
“We Are the Innocent- We Are the Damned” -Ronnie James Dio
I woke up with a cop shining a flashlight in my face. I blinked at him for a second then nudged Jay, who sat straight up.
As cops go, he was cool. He looked relieved. “In my line of work,” he told us, “you’re happy when you see something like this and it’s not a couple of bodies.” We’d had a hard time trying to find a place to sleep, given up, and crashed on a sidewalk in an alley behind a strip mall.
He asked my name. I gave him a fake one, but I told the truth about everything else. I was 15. Jay was 21, he wasn’t my boyfriend, just a buddy.
He didn’t arrest us, just told us we really needed to find another place to sleep for the night. We’d already been caught snoring in some lounge chairs by a hotel pool and been shooed off by an angry manager.

We went to a hotel lobby that looked deserted and crashed on the sofas. It took a whole fifteen minutes for them to find us and kick us out. We went to another hotel and I crashed on the vending room floor while Jay took a dip in the jacuzzi- and was caught by a female security guard, who was cool but kicked us out all the same. I was annoyed with him at that point. I’d been relatively comfortable crashed out between the soda machine and the coffee machine. He could have just gotten himself caught and came back to get me later instead of leading her to me as well, goddammit.
There was nowhere left to go. We ended up on the sidewalk right in front of the Hyatt, heads on our duffel bags, asleep again.
Although I was really fucking sick of being woken up, I didn’t mind so much this time as money was being waved in my face. “I just hate to see people living like this,” the yuppie said, and gave us ten bucks. Suddenly, we were wide awake. Money= food! Breakfast!

We found a lovely little cafe, ordered coffee, and enjoyed the comfortable atmosphere. The hostess/ owner was a charming middle aged woman with a soft voice and wavy gray hair.
I had a bear claw. It was the most delicious thing I’d ever eaten in my life at that point, and to this day, I have a soft spot for bear claws.
As we walked across the brick street, something caught my eye. It was a five dollar bill. This day was shaping up nicely. We walked down the strip and were confronted by a jovial old man who decided to take us to McDonalds.
We had a lovely meal and a great conversation. Well, Jay yacked it up most of the time- I was much more absorbed in my egg mcMuffin sandwich (and yes, I still love those things). We said our goodbyes and were walking down the strip again when Jay decided to bum a smoke.

“Hey, man, you got a cigarette?”
“I got somethin’ better,” said the everyman, and handed him a joint.
He smoked it behind some tamarisk trees by a once- fancy 50’s shaped apartment complex.I tried to take a hit, but (laugh all you want) at that point I wasn’t very good at inhaling.
We spent the rest of the day walking about ten miles from west Palm Springs to the east side of Palm Desert. It was dark when we got to Nectar and Bailey’s.
Nectar was a sweet hippie girl who let us stay the night. We listened to Dio while the ultra- Christian Jay lamented that he loved those guys “way too much.” He was concerned about how Satanic Dio supposedly was- I wasn’t concerned at all.
Nectar gave me some small black hoop earrings since I’d been afraid of my piercings closing up. Jay got mad at me for asking. “That should be the least of your worries,” he said. Nectar and Bailey didn’t notice as they were making shroom tea and tending the healthy marijuana plant on the back porch.
“You don’t have to buy them, you can pick them on the golf courses,” Bailey said of the mushrooms. He showed Jay what to look for so he wouldn’t poison himself.

We made a day of it. I ended up carrying all Jay’s shit and muttering under my breath while he collected mushrooms from the endless green lawns.
We went to Jay’s girlfriend Sandy’s house where he cooked up his own shroom tea. Her friends were trying to convince her that I was bad news for their relationship. In fact, I wasn’t attracted to him at all- he was really fucking annoying for being such a good friend- and he’d talked about nothing but Sandy from the beginning. Nevertheless, she was freaked out and indecisive. She was still nice to me, though.
Unfortunately her dad was a cop, not a dumb one, and not a cool one. “you’re a bum, I don’t like you- and I have a feeling you’re a runaway,” he told Jay and I, respectively, after we’d spent the night. We fled.

We spent the following evening where we’d met, Jay and I, in Taquitz Canyon. We sat on the boulders listening to the water flow by, the wind in the trees, and the occasional frog.
Jay sipped his shroom tea. “Want some?”
I took a couple of gulps. It gave me a little buzz, but Jay was much more affected.
“It’s like there’s a little man inside my head going ‘hummmmmmmm…’”
I slept soundly on my boulder, wearing all the clothes I owned. It was a little chilly for a Southern California spring.
I always look back on this time of my life wishing I could go back. Even if we had nothing but the clothes on our backs, I’d never felt so free, or so care- free, before or since. When you’ve stripped down to nothing but the bare elements, it’s amazing what you don’t have to think about any more. I could have lived on the streets like that forever, as long as I had Jay looking out for me. But I probably wouldn’t, always. I would have probably ended up on my own in a dangerous world (like I did about a year later in Canoga Park) if I hadn’t been caught and dragged home to my parents a couple of weeks later. Still, I remember that ultimate freedom and enjoy the memories. I miss Jay and his high- fives and cheesy humor.
“Wow,” he said to me one day, “My hair is getting heavy.” He sported a long, curly, very distinctive blond mop.
He paused, then said, “At least I’m not light- headed!” He laughed himself to tears and gave me a high- five. “That was a good one!”
Yeah, I miss that guy.
Damn, I was a fucking moron.
