The Road Home Read Online Free PDF Page A

and cool as he went down the stoop onto the street. His Volkswagen bus was sitting at the curb. It had been dark blue when his father bought it for him back in Levittown, but now it was covered with green and orange Day-Glo flowers and glued-on pictures of the Beatles and Timothy Leary.
    As he looked at the van, he remembered the day he had decoratedit and how tripped-out he had been. These days, instead of feeling excited and high on life as he had then, he felt weary and anxious. He stared at his bus for a minute, shook his head, and then headed down the street past the Unique Men’s Shop. Mnasidika, a clothing store, was closed and dark, and the Psychedelic Shop next door was shuttered.
    People were starting to crawl out of the various pads they had crashed in the night before. As Johnny passed them by, he noticed that they all looked like weird, hairy rodents, scratching their lice-ridden heads and blinking at the strange yellow ball in the sky. He walked by the free clinic and noticed the sign in the window.
    â€œClosed. Free penicillin shots on Monday at nine a.m. Free food today at the Diggers tent in the Panhandle.”
    The cafe at the foot of Clayton Street was just opening, and Johnny went in and saw an empty table toward the back. It was September in San Francisco, and Indian summer was in its full glory. The sun was streaming in the front windows, and the bright light was hard on his eyes. He grabbed a menu from the rack by the cash register on his way to the table, and once he was seated, he scanned it quickly. Crash Landing with eggs, toast, hash browns, bacon, and hot coffee looked really good.
    He took a quick look in his wallet to make sure the two twenty-dollar bills were still there, and then he caught the eye of the waitress. She shuffled over and took his order. He peeked at the two twenties again. He could hardly believe he was down to his last forty bucks. What had become of all the gigs he was going to get?
    Johnny the Candyman had arrived in San Francisco in the early spring of 1965. Even out in the wilds of Long Island, he heard that there was a Beat revival going on, led by the likes of Ken Kesey, Neal Cassady and Marty Balin. Johnny was an aspiring folksinger who read The Catcher in the Rye and On the Road in high school and became enthralled with the concepts of alienation, teenage angst, and rebellion.His father, a successful businessman, was never around much, and after Johnny found out about the mistresses his dad kept in two different cities, he shut his father out of his life.
    His mother solved her anger issues with martinis and garden-club meetings and more martinis, so Johnny was on his own for most of his teen years. When President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Johnny felt that any possibility for society to move away from the straight Eisenhower suburban lifestyle had disappeared forever. He started listening to the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and the Byrds, took up the guitar, smoked some pot with his high school friends, and decided that the conventional life he was living in Levittown was a dead-end street. So in the spring of 1965 he packed his bags, liberated two thousand dollars from his mother’s bank account, and headed west in his van to San Francisco.
    Now, as Johnny waited for his breakfast, he rested his face in his hands. Six months in the City and this was it? This was what he came across the country for?
    He thought back to last night’s party. Sure people wore different clothes, had longer hair, but they still played the same mind games as the people he left in Levittown.
    Was there someplace he could go that was simpler? He remembered that National Geographic magazine someone had left at the Laundromat. The feature on Alaska was intriguing. Maybe life would be better there? Maybe they could use his musical talents, if San Francisco couldn’t. Well, it was a good idea, but it would have to wait. Thirty-six dollars wouldn’t get him very far. So now he