After I gathered together my clothes, toothbrush, and other essentials off the street that the police had dumped out after releasing me from jail and stuffed them into my knapsack a car pulled up alongside me and asked me where I was going.

 

Where was I going? I don't know why but I blurted out California and he told me to hop in, he could take me to the part of the expressway going to California. After ten minutes he did, he had asked no questions on the way, and I hopped out with a "Thanks, man". And for the next half hour I waited for any car to come by.

 

Finally a mobile home pulled up. On the side was painted a cross and Jesus, and a middle aged woman with no make-up on poked her head out the window. She asked where I was going and I said California, I heard a man's voice beside her say hop in so I did. He was older, his hands grasped the wheel. She did most of the talking, about how they went to mobile home areas and set up the car like a church. For the next few days I travelled with them, stopping at mobile home stops for showers, getting food along the road. Finally we hit California and they give me $20 and ask where I want to be left off.I wanted to go to LA and check out the scene, so they let me off on the road to catch a ride. They never brought up religion to me once. When they held service, I took a shower.

 

Turns out he'd hitchhiked after the Korean War on the West Coast, so we swapped adventures in those days together.

 

Night was falling, and a car finally pulled over for me. Well, we went over a hill and there was an ocean of lights, down the hill, up again, another ocean of lights. And it just went on and on. It was the biggest city I'd ever seen. As we approached the hippie part of town I was shocked. On each block, 50 to 100 kids were hitchhiking. I had never seen so many hitchhikers in my life. He left me off where there was a sign saying FREE FOOD but there was a line of 200 people waiting for food. This wasn't fun. This was a giant ghetto. A youth ghetto. Every other person was asking me if I had a place to crash! How was I going to find a place to crash, gather my thoughts and get the hell out of there?

 

That's when I saw my angel. I saw someone I knew! He was a roadie for bands in Atlanta and I had seen him hundreds of times, but what was his name? I approached him, he looked up, smiled and said, "Flash what are you doing here?", and started laughing and hugging me. I told him I just got in and was looking for a place to clean up and crash at. He invited me to his girlfriends house for the night and told me we'd leave for his home in Laurel Canyon, and we'd take Route 1. Sounded cool to me. When you have no plan, the person with one rules.

 

So we drive to her place and he tells me his new nickname is Bear and he is talking about how dinosaurs use to walk where we were driving and I believe it. I look outside and see giant light poles and yeah, it's easy to imagine dinosaurs where those lights are.

 

We get to his girlfriends place and as we walk up to the house she rushes over from the porch and hugs him and starts making out with him. He asks where eveyone is and she says in the house so off we go. I remark that he has a hot girlfriend and he says, "That ain't her".

 

He opens the door and there a couple of babes, a black guy and a guy rolling joints on the floor. The guy rolling joints is white, he has a suede jacket with a fringe that has filled his lap, the black guy doesn't have a Afro, those were styled, his hair is more wild ala Hendrix or myself. The two girls are wearing hip huggers that reveal their bellies, one has a tye die shirt that is above her belly button, one is wearing a leather jacket that that falls midway on her body and a man's shirt she has tied up and knotted.

 

He introduces me, kisses the two girls in a way so that I still don't know which one is his girlfriend, and sit on the floor by the guy rolling joints.

 

Now this is more like it. We start smoking and the black guy is talking about black power and the girl is talking about how women should have the same rights as men and somebody asks me what I think as I take a smoke  and blurt out that we are never leaving Vietnam.

 

Over pot, we had just merged all the points of the day into one conversation. Bear got some Ripple wine out and suddenly we're talking about everything that was wrong in the world from cops with attitudes to the straight world being blind to the war, to women being treated badly by society I MEAN EVERYTHING.

 

Well Bear heads over to the kitchen and I follow to ask him which one of the girls was his girlfriend and he said, "She ain't here yet. So you can pick up any one you want".

 

I was starting to dig California. I guess there are a lot of cool people everywhere, you just have to find them.

 

FOOTNOTE:

WILD IN THE STREETS MOVIE TRAILER