I was eighteen in 1967 when I hitchhiked from Sultan, Washington, to Wichita, Kansas, on thirty dollars. My folks didn't think I could do it; nevertheless Mom had made a little pillow for me to carry in my suitcase, and Dad came to me on the highway's shoulder before my first ride to add another ten dollars to my twenty.
The trip went remarkably well, filled with proof of a caring God, and when I arrived at my sister Linda's home on Millwood Avenue, I sneaked in the back door. Her husband Ron was out on the job, but Linda sat there, writing at the dining room table, with her back to me. When I crept up behind her and said a hearty "Hi!" Linda jumped enough to knock her chair over. Then she hugged me. What she was writing was a letter warning me not to hitchhike because it's too dangerous.
I had lived a fairly sheltered life, being the son of a Methodist minister, and I soon found that arriving in Wichita at eighteen years of age was stumbling into sudden adulthood and freedom. Linda and Ron were decent people, but not as religiously lifestyled as our parents. Now I was in a home that had parties, and beer in the refrigerator, and they let me do what I wanted to do.
When we lived in Blaine, Washington, and I went to elementary school while Linda went to high school, I always thought of her as a bit wild, and I didn't even know that she was a member of the Refrigerator Raiders gang. I did know, though, that she'd sneak off to dances, and that at least one of her boyfriends rode a motorcycle and wore a leather jacket. One day I was riding my bicycle down the street, and happened to see Linda in her car, the "Crazy Crinkle," stopped at a stop sign. I rode up alongside her and said a hearty "Hi!" much like I'd do almost ten years later in her Wichita dining room. Linda looked shocked and ducked out of sight. Weird behavior, I thought, to try hiding from her own brother like that. Come to find out, Linda smoked. She tried hiding the fact from us, and so when I pulled up, she panicked and threw down her cigarette. Then it dawned on her that she had just thrown a lit cigarette on the car's carpet, and so she ducked down to find it. I was terribly disappointed to find that my sister smoked, but I helped her keep her secret. (It turned out that our older sister Gloria also secretly smoked.)
In Washington State you're still not quite adult at eighteen. Drinking age is twenty-one. But the Kansas beer has slightly less alcohol volume, and the drinking age there was eighteen! Also you had to be twenty-one to go to X-rated movies in Washington, but only eighteen in Kansas. So suddenly I was considered an adult. Whoa.
My brother-in-law, Ron, knew the comparatively sheltered life I had led, and wanted to help me celebrate adulthood. He took me bar hopping, and to X-rated movies. To this day I appreciate him for this. It wasn't the drinking or the movies (which, by the way, would hardly be R-rated today); it was that he became more than my brother-in-law, he became my friend.
The movies we sat through had only partial nudity, and even less plot than skin. It wasn't until four years later that I would enjoy my favorite "X-rated" movies—"The Telephone Book" and Bill Osco's "Alice in Wonderland."
While I was applying for work at Cessna Aircraft, Linda and Ron were planning a Halloween costume party at their house. Meanwhile I stayed in their basement. The bedroom down there had concrete walls and floor, and a nice double bed. Despite the cleanliness of the main living quarters, the basement was infested with cockroaches. It was when I got up in the night and went across the room to turn on the light switch at the doorway that I got their full impact...
[... keep all remaining story paragraphs exactly as-is, just like above — no separator divs, just clean paragraphs ...]
[P.S. March 2014: Glenn's wife Linda just recently emailed me, saying: "I just wanted to thank you for sending me that interesting read. Only you might have forgotten the last part of Glenn's falsified spiel about me being screwed twice, so the ending of it goes, 'Once by the Globe Trotters and twice by the Chinese Army.' ha."]
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