Epilogue

In case you are interested in learning what happened after 1969 to the characters I mentioned in "How to Break and Ankle," here's a listing:

- Richard, the friend who shared my North Avenue apartment and whose melancholic guitar outbursts so upset the neighborhood, married a girl from Johnstown, went on to become a stone mason and fathered three daughters. Hobbled by a fall from a scaffold, he endured constant pain until about 20 years ago, when he took his own life.

- Fred, Monroe's affable roommate, after flunking out of W&J went on to school and jobs all around the country but was never able to break free of the gravity of Western Pennsylvania. He died here, at 56, of complications from diabetes.

- Monroe served in the Air Force in Vietnam, after which he settled in San Francisco, where he worked as a waiter. "Monroe has decided to become a homosexual," Fred told me at the time. He later moved to New York City, where he now owns two trendy Manhattan restaurants.

- Regis also served in the Air Force in Vietnam. I returned to Perrysburg in 1972 to be an usher at his wedding, but I don't think he will ever forgive me for abandoning him and our plans to emigrate to Australia. As far as I know, he's still living in Perrysburg and working in the family business.

- Bim, my father's half brother, had a bad heart but didn't know it. He collapsed and died during a family gathering of the California clan at age 64.

- I last saw my paternal grandmother, Dorothy McCully Burroughs Achenbach, in the late 1980s. She and Harry had by then moved from Bancroft Street to a double-wide. When my wife, Alice, and I visited them, Gram was dressed in a neat blue suit, but wore enormous, pink, fuzzy slippers. She was still counting her cigarettes. "We are so old!" she complained. Harry died first, and Gram followed a year later.

- My mother lived long enough to see me stop gallivanting around the country and settle down, and to enjoy her first grandchild, but not her second. She died of cancer at age 52.

- My father remarried and remains in Florida and in good health at age 83. He did indeed drag me to a barber shop in August 1969. It was the last time I entered a barber shop. Because…
…the girlfriend I mentioned when Bim and Jeannine arranged my blind date started cutting my hair. She did such a good job of it that I married her, and she has been cutting my hair ever since.

How to Break an Ankle, Part 13

From the window of the plane I saw the dark shapes of seals slipping along on the waves of the bay before we banked and headed into morning sun, bound for Phoenix, then New Orleans. My cast was an obstruction in the aisle over which stewardesses stepped gingerly. Bim had written on it in blue Magic Marker a message to my father: "Sorry we broke your kid, Al."

I was headed to Florida – home, if you could call it that. My parents had moved there only recently, to a house I had seen only once. There was nowhere else to go; it would be weeks before it was possible to walk without crutches or drive a car. My romantic, adventurous quest, my dream of hitchhiking across America and accumulating all those life experiences, which my grandmother said I so sorely lacked, was over. Crashed and burned. I was completely defeated.

As the jet cruised above a rusted, empty, waterless landscape, I foresaw the near future. The wandering son would return, penniless and crippled, to the protective custody of his parents. His mother would tap an angry foot on kitchen linoleum and dab tears from the corners of her eyes, bemoaning her child's tattered clothing and foolish behavior, "gallivanting" around the country instead of toiling at a summer job. His father would deliver him to a barber shop for a "real haircut, not just some damn trim." Lectures.

It was necessary to change planes in New Orleans for a flight to Fort Lauderdale, and the layover was a long one. A wheelchair awaited me as we disembarked. I protested, but a stewardess cut me short. "Sorry, company rules," she said.
The wheelchair came with an attendant. I can't recall his name; let's say it was James. He was a tall, middle-aged man in a blue captain's cap and white, short-sleeved shirt that contrasted sharply with his black-almost-purple skin. He spoke softly and slowly and seldom. Yes suh. No suh. Where can I take you suh?

