…Around The World in 80 Days 1980
If you’ve been following along in the story thus far, you know my sister, Fame, and I had finally run the gauntlet, dodging snowstorm after snowstorm to reach California in the middle of Winter…
Last week’s installment left off after we escaped our final obstacle—the eerie midnight moonscape that was the Mojave Desert—and had descended to the coastal Cali lowlands in the early morning hours of that long-ago February 1st.
There we were, in the Sunshine State at last, having chugged across the nation in the reluctant (and now damaged) bright yellow Plymouth Arrow belonging to another of our sisters, Seven-of-Nine, an Air Force enlistee stationed in Monterey—our day’s destination.
Little did we suspect that first day in California nearly became our last, as well.
Our last day on Earth, that is.
My journal entry for that day is full of excitement, but then again, it was penned at 3:45 in the afternoon, a full ten hours before we would find ourselves embroiled in a scuffle in the section of L.A. known as Watts.
But let’s start at the beginning.
Fame and I awoke early in whatever motel we’d schlepped into the night before, bleary-eyed but elated. We were awake by six, showered, toked up on copious amounts of coffee, and ready to hit the road by 7:30.
By nine it was already pushing sixty degrees, a gorgeous blue sky arching over us we headed up Route 1, the coastal highway.
I later recounted the trip as “unparalleled—astounding!” in my entry, describing how the highway wound in and around cliffs and mountains, offering unfettered views of the Pacific from hundreds of feet up, marveling that there were no guardrails.
At several points we stopped to take pictures and nosh on fluff-a-nutter sandwiches, our standard po-grrl travelling fare, and finish off the black-and-white film in the borrowed 35mm. I handed off the roll to Fame, who was writing an article about our trip for the newspaper back home (though they never did publish it in the end), glad to be able to load a roll of color film in its place.
The sights we were taking in definitely deserved color.
We arrived in Monterey at eleven, proud we’d only had to stop twice to ask directions.
In those days the base was open, its streets used by the public, and we drove directly to Seven’s barracks, pulling in right below her window, several stories up. She was looking out that window, happy to see her car at last but not so glad to see the giant dent in the driver’s side door.
Seven had gotten the day off by donating blood before we arrived, a regular Friday offering at the Language Institute where she was learning Russian: give blood, get the day off school. What a deal. Otherwise, she’d have been in classes all day and we’d have missed seeing some of the sights.
But not only that, we needed to get her car registered, so the first order of business was to drive to Fort Ord. We never could find the place she was supposed to do that, though, so being the truants we are we went to the beach in the bay instead.
(When the satellites all go dark during WWIII, you young’uns are gonna learn the hard way what life was like before GPA—or indeed, cellular communication of any kind!)
My journal entry that day talks of having a good time climbing over rocks, taking pictures, and watching a lone surfer braving the cold waters while several sea lions cavorted nearby, all beneath the shadow of the Goodyear Blimp floating overhead.
After the beach we drove through “ritzy” Carmel, escorted it would seem by a fellow enlistee of Seven’s named Tony. I guess he wanted to show us the sights, but what he ended up showing us were the papers he’d just been issued.
He was being booted out of the service on a Section Eight.
We had a knack for offering rides to questionable characters.
When we went back to the barracks, a surprise was waiting for me—and it surprised Seven as well: a letter in her mailbox. Only it wasn’t addressed to her. It was addressed to me!
A high school friend I’d attended Prom with had joined the military after high school, and we’d continued as correspondents for years (he would later wind up at Monterey too, to learn Chinese and be stationed abroad in Okinawa).
It was fun to see the annoyed look on Seven’s face when the rarified treasure of an actual letter in her mailbox was not for her but for me—on the single day I would ever step foot in Monterey.
Timing, they say, is everything.
By the time I was writing all this down in my journal it was nearing four, go-time for the drive to L.A.
We were hanging out in the barracks, waiting for the others to arrive and listening to Jim Croce music while Fame napped. Seven, who seemed to have been born with a book in her fist, was reading, of course, and what else but a Harlequin Romance? She was as addicted to them as to the cigarettes she’d started smoking again after having quit cold-turkey a year before.
