Crash and Burn
Ultimately, I left Washington DC saying no farewells, and slipped back into my hometown with my tail between my legs to temporarily stay with my parents, maintaining a low profile, afraid to show myself in public lest I draw attention to my spectacular failures.
My next stop was Cambridge, just outside Boston, where I wound up sharing an apartment just off Harvard Square with a folksinger who made me look like a barrel of laughs. "I wish I wasn't a Pisces (I can't remember the sign here)," he would lament as if his particular sun sign were a very real handicap. Maybe it was. The poor guy should have been famous, but recognition - it turned out - was not in his stars.
"Socrates, where have you gone?" he cried out in one of his songs. For some reason it struck me as profound. Off he would go with his trusty dog Gypsy to sing on Harvard Square, and when he returned he invariably had another musician with him or some new admirer who had become spellbound by his music. He was that good. I'm sure his depressions or his drug habits got to him in the end. Otherwise the world would have heard of him by now. His failing was our loss.
My other apartment mate paid the rent courtesy of a certain illegal plant. One day, I went to the local Goodwill shop and bought a "new" coat, and kindly donated the one I was wearing. The next day, this apartment mate returned, opening his coat to reveal yet another one beneath. "A great day at Goodwill!" he announced, beaming with delight. He had stolen my old coat.
One day, after living in Cambridge for about a year, I woke up. I literally woke up. It was the fall of '74 and I was driving a cab at nights. I was 24 going on 25. I was lying in bed in a semi-haze when I got an idea. Why don't I buy a motorcycle? A very ill-timed proposition with winter coming on, of course, but then I thought some more. The hell with living here where it's cold, I decided. Why don't I move to California instead? followed almost instantly by this revelation: Why don't I buy a motorcycle and ride it - to California?
That fortuitous joining of two thoughts during a fleeting idle instant in bed is known to me to this
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