My outfit had a suicide rate that was higher than the casualty rate of most combat outfits in time of war. And it wasn't just the young kids who "took the pipe." Old, balding sergeants would somehow get sort of listless, and then you'd hear, unofficially, that they'd put a bullet behind their ear. You never heard a word officially, of course, not even a notification of the funeral service. It didn't fit the public image the Air Force wanted everybody to believe in.
Soon, you learned to hate the bastards.
The hate I'd felt for years for the organization that had kept me in useless bondage had become a bigger part of my life than I had imagined, and now that those bonds were finally parted, I was left with a vast hollowness inside of me.
I'd sold off almost everything I owned except my camping gear. Even my uniforms were gone, which wasn't precisely legal since I was still supposed to be a member of the inactive reserves. But I didn't have any family or anyplace to send that junk for storage, so if I couldn't fit it into my saddlebags, I couldn't see keeping it.
I really didn't know
what
I wanted, but I had a strong handle on some negatives. Like I never wanted to see another officer again in my life. Mostly, I needed to get way far away from petty rules and silly regulations and people who outranked me, which in the Air Force was just about everybody.
I wasn't the kind who got promoted.
My BMW sort of automatically took me to the Mass Pike and just as naturally pointed west, which was fine. There isn't much east of Massachusetts that you can get to on a bike.
Well. My motorcycle was paid for. My savings and accumulated leave added up to just under $2,000.00. It was springtime and figured I could live for six months without the need to reconnect myself to society. Then, maybe I'd go back and finish my degree. Or maybe not.
The Mass Pike dumped me onto the New York Thruway and a green-and-white sign read "Rochester—231 Miles."
That got me thinking about Jim Hasenpfeffer, since he was working on his Ph.D. at the University of Rochester and this naturally got me thinking about Ian McTavish as well.
Actually, we never did have much in common.
Take religion.
Now, I was a defrocked altar boy whose convictions varied between my normal atheism to militant Agnosticism when I'm argued into a corner. Militant agnostics say that they don't know anything about God,
and you don't either, dammit
!
Ian was sort of conventional about religion. He always went to church on Sunday, but he never much talked about it. I think he was about the only Christian I'd ever met who was capable of being polite about religion. Or at least he was always annoyingly polite with me.
And nobody ever had the slightest idea of what—if anything—Hasenpfeffer believed in. He had this talent for sidestepping whatever he felt wouldn't be personally rewarding.
Or take women.
I always tried like hell, but never got anywhere with them. Or even when I did score, they usually didn't want to see me again the next day.
I'm pretty sure that Ian knew that women were necessary for the continuation of the species, but he acted as though they were something that a rational man shouldn't waste his time on.
Like, once I brought these two girls home because I didn't know what else to do with them. They'd been hitchhiking in Detroit, a profoundly unsafe procedure. They were very young, very pretty, and very stoned on God knew what. Ian was sitting in an easy chair, reading my
Scientific American
, when one of them latched onto his leg. She was kneeling at his feet, babbling something about running barefoot through the forest together, and sliding down rainbows.
Ian looked down from his article, said "Rainbows lack structural integrity," and went back to reading. He wasn't queer. Just sort of indifferent.
Hasenpfeffer always seemed to have a woman within arm's reach. Even baching it with us, I don't think he ever slept alone. They seemed to follow him like flies going after shit.
Or, take politics.
Back then, I was an awfully liberal Libertarian and Ian was a conservative Republican. I'm not sure, but I think Hasenpfeffer was pretty left wing.
Or take partying. I like to drink and sing a lot. Ian was an absolute teetotaler about all drugs beyond coffee. And Hasenpfeffer did moderate amounts of
everything
.
Or take sports. Or hobbies. Or damn nearly anything.
Hell, I'm six foot six and Ian was five one with his elevator shoes on.
Yet when we met in the freshman registration line at U of M, we hit it off pretty quick. Hasenpfeffer had found this huge three-bedroom apartment and was looking for two people to share expenses.
