LITMIR.BIZ

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twenty minutes displaying the dry summertime brown of the un-irrigated California hills.

      An extra lane abruptly materialized on the right. Now the road began to be crowded with clusters of cars and trucks as we raced toward the ascent marking the gateway to the fabled L.A. Basin, to the Southland. An additional lane, and another, merged onto the roadway. We were eight lanes abreast as we lost the big rigs for a few minutes while they docilely exited for an inspection station. Then the files of tractor trailers rejoined our pack of accelerating cars, vans, and pickups as we began to rise toward paradise.

      Earlier, I had become a little bored with my own voice and with my brain churning over the war, the year ahead, and Janey. As I pounded past Bakersfield, I had shifted the radio dial through Buck Owens and Merle Haggard until I hit the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Woman,” which had been number one in the Frozen North when I’d left. At the start of the climb toward Tejon, grooves in the pavement after the Grapevine exit caused my tires to throb loudly and rhythmically. The Bakersfield DJ announced another golden gasser from three years ago, the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love.” Their four-four drumbeat matched perfectly the tempo of the track my tires were laying down — dum-dum-dum-dum, dum-dum-dum-dum:

      I need love, love,

      To ease my mind.

      I need to find, find,

      Someone to call mine.

      A chill of awe and excitement swept up the back of my arms and neck. I was in the thick of it now, pedal to the floor, gunning sixty-five miles per hour up amid a forest of huge trucks on every side while maniac sedans and sports cars screamed by me left and right, or loomed behind, jockeying through the dense flow of other vehicles for a shot at an open expanse of blacktop.

      But mama said:

      “You can’t hurry love.

      No, you just have to wait.”

      She said: “Love don’t come easy,

      It’s a game of give and take.”

      A tractor hauling a train of two semi-trailers lurched unexpectedly into my lane inches in front of me to avoid a slow-moving van pulling a large boat. I braked hard to save my life, glanced in my mirror en route to a lightning-quick shoulder check, then swayed around the rig. The Supremes were confessing:

      Right now the only thing

      That keeps me hanging on

      When I feel my strength,

      Yeah, it’s al-most gone,

      I remember mama said:

      “You can’t hurry love.

      No, you just have to wait.”

      She said: “Love don’t come easy,

      It’s a game of give and take.”

      A gaudily coloured Volkswagen microbus chugged alongside to my left, a mass of flowers depicted on its side as it swept upward with the rest of us toward the summit. The bus momentarily held station beside me. Through its open passenger window, I watched the long-haired driver take a deep pull on a hand-rolled cigarette or joint. From how he held the smoke in, no question it was a doobie. The driver handed the number across to his equally long-haired and bearded buddy beside him. The passenger held up the joint in front of him to contemplate its pleasures while he struggled to retain smoke. For some reason he glanced at me.

      When I registered with the passenger, his face broke into a huge grin. Maybe he recognized a fellow freak, though I’d had my hair trimmed and had cut back my beard to ease my transition across the border at Blaine, where I had to produce my student visa papers. Or maybe as the microbus had overtaken me he had read my rear bumper stickers.

      END CANADIAN COMPLICITY IN THE VIETNAM WAR was one I had affixed there. The Frozen North was a member of the International Control Commission that supposedly monitored violations of the 1954 Indochina ceasefire. That arrangement had established the two Vietnams on either side of the Seventeenth Parallel when the French were kicked out. The current war was unquestionably one big violation of the peace agreement, yet Canada never squawked.

      My other bumper adornment had been purchased by Thad, probably the gutsiest member of our SDS chapter at UC Irvine. He had obtained twenty copies from the local John Birch Society and handed them out at the first of our weekly meetings last semester. The sticker featured a drawing of the UC Berkeley campanile and the advice: GO TO COLLEGE. LEARN TO RIOT. The Birchers intended the slogan as satire, but I had no problem with the literal meaning. Given that the Birchers’ message was situated next to the anti-war statement, my endorsement of what the Birchers meant as a complaint was evident. I was once pulled over by a California Highway Patrol black-and-white outside Corona del Mar, and the cop seemed plenty choked, even though I hadn’t been speeding or anything. He was probably a Bircher himself, who took a dim view of the display of their material by some hippie radical. He ticketed me for not having a passenger-side outside mirror, mandatory — according to him — under California law. The citation didn’t make sense, since I had B.C. plates and a B.C. driver’s licence, and I knew California didn’t impose its vehicular regulations on every tourist visiting the Golden State. I threw the ticket away and nothing happened.

      The Supremes were assuring one another:

      No love, love,

      Don’t come easy.

      But I keep waiting,

      Anticipating,

      For that soft voice

      To talk to me at night,

      For some tender arms

      To hold me tight.

      I observed to my surprise that the passenger’s head and then upper torso were emerging through the window of the microbus racing alongside me. In the heat and roar of the traffic we were rounding an ever-ascending curve. The passenger’s left hand gripped some handhold inside the cabin, while the asphalt tore past beneath his precariously positioned body. At the end of his straining form his right arm unfolded in my direction. The hand at the end of his extended arm proffered the joint. The hairy face at the other end of the arm was one big beaming invitation.

      I waved the doobie off. This would be too weird, toking up vehicle-to-vehicle as we powered up past Tejon Ranch toward the Pass. My benefactor gestured at me with the joint a couple of times as if to ask, “You sure?” I yelled my “Thanks, anyway,” took my hands off the wheel, and pretended to steer to indicate I didn’t want to smoke while I was driving. He caught my meaning, shrugged, and made a wry “Okay, man” face. A moment later he retracted himself into the front seat of the bus and flashed me the peace sign. I returned it, then added the power-to-the-people fist to show that peace and love were all very fine, but something more was needed to bring about the changes we all wanted. He nodded, but gave me the peace sign again as he sucked once more on the joint. The Supremes were still insisting:

      “You can’t hurry love.

      No, you just have to wait.”

      She said to trust, give it time,

      No matter how long it takes.

      We crested the summit. The highway now cut across fifty miles of arid mountain wilderness that would end at the rim of the San Fernando Valley. There I’d pick up I-405, the San Diego Freeway, which would lead me down through the San Fernando range and then up over the Santa Monica Mountains into L.A. proper. The microbus had vanished ahead, as the moon-like landscape shot past in a series of rapid climbs and even faster lengthy descents. Miniature green towns that seemed all palms and mall and gas stations broke up the tawny, shimmering landscape. Strangest to me were the signs that informed the motoring public we were in the Angeles National Forest. Not a tree visible for twenty miles, only some scrubby mesquite bushes scattered amid the baking rocks.

      The Supremes’ song and my ever-more-impending arrival at the Gold Coast had focused my mind on Janey. I felt a surge of delightfully anxious anticipation: only hours or at most days until I saw her. She was an undergraduate who had been in an upper-division Contemporary European History course with me last year. She was stunning, gorgeous, with

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