A Ride to Chicago

For Laurie Cumbo. Thanks again for being part of the great teamwork last winter!

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I was twenty-one. I had spent the winter in East Lansing, Michigan, after leaving my wife and baby daughter. My very talented but ne'er-do-well friend Matt had escaped from a situation in Chicago where people were after him, and hid in East Lansing among the college freaks for a while. I hankered to go to Chi-town after a winter of grief over my break with my family, with lots of promiscuous sex, grass, LSD, mescaline, MDA, MMDA, DMMDA – I was quality control for an underground chemist – drinking, and being a minister to a bunch of hippies that wanted to try being a Gnostic parish. I loved East Lansing, but there was no real future for me there. I had attended a service in a Zen Temple in Chicago and my intuition was that I could find my salvation through the discipline of Zen sitting. Also, my wife had moved back there, and I wanted to see if I could repair the family. Matt wanted to go back to Chi, also, so we took off by thumb early in April.

Now Matt was a right unusual fellow. He was a few years older than myself. He was about six inches shorter than my six-foot-oh, but stocky, and he could fight. Been in jail a few times, and he could take care of himself. Touch of red to his brown hair. Used to be a child evangelist, till he saw too much hypocrisy amongst the other preachers and turned against his faith. He took revenge on the hypocrisy of his former Christian colleagues by making parodies of hymns so filthy and blasphemous even hippies blushed. He was finding a rebirth of faith amongst the hippies of those days, who preached wide-open possibilities of spirit that could include a Gnostic view of the Gospel, Zen, Astrology, and Drugs. Matt could sing and play guitar; he preferred the country style of the Tennessean immigrants to Yakima, Washington, that were his kin, but he could do Beatles and Blues and the folky stuff going around the cities and campuses. And he could turn on the preaching he used to do, all the way to talking in tongues and laying on of hands, dancing around with a guitar, until the most anti-religious of the commie freaks amongst us got up and started testifying! Even so, he had a criminal streak, and sometimes counter-culture nests of wayward individuals depended much on his shoplifting skills for food. But by his wit – oh, and could he do the Dozens! – and his Appalachian gap-toothed smile and his innate charm, people tended to like him. By the time I had met him, he had lost the casual racism of his childhood from hanging around with Blacks and Indians in the bohemian underground of Chicago. But he had crossed a Native woman in some kind of deal, and the word was she was out to snuff him. After a couple of months of living in students' basements and attics, he decided to try to make peace with her so he could live in town again.

On a day when the snow was all gone, we set out on the road, begging for rides. Before you get to Benton Harbor and swing around the southern end of Lake Michigan, you have wide-open farm country on both sides of Kalamazoo, at least forty-three years ago. Some freeway interchanges had nothing but a gas station. Some even less.

I think it was only around Paw Paw that Matt and I had gotten to by dark. It was an intersection with one gas station, and lots of fields ready for spring planting, stretching out to a horizon broken only by trees lining distant ditches. It was getting late, and it was getting cold. We went up from the freeway to the gas station, and the attendant let us spend a few minutes getting warm inside, every hour or so, as the traffic got less and less. He said he was closing at eleven. As it got closer to that hour, we bitched less about the cold, facing a long uncomfortable night on our feet.

And then a car pulled over just ahead of us on the freeway, and it had Illinois plates! With relief we ran up to it, but the driver got out and went around the front of the car to look at something. He was a smartly dressed, short black man with a fedora, and our hearts sank as we saw that he was looking at a flat tire. His pulling over had nothing to do with us. I hardly ever got picked up by black folks and expected nothing, but Matt was more resourceful than myself. As the man looked sadly at the tire, Matt made him an offer.

"If you got the tools, I can have this here tire off in five minutes! I'll get this tire fixed up at the station up there, if you give me and my friend a lift to Chicago." The man looked us over and said, "Yeah! Less do it!" Matt had the wheel off in half the time he said, and he and the driver went up the ramp to the station.

Meanwhile, I looked inside the car. In the vague light from the gas station sign, I saw three other guys. They weren't very clear, but from what I could make out, they were dudes you never saw unless you went to the innermost of the inner city. This will be a very interesting ride, I thought.