We moved in that day. Oh, it was a fourth-floor walkup and the six-foot ceilings were—for me—an absolute pain, but it was cheap and that was the deciding factor. None of us had a family to fall back on for money.
I guess we did have something in common. We were all orphans.
Ian pulled a straight four point and had no difficulty in keeping his church scholarship. Hasenpfeffer had this talent for pulling dollars out of all sorts of organizations. But I was only an average student and I wasn't much good at filling out forms and begging.
I'd used up a small inheritance by the end of my junior year, and joining the Air Farce seemed like a better shot than getting drafted into the Army. They put me through a year of electronics school and then had me spend three years pretending to fix computers under this mountain in Massachusetts. They'd never even let me ride on a military airplane. . . .
Towards sunset, looking up old friends seemed like a good idea, and my bike made a right turn into Rochester, a strange little town.
The locals claim that the engineer who laid out the street plan was drunk for eight weeks before he drew the first line, but I knew better. It takes large groups of people working earnestly together to do something that stupid.
The arithmetic average of the number of streets coming into an intersection is probably somewhere around four, but the modal number is three, with the next most likely number being five and after that seven. The whole town is like a quilt made by crazy old ladies out of random polygons. There's even one frightening crossroads called 'Twelve Points." No shit.
Right downtown, doubtless by accident, there are these two streets that cross at almost right angles, although one of them changes its name in the process. This oddity so astounded the locals that they built this big office structure there and called it "The Four Corners Building."
I passed it seven times trying to find Hasenpfeffer's address, and it was pretty late when I finally got there.
I recognized it right off when I saw it. It was exactly the sort of place he had to live in. It was an ancient clapboard mansion that had long ago been converted into housing for the perpetually poor class, students. It was painted barn red and had a yellow external staircase with fully eleven odd-angle turns in it that led up to the sixth-floor attic. I didn't have to read the mailboxes to know that Hasenpfeffer had to live on top. He was home, and—A Wonderment!—was actually alone, bereft of all female accompaniment.
"Well, Tom. The parallelism of truly linked souls." Hasenpfeffer hadn't changed much. The same blue eyes, blond hair, and straight features. Only now he had a full beard, his hair brushed his shoulders, and he no longer belonged on a poster advertising the Hitler Youth Movement. Instead, he was ready to compete in a Jesus Christ Look-Alike contest.
He was wearing this yellow scholar's robe with a garish collar.
"Huh?" My first comment to him in four years, barring a few letters.
"Your motorcycle. I saw you pull up. I have one just like it, but without the Ranger faring." He stood up and twirled to show off the gaudy cadmium yellow circus tent he was wearing. It had two broad strips of bright blue velvet running up the front, over the shoulders, and then meeting at the back of this oversized hood. Not that he could have put up the hood, since he wore this black tam-o'-shanter with a gold tassel.
"What do you think?"
"They make you wear that all the time, or just when you're on duty?"
"None of the above. I'm getting my doctorate in Behavioral Psychology tomorrow. That
is
why you came, isn't it?"
"Well, no. Just passing through. But I'll stick around if you want."
"You are out of the Air Force?"
"Yeah."
"Any plans?"
"Uh, none, really." I didn't think that he'd understand about officers.
"Excellent! Then we can leave in two days."
"Leave? Where are we going?"
"No place in particular. I have a Department of Defense grant to study social interactions within motorcycle gangs. That's how I bought the BMW. Forming our own gang will be much pleasanter and safer than trying to join the Hell's Angels."
Great. Me they stuff under a mountain. For him, they buy a motorcycle.
"Hell, why not?"
"Excellent! Ian will be with us, at least at first."
"Ian McTavish? What's he doing with himself?"
"He got his bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering two years after you left, and a second one in World History at the same time. He has been working for General Motors ever since. He has three weeks vacation due him, and we're to pick him up in Michigan this coming Friday."
"Great. Who else?"
"No one. Just the three of us."
"So three people constitute a motorcycle gang? I mean, if you've got this paper to write . . ."