I had no sense, no experience, no understanding of the South, and I felt embarrassed for James, forced to serve this master, this reckless, scruffy white boy.
He rolled me through the airport, to the toilet, to the newsstand, humming discreetly.
"Can you take me outside?" I asked him.
"Lawd, no suh!" he chuckled. "Why, you be parboiled out der in dis heat."
"Just put me by the window then. You can leave me there. I'll be all right." I wanted to free him of this menial task, emancipate him.

My eyes grew heavy watching planes land. I watched shadows move and lengthen. I dozed.

Sometime late in the afternoon, I awoke to the gentle shake of James' hand upon my shoulder. "C'mon suh, it time for you to go home."
And so it was.

THE END

How to Break an Ankle, Part 12

The California clan was large, but no one was my age. All my cousins were younger, all my aunts and uncles older. After a week, they didn't know what to do with me. I was too old to take to Disneyland, too young to take to take to nightclubs. The novelty of my presence began to wear off.

The whole family got together for a picnic in Balboa Park. There would have been no picnic if it were not for my visit. I decided then to leave the next morning. Feeling ashamed about chickening out and flying from Chicago, I decided to buy a real pair of shoes and hitchhike back east.

The adults were playing canasta at the picnic tables, and I was playing soccer with my cousins, trying to dazzle them with smooth moves and crafty dodges. I would dribble circles around them, and they would fall down, mostly from laughter. But moccasins from Kmart that were actually bedroom slippers were not the best footwear for soccer. I stepped on the ball to bat it backward, my foot slipped off and came down hard on something not my foot, and I heard a snap, a muffled crack like a twig crushed under a boot, and felt a lightning strike up my leg.
I got to my feet and hobbled over to the picnic tables. No, it’s OK, just need to catch my breath, I told them. But when I rose, I could not put weight on the leg. I sat, and the ankle swelled.

I left the clinic on crutches with a cast – one of those old-fashioned thick plaster things – from my knee to my toes. The broken bones did not worry me as much as how and when I could leave California. Maybe a cast on my leg would be a good lure for rides, but I kept imagining standing along, say, a remote and lonely stretch of road in northern New Mexico, hungry, thirsty, my hands blistered and underarms raw and chafed from crutches, saying to myself over and over again, "You idiot!"

How to Break an Ankle, Part 11

It can be brutally hot in the desert just east of San Diego in August, but not in town, where the breeze passes over the cool waters of Mission Bay and sways the tall palms on Bancroft Street, and wafts over the dahlias coming into bloom in the front yard and caresses us in the shade of the porch.

We were sitting on the swing, Gram and I, in the early afternoon, drinking lemonade and talking about my future.
"So after college, what?" she asked.
"Well, it's not like I have much of a choice. Can I have one of your cigarettes?
"No, dear, I'm counting these."

She was always trying to cut down on smoking, restricting herself to a certain number of smokes per day; either that, or trying to keep people from mooching cigarettes from her. They were Parliaments, in a blue and white box.
"Well, I suppose I'll be drafted, and then shipped off to Vietnam, and then shipped back in a box," I said, trying to be flippant, even though my post-graduate prospects were scaring me to death.
"Oh, don't think that way," she said, waving her bony hand dismissively. She had been a Navy wife for many years, moving her family all over the country and to Panama and back. She said the military was a vast place, and a good place to accumulate life experience, and if I really wanted to be a writer, I would need lots of that.
"You're so young," she said with that deep, halting laugh of hers. "What have you got to write about?"

She talked about her mother and her grandmother and their writing regimens. And she told me I had to read more if I wanted to become a good writer. "All Quiet on the Western Front" and "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" were a couple of the books she suggested.

(Just the other day, I found in my box of mementos a list she had mailed me later, written in her neat, left-leaning script on an index card, 10 books to read right away. "The Black Rose" and "Green Dolphin Street," are among them. Regrettably, I have yet to read any of them. But I will.)

"Here, go ahead, have one of my cigarettes," she said. "I'll resume quitting tomorrow." She watched me smoke, smiling contentedly, her head cocked to one side.
Read the good authors and learn from them, but don't pay any attention to what is fashionable and contemporary and novel, she said.
"Write about what you know."