I guess joining the military does that to you.
Seven’s friend, a girl of eighteen named Nancy (whom I took to be more like twenty-two) was in the room as well. Of her I wrote, “She’s got a mouth like a sewer but seems like a nice person.”
From the vantage point of these distant years, I don’t actually recall piling in the cars and going south in a convoy, but apparently we did leave Monterey as a party of nine people in three cars. One couple, a classmate of Seven’s named Garrett and her civilian husband, were among them.
Gary, as she was called, and her mate were carless, but knew folks in L.A. they wanted to visit over the weekend, so they offered free lodging if we took them along.
Well, that certainly turned out to be a mistake.
If Gary’s husband had been in the military like her, I’d have wagered a week’s pay he would’ve quickly gone the way of Section-Eight Tony, cause I thought he was nuts. The coming night would provide the evidence.
Anyway, whoever else was in that convoy eventually peeled off to their various destinations, leaving the five of us—three fairly witless white girls and a trash-talking young black couple—to complete the rest of the seven-hour drive to L.A. all crammed together in that little hunchback—er—I mean hatchback.
At some point Gary’s husband took over the driving, insisting it’d be easier since he knew where he was going. He also insisted he knew how to drive a stick shift.
He didn’t.
It was one o’clock in the morning by the time we reached L.A., Gary’s hubby ripping the crap out of Seven’s transmission.
The place looked more run-down than I’d expected: boarded up windows; overgrown by weeds; trash strewn everywhere; people squatting in doorways, drinking out of bottles tucked inside paper bags; others stumbling down sidewalks, looking dazed.
What fresh hell had this man driven us into? Were we actually even in L.A.?
I was in the passenger seat, the other three women stuffed in the back seat with my guitar case across their laps and my travel trunk and backpack in what meager trunk space the Arrow boasted. I can’t for the life of me remember how we squeezed in Fame’s luggage, let along Seven’s overnight bag and whatever luggage Gary and her nutjob hubby had packed.
But even if we looked a sight, that poor little Plymouth Arrow outclassed every other vehicle for miles around. For one thing, it had all four wheels and wasn’t sitting on cinderblocks. For another, it wasn’t a burned-out shell.
We stopped at a red light and someone tapped on the window, saying something I couldn’t hear, so I started to open the window. Gary yelled at me not to, said never open a window to no one—not there, leastwise—and we drove on.
At last we got to the accommodations we’d been promised, dead tired and just wanting to sleep despite the realization our beds were merely spots on the living room floor. What I recall is a fairly small house, sparsely furnished with pieces even a third-rate second-hand store would scoff at.
We couldn’t have slept but an hour when Seven was shaking me awake.
“Get up. We’re getting outa here,” she said in that steady, no-nonsense tone of hers I knew meant business. Fame, beside me, was already up and gathering her things, the urgency to her every motion broadcasting something had gone badly amiss. Me? I’d been so deep in slumber the shouting hadn’t stirred me, and it was right overhead, accompanied by feet stepping and stumbling over us.
What the—?
Cursing, shouting, and shoving had erupted around us, filling the small room with angry voices. Men’s voices. Voices of people who hadn’t been there when we’d gone to sleep. Drunk voices. Stoned voices.
In my stupor I couldn’t even recall where I was at first, and to this day I remember those confusing moments as if they took place in flashes—as if illuminated by a strobe light.
A lamp crashed to the floor. The yelling escalated. Weapons glinted in the dim light. Were they guns or knives? Maybe some of each.
Beneath the ruckus three white chicks scurried, arms hugging their gathered possessions like startled refugees forced to move on without notice. We crouch-ran through the front door, and the brawl spilled out behind us: a posse of armed wastrels embroiled in a deadly confrontation that was just as apt to take out one of us as any of them if we didn’t skedaddle, and fast.
We crawled into the Arrow, Gary at the wheel; Seven had given her no option: “You got us into this; you’re driving us out. Now!”
Gary said her mother lived in the Hollywood area and she’d take us there, leaving me wondering why we hadn’t gone there in the first place.
Likely because Nutjob couldn’t have gotten his fix at his mother-in-law’s place.
