Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Monosyllabic dialogue often indicates slang or pidgin, limited brainpower, an under-fun-
ded educational system or inbreeding. This was none of those; we were university students, a
state university best known for animal husbandry, but still. Our communication was not min-
imal but vast, encompassing reality from molecular outward in layers with ready access to the
original electrical synapse at the source of all life. What arced between us was not a short cir-
cuit but a pulse we shared with everything. Once stabilized at orbital altitude and velocity, we
saw, we felt, we understood.
Many people seek meaning in middle age, as perspective changes between the beginning
and the end, asking what might survive. Some people meditate and in time can empty the
vessel, still the pond's surface, watch thoughts fly away like birds. These images help free the
mind, opening it to essence. Essence is common in nature; say in a cat absorbing sunbeams,
or a dog with his head out the window, or a bird singing. Sweet being can arrive, with no
thoughts to disturb it. The 60s were a struggle defined by war and a nation divided—and by
essence. Drugs are easily discounted, but they took us within, to see what might be.
Kenny and I made it into town and ducked into a pizza parlor to warm up and maybe get
something to eat. But we left in short order when a large pepperoni purple and flowing yellow
pizza went to extra large and then jumbo and on to industrial megalith and finally
Godzilla!
The monster pizza rose up on dinosaur feet and roared. We gasped and ran as it chased us
out and down the street. A hallucination? Maybe. But I saw it. Kenny saw it, and the converse
of universal light is the other. A friend on a trip can help keep things light; we laughed like
hyenas comparing details down to its curly eyelashes and nose pustules and the snot flecks
dangling from the corners of its mouth. And what must have been a painful cavity in its third
incisor that likely caused the bad breath too.
We needed more wine or beer or something to take the edge off, but we dasn't go back in-
doors in public—back among those who hadn't learned that love is all around us. So we came
up with the perfect solution, to head back to Marcia's house for a joint.
Hardly two miles out, Marcia's house would have been a walk in the basil, had not a GTO
pulled over just ahead and waited on the snow-drifted shoulder, its throaty 389 ca-chug, ca-
chugging in baritone exhalation. Kenny mimed the super car as one more element to conjoin.
The door swung open on two women heavily clad and introducing themselves as Janis Joplin
and Grace Slick.
“Get in,” Grace said. So we did. We didn't really think they were rock stars, but then we
couldn't be too sure. Mid-Missouri was full of surprises in those days. They drove us twenty
miles down the road to a trailer park in Kingdom City, where their roommate Queenie, an-
other female in XXXL, lay sprawled impatiently on her massive threadbare sofa, awaiting her
pizza and beer. Grace and Janis set the box on Queenie's belly. Queenie raised the lid to reveal
the glop, no longer steaming.
Kenny gasped, “You caught it!”
