My Sugar Ray Caddy--dont press me about how I fixed to have it, OK?--just cruised down the highway like a Goodyear Blimp coasting on a jet- stream, or smoother. Sweet Jesus resurrected in the hot heart of New Jersey, it was pumping, and I felt like a real Joe Rock one more time with me tailfins, dual carbs, flanged skirts, five-on-the-floor (plus reverse). My Queen Bee was a chick 36x24x36, no wrinkles or objections, and she just buzzed through all them towns I knew from scrounging around to look for the Big Break or a good prospect in the blank glare of nothing but boarded up to the Kresges, flea-bag Ritz Hotels, Nedickses going sour and bedazzling insurance towers, underground parking lots, and lots of Dicks moving grubbers like me along to nowhere, back to Belleville for ding-dongs, Silver lake for wopperoos, the Oranges for tutti-frutties. Yeah, inner city clearance, except it never worked cause we'd float like bloated jelly fish back in to jam saxless like Salvation Army rejects and beat pavements and sleep on the grates caked with no happy birthday candles in our crud and fixes and fixations. See, we was cool knowing what it meant to go down and out one way alleys and never care about dead ends...

But maybe we was the living end--not you. So I ask myself, who's gone? Me, real gone, I'm accelerating, blowing out my muffler full blast across the desert left by Newark Airport traffick, and stone deaf, I breeze past the Holland Tunnel Exit, free!--past the wide open spaces of the tortured refinery to the Atlantic Ocean. Free wit next to nothing, all nada, against the skyline of oil tanks, cloverleaves and coils of pipe and smoke--where no humans need apply for habitation.

Sure, the air's like the last puke of rot-gut and grapefruit rinds you dig in tin-lid alley garbage cans. And if a bum gets that far, he's lucky to croak in the smog. But my king of philosophy makes me gun it with all my octane through the flatlands of South Jersey. Spying no alligators to see later like the ones I hear they hunt in Okeyfenokey down there in Disneyland, I just makea road straight and narrow like that night stick that prods you on.

I let my eyes roam every one in a while over a dumb-assed cow or two drooling noon away. And, before I know milk from pasteurization, I'm curdling north of Philly. I can tell cause the signs say Liberty Bell Racetrack, Historic Downtown, and in my cortex Dylan is harmonicking "With God on our Side" and I'm spitting, "bet your bombs, in the Shitty of Brothelly Gloves there's junkies and pimps for all them brothers from the Scardales and Upper Montclairs sniffing out the kind of smut the the wife and kids better not try and test for themselves."

Jumping Jack Flash! I'm beyond Fort Washington and Valley Forge, heading for Noah's Great Rainbow with my six-packs of Bud an six-guns packed among my memories in the trunk, and sure enough, it's raining on the Fat Dutch farmlands as I start to climb the Appalachians and gear my eyeballs to them mean dark tunnels in that steamy downpour. I'm slipping and a-sliding, the Caddy's one of them water-skaters I used to kill with rocks in the Mud Hole when I was a twirp and hungry, fishing for carp.

Carlisle, PA, that's a totem pole in my ear I'll never dislodge. Seems I had a blow-out at 125 mph where one crazy-horsed, tomahawking Olympian fullback grew up in spite of Kraut and Slovak tribes. But me, I was almost sent post-haste to a Sad Hunting Ground, I mean stranded without feathers to fly, and no Lone Ranger to pull me out of my ditch. So I left that pink beast for a dead duck unburied but stuck in a mountain of manure to expedite its roaming eternally on this hell called earth, and, immaculately scared shitless, I stuck out my thumb.

My first ride was a bakery truck with a queen on the make fondling four on the floor. When he made his move in a tunnel so quiet you'd never expect the backfire of any truck, I wanted to kill him. But since he apologized profusely, dripping guilt like an ice cream cone, I insisted on being dropped off at the next Ho Jo's. After flushing off that sense of scum you get from being near creeps, I hitched a ride with this toad who, from the time I settled down in his suicide seat, didn't act enough in his right mind to convince you he could push a scooter down the block. I soon discovered my paranoias was in gear when the pigs sirened him down for side-swiping at 95. Seems he was fifteen and running away from rich, fucked-up and fucking-over parents.

"And where's your home, mister"--the cop was interrogating yours truly.

It took me off my rocks-of-ages to answer cause I aint never been called that before: "Officer, I aint got none. That's why I'm here, I mean just drifting."

So they dumped me off on a turnpike ramp--before they headed for Pittsburgh where, judging from the walky-talky jive, I heard they had a helipcopter to air-lift the schook back home to some god-forsaken place they kept calling Mainline. See, it pays to be the delinquent brat of an Appellate Court Judge.

Meanwhile, I was cut loose again, as luck had it without implications.

"Thank you, officers, good day, I says nice and proper while the words in my skull was "hijos de la chingada, figli di puttana." Danged and dingled if I wasn't right about my verdict. The toll-collector spies me and shouts, "hey!, dude, the last hitch-hikers in these parts waited a day or three before they got run in for loitering."