It was a Sunday morning. The newly built interstate highway was mostly empty but the parking lots of the churches on access roads were filled.
The young man drove a hundred miles to the west to start his career. Behind him now were those student jobs serving creamy whip and fitting women’s shoes.
His father and his oldest brother worked on the railroads. They talked about pulling into towns and having to “layover” for the night. The young man assumed layovers included all kinds of makeshift accommodations and, short of bed bugs, he was game.
He entered his new town midday, picked up the Sunday paper, cracked open a roll of dimes and started calling the classifieds to find a bed. Checking into a hotel never occurred to him. He called a listing on the Southeast Side where there was row after row of bungalows. When he pulled up, cars were parked halfway down the street. A party or something.
The inside of the tract house revealed something different. There were a dozen cots in the living room piled with things reserving them for guys who were out for a bite. There were more cots in other rooms. They would all be filled that night.
A cartoon character ran the place. He called himself Big Bill, Big Jim, Big Something. Big Something had broken both legs but nobody signed his casts. The explanation he gave for a wearing a revolver on his hip changed every time he was asked. “It’s not loaded.” he liked to joke. You were supposed to laugh. He dealt exclusively in cash.
A patrolman the age of the young man’s middle brother had the next cot. You don’t want to stay here too many nights the cop told him.
Sunday blue laws were enforced locally so most stores were closed. The kid drove around looking for milk, bacon and bread. When he fried up breakfast the next morning, early on his first day of work, he noticed a new song on the radio. It captured the disquiet of those times.
A young president had been assassinated, cities were rioting, our nation had stumbled into an impossible war. Bob Lind sang about “…the bright abandoned ruins of the dreams you left behind.” The Bright Elusive Butterfly of Love would quickly climb to number six on the Top Forty.
And sure enough good times were elusive in that town. The young man tried the wrong things. The wrong people gave him the wrong advice. He fell in with fools.
What he was too young to know is that certain towns are practice towns. They are created for the sole purpose of giving young people a place to make mistakes. When he left three and a half years later, his conceits and missteps were erased from his permanent records.
There were only two times he checked into a hotel during his stay in that town. There was that one New Year’s Eve and that one long weekend way out on 38th Street where the parking lot couldn’t be seen from the street.
