopped serving because the place was empty except for me, hundreds of plates of half-eaten food and a pervading cloud of flies.  "Who lives like this?"  I wondered to myself.  I had never seen such squalor and I was shocked to see it in a public establishment attached to something as major as a train station.  In my snobbish American sense of superiority, I shuddered to think of what the rest of the country must be like.  Debbie and I were about to find out.

     On the marquis outside Club Madrigal at the Juarez Roadway Inn, was Steve's name up in lights with the sub-heading "El Borracho Hawiiano". (the drunk Hawaiian).  He had recently been entertaining in nightclubs in Waikiki and fancied himself the white man's Don Ho.  I guess he was promoting the image of the swinging tippler.  Steve was a decent accompanist on piano and he had a wonderfully dramatic bass voice.  He claimed to have done a bunch of macho beer ads in his past, but I was to find a lot of 'holes' in Steve's life narrative in the years that I was in contact with him.  When he was staying at Happy Acres with Deb and myself, we had actually written a few songs together and Steve promised us that he'd feature me in a couple of duets from our ringside table at the club.  Verily that came to pass as each of the four night's (that we were there) closing set included Steve coming down from the stage to our table and the two of us, glowing in the spotlights, would sing "I Don't Care About the Whereabouts of Me" and a couple of others I have since forgotten.

     The closing night of Steve's gig was well represented.  He had been a foreign exchange student in Mexico when he was in high school and spoke passable Spanish.  This, plus the fact that he was a past performer in Vegas made Steve something of a big name around here and his annual Christmas gig was very popular, especially with the padrones who owned ranches there in the high Sonoran desert.  Steve introduced us to one group who invited me to go on a cougar hunt.  Not wishing to offend Steve or his friends, I feigned interest in the invitation and asked them how it worked.  "Well, Miguel, we pile into our pick-up trucks and set up out in the desert.  We put a portable cassette player out on a rock and play a tape that we recorded of a jack rabbit being tortured.  Sometimes the screams of the rabbit brings out a cougar.  If we see one, we drop our bottles of homemade mescal, grab our rifles and start blasting away."  Diamond Deb said we had other plans...

     The final show ended at 4 AM but back then, there was no curfew or closing hour in Juarez, kind of like Las Vegas.  Steve and I hopped into a taxi and went club hopping in the heart of Juarez's entertainment district.  All the club owners knew Steve and he and I sang several boozy renditions of "You Are the Sunshine of my Life" and other standards  of the time in some of the nightclubs and dance halls around town.  We finally headed back to the Roadway Inn at sun-up.  I still have this image of us sitting in the back of a taxi with Steve leaning out the window saying a dios to his huevos rancheros. 

     The next day, Deb and I said our goodbyes to Steve and the town of Juarez and headed out on the open road.  Next stop:  Wherever...  Actually since we were in pretty elevated country and it was December, we decided to head west, over a series of mountain ranges and decamp in Mazatlan, on the coast.  Most of you can probably imagine from personal experience or stories you've heard, that driving in Mexico can be an adventure.  If this sounds euphemistic to you, well, you're right.  At times the Mexican driving experience was downright scary.  The narrow mountain roads with their hairpin turns and sharp drop offs and no guard rails were a particular concern of ours.  It seems like there was a little roadside shrine at each such turn for the unfortunates who had preceded us and not lived to tell the tale.

     Luck was with Diamond Deb and I, and we made it safely to the relative warmth of Mazatlan on the Sea of Cortez.  (I prefer the term Gulf of California, considering what a monster Cortez was to the locals...).  Our travels also took us further down the coast to a little town called San Blas (sand fleas) and, eventually, Puerto Vallarta.  Our brief stay in "P.V." included Christmas Eve dinner at a Chinese restaurant.  One day while we were lolling around on the local resort beach, we watched a squall come roiling in from out to sea.  The raft we'd been sunning ourselves on began to rock with the incoming swells and we dove in for the short swim back to shore.  The waves were producing a sweet little shorebreak that was right up my alley as a bodysurfer and I got in some great rides in that storm surf.  When I came out of the water, (the rain hadn't arrived yet) the people on the shore gave me a standing ovation for my wave riding prowess.  Thank you, thank you very much, people of Puerta Vallarta!...  Up on the cliff above the beach we could look down on the town as the storm came ashore.  You could see that lights wink out as each section of the city got wet.  I was reminded of a lament I'd heard said by Mexicans about their country.  "Poor Mexico!  So close to the United States; so far from God...".  

     As I look at my map of Mexico now, I marvel at the distances we traveled on that camping trip forty years ago.  We spent more than two weeks and drove over four thousand miles.  It was inevitable that we were going to pick up "Monezuma's revenge" aka "The Aztec Two-step".  With that amount of close proximity to the local populace, avoiding tap water was next to impossible.  As we drove North to Tijuana, an uncomfortable rumbling set up shop in my nether regions.  The first night back in the U.S., we parked in the vast empty parking lot of a Macy's store in Long Beach.  The rain was howling down and we were howling in our own misery.  Having the tourista meant having to brave the elements about every ten minutes for "evacuation".  Incredibly, at one point during the  night's tempest, we heard a knock on the camper's door.  Some poor homeless soul was begging us for shelter.  We told him things were pretty cramped and we had to make frequent exits but he was free to lie under the bus if he cared to.

     The next day was sunny and we'd make it home that evening so we could begin healing from our sundered stomachs.  Highway 5 had just recently been built and it was the most direct route from LA to SF.  Unfortunately, it had not yet filled out with lots of service stations and fast food franchises.  If you saw a gas station, you had better stop and top off the tank as insurance.  Somewhere north of Los Angeles, just past the grapevine we started running low on fuel.  We also hadn't eaten and the next stop was a large 76 service station and restaurant.  Before gassing up the camper we went into the diner for a hearty breakfast that we hoped would stay down as we drove through the central valley.  As we sat down, Deb and I discovered to our horror that we were out of money.  Somehow the funds had quietly dribbled away without either of us noticing.  That was the situation that the movie I referred to earlier reminded me of.

     "What are we gonna do for food?  My 76 Gas Card will fill up the tank but we can't drive all the way home on empty stomachs!" wailed Diamond Deb.  "You've got your checkbook in your purse, right?  Once we've eaten, they'll have to take a check.  Either that or make us wash dishes.  I'll wash, you dry..." I replied.  Having been in the restaurant business for some years prior, I had had to deal with similar situations, and several times we, the help, had to chase down fleeing patrons who were also financially embarrassed.  Debbie gulped and muttered a shaky "OK" and we proceeded to order a large portion of the menu some of which we would hide in Deb's purse.  When it came time to pay, we went up to the cashier and made a charade of looking for our money.  The hostess's friendly grin soon turned into a malicious scowl.  "What!?  You mean to tell me you can't pay for your meal!  You've gotta have something in there!"  And with that she grabbed Deb's wallet and started leafing through the slots where she kept her store cards.  Suddenly that sunny smile came back on the face of our cashier as she triumphantly held up the 76 Gas Card.  "You don't need any money! Your gas card pays for the pump as well as the food!"

     What a relief that was.  Now we knew that we could cruise home not having to worry about being penniless out on the road.  Right about then, my bowels growled in appreciation.

     Vaya con Dios!  Mickey da Mayor of Happy Acres