Matt and the driver were walking back down the ramp when the lights at the station went out. Made it just before the station closed! Luck's smiling on us!

Matt bounced the tire near the jack like it was a basketball, and knelt down to slip it onto the bolts of the hub. As he had the tire in both hands, lining up the holes, the driver hovered over his back.

The man asked, “Say, you fellas hear the news?”

“No. What happened?” Matt said, as he shifted the tire a couple of degrees clockwise.

“Martin Luther King got shot.”

Matt froze at those quiet words.

I said to the driver, “White guy?” I knew anyway.

He nodded, "Seems so."

“Did he die?”

He nodded again.

Matt got the tire on and spun the crosswrench five times. And I went underwater into that place where time and space are different for a while.

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I was not surprised, but I was shocked. Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior, was a moral focus for the two great political passions of my youth: peace and civil rights. I was shocked, but I also felt fear. Fear is magnified by insecurity, and we get really uncomfortable with people of other cultures when it's so much harder to know what's safe or dangerous.

But I was not really thinking thoughts like these. I was trying to grok the situation, and under the stress of potential danger, my mind rhymed its assessment:

treeless fields and barrenment

no place to hide nowhere to run

exemption from resentment:

long hair no guarantee

no one to hear or see

possible gun

four of them, and Matt and me

man, they got you if they want you!

all there is, is a bare word

only innocence can be honored

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Back in ordinary reality, realizing the situation was out of my control was somewhat comforting. Obviously, refusing the ride would have been insulting, and could precipitate a violence that would not happen otherwise. Matt likely had the same thoughts. A guy with a do-rag got out of the shotgun seat and pulled the seat forward. Another guy got out of the back seat and motioned for Matt to get in. Matt shifted the bulk of the guitar and got in next to a fellow who had not cut the nails on his little fingers likely for a couple of years. I sat in the middle of the front seat. We rode in silence for a while.

The dude sitting next to me, with the do-rag and Little Richard mustache, turned to look at Matt in the dark. He took a drag from a Kool and asked, "You play that thing, or carry it for show?"

Matt took out his finger picks, and removed the cracked Washburn from the case that was little more protective than cardboard. He fussed with the tuning a bit, and began noodling a free-flowing tune. Almost everything he ever strummed idly turned eventually into "Cocaine Blues," the way Dave Van Ronk played it:

Well, I reached into my pocket, grabbed my poke,

Note in my pocket said, "No more coke."

Cocaine!

Run all 'round my brain.

And then it would turn into something else. It was his meditation to get in touch with deeper layers of his psyche, where things like music and religion lived. Getting sucked into the shifting patterns of the notes he was calling up took my mind off our situation, which was awkward at best. The other guys were quiet, presumably also fascinated. The patterns kept shifting, although the beat stayed steady. Maybe he was fishing around in his repertoire for something we'd all like. Shapes formed in the sounds. Spotlights and slinky black women. Matt began to sing:

Set me free, why don't cha babe

Get out my life, why don't cha babe

'Cause you don't really love me

You just keep me hangin' on

You don't really need me

But you keep me hangin' on

Why do you keep a coming around

Playing with my heart?

Why don't you get out of my life

And let me make a new start?

Let me get over you

The way you've gotten over me

I looked at the driver, and he was smiling. The guy with the do-rag was slightly nodding his head. Matt had a good clear voice and expressed the frustrated passion of the Supremes' song very well, building it for the last verse:

Why don't you be a man about it

And set me free

Now you don't care a thing about me

You're just using me

Go on, get out, get out of my life

And let me sleep at night

'Cause you don't really love me

And suddenly all four of the men we were riding with joined in for the last line:

You just keep me hangin' on!

Without a break in the picking, Matt went into "Tears of a Clown," and then "Early Morning Rain," and "Don't Think Twice." After some more noodling around, he went into the spiritual:

Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin' for to carry me home;
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin' for to carry me home.

I looked over Jordan,
And what did I see,
Comin' for to carry me home,
A band of angels comin' after me,
Comin' for to carry me home.

But then he abruptly changed to a faster tempo and switched to "Swing Down Chariot":

Why don't you swing down chariot

Stop and let me ride

Swing down chariot

Stop and let me ride

Rock me Lord, rock me Lord

Calm and easy

I've got a home on the other side

He got the guys to clapping by the end of that. He stopped to get his breath.

