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. At most every step in the dark, I could hear a crunch beneath my feet; and when I clicked on the light the dark floor suddenly spread into a gray floor as the hundreds of roaches ran to the cracks. The dead roaches showed me where I had stepped. Other than this, they didn't bother me at all, and stayed well out of sight.
I went to the karate school around the end of the block to rent a costume for the upcoming party---a karate gi. They let me rent the white uniform, but refused to include a black belt (understandably), so I wore a beginner's white belt with it. Linda and Ron's party had a good turn-out, and there was drinking, and I drank, and there was cigarette smoking, and I smoked. For an addition to my costume, I had put on makeup to look like I had a black eye. After getting somewhat under the influence, my wearing the karate uniform, along with comments from some guests, increased my bravado and decreased my intelligence. I went out into the backyard to find a brick. After finding an old red brick with some slight cracks in it, I returned and set up two chairs with the brick crossing between them. Everyone gathered around to see the drunk kid in a karate costume break a brick. "Think through it," I remember hearing from some ancient lore, as I slammed the edge of my hand hard against it. While everyone yelled, I danced around holding the hand I thought I broke. Then I saw why they were yelling: On the floor lay two halves of a red brick!
Among the guests at the party were Ron's cousin Glenn and Glenn's wife Linda. This was a couple unlike any I had ever known growing up in a parsonage. Glenn had a rough sort of worldly look to him, and his wife Linda was a brunette and quite attractive, with, to a sheltered eighteen-year-old, a sort of mysterious mystique about her. Having been raised in a home that wouldn't allow even such words and phrases as "gosh," "golly," "gee," "darn," and "shut up," and still never having had sex and thinking all but few girls are virgins, I was shocked to hear Glenn and Linda sit on the couch visiting with Linda and Ron, (Glenn's) Linda telling of her sexual experiences and Glenn remarking surprised, "I thought you told me you only screwed twice!" I was repelled but in awe of this couple.
As the party wound down, I ended up at the kitchen table alone with Glenn, while in his inebriated condition, and mine, he told me things I'd never heard before, and that I should meet some of his friends sometime---who, by his description, I didn't really care to meet. I told him about the time I had sneaked into a nudist camp, Fraternity Snoqualmie, and he told me he had a collection of nudist magazines and that he would loan them to me.
True to his word, Glenn soon returned with a stack of magazines I had never known existed, and said I could borrow them for as long as I wanted. There are good nudist magazines today ("Naturally" being among the best, especially since it's published several true stories of mine), but none can compare to the nudist magazines of the 1950's and 1960's. This was the genre's heyday. I had sneaked peaks at girly magazines in stores, and even stole many, and finally actually bought "Playboy" in Montana; but nudist magazines were very different. Despite showing complete nudity of men, women and children, they were wholesome! Sexuality wasn't flaunted or exploited or even displayed. And instead of hot, airbrushed, perfect women, these magazines illustrated life being enjoyed by everyone just as they are. It was like seeing my wonderful day at Fraternity Snoqualmie on paper on my lap. For hour on end I would relax in the cockroach-infested basement and peruse these magazines, learning every one by heart. Later, in the Army, I would subscribe to one of them, "Nudism Today," I would spend my last military leave in a Miami nudist resort, and after the Army would even join a club in Washington State and eventually live there full-time with my growing family.
I kept smoking, and chose Benson & Hedges cigarettes because of the clever commercials concerning its being longer than other cigarettes (elevator door closing on it, etc.). If they did mind it, Linda and Ron never let me know, for both of them smoked, and I felt free. I stayed in Wichita that time a total of three months, and later in my stay, having eventually gotten the job at Cessna and renting a nice apartment of my own, I ran out of cigarettes and felt the loss. I noticed myself beginning to shake because I didn't have one, and realized I was becoming addicted. So I stopped smoking cigarettes. I tried a pipe regularly in South Carolina while staying with my oldest sister Eunice and her family, and in years to come I would smoke marijuana, and to this day I enjoy sitting on the porch every few months with corncob pipe or good cigar. But I never got back into cigarettes. Much of this has to do with something my older brother said to me years before. I idolized Paul and asked him why he doesn't smoke, and he said, "I never saw the sense in it." That makes good sense. By the way, Paul and I once made a hookah water pipe, and smoked two bowls of tobacco through it, getting to feel very sick, then dumped the water out on the sidewalk. A yellowish sludge of what the water had filtered splatted in wet piles onto the cement, making us sick to look at it. We realized aloud to each other that, for those who don't filter their smoke through a hookah, this yuck is what collects in their lungs! It was a good lesson.