How to Break an Ankle, Part 10

(Grandmother Dorothy and my father, Bronxville, N.Y., 1957)

My mother's family history is simple and straightforward: They came to this country in early 20th century from Poland, where my mother's parents were born, peasants, like countless generations before them.
My father's family tree is more complicated and mysterious, its trunk and lower branches obscured in the ground fog of time. What little we know about the paternal line is something we'd rather not know at all. You wouldn't either if you found out Booker T. Washington was a slave on your ancestors' Virginia plantation. While Booker T. was working for The Man - James Burroughs – my father's mother's Irish and Scottish ancestors were on the Oregon Trail. They became pioneers in Oregon, Washington and Alaska and seafarers who sailed the China route. At the time my mother's mother was boarding a steamship for America, my paternal great-great-grandmother, Ada Woodruff Anderson, was churning out novels about adventure in the Northwest. Her daughter, Great-grandmother McCully, would become a writer, too, mostly of gardening books and articles. Her daughter – my grandmother Dorothy – never published but was a writer at heart, an avid reader and the composer of great letters. She would have a profound influence on my career, although this would not be apparent until years after that summer of '69 in California.

She lived on Bancroft Street in San Diego at the time, an old, quiet neighborhood, with her second husband, Harry, a retired Navy man. It was a house I still walk through and around in my dreams: a garage stacked with dusty curiosities, a miniature house where Gram did her sewing, a lemon tree, a shuffleboard court, and a garden that Harry was constantly tending and watering.

Gram was pencil thin with a constant and broad smile that made her top-heavy. I remember her, there and when she visited us on the East Coast, as delicate and sophisticated, a cigarette and cocktail balancing in her hands like weights on a scale.
I spent a couple of days at their home that August, poking around the garage, playing golf with Harry, and sitting in the porch swing with Gram, and that's where it happened. No, not the broken ankle, but her influence on me: what she would say that would set my course.

How to Break an Ankle, Part 9

Although Bim sold insurance for a living, most of his friends had real-man jobs: policemen, firemen, career Marines. He took me to their weekly poker game for some cigar smoking and whiskey sipping and gambling, although these guys played with nothing but pennies. Sorry, but it's not so impressive when the motorcycle cop in a muscle shirt and flat-top pushes a stack into the pile and says, "I raise ya 15 big ones," and a hush falls across the table, even though he's talking about 15 cents.

It was this group of he-men who taught me to play Indian poker. This came late in the evening, when they had had too much to drink and were acting silly. In Indian poker, everyone gets a card that he holds against his own forehead so that everyone can see the player's card except that player. It's a game that seventh-graders find hilarious; for drill sergeants and San Diego's Finest, it's pathetic.

Bim let me ride his motorcycle around the neighborhood, and he promised that he would borrow a friend's bike and the two of us would ride out into the desert and spend the day. But when Saturday came, his friend did also, and I found myself riding passenger on Bim's bike, which was more than disappointing; it was mortifying, because there is nothing so pointless as being a passenger on a motorcycle. It's like watching someone eat a good steak while your jaw is wired shut.

Nevertheless, the day was enjoyable, exploring wilderness which today's is probably a housing development or a shopping mall. Bim's friend pointed to a cliff from which a trickle of water fell smashing on the rocks below. He said that he had seen a girl standing at the top of that cliff two weeks earlier, stark naked except for a string of beads around her neck.

For a young man in 1969, that was an exciting thought. I kept my eyes peeled for naked women, but we saw almost no one the whole day. Exploring around the base of that cliff that afternoon, I found a bead necklace among the wet rocks and put it in my pocket. Years later, I would take that necklace out of a box of mementos and recall that vision of unclothed beauty, that vision that I never experienced other than in a tale told under the canopy of tall aspens on a hot Southern California day.

