The land of milk-honey, honey and milk, and MLK’s dream, and that stoned amnesiac feeling, looking up at the clouds, that everything has happened, already, a few minutes ago. This is why Carolina smoked a spliff, set off for Robert Johnson’s California in her beat up old Corsair, having read Kerouac, leaving her father and stepmother nursing the residuals of an early retirement and a mild heart attack. Going west was completely consensual: she was old enough her divorced and anxiety-ridden parents – alcoholics both (her father in recovery, her mother not) – they could care less.
She was careless.
She hitchhiked after her car broke down outside Witchita. She spent the night in a motel with a man driving a black Corvette. He was traveling with a pistol and no suitcase. He bought her bacon and eggs, coffee – breakfast for dinner was her all-time favorite. Outside their room, looking out at the strip, he gave her sips off a half pint. Then they each slept in a separate double bed.
The sun rose sparkling over the Rockies, but she never looked back. In her mind, manic, she had been gone for years. San Francisco was sixteen more hours of driving rain, cold coffee in a truck stop, and the rest of the way in an eighteen wheeler once the weather stopped. The big rig driver reminded her of her second stepfather, he pulled off into a vacant lot to show her how to drive it. It was eighteen gears. She was strangely obliged, intoxicated by experience, and she gave him head on the ride into the city as he drove.
Then, the Golden Gate of the Golden State was still gold in the late, last light of the day as she crossed over from the city, hitchhiking north. She would stay with a friend of a friend who had a place in Petaluma for four days, before wandering back into San Fran in a different friend of a friend’s mom’s minivan, which Carolina named Belinda (the minivan), sort of stolen but not really, long story short – it was complicated, it always was a thin line between love and theft, and she threaded the Lombardi needle full throttle, flipped a bitch, and parrelel-parked it on a hill in North Beach. She drank a chipshot in Vesuvius because it was still before breakfast, no one even asked for her fake ID, then she read poems all day upstairs at City Lights. No money to buy the novel she noticed on the way out – she decided she’d soon need to call home.