"I can pad it out a bit. No one reads these DOD things anyway."
Hasenpfeffer lent me a tie and made me wear it to the graduation ceremony. I thought it looked funny with a T-shirt and a leather jacket, but it was his show. It was about six hours of boring people proving how boring they could be, and after all that, they didn't even give him his diploma, just a blank roll of paper. The real one was to be sent later. Much later, as it turned out.
The party afterwards was worse than the ceremony itself, with all the grads and their families standing around while the professors came in, "made an appearance," and left as soon as possible.
I'm patient enough to put up with things like that for old friends. Once in a while. At least I didn't have to stand in formation.
In the course of the day, about a dozen slender young women came up to say goodbye to Hasenpfeffer. They each got a smile, a hug, and some vague promises about seeing each other again. He politely introduced each of them to me, but it seemed that I wasn't somebody that they wanted to meet. They each left as soon as possible.
That night and the next morning, we got all his stuff packed and a moving company hauled most of it away for storage. A half dozen more girls came by for their goodbye kisses, and one of them spent the night with him. He actually invited the last two of them to spend the night, but with me, since he was already occupied, but they developed pressing engagements elsewhere. They both left at a dead run, although one of them stopped to see if I was following, and to pick up a rock.
The two of us were on the road Friday morning at ten with a clear blue sky above us.
We took the short cut through Canada, and 401 is a good place for road bikes. I was glad that Hasenpfeffer had bought a BMW because people who own them don't much like rolling with those who ride all the lesser breeds.
It's not that we're uppity, so much, though pride has a certain amount to do with it. It's just that a BMW is about the only machine that can go on forever without breaking down. I had to stop running with a buddy in the service because his Honda had an average of three mechanical problems a day, and that sure ruins a trip.
But with good machinery between our legs, we knew that there wouldn't be any holdups, so we could afford the time to make about four beer stops and load up on that fine Canadian brew. I never could figure out how one people could make such great beer and such lousy cigarettes.
We got to Ian's condo that evening. It was quite a place, with carefully tended gardens and an impressive entranceway. It looked as though GM was doing well by our boy. The living room was spacious and nicely furnished with Danish Modern stuff. Indeed, it looked a lot bigger than it actually was. I found out the reason when I sat down. The furniture was tiny! It turned out that he had furnished his "pad" with the three-quarter sized stuff they make to put in model homes, so they can fool people into thinking they're buying more than they're actually going to get.
It all fit Ian just fine, though, and it was his place after all. It got me to wondering if anybody made furniture to fit proper-sized people like me. Not that I could afford any furniture, much less a place to put it in.
But what wasn't undersized was Ian's motorcycle.
"Hey, you bought a Harley?" I said.
"What's wrong with buying American, Tom?" Ian said.
Ian was using my name, and Hasenpfeffer's as well, a whole lot more than he used to. Obviously, while I was gone, he'd taken a Dale Carnegie course. "How to Win Friends, Influence People, and Be A Complete Phony in Ten Easy Lessons."
"Well, nothing, when you're buying cigarettes or cars," I said. "But the engineering in that thing is forty years out of date."
"It's tried and true engineering, Tom."
"Tell you what, little buddy. I'll lend you a hand the first two times a day it breaks down. After that, you can find me at the next bar up the road."
"Have you ever considered the advantages of autocopulation, Tom?"
Back in college, I'd ragged Ian a lot about swearing as much as he did while at the same time being such a regular churchgoer. This last statement obviously represented his attempt to cut down. It didn't last.
The next morning, we were on I-75 heading north. The plan was to go to Washington State by way of Minnesota, head south through California, and then get Ian home in three weeks by way of Louisiana.
By noon, we were off the expressways. We didn't plan to use the Interstate system all that much. The best way to travel while on vacation is get a map, figure out where you are, and where you want to be that night. Then you draw a straight line on the map between those two points. After that, you try to stay as close to that line as possible while staying on paved roads. This gets you into the country, where things can get interesting. The expressways are efficient, but they're also boring.