How to Break and Ankle, Part 8

Bim and his wife, Jeanine, had three little boys, the oldest of which was 9. Perhaps it was for their sake, because my presence would be an influence on them, that Bim was determined to make a man out of me.

My hair wasn't all that long at the time, but it was long enough to make my aunt and uncle worry that I might be one of those kind, you know, "light in the loafers," as he would say, a Nancy-boy. So the first thing they did was to arrange a blind date.

"I already have a girlfriend," I pleaded, but they ignored this as imaginary nonsense and summoned one Debbie, a neighbor girl who stood about six feet-two in flat shoes, and add another four or five inches for the teased hairdo. I kept this photo of us, Debbie and me in the backyard of Bim's house with my cousins and their dog. Jeanine had sent it to me and had written some quotations on the back. Apparently, I had said, "Boy, are you tall!" And apparently, Debbie had said, "Don't you have any other shoes?"

I can't recall where we went that night or what we did, but I do remember the crick in my neck I got from looking up all evening.

Bim's next manly endeavor was to take me to San Diego Stadium to watch the Chargers play and exhibition football game. Our seats were in the top row of the highest section, the steps to which were so steep that it was nearly impossible to carry beers up to them without spilling them. We carried many beers. We cheered with such enthusiasm that the few other people sitting below us in our section found other seats where they could remain dry. The top section of seats was so steep that when after my fifth beer I lost my balance and tumbled forward, I landed five rows away.

If you think that here is where I finally broke my ankle, you are wrong. I landed as relaxed as a laundry bag filled with lingerie, and got up laughing like a jackass.

No, I would get my punishment, but it would come later.

How to Break an Ankle, Part 7

Back in 1969, the airlines offered student discounts, and you could fly standby for half price. I used to fly to New York from Pittsburgh for $12, and that included a meal and a complimentary cocktail. So, flying from Chicago to California, rather than hitchhiking, was a no-brainer. I probably paid no more than $40 for the flight to Los Angeles and the connection to San Diego.

I called Bim from the airport in Los Angeles and told him when I would be arriving. Bim was my father's half-brother, just eight years my senior. As a child, visiting relatives in California with my family, I had idolized Bim, the rollicking teenager with a stack of comic books in his closet as high as my head.

Back then, the entire clan would come out to the airport in San Diego to greet us – all my father's siblings and cousins and all of their children – cheering us as we emerged from the baggage area as if we were movie stars. Coming in for a landing, I wondered if I would get the traditional welcome, even on such short notice. But only Bim was waiting for me. I saw him before he saw me, touching up his neatly coiffed hair with a pocket comb, standing in the bright sunlight in a white dress shirt and black slacks, looking so adult.

And then he saw me, sauntering toward him in an old work shirt and bell-bottoms I had altered myself by slitting the legs and sewing in triangles of bandanna cloth; a knapsack flung over my shoulder, the long hair and muttonchops, the aviator sunglasses. Then he recognized me, although his face was screwed into a question mark. He said my name, but it was a question. We shook hands, and he tentatively touched my shoulder. He could not mask his disappointment.
"Jeez! Look at you," he said. "You got so tall, and… I just didn't expect… I mean, what's with the costume?"

He had expected me to appear clean-shaven and clean-cut, dressed appropriately for travel, a younger version of my father, the brother he idolized. I was a shock, from which he would recover, but he would spend the next week or so trying hard to make me "normal."

How to Break an Ankle, Part 6

I trotted after the white Chrysler that had stopped on the ramp. I could see three men in the car. The back door swung open. I took a quick look. It looked like an episode of "Ozzie and Harriet."

OK, for all of you not old enough to get that, I'm not talking about zoned-out rock and reality star Ozzie Osborne, but rather Ozzie Nelson. That old TV show featured the real-life Nelson family in make-believe situation comedy. The two boys, Ricky and David, were the handsome, athletic, respectful, white-bread ideal sons with no nonsense about them. David's fraternity brothers were always dropping by the house for large helpings of milk and cookies. It was a show about typical America that exists only in the wishful thinking of chuckleheads.

