King Without a Crown Chapter 2

Chapter Two  King Without a Crown

 After meeting King, I went home.  The day was nearly over.   Behind the house, the low sun flaunted a swathe of apricot pink across the sky, as I sat in the driveway and looked at our house.  It was our fifth house, the house we gave the funny name, Caesar’s Palace.  I realized I did not want to go in. 

We called it Caesar’s Palace because when we first entered into the grand foyer it was very bright for a British home.  It had a cool cream marble floor with bright white walls and a large urn placed under a hanging golden chandelier.  It was as if we had left England and suddenly were transported to a Greek island by the light.  Adding to our illusion, the owners of the home had mirrored pictures of Grecian women hanging in the living room among two white sofas pushed against opposing walls and bookended by white lacquer end tables on each end.   We were house hunting the first week we had arrived and we had viewed several homes.  In order to remember this house Walt said, “You know the one that looks like Caesar’s Palace, the one with the pillars in front.”  It became the house we lived in for nearly three years.

I could see the flicker of the television through the open living room window.  I didn’t want to return to my reality, whether or not as King had said, I had created it.  As I walked through the front door, Walt called to me with a hint of irritation in his voice, “Where have you been all day?”

I didn’t answer his question.  I couldn’t even imagine where to begin.  I stood in the doorway to the living room and smiled.  He was sitting on the couch with Delia sleeping across his lap with one of her little legs hanging over the arm of the couch.  The boys were lying on blankets in front of the television watching a Star Wars movie.  I turned and headed straight up the stairs to my bedroom and looked for a journal.  When I found one I began scribbling words on a page.  The words themselves weren’t much, I wasn’t composing prose or channeling the next Shakespearian sonnet, but it did not matter; I was free and I was writing.  First I tried King’s suggestion; I made long lists of everything that I was grateful for in my life.  I was grateful for my health and the health of Walt and the kids.  I wrote about the beauty of England, the flowers, the history, the castles and how I was so grateful for all of my friends in England  and back in the States.  And then from my hand flowed an even longer list of ancient festering resentments, as well as daily frustrations.  Before I knew it, I was slipping back into the negative thoughts.  I want a partner who communicates honestly, who defends me, who encourages me, who treats me like an equal, who doesn’t always try to control me, who can make a bloody cup of tea.    But I justified it didn’t matter.  The idea that I had a pen in my hand and that my thoughts flowed freely and onto the page were enough for me.  I was a starving prisoner of war and finally someone had come along and rescued me and had given me a crust of bread.

I had been procrastinating since June of 1999.  It started just after I completed my MFA and then moved from Spokane, Washington to Macon, Georgia.  Like an addict who won’t quit, I had become a master at justifying my reasons for not continuing writing my book about my daughter Claire.  The first year my procrastination started with debilitating thoughts of…I have a new baby Donovan to take care of now.   I will get to it when he is older.  I am still grieving and it’s hard to go there.  I had every angel for procrastinating covered.  But the truth is…I was afraid of failing.  Afraid that no one would read my book or no one would care about what I had to say.   I rationalized my lack of effort.  I was lying to myself about my dreams and goals. Eventually ten years had slipped away and still no real progress with my writing.  Failure was now real, not just a fear.  By then, I had three more children and a military husband who was never home.  Every time I would muster up a sliver of motivation I wrote a few pages.  After ten years, six chapters were written, of which five were written in my MFA program and I had no real prospects for publishing.  With no hope in sight, I wondered what had happened to me.  As an MFA student my motivation to learn and write were insatiable.   I considered it my job at the time to do well.  I never missed a class (except when I delivered Donovan) or a writing assignment and I was diligent when editing my classmates essays in the workshop classes.  Before that, as a Television news reporter, there was no time to think, just enough time to write the story and put a video package together before the deadline.  It’s amazing how fast the mind can work when the pressure of being sacked looms large like an evil spirit hovering over you with a gun to your head.   Anyone who works with extreme daily deadlines knows that fear.  It becomes the addiction.  As the adrenaline pumps through your veins, you push the photographer to get the shot, you run into the edit booth and push the editor through the footage and yell to him to stop when you see what you want.  You never give up and push right up until the very last second.   You have no idea each day if you will make your time slot.  It’s like when I lived on Long Island, every morning catching the train into the city was an art.  I had my drive to the station down to the last second, that is, of course, if I timed the street lights correctly.  I moved confidently watching the clock on the dash board of my beat up Ford Escort. I parked in the station parking lot every morning and walked calmly to the station platform.  Just as I stepped up to the top step, the train would come whooshing by and I would climb on, having only waited a mere few seconds for the doors to open.

