VIGNETTE-1973-When Travis Made a Quickstop
A Chestnut Point Stories Vignette
DIRECTORY - SQUARE ONE - FLIPBOOK READING ROOM
VIGNETTE-1973-When Travis Made a Quickstop
By Jackson Tel
1973, Hyattsville, Maryland
In the spring of 1973, Travis Mann’s best friend, Barry Wolff, gave up his Deadhead lifestyle and went on a mission to find God through meditation and selflessness. He parceled out his worldly possessions to friends and flew to Colorado to live in an ashram of the Divine Light Mission ten miles outside Boulder.
Barry entrusted all his Moleskine notebooks and rock-and-roll memorabilia to his girlfriend, Cookie, before leaving. He entrusted his beloved record collection to Phillip and gave the keys to his rent-controlled New York apartment to his baby sister. And last but not least, Barry signed over the title of the 1968 Westfalia Camper to Travis.
The Volkswagen van looked and ran rough after four years of constant travel to Woodstock, the Baja Peninsula in Mexico, and from one Grateful Dead concert to the next. However, Travis enjoyed working on cars and kept the camper on the road despite his lack of cash for parts and tools.
…
That summer, Travis was renting a tiny apartment above an old brick carriage house in D.C. off an alley on H Street near the Washington Coliseum. The garage space below, originally built to house a horse-drawn wagon, was so small that ‘the Wolfmobile’ barely fit in it. Travis had to open the carriage house’s wooden doors from the alley side and crawl into the van through the rear hatch to go anywhere. Getting the vehicle in and out of the alley was a complicated process, involving a precise three-point turn and lots of mirror-checking. But after a while, Travis became adept at the maneuver even when coming back home stoned and half asleep from his job at The Crossroads nightclub in Bladensburg.
…
On August 30th, during rush hour, Travis was driving south, high as a kite, down Route 1 from Hyattsville after making a weed delivery. He was wearing stonewashed cutoff jean shorts, handcrafted leather sandals, and a brand new Boast polo shirt. (an unwise choice if he were to be pulled over by the police because the embroidered Japanese maple silhouette on the breast was often confused with that of a marijuana leaf )
All of the windows in the van were wide open. It was so hot outside that, as his Pop-Pop was fond of saying, “you could fry an egg on the sidewalk.” The thermometer on the Citizens Bank sign in Hyattsville read 94 degrees.
Travis turned on the radio, tuned it to 102.3, progressive rock WHFS, and cranked up the sound so that he could hear over the traffic noise. It was five o’clock and time for Weasel, the afternoon disk jockey, to start his popular set of music and interviews.
There were tons of stoplights on that stretch of road. At each intersection, Travis got annoyed looks from the drivers and passengers stopped alongside.
Late at night, if you timed your speed just right, you could catch all the green lights for miles. But, at that time of day, navigating the parked delivery trucks, grouchy commuters, and jaywalkers made the going slow.”
In Mount Rainier, Travis turned into the old trolley stand to take his sweaty shirt off. His driver’s side left arm was so sunburned that there was a dramatic line between the skin tones on his bicep where the sleeve ended. Around his neck hung a chain bearing an antique silver coin that looked hundreds of years old.
Standing at the corner on the opposite side of the road, with her thumb out, was someone who looked very familiar. Travis recognized the long braid of hair that reached all the way down to the small of her back. It was that girl, Eileen, whom he met back in June at the fraternity house in College Park, the day of the Grateful Dead and Allman Brothers concert at RFK. She wore a broad-brimmed straw hat, a long peasant skirt, an embroidered blouse from India, and dance flats, with a large macramé bag slung over her shoulder.
Travis put the van in gear, watched for a break in the traffic, made a U-turn, and pulled over to the curb to pick her up. Eileen looked through the window to check him out first.
“You smell like pot,” she said.
“You smell like patchouli,” Travis retorted, and they both laughed.
“Where you headed?” Travis asked.
“Queensbury Road near the train tracks,” Eileen answered.
“Hyattsville?”
“Riversdale, actually.”
“Ok, you’ll have to give me directions. Hop in.”
Eileen opened the door, lifted the bulging macramé bag carefully onto the floorboard, and climbed into the passenger seat.
Travis took a peek at the contents of the bag. It was stuffed full of vegetables, a brown bag labeled Glut Food Coop with ‘brown rice’ scribbled in pencil, a bottle of tamari, and at least a dozen of the largest, most delicious-looking peaches he had ever seen.
“Want one?” she offered.
Travis nodded emphatically.
Eileen reached down and picked out two, one for herself and one for him.
Travis, holding the peach in one hand and steering with the other, shifted into gear and headed back up Route 1.
