The Devil made me do it.

It was one of those nights when the gang got together and made up an idiotic game challenge. The loser of the dice toss had to do or respond to the challenge. Ingrid chose the challenge that night, and I lost the dice toss. Ingrid smiled, and then she challenged me to list all the addresses and cities I had lived in during the 1960s.

I had to labor over it. I came up with over thirty in the six years since leaving my parents’ home. I did not count serial inhabitance – I moved in and out of the same properties countless times, as I went to and fro. The Folkie Palace on Boston’s Beacon Hill most frequently, but it received only one notice on the list. Sometimes I was running from or to something or someone. Usually, I was seeking a change. As we said, cogitating my veritabilities or taking a loose alternative. I was constantly in transit.

I was embarrassed. Ingrid was aghast. She had spent her entire life within fifty miles of the city in Maine, where she had grown up. She asked me what I remembered most about them. Not much, I confessed. The memories were of the journeys between locations. Of ” Moving to and fro in the earth and up and down in it.”

“So now you identify with the Devil?” she quipped. “No, not exactly. It’s just a good response to people when they ask you where you’ve been traveling.”

“The real moving experience isn’t where you wind up. It’s how you get there, and why you went. And most times you find out that the new place is not much better than the old one.”

She looked at me, “Take me with you next time!” sure said I. “I’m leaving for Boston tonight, be here by midnight, I’ve got a ride for us as far as Kittery. Boston’s only an hour more if we get some good rides. But be here on time, we won’t wait.”

Lots of people fall in love with the “mystique” of the road. They imagine all sorts of revelations, spiritual renewal, adventures, and dangers. We, Pius Itinerants, road bums, travelers, indigents – choose your term for us – encourage this idiocy. We stand about accepting the free drink, toking on the pipe, or the admiring look. We drag out that half-truth tale of that hell ride through West Virginia with the bunch of rednecks. And then we intimate that there is so much more beneath the surface. Sometimes we even believe our own lies.

We avoid talking about the culinary treats of canned beans warmed over a trash-fed fire, or the dirty bathrooms in dirty gas stations in towns that barely have a name, or stops by the side of the road when some local Officer Opie decides that his shift is too slow and harassing you offers a bit of fun.

Then, when you stop and take a job to earn a stake for further travel, it’s the worst one available, literally the crumbs off the table, and you’re grateful to get them. As often as not, that’s the real “mystique” of the road. Who was that jerk who wrote “On the Road”, Jack something or other? What about the movies…that lovely music in the background, the vistas of mountains? What the hell were they smoking?

Ingrid was late. Having thought about it, I regretted my casual agreement to take her. Terry and I pulled out just a moment after midnight. We waved to Ingrid and honked the horn as we went past. Terry asked if we should stop, and I said no. Maybe I shouldn’t have refused to pick her up. I don’t know.

That trip, I wound up taking several detours through Michigan, into Canada, and then to the Gaspe before returning to Maine. I played insome coffeehouses, told a lot of tall tales, met a cute girl who I almost stayed with, but left because her brother objected strongly to his sister being with a “heathen” who did not belong to the “church.” Eventually, later in the year, I wandered back to Maine.

Next time I saw Ingrid she dumped a cake, icing and all on my head, called me a bunch of names, and kicked me in the shins. I suppose I should have taken her with me?

Daily writing prompt

Write about a time when you didn’t take action but wish you had. What would you do differently?

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