So there I was a mother of three, former TV news reporter with an MFA to my credit, living in Rickmansworth, England and I couldn’t write a word worth reading.    Once we arrived in England for Walt’s three-year assignment, I became the social butterfly.  If there was a celebration to have I was hosting it.  I even became the President of a women’s club.  I justified my lack of writing by saying to myself and anyone who asked, “I am so busy with the kids,” or “I am enjoying my three-year vacation in England.”  But the truth of the matter was simply, I was lost and I needed to find my way back to the road I had gotten off of so many years before.  My story is not anything extraordinary.  It is not news to any reader that a stay-at-home mom loses herself in her family and her goals get pushed aside.  I am just one of millions of women who lose herself in others and somehow found inspiration in the most unlikely place.

The next day, after I dropped off the kids at school, I met my friend Caroline for a coffee at Nero’s.  She became my go to girl, my best friend, a free-spirited Brit who had rescued me during my early days in England by telling me not to feel alone, I was to consider her my British sister.   We were barely seated on our favorite plush brown couch in the back corner of the café when I launched into every detail about my meeting King.

“I met the most interesting person yesterday.  He’s like a Guru or something. His name is King and he’s American but has lived all over the world for the last fourteen years.  We sat here yesterday for hours and he has really helped me take a better look at my life and my goals.”

“Really?  Where did you meet him?”

“At the library.  And then we came here for a coffee.  He read his Tarot cards to me and said some pretty interesting things about my life.”

She smiled and laughed at my impetuousness and said she wanted to meet him.  I loved going to Nero’s on Monday mornings for coffee with Caroline.  This was our mom headquarter office, where we would catch up after the weekend and talk about our week ahead"our kid’s activities, our ladies’ night out and the fun trips into London.  I often tagged along with Caroline as she sorted out one of the flats she owned and rented out.  In between sipping our hot lattes, and checking our text messages, we watched the rush of people coming and going.  The usual, business men in business suits juggling newspapers, brief cases, grabbing their coffees and pastries, before running to the train station around the corner and heading off to London.  There were secretaries in spike heels, and the ubiquitous gaggle of teenage girls in their burgundy Catholic school uniforms, wearing skirts that barely covered their asses, usually holding organic juices and ordering almond croissants.   And the sleep deprived moms negotiating their prams out of the way of people leaving the counter as their octopus babies squirm and cried and tried to climb out.  It was in between all the commotion of the street traffic pouring through the open windows, and the clamoring of coffee orders over the counter that Caroline and I came up with a plan.

“What if we got a group of us ladies together and had King do our readings? And I think he could use the money,” I said.

“I think the girls would love it.”  Caroline said as she picked up her cell phone that was buzzing on its back like a wounded bee.

Later that day, I grabbed King’s email address on the Tesco receipt in my purse and furtively emailed him.  I asked him if he wanted to meet some of my friends.  Unfortunately, he said he would probably never be back in Rickmansworth ever again.  He was initially only there to visit someone who lived on a house boat on the canal whom he had met at a Rainbow gathering.  But he said this guy was a “drainbow” which meant not a real hippie.  According to King, there are two kinds of hippies.  The real hippies who strive to live on love and light and the drainbows.  The “drainbow” is the kind of person who is a taker of energy and lives without giving.  He goes to rainbow gatherings smokes herb and leaves behind his trash.  King said this guy claims he is the direct descendent of King David and he has a plan of creating a floating Rainbow gathering that will travel around the world. 

I laughed when I read this email and responded with a quip, “Yeah, guess what?  It already exists and they call it Carnival Cruises.”    

 “You are very funny,” King responded.

Even if he was a complete charlatan, I was so intrigued by King.  I wanted to know how a person who lives completely outside of society can survive and appear to be content with his life.   There was also some nagging inner force pushing me to pursue this friendship, especially after I felt such suffering about some of the stories he had told me of his destructive childhood.  All I could think of was how does a young black man who comes from a no-hope, brutal childhood with a pimp as a father and a thief as a mother become so spiritual and loving? On a level I did not understand, I knew this man would lead me to the freedom I desperately needed from my own sadness and grief and somehow I would do the same for him. How could this possibly happen?  For all intents and purposes this man should be in jail right now, instead he lives on love and light and he has inspired me, a middle-aged spoiled housewife, to live my dreams.