The fruit was so ripe that the juice got all over their hands with each bite and ran down their arms. They smiled in mock embarrassment at each other.
Eileen asked, “Do you have a tissue or something?”
I don’t think so, maybe in the back. Then Travis grabbed the polo off the dashboard. Here, use my shirt.”
“You sure?” she asked skeptically, “Looks expensive.”
“I don’t care,” Travis fibbed.
Wiping up, Eileen inquired, “Do I know you from somewhere? You look familiar.”
“I met you upstairs at Delta Sigma Fi in College Park back in June.”
“Oh yeah! You’re that dealer guy. James traded his old electric guitar to you for pot and concert tickets, right? How’s the music going?”
“Pretty good. I’ve been getting better. I work at night at the Crossroads in Bladensburg, and I get to sit in with the guys there sometimes during sound checks and stuff.
“Cool. Take the next left.”
“On Cleveland?”
“Yeah, it’s a shortcut,” Eileen said, throwing her pit out the window.
Between steering, shifting, and munching, Travis was way behind her. His peach was only half-eaten.
After making the turn on Cleveland Avenue, they had to stop at Chambers Funeral Home, as a burial procession with headlights on was slowly being directed out of the side parking lot.
Travis finished his peach as they waited, then took out a baggie filled with chunks of hashish, a broken-off wooden chopstick, a Bic lighter, and a pack of Marlboros from its hiding place in the side door panel. He gently massaged the tobacco out of one of the filtered cigarettes, sprinkled in some hash, replaced the mixture using the chopstick as a tamper, lit it, and asked, “Want some?”
Eileen looked around front and back, asking, “Aren’t you paranoid?”
“Nah, just act naturally, and no one will notice. People don’t really pay much attention to what is going on around them unless something unusual happens. They are mostly preoccupied with what is going on in their own heads.”
“Ok,” Eileen agreed, leaning down as low as she could behind the dashboard and took a hit.
Travis chuckled as he took a deep drag and let the smoke drift slowly out of his nostrils, “You don’t need to hide. Pretend like you’re smoking a regular cigarette.”
“But I hate cigarettes. I have never smoked one in my whole life,” Eileen said, taking another hit, as if she were Audrey Hepburn, “Darling, I simply don’t know how.”
“You are a cigarette virgin,” Travis commented.
Eileen shot right back. “And you’re a marijuana whore.”
For some reason, both Eileen and Travis thought that was hilarious. They laughed so hard that they started coughing together at the same time.
Suddenly, both Travis and Eileen realized that the mourners in the cars, one by one, as they made the slow turn out of the funeral home, were eyeing them indignantly. They straightened right up and stared into space, affecting somber expressions.
After the last car finally pulled away, Eileen chided Travis, “Act natural, and nobody will notice,” and they burst out laughing again.
Once again, Travis continued on. This time, he kept his hands at ten and two on the steering wheel, stayed well within the speed limit, and cautiously came to a full halt to look both ways at each stop sign.
Oddly, smack dab in the middle of the residential neighborhood, they came upon a traffic roundabout. Halfway around, Travis couldn’t resist the compulsion to complete the 360-degree circle.
Eileen leaned out the window, as if she were on a theme park ride, to enjoy the cooling air flowing upon her face. As the joyful circumnavigation came to an end, she pleaded, “Again,” so Travis gladly proceeded to take another spin, and after that, she urged him on, “Again!”
But Travis couldn’t finish the third circuit. Suddenly, he felt an intense burning pain in his crotch! He could feel something moving! Travis looked down and took one hand off the wheel to frantically unzip his Levis to get “whatever it was the hell “ out of there.” Taking his eyes off the road, he momentarily lost control of the vehicle.
As the camper veered erratically across the lane, Eileen braced her hands against the dashboard. With wide-open eyes, she demanded to know, “What are you doing?”
Travis grabbed back hold of the wheel in time to steer sharply off onto a side street. Three mailboxes up from the turnabout, he came to an abrupt stop, threw open the door, hopped out onto the pavement, and, cursing to high heaven, pulled down his denim shorts.”
An elderly couple was sitting in the shade of the front porch at that house. Surprised, they rose from their rockers and stepped to the railing to see what was happening.
“Sorry, sorry,” Travis apologized as he pulled his pants back up and loudly explained, “I got stung by a bee. Sorry.”
When Travis slid gingerly back into the driver’s seat with a grimace, Eileen just shook her head in disbelief and said, “You’re a big dope.”
…
And as it turned out, that was not the last time she would say that to him.
****
When Travis Made a Quickstop
To Be Continued Per Your Request
Email: jacksontelstories@gmail.com
DIRECTORY - SQUARE ONE - FLIPBOOK READING ROOM