116 will.” I was part of this American moment, but unaware of what it meant. The next day, Laurie and her family took me on a tour of St. Louis, which was much nicer than Detroit, I thought: “Courthouse squares, trees, statues, parks, and many stately old buildings.” Before I left town, I went to the main post office and checked for mail at General Delivery. Nothing yet. I walked to the Mississippi and gazed at the river, “Mark Twain’s river, big and exciting, but I wish I could have seen it in his day, floating down it in a raft.” West from St. Louis, the country changed. The flat land of Illinois gave way to the rolling fields and hills of the Ozarks. Mountains, I thought. “One long, slow field that stretched along a hillside caught my eye, wind blowing across it, turning it frothy, greenish-white.” Was this more wheat? The bus went through roadcuts of reddish-brown rock. I wished I knew the names of things. We passed a herd of cattle, lying in the shade near a river. “Then fallow fields like dark water, waters of the night. And then a junkyard in the middle of nowhere, probably owned by a man in a city.” As we passed more stands of trees whose names I didn’t know, I couldn’t jot things down fast enough. I pictured myself living on a farm and knowing country things, not just a Stranger Passing Through. Five hours later, I got off the bus in Springfield and asked directions to Southwestern State University. When I stopped at a burger joint for dinner, a high school kid with acne greeted me in a nasal, southern drawl, asking me where I was from. I told him Detroit. A Long Way. He seemed excited to hear me tell about my trip. I asked him about his job, and he wanted to know if I was looking for work, mentioning the name of his boss. He said I might find a room to stay at the college, since school was out and the dorms were empty. I thanked him and headed on my way. “I’m a Stranger in Your Town,” I told the older couple who gave me a ride, driving me to the door of a rooming house. They asked if I was going to school. “I must look the intellectual type,” I wrote. I told them I was Passing Through, heading for the West Coast. Later I walked around Springfield, the college empty. I drank in “the slow flickering of fireflies, cricket noises, a heavy smell of flowers in the air.” At a dimly-lit street corner, four scraggly kids looking for someone to buy booze for them asked if I was twenty-one. I told them I wasn’t and was looking for someone to buy for me. They all laughed. “You go to high school?” I asked one of them.
CIRQUE “Na, they won’t let me.” “How come?” “They don’t like drunks.” He snickered, then offered to get me “some black pussy for two dollars.” I told him no thanks and asked where all the girls were in this town. “They’re locked up in jail.” Again, he laughed, and his buddies did, too, as we walked on. Where do the kids hang out?” I asked. “The clean-cut ones go to Fishers, but I can’t stand them.” My shoes were scruffy, my hair too long, and I wore my father’s beat-up leather jacket. When my friend told me there was a bar that would serve me beer if I wanted, I wondered why he didn’t go there himself. “They were a sad bunch,” I wrote, “the dispossessed who’ve fallen off the whirling disc of society.” I headed back to my room, thankful for a bed. My journal doesn’t mention if I checked out Fisher’s. Next morning in a cafe, I ate a big breakfast-bacon and eggs and toast and milk. My lunches were usually raisin bread and cheese, but breakfasts and dinners I ate out. At the counter, “a wrinkled man with a wiry build” spoke to me. Were all adults really so wrinkled back then? Mort soon confided that he and his wife had agreed to disagree. “Never was any good,” he said. He asked where I was from, and I told him I was a stranger, Just Passing Through. When I told Mort about the high school kids, he said he never bought booze for anyone but himself. “Got enough troubles ‘thout looking for it.” After we exchanged small talk about where we came from, he whispered, “I’d like to find me some ass.” I told him the high school kids said all the women were locked up. “Oh, you can’t take them kids’ words for anything.” He suggested we ask a cab driver. I didn’t reply, thinking of a line from a Delmore Schwartz poem, “The scrimmage of appetite everywhere,” which I’d read in my beat-up paperback Immortal Poems of the English Language, the one book I’d brought with me on this trip. Mort said he could tell a lot from a person’s countenance, and he gave me a long look. “I think you’re all right, Richard.” I told him he was all right, too. When he asked me where I was heading, I told him, “California. On the bus.” “Well, if you’da been in Columbus day before