CONVERGENCE. CHANGE. YET MORE of the same. More of the same.
I’m not sure when I decided to stay in California—probably long before Grandpa Wapinski and I even left Mill Creek Falls. I stayed at Bobby and Sara’s, at first, taking care of Josh while Bobby and Sara went to Yosemite and then on their raft trip down the Stanislaus, which after his fall into the San Antonio took giant coglioni on Bobby’s part. I put Pewel on a 707 for Philly. Miriam and Doug had split from the reception after some snide comments. I didn’t see them again for years. Pewel said he could make it back on his own but I called Annalisa—I couldn’t call Linda with her having filed for divorce—and she and Edward picked him up in Philly. I didn’t have the Harley; no wheels, little cash, few needs. I slept in the office-mobile for a while then split for Frisco.
More of the same. Dives. Flophouses. Panhandling. Temporary jobs, dope, booze, some loose ladies who seemed to love me beyond reason. Crash. Withdrawals. Extended drugged states. Occasionally I cleaned up, sobered up, went up to San Martin, visited Bobby, Sara and Josh. Talked about his grandfather mostly. Or about the farm.
It was more of the same through the summer of Watergate and into the Gerald Ford period, which was both the sickest and the healthiest time in American history. Sickest is easy to understand, eh? But healthiest? Watergate renewed my faith in America, in our system of government. The system worked. That the individuals, principals, involved were scuzzballs makes it, the workings of the system, all the more impressive. Had we been a benevolent dictatorship, or had ethnic, racial, economic or social divisions dominated our governmental or cultural system, America would have come unglued. Put to the acid test, it was only deeply scarred: an incredible demonstration of strength.
More of the same, too, for Ty. He didn’t see the system work. He saw an old system reemerging, a system of bigotry. One of the shrinks later said he thought Ty had set himself up for all the accidents—eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth type thing—by participating in mutilations in Viet Nam and Cambodia. When I first heard that I thought it was an earthenware vessel of excreted by-product, but after ... I wasn’t sure.