Arizona 1976

I’m eleven years old, half feral, and worn out from getting into fistfights with other boys because I’m a long-haired hippie freak.

My dad is totally out of it these days. He’s going through some heavy shit and has the stare of a shell-shocked combat vet in Vietnam. I don’t really understand, but I do, because it’s been a hellacious year and it’s only April.

Dad’s girlfriend Linda ditched us in March. She took off with the bread truck that’s been our home since ’72, leaving with my baby brother. She actually beat me to it. I was ready to split when the cops raided our desert house community after a peyote ceremony in January, but the boy I planned to run away with had a sister that squealed and we were busted.

Without a mostly sensible woman in the picture, I figure we’ll be on the streets, but good old Papa Casanova shacks up with a lady named Jiliflower, who has a two-bedroom house she shares with her twin daughters. This means home for me is a pallet on the living room floor, as she’s taken in another refugee who’s already claimed the couch while my dad is sharing Jiliflower’s bed.

The couch surfer shares my name, but we couldn’t be more different. He’s not much taller than me, but he has very dark brown skin and long hair, and he’s one of those spiritual types who wears all white clothes and smells like incense. He also has a Mexican mustache and large teeth.

Me, I just hit puberty running, and I’m tan from being outdoors all day and skinny but muscular from a lifetime of climbing trees. I look like Tarzan’s bastard son, especially when I went native last year and roamed the desert in a loincloth, shooting at saguaros and rabbits with a bow and arrow. Yeah, that happened.

Nowadays, I’m usually in grubby thrift-store jeans, still mostly shirtless unless it’s really cold or I’m trying to blend into civilized society.

2.

One morning on Fourth Street, I see Heather and Michael panhandling in front of the Food Conspiracy.

Heather is a very pretty hippie chick, barely in her twenties, with a little boy named Michael who’s maybe five or six. She’s holding a hand-painted sign and her son is sitting cross-legged at her feet, poking at a crack in the sidewalk with a stick. She looks tired, dusty, and still beautiful in that earthy way—sun dress, bare feet, beads, beads, beads.

I met them at Eden Hot Springs near Globe after I rode out there with a bunch of Rainbow Family folks for a healing gathering. My dad was too sick to come along and stayed in Tucson. Funny that people always call them healing gatherings, or festivals, when there’s usually a bunch of people flipping out on psychedelics or puking from spoiled communal stew.

Heather is trying to scrape together money for food and gas because she has this plan to hitchhike up to some land outside of Ukiah in Northern California. Supposedly there are cabins and horses and a bunch of cool people living there. Sounds like a small commune, or at least a place where adults don’t yell at you for running wild while they’re letting it all hang out. Heather doesn’t know much more about the place, but she talks about it like it’s paradise.

It sounds like a dream to me. My earlier plan to run away didn’t have a specific destination in mind, maybe San Francisco or somewhere in Oregon, so this just feels like the sign I’ve been waiting for. I tell Heather I have fifteen bucks saved up from doing odd jobs and I’ll share it if she lets me tag along. I’m thinking I’ll take care of her and the kid, like I’m a grown-up sugar daddy or something. She looks at me like she’s trying to figure out if I’m serious, and I guess I am, because for the first time in years, I feel free.

~ Richard La Rosa