“Are you writing all of this down,” I pursued. 

“No!” he said.  “You are the writer. You are the witness, you write.  I am too busy living in love and light.”  I was filled with emotion at that moment, a renewed energy, raison d'etre, a reason to write.  I knew then I had to write King’s story.

“Really, can I write your story?”

“Let me check my schedule.  Hum, OK, I am available.”

“LOL.  Now, you are the funny one.”

I sat at my computer and thought of our meeting at Nero’s and the hours we had spent talking.   He had so many stories.  King’s life was a kaleidoscope of many lives, a menagerie of places, people, experiences, deep sorrow, and survival.  I knew we understood each other.

“So how did you start traveling around the world?” I asked.

Well, I went to my first Rainbow gathering in Northern California in 1997 when I was sixteen.  I went up there from San Diego with my friend Robert’s brother Spaz.”

“Why didn’t Robert go? 

“He was very sick with cancer.”

“Oh, I am sorry.”

This is when I realized King was real.  He was only sixteen, but his life was like living in dog years, each year was worth at least seven years experience.  Grief is the greatest experience in life because it offers two options; either a person becomes a cynical atheist or a grateful believer.  I have learned that grief is also the greatest gift of all; because only through suffering can a person relate to the universe and grow closer to God.

King was a parentless, skinny, black American teenager living outside of San Diego in the rodeo town of Lakeside, California when he met Robert.  His mother Brenda had just gotten arrested again for shoplifting.  After Brenda’s arrest, her ex-con boyfriend William stayed on for three months and looked after them until Brenda had him kicked out of the house.  “A man is a man.  And Brenda never had a man treat her right, so she became suspicious of William and so she had him kicked out of the house from jail.  That’s how tough she was,” King said. 

King hadn’t seen his own father since he was thirteen, when he left him in a rundown hotel[s1]  in San Diego with one of his hookers.  He went out to get something, told King he would be right back, and he never returned.  As the oldest of his mother Brenda’s children King, known to everyone as Greg or “G”, took care of his brother David, and his sister Britney.  After William left, they lived adrift without parents to take care of them for awhile.  There was a friend of Brenda’s whom they called aunt.  Aunt Hope tried to take care of them.  She was a big broad-shouldered, light skinned black woman who checked up on them, stopping by the house daily to give them food.  After she was awarded custody of King and his siblings, she took the three of them in with her.  She already had four daughters of her own, was in the process of adopting a six-year old white girl, and had a tenuous marriage to an ex-marine, but she took on King and his brother and sister.  Brenda would say she did it for the state’s money, but King believed, “Aunty had hell on her hands and she was holding the bible in her belt so she dealt with it and took on another baby girl in the process. Hope was without ego,” King told me, without any hint of emotion in his words.  “God placed her in the line of it.  She was not the saint, don't get her twisted, but her heart was in the right place.”   

Aunt Hope’s over-crowded, hectic house in El Cajon was not far from Lakeside.   Luckily for King this move put him closer to Robert’s house and that was where he found his refuge.  Robert saved King from the home he dreaded going back to at night.  King had no privacy.  He slept on a mattress on the floor in the living room with his brother David in the tiny three-bedroom, one bathroom ranch-style home in a low-income housing neighborhood.  All the houses were the same; they were made of red brick with white metal awnings and black metal gates on top of wooden doors.  Some had chain linked fences that kept in barking dogs, while most had white sheets waving in surrender hanging on clothes lines between two metal poles.

Robert was one grade ahead of King but two years older.  He drank coca cola and ate a Snicker’s candy bar every day.  He was the white version of King, except he had a long skinny nose in contrast to King’s and he wore brown glasses.  They met every day after school by the back door at twenty minutes after four and walked across the school’s parking lot to wait for Robert’s mother to pick them up after school. 

“Smell that s**t?”King asked in disgust.

“Yeah, man it’s really bad today,” Robert replied, as they walked. 

The smell King referred to was the stench of cow manure.  On hot dry days when the wind picked up it carried the smells of the surrounding farms in the valley.

“Man, this place sucks.  We need some fresh air dude.  When school is out this summer we are headed to Pacific beach,” King said, as he skipped ahead of Robert to look him in the face.