I can’t recall anymore how far a drive it was, but soon palm trees seemed to be everywhere. We drove down a long lane leading to a home standing alone as if forgotten in the forward march of time. We didn’t seem to be in a city at all.
To our relief, Gary’s mom seemed really nice and her house a well-kept lower-middle-class home familiar to our own upbringing. I don’t recall where we slept, but a few hours later she was up and making us a wonderful breakfast—I had to get to my ship by noon.
The shenanigans of the night before already felt as though they’d been part of some surrealist’s dream. Outside on the stoop after breakfast Fame chatted amiably with a chain-smoking neighbor man curious about who we were and why we were there. His response to her every revelation was to thoughtfully intone, “That’s heavy, man.”
But what was truly heavy was our relief.
We were relieved to have made it through that heated drug-and-alcohol-fueled melee, relieved to be at the tail end of one adventure and at the dawn of another, relieved Seven’s poor, abused Plymouth Arrow was still running.
Postscript: That little car? It served us for many more years.
Seven had the Arrow’s alternator replaced and its needed body work done once she got back at Monterey, and it ran fine.
She later sold it—to Fame—once her military career sent her overseas to spy on the Russians. Some years after that, Fame gave the Arrow to me (the first of three yellow vehicles I’ve owned) for the price of flying to Columbia, Missouri, where she then lived, to fetch it.
I too had that car for a number of years, and it was hard to let it go.
It had taken us, the youngest three of nine siblings—we, the tail end of the tornado, so to speak—on a lot of adventures, and even on a few desperate errands, like the night eleven years later when my infant son’s heart stopped beating.
But those are stories for another time.
That Arrow was my first car, the one I owned when I attended the police academy, when I met my husband, when I had my first few children. As a firefighter I drove to many a fire call in it, and it got me back and forth to my job when I became a cop—finally walking into weaponized brawls to break them up instead of skirting away from them in terror.
That little Arrow was the first of my cars to carry my signature vanity PA license plate: CHEKOV (okay, I’m a Trekkie, y’all).
Eventually tired of wrestling two car seats and two writhing kids in and out of a hatchback, we traded the Arrow in but were immediately sorry. The clunker Buick station wagon we were swindled into trading it for, unbeknownst to us, had been in a crash, had a cracked engine block, and wasn’t long for this world.
I had a harrowing misadventure in that Buick, too—also a story for another time—also in the middle of Winter. But that time it was me alone with a wailing tot and a screaming infant in the wilds of Pennsylvania during a snowstorm, traveling in a car that couldn’t top 10 mph, and if stopped wasn’t going to ever start again. Remind me to tell you all about it sometime.
It was one of many misadventures in those middle years—the ones that bridged my mindset as an independent, if pigheaded, adventurer to that of sensible friger mom. What’s a friger mom? I just made that up; it’s a hybrid of free-range and tiger parenting because I was a little of both.
Or maybe it’s just being bi-polar.
Meanwhile, how about you? Do you have a car you remember fondly? Why? I’d love to hear a few car adventures—happy or harrowing—from some of you. Share in comments, below!
And please join me next week for part four of our ongoing saga when I finally set sail for the western horizon, destination: Hawaii.
Thank you for sharing a little of your Monday morning with me (or any other time you happen to be reading this). I have news!
My inaugural book signing event is set! I’ll be appearing at the Winchester Book Gallery in Winchester, VA from 2-4 on April 27th—National Independent Bookstore Day! How cool is that?
Because I know few of you may be able to join me and my Wild Ink / Conquest Publishing cohort, Magdalene Dietschka, in person, I’ve created an online FB mirror event where we can talk all things Shay the Brave and you can win cool Shay #giveaways right along with folks who can show up in person.
So stop over and click “going” because that will earn you your first ticket into the drawings for this event. See you there!
And don’t forget the other two #giveaways already underway. You can review them and see just how easy it is to enter either of them at this previous issue of Riley Kilmore’s Monday Morning Literary Bric-a-Brac.
You could write a blog about your yellow cars titled, “What in Yellow Car-nation Did I Get Myself Into?!”