Bill didn’t take the bus into work. He wasn’t fit to drive, but he wasn’t fit to take the bus either. He was slightly high from drinking and pissed off from nothing other than wrong-think. Altogether this was not a good combination.
As he drove, he considered that he and his wife had had a good night and morning together. The shower together and their sleep were close and intimate. This was a good thing. She had brought him coffee in bed, who could ask for more?
But then…
More wrong-thing as he drove.
Where was he going? Why was he going there? What did he do wrong? What did he do to deserve what he got?
These were the basic questions that hit him as he made his way to the hotel.
Then there was the next set of questions. What was waiting there for him and why? How did this happen and how did he allow it to happen? How the hell did he get to where he was at?
No-good place four.
They cut his hippie hair, the hair that went down his back, in about four straight moves with the trimmer. Zip. Zip. Zip. Zip. All the moves front to back, in a row, just like mowing the lawn. His beautiful hair, hair he had fought his father so hard to be able to grow, hair that took years to get as long as it was, was gone in less than two minutes actual time. Zip, zip, zip, zip. Hair that he loved ended up in a big puddle on the floor of the workhouse barber shop.
Goddamn.
Then to make it worse, he remembered, they made him sweep it up himself.
None of the other inmates had to sweep up their hair. The others, they just got their cuts and went on about their business. But the guards who didn’t like Bill because he was A&B on a police officer stood by and made the barber make Bill get up out of the chair and clean up his own hair.
“How you like that, hippie boy?”
Except he wasn’t a hippie boy, not really. He wasn’t an anything in that regard. Yeah, he smoked pot. Yeah, he did speed. Yeah he was liberal and free-thinking and he took hallucinogens every now and then, at least he had done so until his wife-to-be had a bad trip and showed him they shouldn’t do that stuff.
So what? That was all part of being young and alive at the time he was young and alive. He didn’t belong to any organizations or political organizations. He didn’t proselytize. He wasn’t against anything per se. He didn’t agree with the war. He thought all people should be treated the same way and have the same rights and opportunities. He thought this was the way it should be in the world and that anyone who didn’t think this way, well, he didn’t want to be around them.
Nope, he thought. He wasn’t anything but a writer. That he was. That he did. He was a writer.
He was with his best friend Bobbie when they were fifteen over at Bobbie’s house. They were smoking pot and listening to music. Bobbie had speakers that went just about floor to ceiling. It was mid-winter, he remembered that because he remembered the cold walk home during which he kept repeating the same phrase over and over so he wouldn’t forget it.
“I have to go home,” he said to Bobbie.
“What? Why?”
“I have to go write something.”
The phrase had just popped into his head and now his mind demanded he go home immediately and write.
Nope he wasn’t anything but a writer. He wrote poetry and would later move into writing fiction. Yup, he was a fiction writer although he didn’t quite know it at the time.