Taking advantage of the fact that I could drink legally, I bought a beautiful knight's-helmet decanter and kept it as a centerpiece on my Wichita apartment's table. Not knowing any better, I filled it with Pink Catawba dinner wine. One of my friends at Cessna was Bobby, a black man who understood and took advantage of the fact that he worked at the plant as a token minority, a victim of Affirmative Action, and tended to be very lazy, pissing off all the white guys. But Bobby became my friend, and would often drive me to and from work, although my apartment was walking distance away, in his big car that would make any seaman feel right at home. One day, taking me home, Bobby turned the steering wheel but his car wouldn't turn. The wheel broke loose from the steering column. Creepy! He managed to slow down and pull over without tragedy. Later at the apartment, I invited him in for some wine, and it was then I learned that I hate Catawba Pink dinner wine! Awful stuff. Bobby didn't let any ungratefulness be known though, and we had a good long talk.
Bobby and I were among several trained sealers at Cessna Aircraft, the first to be trained to seal fuel tanks now being built into the wings of certain small planes. Other than the tank-sealing goop tending to make our steel-toed boots ugly, we didn't mind the job. What we did grow to mind was to buck rivets. Whenever our supervisor, Larry, found it desired, he would pull one or two of us off our sealing jobs to go up the line and buck rivets for the riveters. This involved deep stretching while holding heavy steel blocks on the inside of wings to meet and flatten the ends of the rivets being riveted by the riveters. It was fairly hectic, hurrying to keep up with the riveter and occasionally missing the right spot, and miserably noisy. We preferred the laid-back job we were trained for. So bucking rivets became one of our pet peeves, as did our supervisor, Larry.
Incidentally, someone there told me that vodka can't be smelled on the breath, and so I once came to work feeling quite good on vodka, and, indeed, no one sensed it. I've been since told that this isn't true, about no breath smell, but fortunately I lucked out. Around that time, while I had vodka on hand, I took advantage of it after eating a box of Black Crows licorice candy. I was drunk enough to get sick while making my way up my apartment steps. Remember this, if you remember anything at all: You do not want to get vomiting drunk after eating Black Crows.
Anyway, one day, when I wasn't in the best mood and was feeling antsy and wanting to continue my hitchhiking adventure, Larry came over and said, "Lund, I want you to go buck rivets."
"Do I have to?" I asked.
"If I say so, you do!" he said.
"Then I quit," I said.
Larry looked as though someone had slugged him in his fat stomach. His eyes and mouth all opened wide and he held out his hands and said, "Wait here! Wait right here," then ran off. All my co-workers learned what had transpired before Larry returned with two big-wigs in management. They calmly told me that I had the choice of quitting or being fired, and I shrugged my shoulders and repeated, "I quit." Then one of the big-wigs took me under his wing. He had me do a little paperwork in an office, then took me on a private tour of Cessna Aircraft. He was a nice man, treating me respectfully despite my quitting without notice, and gave me such a nice tour of the place that, by the time I walked out the door, I thought Cessna was a pretty good outfit.
When I walked out into the parking lot, I noticed that the cars of my co-workers were missing, and wondered why. It was hours before the end of the shift. Later I heard that, prompted by my quitting, the sealing employees staged a big walk-out. They didn't wait around for a guided tour. They just left, and the whole assembly line shut down.
After arranging my farewells, Linda was my first ride in my ongoing journey, and she waited until my second ride picked me up and disappeared over the horizon. After working three months at Cessna Aircraft, I blew all my extra money on Christmas gifts, except for the fourteen dollars that got me to Charleston, South Carolina, where Eunice lived. While walking through a Charleston suburb in the dark, a big black man ran up out of a deep ditch and stopped right in front of me. All I could see besides a faint, large silhouette were two wide-open, white eyes. I leaped back, but he yelled, panting, "You scared me half t' death!"
"You scared me!" I shouted, relieved. We both burst out laughing, and we went our separate ways.
And so I continued on in my journey around the U.S., and in my journey of life, discovering new things, trying out new experiences, meeting with joys and fears, and finding that many fears are unfounded. Most wrong things I've done eventually become lessons learned. Most good experiences remain to comfort me. But, after all, I'm still coming of age.
[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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