"Say, man, where'd you learn to sing spirituals?" So Matt told them he used to be a kid preacher before he ever became a man, though his beliefs had changed considerable since. "Yeah? Do a little preachin' for us."

Matt didn't need encouragement. It looked like he was just picking idly on the old Washburn, but he was collecting his spirit. Back to "Cocaine Blues." Then he began to emphasize a slightly faster bass thump. It got faster until I began to hear the melody form. He had an other-place look, like dreaming of somewhere he'd been to and expected to get to again. Like he knew his fingers were doing something that didn't necessarily really concern him. I felt the energy serpent rise in my own spine to prickle out on my neck. Matt seemed calm but his guitar took command with authority while he looked on it with the paternal interest of a sculptor on his block. He had us -- what was he going to do with that?

He began slow, low, and soft:

Glory,glory! Hallelujah!

When I lay . . . my burden down

He repeated it just a bit stronger:

Glory,glory! Hallelujah!

When I laaay . . . my burden down

Lord, I'm feeling so much better

Since I lay my burden down

Lord, I'm feeling so much better

Since I lay my burden down

All my sickness will be over

When I lay my burden down

All my sickness will be over

When I lay my burden down

All my troubles will be over

When I lay my burden down

All my troubles will be over

When I lay my burden down

Glory,glory! Hallelujah!

When I lay my burden down

By now he was putting it out there so loud it hurt my ears. We were spellbound, clapping and laughing. And then he abruptly stopped singing, but he didn't miss a beat, launching into passionate spiritual speechifying.

"We've got hard times, Lord! We've got some pretty tough times, brothers! The Rich Man is sipping fine whiskey in his house on the hill, while poor old Lazarus is working in his fields to get a little money to buy him some food to live to work another day, to buy a little wine to take the pain from out of his bones for a little while. Old Lazarus done grown old and tired, and if he gets sick and can't work no more, he's got just the mercy of Death to call him back home. And the Rich Man don't even know another good man is gone!"

"Yeah!" "Tell it, man!"

"But I tell you, God is just! The Rich Man likes his wine and his women, he likes his fine cigars. He likes telling judges and congressmen what to do with the rest of us. And most of all, he likes looking down on old Lazarus and feeling so high and mighty, and so much better than the likes of poor old Lazarus, who brings in the olives from the groves for him! Who brings in the grapes of the vinyards for him! Who picks the cotton in the sun for him! Who works in the factories and makes the steel, and who takes the steel and makes the cars, who sells the cars and makes the Rich Man richer, while he bleeds out his life trying to feed his family!

"God is not mocked, brothers! God is patient, yes, a thousand years is but a day to him, hallelujah! But judgment is coming, and it's coming like a mountain falling, and those that have not been kind to least of His, will not know kindness! They will seek to hide in the holes of the earth, and the earth will turn them out! They will dive into the sea, and the sea will spit them out! They will jump into the abyss, and the abyss will deliver them to the feet of the Lord! And they will beg for mercy, and the Lord will ask, 'On whom have ye had mercy? Had ye mercy on those I sent ye?'

"Wherefore need we worry on God's judgment, brothers? Let's us but be true to each other and live in harmony, as Jesus said. Let us share what we got, and help as we can. The rich have their reward now, but God knows how they got it! Let who labor have their earnings, and not be deprived."

And so on for quite a while. When Matt preached, he got red in the face and the veins stood out on his face. I had seen this preaching before, but Matt was especially passionate – he might be a rogue and a petty thief, but he was being sincere – and the dudes were impressed. Now he was losing steam, getting slower and gentler.

"Let us remember those the Lord hath sent with love and thankfulness. Let us remember our brother Martin, who did not shrink from danger, but gave his life for the peace and freedom of all of us. May we live to be worthy of the ransom price!"

He stopped. There really wasn't anything to say so we all just rode together through the darkness of the night, with the dashes marking the lanes whizzing under us. After about a mile, the man with the do-rag and the penciled mustache asked, "Say, you fellas hungry? We got half a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. It's kind of cold, but . . . "