Travels On The Road To America

You know how it is. Summer comes orange over the horizon. Plans form in your mind. The days shorten and most of them don’t work out. August steps out of the trees and leaves shadows so different from those of July. The green seed pods on the caraganas have aged to a deep brown; the deep purple chokecherries bend their branches toward the earth; the mother wren, free of her brood, chats and scolds in the hedges. The year is aging. Soon the winter cold will conquer the summer, so you’d better do something.

Custodians Tommy Dodge, Clyde Colvin, and I had been working in the school since graduation in May. Tommy had taken his two weeks and gone fishing in June. Clyde never took any time off, claiming he couldn’t afford to at his age. For me it was August or never.

That had been a bad year.

Vietnam, the fighting and the demonstrations; Apollo 13 just about didn’t make it back to Earth; Kent State, demonstrations and shootings; Ulrike Meinhof helped Andreas Baader escape from jail in West Germany, where they would go on to form the Red Army Faction, a terrorist organization.

Sunday dew glistened in the grass and glossed up my boots as I wheeled the Honda CB750 out of the large lean-to addition at the rear of my house. When Miss Mae Larson owned the house right next door to my parents’ place, the addition had been a storage area; it served me the same way. Miss Larson had been our school and city librarian until she died alone in bed, the way she had slept her entire adult life. She hadn’t done much with the house since she had inherited it from her folks, so I got it cheap.

The Honda cost me $1500, almost as much as the house. I bought it at Be-Bop’s Cycles on the west side of town. There were three colors available: Candy Blue-Green, Candy Gold, or Candy Ruby Red. It wasn’t the red color that sold me; it was Be-Bop explaining the advantages of the electric start, the front disk brake, and the quality engineering.

Be-Bop had fought in the European Theater, from Normandy to the Ardennes, without so much as a scratch. He came home full of “piss and vinegar,” as they say, and took up with the Crusaders, a group of vets and a couple high school dropouts who rode Harleys.

They weren’t a motorcycle gang as such, just a bunch of guys who would ride to neighboring towns on Friday and Saturday nights; try to drink the bar or bars dry; get into some knuckledusters, nothing too serious; and weave their way home.

Be-Bop bought a big two-story house on the west side of Menninger, converted the first-floor into a repair shop with two large doors, and lived on the second floor. He had a way with motors, small engines, anything mechanical, so he started taking care of the Crusaders’ bikes. Eventually, he started selling Harleys.

Through attrition—marriages, moving away, health issues, and one death when Jimmy McTag drove drunk right into the side of a GN freight stopped at Benton—the number of Crusaders dwindled from a high of thirty-five to five before they disbanded.

Be-Bop’s business suffered accordingly, and he had to go to work as a mechanic at Menninger Motors, but working the weekends in his own shop. Then in the late Sixties Harley quality dropped and nobody wanted to buy them. Be-Bop had to do something, so he turned Japanese.

Honda saved his shop, but lost him his friends. The four ex-Crusaders hated the “rice-cycles” and refused to let Be-Bop work on their American bikes, preferring to trailer them to Caseyville when they went bad.

I didn’t like the treatment Be-Bop was getting, and I didn’t want to be burned buying the shoddy workmanship Harley was putting out, so I had Be-Bop order a CB750.

He test-drove it for me, and he made certain it wasn’t a sandcast model because their chains could stretch out, get caught up in the sprockets, and whip through the cases, making for a nasty repair problem.

The first time I took it out on the East Highway, its inline four banging away between my legs got me up to a hundred before I eased off. I hadn’t even hit top-end.

I strapped my gear on the back of the seat and went into the house for a final check. When I saw the record player, on a whim I decided to play a couple songs.

I put on the Dot 45 of Roy Clark’s “Yesterday, When I Was Young.” Whenever I felt gloomy, I’d listen to the lyrics and reflect on my life about being young “yesterday” with happy songs to sing, but without happy songs “today”—and get to feeling sorry for myself, how I was getting older and hadn’t accomplished a blamed thing of importance.

After I was thoroughly depressed, I pulled Tommy James and the Shondells’ “Crystal Blue Persuasion” out of its Roulette Records sleeve. Every time I heard that opening bongo joined by the guitar it made me feel good. Some of the druggies were saying it was a veiled reference to drugs, maybe acid, but I just thought of it as a very optimistic, maybe naïve, song about what life could be like with a new day coming, people changing, it could be beautiful with a Crystal Blue Persuasion.

Mom and Dad were having bacon for breakfast; I could smell it as I walked into the house where I grew up. Mom was at the stove, scrambling eggs. Dad was seated at the table.

“I’m gonna take off.”