Friends of the Devil, Part 1
(Me with my friends Prch & Jon & the rest of our high school senior class Student Senate. 1972)
A year after my first hitchhiking trip south and west [see Falling in Love for the First Time, Part 3], I pointed myself in that direction again. It was mid-December 1975, the beginning of winter break, and two degrees above zero that morning in Iowa City. I’d just taken a semester of Intensive Spanish at the University of Iowa and was picking it up fairly quickly because of the rather ridiculous fact of my four years of high school Latin. The plan was to get as far into Mexico as I could in a month. So, west to Des Moines and then southbound on 1-35. I joyfully kicked up roadside feed corn and caught a ride from Des Moines to Kansas City before I’d even had a chance to stick out my thumb. By the time I reached Wichita the wind was whipping unabated across the endless rolling prairie and the sun was turning orange and saying goodbye. I stopped at a Denny’s for a cheese omelet and coffee and unfiltered Camels.
I caught one more ride to the outskirts of Oklahoma City. As deep night settled in, I found myself at a busy highway crossroad with little room for a driver to pull off and pick me up. An Okie state trooper stopped to give me a ride. Although this was a bit unusual – and I was keenly aware of the two joints tucked in my breast pocket – a good hitchhiker never turns down a reasonable ride. The trooper was cool, just helping me out with a ride to a better – and safer – spot to hitch outside of Norman. But it was getting late, the traffic was light, and I was traveling light, with no heavy coat to ward off the winds. It was pitch black except for a fool moon and cold cold cold. I retreated to a nearby Ramada Inn, where I settled into a lobby chair to warm up … and then intermittently sleep till dawn. A man in a red blazer stopped by to tell me his clientele would be around soon, so I should get a coffee and be on my way. Oklahoma was okay.
By that afternoon, I made it to Austin, where the climate was more accommodating. I was stopping off there, hoping to meet up with one of my closest high school buddies, Jim “Prch” Prchlik. Prch grew up in Detroit but landed at Walsh Jesuit High School outside Akron at the beginning of his sophomore year when his dad, a former Detroit Lions defensive lineman, took an executive position at a nearby Ford Motor Company plant. Prch was a hard-nosed linebacker on the football team, but he was also gregarious, fun-loving, and sweet-tempered. We bonded over our mutual admiration of Jack Kerouac’s novels about exploring the road and all that entailed. We agreed with Jack that “there was nowhere to go but everywhere, so just keep on rolling under the stars.” The summer after high school, we’d hitched back east to Cape Cod, and when Prch started school at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor became an important hub of my own hitchhiking trips. In the summer of 1981, we met up at his friend Albert’s apartment in Kassel, Germany, and then traveled together, one more time, for over a month, down through the Vosges Mountains and into Italy as far south as Rome, a memorable story of hitching and backpacking worth retelling some time.
Prch had given me the address of his friend Kate, whom he was planning to meet up with. He had a drive-away from Ann Arbor to Los Angeles, given two weeks to transport the car and $200 for the effort. Kate was going to accompany him on the Austin–LA leg of the trip. The address led me to a little trailer, where Kate lived with her sister Rose and Rose’s partner Frank and their baby. Prch hadn’t arrived yet, but I met Kate, who could simply be described as a sweet, free-spirited hippie. I know that’s a trite cliché, but there’s a reason it exists. One sensed that carefree Kate was up for just about anything, ready to enjoy the transient party that represented our lives then. That evening, I tried to make myself useful by cleaning up after dinner and entertaining the baby.
Not much extra room in the trailer that night, but Kate directed me to a spot in her bedroom where I could throw down my sleeping bag. We talked for a while, comparing notes about our mutual friend, and turned out the light. Before long, Kate was inviting me to share her bed. I felt a bit conflicted – this was the girlfriend of my best friend after all. But how do I explain the ethos of the time? Kate knew what she wanted, and it was hard to argue with her offer of the comfort of her bed. Our generation wanted to try everything. We wanted to know what it felt like to be impulsive, intense, intimate. We wanted to make sure we didn’t repeat the mistakes of our parents’ generation, of the conventional and conservative fifties of cufflinks and cash flow.
The next afternoon, I was scoping out the scene down on State Street near the University of Texas campus when I ran into Prch. We shared big hugs and laughter, celebrated the serendipity of life, and went off to the Armadillo World Headquarters to catch a show by Quicksilver Messenger Service, one of the fine rock bands that emerged from the late sixties San Francisco scene. I never said anything to Prch about the previous night with Kate, perhaps because I felt that in the grand scheme of things our dalliance was inconsequential, just a bubble in time. Leonard Cohen explains this feeling best in his song “Sisters of Mercy.” After introducing us to these compassionate sisters, he sings, “And you won’t make me jealous if I hear that they’ve sweetened your night. We weren’t lovers like that, and besides it would still be all right.”
Before I continued south and Prch and Kate headed west, I stayed a few more days in Austin, spending my days with the two of them, and my nights next door in the trailer of Kate’s friend, Bob Fullalove. In retrospect, I realize it would've been better to be straight with my friend. If there was truly no harm in that one sweet night with Kate, then I should’ve been totally up-front. In fact, when Kate and Prch got to California, she did tell him about our night together, and he was cool with it, that generous sharing of ourselves. Back in the spring, they’d agreed to give each other permission to enjoy the company of others when they weren’t together, that it might even be bonding if they were with someone the other was close to. Still, I wish I’d been honest with my friend, and perhaps this will serve as my apology to him. As I get older, and have a little more hindsight, I can begin to forgive who I was, and realize I still have much to learn.