USA SummEr OF 1979
We cruised along at sixty miles an hour while local country stations drifted in and out like ghosts.
It was the summer of ’79, and off we went, driving from New York to California in a 1978 Buick Century. Three long, unhurried months stretched ahead of us. We had no fixed plans except to reach the West Coast and meet up with friends of a friend we never met.
But New York was exhilarating and kept us there longer than we had planned. There was punk, neon, sweat, and rock ’n’ roll. At four in the morning, young people spilled out of bars with cigarette laughter and sleepless eyes. Devo blasted “Mongoloid”. Lou Reed sang of “Coney Island Baby”. Patti Smith, "Dancing Barefoot" at CBGB’s and Suicide’s feverish, hypnotic "Ghost Rider" pulsed through the hot, intoxicating night. Gay men and women poured into the streets and made them their own, hundreds of thousands of voices merging into one vast, colorful celebration of pride.
Between the East and West Coasts stretched 2,800 miles of endless emptiness. Wheat fields, desert, thunderstorms, and thousands of lightning strikes. Truck stops shimmered in the darkness. The summer hit of ’79, “My Sharona,” seemed to crackle endlessly from the radio. We cruised along at sixty miles an hour while local country stations drifted in and out like ghosts. A preacher from Oklahoma. A heartbreak song from Texas. A weather report from a town we'd never heard of.
Las Vegas rose like a hallucination in the desert, never really dark. Slot machines rang day and night, and gambling was the local religion. We moved through that casino stunned, under ceilings of endless glittering neon light, everything too bright, too loud, too eager, too greedy, too much. It wasn’t our scene.
And San Francisco, ah, San Francisco. Tuxedomoon in the air. “No Tears” drifting through the fog rolling down from the bay. No tears for the creatures of the night. No tears for the last romantics of the decade.
Highway One, Big Sur rolling beneath the wheels, the endless blue of the Pacific to our right, then L.A. Venice Beach was all movement and emptiness at once. Chic's “Good Times” poured from boom boxes, and roller skate and roller skate. Clams on the half shell. Bodybuilders pumping iron, sculpting themselves beneath the sun. Street prophets. Runaways. Dreamers. Strange faces, beautiful faces, lost faces. Gas-guzzling chrome monsters rolling down Sunset Boulevard, the Whisky a Go Go burning through the night, a cheap motel and another dawn.
South again to Santa Barbara, Sue and Mark, friends of a friend we’d never met, were waiting for us. They served us king crabs freshly caught by our host from the Pacific, cool bottles of Californian white wine, sea air, loud laughter, another perfect day slipping away before anyone could hold on to it. “Good times, These are the good times, Our new state of mind, These are the good times”.