Trisha began to laugh uncontrollably. 'Oh no,' I thought, 'The police have laws against laughing. We're dead for sure'. I braced for the inevitable. But the shark just swam on by. He didn't even look at us. Trisha was still laughing. At least somebody was having a good time.
I realized then that we had walked all the way up to end of the block. We got turned around and began the long journey back to Karl and Rose's. Trisha scrutinized every person that we met along the way. She laughed at each of them and muttered something as they walked by. When one man passed us she looked up at me and said, “He's a pedophile. I can see into him. The bastard's a child molester.” She was horrified with this knowledge; then she laughed again.
I was very confused. I really liked her. I thought she might be my first love. But I felt so inadequate, so insignificant, so undeserving. I wanted to announce my authority. I turned to her and said, “Trisha, you're a big piece of shit.” Clearly, I had not yet mastered the art of sweet-talking my girl.
Trisha stopped laughing and looked at me with a puzzled face. She was angry; hurt. She looked down. I didn't know what to do. What if she started crying? I made an awkward move to console her.
She pushed me off and burst into laughter again. When she was staring down at the sidewalk she hallucinated a big pile of shit with a happy face in it grinning back at her. That's what made her laugh.
Her laughter made me mad. I shouted the worst insult I could think of, “you've got one giant ego!”
I walked on ahead of her back to the apartment. I realized that I was crying. When I entered, Jim took one look at me and yelled at Trisha, “What have you done to Rocky?”
I went right through and out the back door to where our trusty van, Sub-A-Lub was parked. I got in and sat alone for a long time thinking about what had just happened. I had convinced myself that it was my duty to tell Trisha about the 'white light', the 'oneness' and 'God'. I thought I could be Jim but I had no idea of what it all meant, or how to say it. I didn't know it at the time but I was wrong. She understood what I was talking about even if I didn't.
I went back in and we enjoyed the rest of the trip together.
In the early morning hours of June 6th, 1968 Senator Robert F. Kennedy died from gunshot wounds at the hand of assassin Sirhan Sirhan. He had been shot at point blank range after delivering a speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Another American leader had been murdered in his prime; first his brother John, then Martin Luther King and now Bobby. Stubbornly, we tried to hold onto the Summer of Love.
Trisha was going to Brighton in the south of England for the summer. Even though we were fucking like minks our relationship was still undefined. Were we boyfriend and girlfriend? The answer would have to wait until the fall when she came home.
Jim was organizing a second barnstorming tour. This wasn’t that difficult a chore as the only actual organizing involved was to point Sub-A-Lub east. This time we set our sights on Halifax, Nova Scotia even though it was almost six thousand five hundred kilometers away on the Atlantic Ocean. We reasoned that we should play our way across Canada and live on the east coast for a reversed perspective.
In July we hit the road in much the same fashion as last year. The only difference was that, instead of Howard and Norm, we took along Keith Light. It was Keith’s mom who wrote the magazine article that had freed me from imprisonment at school. Keith was tall and sinewy with long straight hair and an even longer beard. He had a spiritual aura about him and was hard working and enthusiastic.
Also, Geoff had married Jocelyn in a quickie civil service and they rode separately in their new 1968 Datsun 2000 station wagon; a wedding present from Jocelyn's parents. Funny, even though there were now only six of us in the van, I still seemed to be sitting on some uncomfortable piece of musical equipment.
There would also be a very big difference for me on this trip. From the first night out I found free-love; or more factually, it found me. It simply seemed to happen wherever we went. We drove directly to Nakusp like we were drawn there. We arrived just as a parade was about to start in celebration of some civic event. The mayor loved Sub-A-Lub and insisted that we act as the Grand Marshall of the parade. After the parade was over we set up in the mayor’s front yard and played all afternoon.
Later I slept with a local girl in a sleeping bag on the shores of Summit Lake. She was only the second girl that I had scored with. I marvelled at how different she felt than Trisha. Different, but the same ... It was mystifying. I decided to stop trying to comprehend it and just swing for the fences.
Coincidently, there are a lot of Wanstalls in Nakusp. I heard that one of the local Wanstall girls later had a son who she named Gary after me. Was it the girl in my sleeping bag? I’m pretty sure I didn’t have anything to do with it or I would have heard about it by now. Donna, the girl who had introduced us to Nakusp last summer, and who had been sleeping with Geoff, also had a son around that time. She named him Geoff, after our Geoff, but never disclosed the meaning of this.
We discovered a pretty little town one valley over called Nelson. There was a nightclub there called Garth’s Grotto run by a young local named George. We stayed a couple of nights and played at the club. I met a living-doll named Candy. Nothing happened there but she followed me to Banff and we made love in the back of the Datsun parked under a tree in the campsite. She was a sweetheart but she only stayed one day. She broke my heart when she left to go back home to Nelson.
I found consolation in the arms of a seductive seventeen year old who worked at the Grizzly Bear House restaurant. She snuck me up to the tiny dorm that they provided to her for the summer and ravished me for hours. The frenzy continued for several days in her bed, in tents, under trees, in the van and anywhere we happened to be. She was insatiable. My appetite for her was equally voracious. I was up to the task and we devoured each other day and night. She turned out to be the girlfriend who had broken George Greenwell's heart before last year’s barnstorming tour ... I didn‘t know! As the band was getting ready to leave she informed me that it was her ambition to get herself pregnant that summer. She thanked me for my contribution. As we pulled out of town I couldn’t help but wonder if any of my shots had hit the target. I never heard from her again so I guess I’ll never know.
And so we went - and so I came - across the infinite prairie provinces of Canada; Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
There is a saying, or maybe it was the result of some scientific study or maybe it’s a law of nature, or maybe I made it up - regardless, 'they' say a person is defined by the song that was Number One on their eighteenth birthday. I turned eighteen on July 18th. Steppenwolf’s Born to Be Wild was Number One on the Canadian charts:
Get your motor runnin'
Head out on the highway
Lookin' for adventure
And whatever comes our way
Born to be wild
Born to be wild
We hop-scotched our way from city to town all along the way - renting halls, drawing up posters and playing for food and gas money. We discovered that Edmonton was a city of fabulous musicians, Saskatoon had gorgeous women and Winnipeg loved to rock & roll.
Jim did almost all of the driving but allowed me to take the wheel when he was exhausted. I loved this, as anything was better than sleeping on top of a drum kit in one hundred degree weather while hurling down the highway in a tin box - and I did consider myself to be an excellent driver. However, by this time the gear shift lever on the steering column had broken off; I believe it was kicked off in the passion of some sexual encounter that I claim no responsibility for, and in order to keep the van in gear you had to hook your right leg over the stump and hold it firmly in gear under your knee. I drove for four hours from Regina, Saskatchewan to Brandon, Manitoba without moving because there is not a single curve or hill on that four hundred kilometer stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway and I didn’t have to shift, brake or turn the steering wheel the entire way. My right leg was so sore I couldn’t walk properly for days. After that I never complained about sleeping on the drums.