“Yes, that’s cool.  I’m in bro,” Robert replied, his eyes still looking down as he walked.

“What’s the matter man?”

“Nothing, I’m cool bro.  It’s all good.”

“Robert, you are finished with that chemo s**t.  You are all good man.  It’s time to party now my friend.”

“Yeah.”

As they walked on, the smell of cow manure continued to waft through the air as they ignored the view before them unaware of how the prehistoric rock formations foreshadowed their lives.  El Cajon Mountain was in the distance with its three ancient faces"an Asian woman, an ogre, and the profile of a skull" all staring down at them, one for protection, one to remind them of the evil in the world and the other, death itself.  These faces carved into the mountain followed them loyally each day. They had met in agriculture class where Robert gave King his first pet, a prize-winning white Holland rabbit.  King marveled at how Robert, bald from his chemo, never complained about how he felt or how he looked.  He still walked around school as if nothing had changed in his life.   In a California town of cowboys and skinheads King and Robert had little chance of fitting in, but once Robert went bald he managed to gain respect from the skinhead crowd.  Although, this new found respect from the skinheads repulsed Robert. 

“Did you see that skinhead mother f****r nod at me like we were friends,” Robert said as they walked.

“Yeah, man their s**t is all fucked up,” King replied.

“If they only knew how much I f*****g hate them man,” Robert said.

“Yeah.”

Robert’s dark blue bedroom walls were nearly covered with all of his artwork.  He was a good artist.  His drawings consisted mostly of the action hero Spiderman.  For many afternoons King and Robert sat and listened to Hip Hop across from each other on twin beds.  Robert introduced King to the Hip-hop music of Tupac and Biggie.  If they weren’t listening to music they were outside in the back yard taking care of Robert’s prize-winning rabbits or shooting birds with Robert’s bee bee gun.

Summer came around and the boys ran away from home and headed for Pacific beach.  Once there they found other kids without parents just like them. They started a group of misfits called “No Bodies Smiling”; they were skateboard kids and kids who didn’t have a place to call home.   At night they partied with bon fires on the dark cold sand and either slept on the beach or a group of them would chip in and rent a hotel room for the night.  The ones with the most money got the bed, the rest of them found a place on the floor. Some nights they slept at friend’s houses until the parents would get tired of them or they would return home from their vacations and kick them all out.   

Robert thought he had beaten the stomach cancer that had ravaged his body and he was ready to live.  Robert called his parents from time to time to check in with them, and he would tell King his mother wanted him to come home.

“Man, she’s wants me to come home.”

“She know you with me.  She know I got your back.  We’re like peas and carrots.  We go together.”

They traveled on skate boards all over the beach near the Mission Beach Pier looking for ways to feed themselves.  King learned from his mother Brenda how to hustle.  He relied on his instincts to alert him when danger was near and knew how to avoid the thieves, the alcoholics and the homeless schizophrenics who lived their crazy lives in a constant argument with themselves.  Instead, they followed the party.  When the bars closed young people filled the streets before moving on to house parties.  King and Robert made friends and lived off of the kindness of hippie college kids who let them sleep on their couches and smoke their pot.  They learned how to panhandle the tourists for spare change and shared everything they had with each other.  Right before school started that year, King and Robert made it back to El Cajon only now King’s base had moved on.  Aunt Hope had moved to San Marcos  about thirty miles from El Cajon and Robert and King were separated.

 Robert wanted King to meet his brother Spaz.  King had heard all of Robert’s stories of his illusive older brother who had traveled the world.  A year later Robert was pretty sick again and he had been in the house for a good while.  King visited him as often as he could and on one sunny warm day King found Robert sitting on the back porch covered in a crocheted rainbow colored blanket.

“What’s up G?” Robert grinned.

“Yo, bro. What’s up?” King smiled.

King sat down across from him and never asked how he felt because he could see it on his body.  He was emaciated, a mass of bones with flesh hanging off, nothing more than a holocaust victim.  His face told another story.  His smile was genuine and warm and full of all the lost vitality he had once possessed.

“Hey man, my brother Spaz is here.  He has been here for a couple days and he is leaving for a gathering in Oregon,” Robert said.

“Cool, man.  Can’t wait to meet him,” King replied.

 King couldn't imagine Oregon at the time.  He couldn’t even imagine the world outside of California except for the small flashing memories, now figments, like particles of dust floating in his head, of when he and his dad drove across the country when King was eight years old.