Well anyway, David's fraternity brothers were offering me a ride, which I took. The guy sitting next to me in the back seat was wearing a short-sleeve madras shirt, white jeans with neatly ironed creases, and Docksiders. They all looked as if they'd just come from a barber shop. Where was I going? Why? Where was I from? What did my father do for a living? Did I enjoy sailing? They peppered me with questions, and all three, even the driver, felt compelled to look at me and make eye contact when they spoke. It made me nervous.

"Do you smoke pot?" the one in the backseat, the youngest, asked me. He seemed fascinated with my clothes and long hair and sideburns. I realized that they had picked me up out of curiosity. They had seen hippies before, but they'd never really talked to one. "Sometimes, but I don't make a habit of it," I answered. They all looked very disappointed.

By afternoon we were rolling across industrial Indiana. The questions kept coming: "How long do you think it will take you to get to California?" "Where will you sleep along the way?" "Aren't you afraid of being stranded in the desert?" I hadn't thought about these things, and although I tried to be nonchalant, the questions rang in my head like alarms. I unfolded my map and studied it. Hmmm. I thought Iowa was a small state, but on the map it looked enormous, vacant, frightening.

David's fraternity brothers were headed for their homes somewhere north of Chicago. Earlier, I had told them they could drop me off just beyond Gary, Ind. I thought about the 1,750 miles of hot pavement ahead of me and considered the bottoms of my moccasin slippers, purchased just a week earlier but already sprouting holes.
"Do you guys pass O'Hare Airport on your way home?" I asked them. "How about just letting me off there."

How to Break an Ankle, Part 5

The drivers of cars and trucks coming through the Ohio Turnpike entrance stopped and grabbed their tickets, then headed up the westbound ramp, staring straight ahead, ignoring me as I sat on a guardrail holding my "WEST" sign. Patience, I kept reminding myself.

Another group of hitchhikers had appeared beside the eastbound ramp – two girls and a boy, maybe my age or a little younger. Every time a likely looking ride passed them, the girls would jump up and down and wave their signs, like cheerleaders at a fundraiser car wash. One of the signs read "N.Y." and the other said "Woodstock" and was adorned with a guitar and flower crudely drawn with crayon.
I watched them wear themselves out for about half an hour, and then one of the girls crossed the traffic and headed in my direction. She was wearing hip-hugger bellbottoms and a fringed leather vest with nothing on underneath it.
"Hey, man, like where are you going?" she asked me.
I held up my sign and told her California.
"Wow! That's like really far away. What's happening there?"
I told her I didn't know of anything happening there, I just wanted to go there.
"Far out! We're going to the Woodstock Musical Festival. Did you hear about it? Like everyone is going to be there."
I'd heard something about it, but wasn't interested. I had grown up around New York and had gone to boarding school upstate, and I had no desire to be back there at the moment.
"Hey, man, why don't you come with us? It would be groovy."
No thanks, I told her. Wherever she was going, this Woodstock thing, couldn't be as thrilling as California. Of course, I didn't mention that I wasn't going to San Francisco to drop acid and demonstrate against the war and have my fill of free love, but rather going to San Diego to stay with my grandmother, aunts and uncles and share the bedrooms of my juvenile cousins.

"Well, peace, man," she said, flashing me the hand sign before heading back across the ramps. Even before she reached her friends, a VW microbus loaded with luggage on top had stopped to offer them a ride. Pulling away in a sputtering cloud of exhaust, the girl flashed me another peace sign out the window, and I felt a pang of regret.

How to Break and Ankle, Part 4

Monroe was not the only Perrysburg boy to attend W&J College. Regis was also in our class, and through the two of them and visits to their homes on weekends and vacations, I made other friends in the town I thought of as ideal and dreamlike.

