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Skippy and Lou were 2up on his big Honda, they were 10 weeks into the trip and that summer of 1977 they would put over 15,000 miles on the bike. They were bone tired of the road. Skippy and Pooler had been climbing mountains in New Mexico and Colorado, in Wyoming and Utah. So everyone was tan and thin and all of us had yellow hair bleached by a long summer outside. When you cross the continent on a motorcycle you get to be "outside" a lot. This was their 3rd year crisscrossing the continent. Skippy and Lou spent 102 days of each year living off the motorcycle somewhere in North America. Friends had died during these years. Everyone on earth got divorced. Skippy was 33 - his Cristos Annum - Lou was 23. The last summer - the Bicentennial year - they had traveled in the south and Skippy clipped a leave off a Banyon Tree which Hemingway had planted in his back yard in Key West. His Zen-Task was to save that leave for a year and then take it on the road with them to Idaho and then burn the leaf over Papa's grave. He did too. That's the kind of life they lived on the big Honda - a pilgrimage to Kit Carson's grave outside the Pueblo in Taos. Spending the day stoned in the Redwood forest watching a slug the size of a cat creep across a track in the woods. Outrunning waterspouts on the long causeway across the Ponchartrain. And then we watched another biker die right in front of us on 7-7-77 the luckiest day of the century. He drowned in the Colorado after jumping off his Harley Sportster, stripping off his clothes and leaping in the river. This is in Cataract Canyon in Utah. He never came up. All of us just stared - for most of the day - at the spot in the river where he went down. So by August 16th, Skippy and Lou were turning a corner on the continent and heading home. They were crashed in the Capri Motel in Avoca, Iowa when the News Nazis on the TV busted into the game show and said that Elvis was dead.
The next day they made it as far as Concordia, Kansas. And only as far as Hebron, Nebraska the day after that. Skippy was fighting an inner demon which wanted to turn towards Memphis and go to the funeral of the King. They needed a decision before Omaha. The days were hot, grey, muggy and America can be ugly on day's like that. Elvis was a Joke at the end. But not at the beginning. In 1956 Elvis Presley was the only evidence at all that god still liked us a bit 'cause he let the devil give us Elvis. Then came Kerouac & Lenny Bruce and Skippy was a Lost Boy before he knew it. He became a culture vampire, hot to suck the waning lifeforce out of the cold, grey, mask of everything with any tradition. Anomie, Durkheim called it, the process by which a civilization loses its soul and all of its culture forms and institutions are degraded and depreciated. It's when all the Rules are thrown away. Elvis was an Archangel of Anomie. By the 60s, he didn't matter and like Hemingway had become a poseur of himself, a mirror-image whose only intention is to copy the world across from it. By the end of the 60s nothing much mattered at all anymore. Skippy missed the turnoff in Omaha to Memphis and he took that as an Omen. At the end of that summer Skippy sold the bike. America was losing all of its Spirit and Skippy cast his eyes back across the cold, grey Atlantic to Europe, the bloody continent of his youth.
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