I want to be a little boy again

Morning Rider on the Road

By

Timothy Stillman

(Title from and the story inspired by the song by Tony Romero—sung by David Cassidy and ‘The Partridge Family’)

(To Ian, Richie and Rex-I miss you guys more than tongue can tell)

(And of course, like my whole life, for Joel)

It was the Sandias when I admitted it. My kingships had fallen. I was not the star. I was not even in the film anymore. Lenore had sung my last song and it was found wanting, so I junked life, I junked the band, and headed out on my Harley, where the world lay. Where the evening stars would gentle fall on me. And their lights would be from memories of stars. Luckier than I, in my windbreaker and my heavy Levis and my cambric shirt full, my boots, and all filed with young me. All filled with an attempt after everything had fallen. I took to the road. I decided to do my life on the road. All the way. My long hair blowing in the breeze and gales and raindrops and snow.

Circling round mountains, cresting hilltops and seeing the containers where people had their days and their nights. Eyes, clear of brown, and cloverleafs for bearing down on; freedom and the spring coil of young muscles, the hunching over, the wind break shield; the vroom and the feel of my bike under around and inside my thin 20 year frame of me, leaving the sideshows, the freak shows behind. How I thought she had found me and how lucky she, with my music for her alone, knowing she could not exist on even a blade of grass level without me, but she proved me wrong. Proved me insubstantial as long gold hair to my shoulders and stubble on my face that was fox-like in appearance.

I was Jack Kerouac and Lenny Bruce and Alan Ginsberg and I was free and didn’t have anyone or a dime except from odd jobs traced the maps of my odyssey. There for the plate glass sky, and the rage in me started at the beginning, but was leveling off now. Was here in minor plates of my body, taken bronze of summer and put on pale of leaving this world I had known, where I was liked and where I had friends and where they dug me and Lenore, hey Poe, Lenore did it to me too and let’s dump ‘em all, let’s see just how shattered and wasted a life can get and still try to put the parts back together, not knowing, not caring if they would fit again, or how, or why.

Snow reverted into rainbows over time endless and the skies were big and huge and were bigger than a god the squares claimed chimed in again, though I never heard any chime from him, only their desperate demands for money, which was like love; it washes supremely over a person, like all the loves before her, caught in the corner of the eye and then whisked away, like the whisper purr of a cat from when you were a child and corners of my room were the only things that made me feel safe. Off in distance, the vision hawking that made the end of the highway like the sky meeting it. Like all the distance of birds and owls and falcons caught in that big blue up there.

A marble grown dim and dusty over time, with the big rigs screaming past me or toward me and the veering of their brakes and the pull downs on their whistles and I was alone; I was alone all this time, for they had tricked me, pillows were the grass by the side of the road and whatever I could find along the way; so they gave up their rock star and told me nothing more than Lenore and the castle by the sea, all headed in the bumpings of going over hard high railroad tracks, and taking my share of spills, with my breaker or my black leather studded, mind you, here a filling station to make maybe 10 bucks for doing odd jobs for a day or so, till I get restless.

Till that highway starts beckoning me, like a taste for blueberry pie that haunts me so I gotta get some wine and take to my cycle again, circumscribe the feeling of warm and hot in my mouth and belly and the circle world the pear shaped world the endless runnings round on the circle blue tiny big ball underneath me and the clouds slapping together in pure white; or pure black for thunder, then tell me the moral of early morning skies, I would say to no one at all, as I would wake by a roadside and look at the canyons and the sun gone gold splash on them, baking my eyes and breaking them and filling my thin body with song.

And it broke me I didn’t have my guitar because I had cords and refrains and ballads and a voice that was sweet and pure as a child’s gets on his first happiest morning of Christmas, as I looked at Colorado, as I looked at the awesome painting the sky was doing on the canyons that were so detailed, so massive, but so delicate and subtle at the same instant, as I got on my bike and roared past, back from the little off path to the main highway, and forgetting the dates, the months, even the year, cars tell me of clockwork. With their huddled up passengers and half asleep driver in the car moggy heat—then winter, if even the weather is warm because a calendar decrees it so, and they are tied to the calendar like tied to a clock, feeling nothing, seeing nothing round them. Ever.

And if there are screamy kids in the cars and dad’s helling them and I see his wearing a Hawaii t shirt on, then it’s summer for sure even if where we are, the cold is still battling back the dawn, but we will have a great day freezing off tits and asses at the beach, the pool, the river, the ocean today, and if there’s fishing poles in the car or lashed to it, I zoom out from them fast, heading up to the highlands, remembering Saroyan’s song in them, remembering when the night is silver and quiet coming, un-red from the dawn of day, the sun gone now, no longer cold heat and a mockery, no longer hot blistering sun falling on me like burning sand turned to candle oil hot.

I am little landscape in the huge ones all round me. I see through my goggles and I scrape the gnats and mosquitoes and other bugs off them every so often, little creatures flying in the wrong place the wrong time, and I feel constant now. I feel as if there were no suggestions anymore, for suggestions quickly become rules. I feel as if I have been freed to live always in forever, as I pass rock walls that are gray and caramel colored, I am hungry, I am in need of friendship, and then when my belly is full of a sandwich from a diner, I soar again and I am bigger than myself, I find that mewling baby back there in all that armor that he hid behind called peace called love; no, call it instead abject fear.