“Yo, Spaz come here.  G is here.  Come meet him,” Robert managed to yell, hoping his voice was strong enough to carry into the house.

 The sound of heavy combat boots stumping up the stairs and keys clanging together preceded King’s first glimpse of Spaz’s Mohawk and dangling brown dread locks of what hair remained in the middle of his head.  He had piercings all over his face.  He walked up to King and threw his tattooed arms around him.  The hug was more like a blow that forced all the air out of King’s lungs and it scared him because he had never been hugged that tightly by anyone. Spaz stepped back from King and made straight eye contact with him.

“Robert has written to me about you.  He has told me about how you have loved him like a brother and says you are my family forever.  You need anything it’s yours,” Spaz said with a lisp, and then sat down and rubbed his tongue ring across his teeth.

“So what are you doing right now?” Spaz asked.

“Nothing.  So what is a Rainbow gathering?  I hear you are going to another one,” King asked.

“It is life on the other side of Babylon,” Spaz immediately replied and then added, “It’s the place where all is for the children to experience the beginning,” Spaz explained.

King was utterly transfixed by this entire exchange with Spaz.  He felt excited and moved automatically and then asked Robert, “So we are going right?”

“Not me my brother, but you,” he said with a smile.

“No way, not without you, my Nig,” King replied.

“G, I can’t man.  I am fine though.  You go see it for yourself,” Robert said.

It was final.  Spaz stood up and said to King, “You’ll need a bunch of socks and two hundred dollars.”

“Socks,” King replied incredulously.

“Yes, socks.  And a few clothes, but socks are your major need,” Spaz said.  His smile revealed perfectly straight white teeth, the kind that are pulled straight by many years of braces.

“Meet me at the train station in downtown Wednesday at eight in the morning,” he said, and then he showed King his train ticket.

“I will be there, will you?” he asked.

King had twenty pairs of socks, two pairs of pants, a jacket and two hundred dollars in his pocket.  He stood at the train station not knowing if Spaz would show up and he hadn’t a clue what to expect of this journey.  Aunt Hope wasn’t thrilled with King’s trip but she could do nothing to stop him.

“No, sir.  You are not going up to some hippie Rainbow gathering. Do you hear me?” she yelled at King, as he stood in the door with his flimsy worn out backpack.

“Sorry, Aunt Hope.  I will be back in a week,” King replied, and walked out the door.

 

Spaz walks up to King from behind and whispers into his ear, “You ready to go?”

King jerks forward and turns to see the grin on Spaz’s face.  King begins to talk very quickly, stammering on about having enough socks and then realizes Spaz thinks he needs to learn some lessons on hard travel.  Spaz immediately walks to the back of the train, finds the bathroom, and steals the first aid kit.  Then he looks around the train.  King follows him helplessly observing his every move. He moves to a seat and reaches down under it to find anything that isn’t held down like tight ash tray cups. He is preparing. 

“You have two hundred dollars,” Spaz asked.

“Yeah, man.  I do,” King replied.

“Give me one hundred and take the other hundred and put it in your sock. It is your get home money in case at any time you don’t want to continue on.  You can get back,” he says.

King takes a deep breath as a whiff of confidence begins to fill up his chest.  The Amtrak conductor comes by them and announces, “Tickets, please.”  Spaz gives the gentlemanly conductor King’s one hundred dollars and his ticket.

“San Francisco,” the conductor says expeditiously, and makes a ticket for King by expertly punching holes into the slip of paper and then slides both tickets into slots above their heads. Then the conductor gives Spaz twenty-three dollars in change that he hands to King. King makes a mental note that he now has one hundred and three dollars.  Spaz falls asleep quickly.  King feels boredom set in as the train starts to move along and finally after an hour, the motion of the train quavering on the tracks lulls him to sleep as well.  He dreams.  He is warm in his seat and dreams of a magical rainbow colored land where all he feels is warm sunlight, happiness, and contentment. The train pulls up to the woods where giant redwood trees stand at attention as the station is full of 60’s hippies wearing rainbow colored Tie Dye and everyone is all consumed on drugs and no one is living in reality.  As smoke fills the air, the train conductor announces with a crazy laugh, “Welcome to the happy hippie land.”

They sleep for hours. Spaz hits King’s arm.  “G you hungry,” Spaz asks as he pulls out two ham sandwiches from his backpack.  King eats the sandwich and looks out of the window.  The California landscape is golden and barren.  He sees a tumble weed roll across a field and he falls asleep again.