It seemed that most times we approached Perrysburg through thunderstorms on the Ohio Turnpike, but in the distance we could see the town gleaming like a diamond, rays of sunlight from a break in the clouds reflecting off wet roofs and church spires. The weather was always perfect in Perrysburg, its people always pleasant, and if there were any problems there, they were packed away in boxes and stacked in cedar closets.

My recollection of those days I spent there in August is foggy after nearly 40 years, but I do remember that I did not see Regis, because he had already left for basic training in the Air Force. And I recall the guilt I felt for my betrayal of him.

In the beginning of our sophomore year at college, Regis and I became close friends and confided in each other about our fear of the future. We felt trapped in college, needing to be there for the draft deferment only. If we left college, we'd be drafted, and there looked to be no end to the Vietnam War, so once we graduated, we'd be sure to be plucked. The U.S. was drafting more than 300,000 young men a year at the time, and although only a small percentage of them would end up in combat, you couldn't tell us that at the time. In our troubled minds, being in the military was equal to death in a rice paddy.
We were angry at the government for the theft of our freedom, torn by the conflict between our own morality and sense of duty to country, and ashamed of our cowardice. So, we made a plan to escape, to emigrate to Australia. At the end of the semester, we withdrew from W&J. I called home and told them that I had quit college, but not about Australia. The next day, my father flew up from Florida, and he, along with the dean of students, managed to talk some sense into me, and I re-enrolled.

Regis' father did not come. "I knew you wouldn't go through with it," he told me in disgust as he left for home. Rather than be drafted into the Army, he enlisted in the Air Force. Monroe would do the same.

Regis' family lived on Front Street, and I stopped by to see them. They tried to be pleasant and welcoming, but there was a noticeable chill in the conversation, and awkward avoidance of Regis' name. He was gone, and they could not put aside the fact that I was a cause of that.

When I left their house it started to rain, and it rained all night. I decided it was time to move on.

How to Break an Ankle, Part 3

(Fred, left, and Monroe in my dorm room, 1968)

The two-lane road to Perrysburg was 14 miles long, and because no one would stop to give me a ride, I had to walk all the way, in my slippers. Dusk and I reached Second Street at the same time, and I was hot, tired, footsore and discouraged.
A quiet had settled on the town; the birds had quit singing, and only the faint humming or air conditioners and the occasional creaking and slamming of a screen door could be heard.

Earlier, walking backward with my thumb stuck out, I had daydreamed of walking into town quite differently: My friends would come running out of their houses, yelling "He's here! By God, he made it!" Their sisters would throw their arms around my neck and peck me with kisses, and we would all march arm in arm to some beer bash held in my honor.

The blue light of television sets flickered and smells of finished suppers emanated from the old houses shaded by sycamores as I reached my friend Monroe's house and knocked on the door.

Monroe and I lived on the same floor of our dormitory our freshman year at W&J. He, his roommate Fred and I became close friends, but both of them left college after that first year, Fred flunking out and Monroe on his own accord. Monroe had the look of British entitlement about him – powder-blue eyes, ruddy cheeks, prominent teeth. Put him in a pair of jodhpurs and riding boots and you'd swear he was one of Queen Elizabeth's sons. He was funny, and kind, and although it never dawned on us at the time, gay. "Gay" was not a term in use at that time. If anyone had ever broached the subject – and no one did – we would have said, "Are you kidding? Monroe's not a homo! He's just… sensitive." We were in denial, despite all the obvious clues. Fred let Monroe do all the decorating in their room, which had posters of Dionne Warwick and Barbra Streisand on the walls, a beaded curtain in the doorway and Judy Garland on the stereo.

I knocked again at the door, but the house was dark and silent.
With a heavy sigh, I lifted my pack and padded down the walk toward town, feeling invisible, in search of a pay phone and, I hoped, an offer of a bed for the night from one of my other Perrysburg friends.

