driving adventures -- part 1

Some days are larded with memories.

The year was 1972. I was stationed at Castle AFB in California's San Joaquin Valley. My university friend, Stan Ackroyd, had stopped by and suggested that we should drive to his cousin's wedding in Los Angeles.

With little more thought than that, we piled into my 1967 Olds Cutlass Supreme convertible and hurdled south down Highway 99 toward Los Angeles. I say "toward" because the car did not get there.

Just south of Bakersfield and short of the much-storied grapevine, oil started forming on my windshield. My oil pump was in the midst of a major failure. But fate was partially on our side. The failure happened near the shop of a shade-tree mechanic.

He could fix the problem, but not then. He did not have the part; it would need to be ordered. It might take a week or so.

That did not deter Stan and me. Even though we were dressed in our wedding finery, we headed out to the highway hoping we could hitch a ride further south. We were lucky. A rather ratty Chevrolet pulled up driven by what seemed to us as an older guy. He was probably in his 30s.

Through a cigarette clinched in his teeth, he told us he could only take us a piece down the road. We accepted the offer -- both of us sliding across his front bench seat. After all, what could go wrong?

We exchanged pleasantries and were only a couple of miles on our way when, between swigs from a beer bottle that rested between his legs, he volunteered the fact that he had recently been paroled from San Quentin. He came home from the war and found his soon-to-be-ex-friend and soon-to-be-dead wife in bed together. He shot them dead.

Now that tale sounded a bit like a bad movie script. I did not know what to make of it until Stan used his eyes to give me the universal look-at-the-floorboard look.

Behind the driver's feet and tucked only partially under the seat was a pistol. A revolver. I cannot tell you the make, but the image of that gun is burned in my memory.

I knew Stan was thinking the same thing I was: "How do we end this journey?" We need not have minded. Within a couple of minutes, he stopped the car and informed us he was heading a different direction. We should be able to catch another ride on the freeway overpass.

And away he drove. To a bank robbery? To discipline another friend or girlfriend? I could only imagine. But he was no longer a character in the tale.

If I remember correctly, a family in a station wagon gave us a ride to the nearest little town where we bought a Greyhound bus ticket to Los Angeles. I guess we had had our share of Hitchhike Bingo.

And I have as little memory of the bus ride or where it left us in Los Angeles -- other than the young woman across the aisle from me, who was a baker's dozen of oranges short of a full crate, and insisted that President Nixon was actually Nikita Khrushchev in disguise, and wanted to share her life insights with me.

My next vivid memory is Stan and me walking through the oil fields of Los Angeles looking like two forlorn figures that had just fallen off of a gay wedding cake. Fellini could not have filmed a better scene.

We missed the wedding ceremony, but we arrived in time for the reception to dance with the bride. And that was enough for us to declare the trip a full success. I suspect both of us have been dining out on this story for years. It is one of my favorite memories.

But it does point out the oddities of how our minds store memories.

Why do I remember the chatty woman on the bus, the details of the driver who picked us up, and dancing with Stan's cousin? And yet I cannot remember any other details of the bus ride, what the rest of the driver's car looked like, or anything else about the reception?

Or how Stan and I managed to get back to Castle AFB? Or how I retrieved my Olds? I have no memories of either event.

And speaking of questions, why am I telling you this whimsical piece of fifty-year old nostalgia? Where is the Mexico hook?

I cannot answer the memory questions, but I can answer the last two. And I will later this week. It is about Tuesday -- a day that will undoubtedly be one of my favorite Mexican stories for years to come.