Me, here. Winnowed. Flensed. I am a part. Keeping my cycle tuned and washed and cared for, as though it is a piece of the earth, it is seasons and county fairs passed by and farmers with broken down trucks by the side of the road, and how mad some are and how resigned and given up others are, but all glad when I take the time to give them some help and no thanks happy to do it as I refuse their grimed work stained painfully hard earned money, and they smile at me then, in their different ways, as they get in their trucks and pull away, some even waving. The Good Earth. Mom read that novel by Pearl S. Buck I remember, and I’ve come to see what that title means. It is good. Me sitting in a lone field, toking from what I could find and afford to by, or some wine in a bottle not lasting long, and just me and the day and the night forming free of charge, not even at the cost of any heartbreak that humans are so good at, and I look at corners of darkness and the ghostly images come up way too close when it’s foggy night or hazy morning.

And now I am in New Mexico, Land of a Thousand Enchantments. The state tourist motto. I think of all the majesties I’ve had the honor—this is a helluva beautiful country, dude, if people would just get out of the way—to ride through, to feast my eyes on, to feel all the different worlds of it—but Albuquerque, man, that is it. It is cool days and cold nights. The Indians sell their fake jewelry and rugs and the place is on top of the world, man, Santa Fe is 1890 again and the outside of everywhere at night is the sky, like I am off on the other side of it and seeing cobalt blue; I’m not blasted or high now, I’m just filled with God’s good oxygen, can’t suck enough of it in, as the mountains over there, winter time on them, though cars recently passed by with the human curlicue shapes inside, harassed Dad, gaudy T shirt, squirmy chest bared kids, all clone in cars gone by with no people in them ever to follow the trail of a hawk in the sky and to imagine I flew with him, calendar suckers tell me it’s summer. To prove I was not what people were.

Not that I truck with religion. But something spiritual deep down that said my odyssey was up there on those mist covered mountains there beyond, so I treated myself to spaghetti and wine and pie in a Mexican restaurant, not having courage to try their hotter than hell chili. And that night I unrolled my gear from the bike and curled up in my tattered old sleeping bag from when I was in the cub scouts, short was, now especially compared to me. And I shivered in the freezing cold, looked up at the stars that seemed to shiver too in all that blackness, that would in morning become big paths of stunning nameless colored lights, and I would ride along and dream of walking on that sky and looking down at this earth, which always almost caused a collision or two. Sometimes crimson bathed the whole world.

Partway, I traveled the famed Route 66 to get here, heard the theme of the TV show reruns in my mind. Buzz and Todd traveling in that one of a kind Chevy cry your heart out to have that car, and the music; I made an intention after I tossed my Ipod on the first leg of my journey out of such pain, out of such scary helplessness, away from where I knew I would be forever and celebrated just getting bigger and bigger, I tossed it because every song on it had to do with individual happinesses then that turned to haunts that now mocked me, so I listened to the sounds of cars and the earth and the stars and the cold and hot days and my hawg under me and my feeling the springs of man made metal and sparks and engine thrust like I was flying, all the sounds of the days and nights no one maybe but me has heard in a long long time and it tasted sweet and kissed away my tears.

Morning light tunnels me in and I rise with that empty friendless stomach I have at such times. Part of my journey has been riding into words I had only reed before, the red clay of the South, poor people picking cotton for nothing, small towns with wizened death airs about them, skirting round cities all gleam and silver and huge massive indeed importance. Ocean looked into, a funny looking man with dirt furled face and hair that was unkempt and unwashed for how long I did not know. So, no one around, I stripped and bathed and swam in the delicious ice-cold diamond brew of water.

I am close to the Sandias tram now. I parked my bike. Chained it every whichaway. Paid a kid to look after it. Made a convincing threat if he and the bike were gone when I got back. Paid him an extra buck cause I felt guilty. He just looked up at me from his silly-assed cowboy suit, nodded, and asked if he could sit on my cycle. I nodded. And serious like all the time this kid, he did, slowly and carefully, like he was entering into a prayer with awe. I took the shaking in the breeze bumpy tram, scared me and I held on, but the other passengers could see I was a virgin tram rider, so I laughed at myself, and they smiled, one guy patted me on the back. I was in convocation of more people than I had been with in all this time, my God, but it felt good.

And then I stand on these huge mountains, heavy with snow as I zip my black leather jacket up and walk the winter woods, breathing in all the North there ever could be, feeling my skin pop alive, as I stood right at the lip of a boulder a few feet from the ledge that I could jump off from had I wanted. Not that I did not consider it, but the country, the places, the soaring things I had seen and had seemed to be, all of it was like a process of sewing me back together, putting me back in place, day and night, for I was cared for and the importance I felt back there had been a lie; the importance I felt now was the truth; I was worthy of existence and had no idea about tomorrow, but I stood there and looked out at birds flying in formation, as I picked up some snow and made a snowball and heaved it hard as I could off the Sandias down way down into infinity, and I laughed and felt so damned good. I would stay here for a while, before I moved on. I was not a tram virgin any longer.

My bike was waiting for me. The kid said he did real good protecting it. I smiled down at him, asked him if he wanted a quick ride. His face screamed COOOOOLLLLLL. So I took him for a spin. Then, took him back and said goodbye to the happiest kid in the world, waved at him as I continued along, as he waved back. Sometimes a person knows the happiest moment in his life as it happens. You shape it and hold it and protect it and care for it like a living thing, and take a picture of it in your mind. This was my moment. Maybe his too. I kinda hope so. It’s kinda selfish of me, so I’ll hold the memory for both of us. I have room now.