How to Break an Ankle, Part 2

At 20, I hadn't been alive long enough to acquire much wisdom, which you could see by looking at my feet. I stood at the entrance ramp to the Turnpike in Beaver County wearing a pair of bedroom slippers. They were soft-soled moccasins that I bought at K-mart for $2.99. They were a lot cheaper than real shoes, but they didn't hold up too well on pavement. I'd just buy another pair every time the soles wore through to my bare feet. They looked cool, I thought.

I wouldn't even consider picking up a hitchhiker today, but hitching rides was a common and relatively safe form of transportation for young people in the 1960s. A tractor hauling a flat-bed trailer loaded with girders slowed and stopped and I had to climb like a monkey to get up into the cab. As safe as hitchhiking seemed, you still had to wonder about the people who picked you up. It was always a good idea to take a good look inside the vehicle before you sat down and slammed the door. The truck looked OK: an aqua-colored transistor radio hanging from the roof of the cab, a box of Tiparillos and a statue of the Virgin Mary on the dashboard. The driver, a fortyish, paunchy, jovial man in a wifebeater T-shirt, asked me where I was headed.
"California, eventually, but Perrysburg, Ohio, to start," I told him. I planned to mooch off friends first. He said he was headed for Michigan but could drop me off at an exit about 14 miles from my destination. No problem, I thought.

He told me he liked to offer rides, that talking helped keep him awake on the long hauls. He did most of the talking, telling jokes and laughing in that way that some people do – silently, squinting, lips pursed, convulsing. He told me that I couldn't imagine what he witnessed from his seat high above the other cars. He had seen both men and women driving on the turnpike stark naked. He described the sexual acts he had witnessed in passing cars.
We drove west through the hottest and brightest part of that August day with the windows open, bouncing as if we were riding in a stage coach. Approaching Toledo, he pulled off the road at a place near where I'd be able to get a ride toward Perrysburg. We shook hands, he wished me luck getting to California, I thanked him, opened the door and, forgetting I was about eight feet off the ground, tumbled to the gravel.

But I did not break my ankle then. That would come later.

How to Break and Ankle, Part 1

Bones, even those of a healthy 20-year-old, will break when stressed in just the right way. This usually happens when you least expect it, so I learned in the summer of 1969. Let me take you back there.

Think back to when you listened to Neil Diamond singing "Sweet Caroline," and Creedence Clearwater Revival doing "Bad Moon Rising." Think about the first time you might have heard "Hot Fun in the Summertime" on the radio. That was the summer of 1969.

My academic performance during my sophomore year at W&J College had been miserable, and so I was forced to attend the summer session to soak up some Shakespeare and sociology. Classes were over at the end of July, and I had the whole month of August to kill before the fall semester began. I had no desire to go home; my parents had moved during the school year to Florida, which was hot and friendless and no home to me.

Spending August at the apartment on North Avenue I shared with friends was an option, but not a good one. We had fun that summer – skinny-dipping at the No. 4 dam south of town, and the party we hosted at our apartment for the moon walk on July 20 – but there were problems. My friend Richard, from my hometown, had enrolled for summer classes and moved in with me. It was his mother's idea. After breaking up with his girlfriend, he had suffered a mental breakdown. She thought summer school would be a good distraction, and that I could keep a close watch on him. I agreed, not knowing just how far over the edge Richard had gone.

You could see Richard coming from blocks away; he was the one wearing the blaze-orange flight suit and the green rubber boots. When you didn't see him, you'd hear him, wailing away on his electric guitar from his nest on the third floor of our building, littered with empty gin bottles. What he played was mainly distortion and feedback, which sounded like torture and brought neighbors to our door begging us to make him turn down the volume.

We fought about this, and one time he even packed his things in his Mercury Cougar and left town, much to my relief. But a few hours later, he returned, promising to behave better. He settled into his nest and, eventually, his old habits and showed no intention of leaving until September.

And so I had to go. I thought I would make it an adventure, so one morning I packed a knapsack, wrote the word WEST on a piece of shirt cardboard with a Magic Marker and left Washington, intending to hitchhike to California.