“Greg, wake up dude.  We are here.  G wake up dude we are here.”

 As King slowly opens his eyes.  They are at the train station in San Francisco and it is nothing like the dream.  There are lonely people standing around waiting for trains, there are no happy hippie people.  Spaz grabs his backpack and it is much bigger than his skinny body. But he holds it on his back with ease.  King tries to do the same, but the weight on his back is unfamiliar, so he stumbles a bit and follows him out into the streets of San Francisco.

 They walk all the way through San Francisco and up a hill to the Haight- Ashbury neighborhood.   King has never heard of this place where hippies have gathered since the 1960's.  On this day there aren’t any hippies hanging out in the streets.  King only notices street junkies and rich people.  Spaz does not stop to talk any one.  Spaz leads them to a place called “hippie hill” where people play Frisbee and smok marijuana.  There are a few hippies playing drums as drunks and homeless kids clap to the beat.  As King stands watching the drummers on their bongo drums he loses sight of Spaz.  Spaz just simply walks away.  King spins around on one foot and looks in all directions for Spaz.  Holy s**t where did that mother f****r go.  What the f**k?  OK, stay calm, he will come back.  He knows I am here.  King feels his heart pounding in his chest to the beat of the drums as he walks around the group of people and searches every face for Spaz.  It’s very late at night now and King notices the cool fog rolling in from the ocean and descending over Twin Peaks as the pastel colored homes look wedged into the hill.  He waits for a long time, by then the drummers have broken down their makeshift stage and have moved on.  It is getting colder as King sits in the grass trying to maintain a clear thought and think of his next move, and then there’s a glimpse of Spaz coming up the hill.  

“I got a ride man.  I’ll meet you at raggae at the river. It’s a festival in the north part of California in the emerald triangle,” he said with a smile.

“What?  What the f**k am I supposed to do?  Where have you been?  I have been sitting here for three hours,” King said, holding back tears.

“Be cool, man.  It’s all good,” he said.

“I thought we were going to the Rainbow in Oregon.  What the f**k is a reggae festival?  And where the f**k is the green triangle,” King yelled.

“Dude, we are on our way.  Take a deep breath.  It’s only six hours away and after that we will be closer to Oregon.  It’s all good.”

“Are you f*****g with me?  How the hell am I going to get up there?”

Spaz is very serious, he is going alone. He intends to leave King in San Francisco.  King is befuddled as thoughts and pictures of infinite possibilities bounce around in his head ricocheting off the interior of his mind like fireworks going off in the wrong direction.  I have come all this way for him to leave me in the first place he has a chance.  What am I going to do?  It’s getting dark, I have nowhere to go, I don’t even know a single person to call in San Francisco. The last image of King’s father walking out the door of that dirty motel flashes across the back of his mind.  He gets a sudden urge to grab and shake and hurt Spaz until he understands this feeling deep inside, the feeling he cannot shake and yet he cannot even verbalize, so deep down inside of King, so suppressed he doesn’t even know it’s there, until now.

Spaz looks at King as if it is perfectly normal to leave a sixteen year old boy in the middle of a huge city and expect him to find his own way six hours north to a reggae festival by a river.

“Please do not leave me,” King pleads with Spaz.

“Dude, it’s only six hours away.  You can hitch a ride man,” he says, as he picks up his heavy backpack with ease and turns to walk down the hill. 

King decides he is going home.  He will find a bus he thinks to himself as he watches Spaz go farther and farther down the hill.  He sighs deeply and starts to walk in the opposite direction; Spaz turns and yells up the hill to him.

“Man, you can do it.”

King flips him the finger and tries to remember where he saw the freeway so he can look for a bus to take him home.  An hour later, King finds a bus stop and sits down to wait for a bus headed south.  Tired but feeling relief from his heavy backpack, he looks across the street and notices on the opposite side of the road there is a bus at the station.  The bus is idling; waiting to take off, only it’s headed north.  He sits there for a long time staring at the bus before he decides that Spaz might be right.  Maybe I can go north.  If I have the chance should take it.  I have one hundred and twenty- three dollars, if go north, I can get stuck, but if I go south I am never going to be able to face myself as a man.  He crosses the road and hops up the stairs of the bus.  The bus is headed to Santa Rosa.  He smiles and pays the bus driver the fair.  It’s now past dawn and once in Santa Rosa, it’s nearly midday, he starts walking around the town.  He notices there are people his age all over the city hanging out.  He sits down on a bench in the city center and a little boy, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, walks up to King and asks him where he is from.  King answers kindly, “San Diego,” happy that at least one person in his day seems to care about him.  The boy’s eyes light up with an expression of amazement as if San Diego was on the other side of the earth.

