Last Chance Texaco by Rickie Lee Jones

Author:Rickie Lee Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2021-04-15T18:46:53+00:00

Chapter 12

Surfer Girl on the Waterbed

Julie and Bruce

Ienrolled in Olympia Vocational Technical Institute where kids who were kicked out of school got their GED or learned a trade. Once I passed my GED, I enrolled in Tacoma Community College, making me the first of my entire high school class to go to college. My brother bought himself a cabin, so we Jones women moved in with him. All of us girls in one bedroom, Dan in the other. I had a horse, there were chickens and a rooster (until we ate him), and I was thinking of myself as a kind of “back to the land” mama. The reins were looser. It was summer.

My high school buddy Bruce and his girlfriend invited me to join them on a trip to Los Angeles. Mother wisely relented, understanding my summertime wanderlust wasn’t anything she could successfully stop. At least this time I wouldn’t be hitchhiking. We started the two-day trip from Olympia to L.A. with a bag of cashews, forty-one dollars for gas, and a couple tabs of LSD. We drove twelve hours, then spent the first night in a cornfield outside of Sacramento. We woke up hungry and hot, but drove on through to San Francisco where I got a speeding ticket. On Highway 1 through Big Sur I showed them the Salmon Creek cave where I had lived. It seemed smaller now somehow.

We stopped near San Simeon (just past that hotel I had shivered outside during the summer of 1970). The sun was going down. Each of us dropped a tab of acid and I got behind the wheel to drive. Soon I was flying over the two-lane Ventura Highway. Hey, were we actually flying? The roads seemed like ocean waves. I can still see the face of the driver in the oncoming lane, frozen in terror. Was I driving wrong? Sixty miles per hour, that was normal, wasn’t it? Bruce said, “Pull over.”

Well, shoot. I had my driver’s license but I didn’t recall anything in the test preparation about LSD. Once again, everyone was pissed off about my driving, and again I was unceremoniously dropped off, but this time I was at good old Seal Beach. I’d find Seebu and Tina and we would be the Rickie-Tina-Seebu combo once again. Here I was with nowhere to go, no money, and an LSD-warped reality. Rickie’s home!

I knocked on Seebu’s motel door and said, “Surprise!” She had not seen me since the day I disappeared from Seal Beach on my way home from her house. I wondered what she knew about my travels. I told her that I’d gone up to Big Sur but I didn’t tell her everything, not yet. Seebu was happy to see me. She took me to Jay’s house, he was one of three sailors who lived by the beach. One of the guys was deployed on a submarine, so I could take his place for awhile. Jay looked after me like a brother for most of the summer.

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