“Where you going?” the boy asks.

 “Reggae at the river,” King replies.

“Really my aunt lives there on the river,” the boy replies and then smiles.

“Is it far away?”

“You want me to take you there?” he asks.

This is another sign King thinks to himself.  The week-long festival set up in the mountains of the emerald triangle is where bushels and bushels of marijuana are grown all year round.   The boys set off to look for a ride.  As they walk along the sidewalk King admires this kid’s spirit and the fact that he has no fear at all.   All of a sudden a guy sitting in front of a cafe yells out to them as they pass by, “Hey, where you from man?”

“Diego,” King replies.

“You want to sit with me and have some food? It’s too big for me.”

Another sign, another magical moment, a gift from the Universe, King thinks to himself.  They chat about Santa Rosa and the guy wants to know what their plans are and then the guy offers to find a ride for them to the Reggae on the River.  King and the boy eat the huge meal of French fries covered in beans and cheese with gratitude.  While they eat, the guy leaves the table and goes around the corner and comes back with two girls who have a car.  He tells the boys that they will drive them to the reggae on the river. King thinks they are college girls, because of the expensive looking sweaters they are wearing.

“Hey.  You guys looking to go to Reggae on the River?” the pretty blond asked.

“Yea, we are,” King replied with a smile.

“Got any money for gas?” the less attractive one asked.

“Yea, how much?” the boy replied.

“Twenty each,” she replied.

“Make it twenty altogether and we’re in,” King quickly replied.

“Deal,” said the pretty one.

It’s getting dark, there is no light in the car, except for the occasional street light they pass as they head up into the mountains.  The less attractive girl in the passenger seat offers each boy a beer.  The boy drinks the beer as if he were downing a bottle of water. King hates beer, to him it just tastes all wrong.  He sips his slowly.  The boy falls asleep within minutes of finishing his beer and King looks over and notices his angelic face, framed by long blond hair that is matted in knots, in between the flashes of light as the car speeds along narrow roads in the dark forest.  The girls do not include King in their conversation, so King stares out into the twilight turning to darkness and wonders how he is going to find Spaz and how is going to get into the festival since the girls tell him it costs three hundred dollars for the week inside the festival.   He knows he is carrying a hundred and twenty-three dollars in his pocket.  After many hours of listening to the girls chatter about boys and parties, King notices the lights set off in the distance in the middle of the forest. They are police lights. They have a check point set up in front of the festival.  The pretty girl driving stops the car and the other one tells them to get out if they are sneaking in.  King shakes the boy on the arm.  He’s groggy but he manages to pull himself up.  They climb out of the back seat and head into the woods under cover of shadows from the police lights.  The boy is awake now and starts to jog toward the dark forest, King follows his lead.  They jump the first gate with no problem.  The next gate poses more of a problem because it puts them into a farm yard where nearby they can hear dogs start to bark.   They stop for a second to hear if anyone is in pursuit of them, but no one comes out of the house, they keep going.  They whisper and nod to each other as they move along in the dark.  The next gate is huge and made of orange plastic mesh and staked into the ground, but it’s not stable and hard to climb over as it sways with each foot they try to put hold into it.   Nearby they hear more dogs barking.  They abandon the climb over the fence and crouch down breathing deeply and listen to the dogs barking once again.  King remembers the Gerber knife in his backpack. He whispers to the boy, “We will have to cut our way through it.”  King begins to slice their way through the fence with the serrated knife.  Once through, they realize before them is an even bigger challenge then the fences and the gates, now they are facing the river.   As they reach the river the boy starts to remove his clothes, King does the same and follows the boy into the freezing cold river.  The water gets higher and higher until King has to put his backpack on top of his head.  The river rocks at the bottom are smooth and slick causing short slips that make the cold water touch the top part of their bare chests.  King wants to scream out, but holds his breathe instead.  They reach the other side of the river shivering and wet.

 

 

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 [s1]This offers beginning thoughts on Chapter .  The California landscape is golden and barren.  He sees a tumble weed roll across a field and he falls asleep again.the last time King saw his dad