Hitchhiking, in any day and age, is dangerous. Maybe it was safer in the 50s, but it certainly wasn’t safe in the 60s and 70s. My first trip was in 1969, about 150 miles north from Urbana, Illinois to Chicago with my first lover. But most of my hitchhiking was solo. Why? Poverty.  

In the cold of February 1972, broke, I left an unfaithful lover, hitchhiking from Spokane, WashingtonChicago, Illinois in 24 hours.  In 1973, I had little money but acceptance at Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Middlebury, Vermont. Chicago to Vermont, round-trip, hitchhiking.  That year I had a ride from Chicago to Santa Monica, California then hitchhiked to Spokane to get my personal belongings from the man I had left, then hitchhiked back to Chicago again. I think after I graduated from grad school in Vancouver, Canada, I may have hitchhiked from Vancouver to San Francisco. One of the longest trips was with the love of my life, a guitar player, from San Francisco to New Orleans and back. home to

Many times while hitching solo, I asked to be let out of a car. I soon learned to ask the driver to exit the highway at the off-ramp, then leave me on the opposite on-ramp, where it was safer to hitch from. 

One time in California, a man kept pestering me about my ideas. I soon realized where he was going, so I highlighted my poverty: working my way through high school and college; unable to buy new jeans, go to rock concerts or do many drugs because of work schedules; and my large family and father working two jobs – any and everything to counter the anger he expressed towards middle-class people. Years later, a newspaper reporter interviewed a California man in jail for murdering hitchhikers. The killer described who he targeted: spoiled middle class women in their 20s.

When bothered, I asked to be let out quickly. A few times I said I carried a knife. On the trips from Spokane through cowboy country, I talked about a brother-in-law who had won a prize as best rodeo guy…. That was true and calmed quite a few truck drivers down. 

Once, with the guitar player, we were hitchhiking and I had gone to the washroom at a gas station and returned. My lover kept saying we should leave…. Finally I gave into him and we asked to be let out on the road. It had taken my friend a bit of sparing with me to get me to agree, since the trucker was going all the way to New Orleans. Once the truck was gone, my friend yelled at me. ‘Don’t you ever doubt me again! You should have seen the pictures that guy showed me!’ 

‘All guys have porno magazines,’ I said in protest.

‘Not porno, mutilation.’ 

‘Mutilation? Women tortured and killed?’ I asked.

‘YES! What do you think he had in mind?’

But life on the road wasn’t always like that – although I did learn hitchhiking through Texas that most every Texan carried a gun. 

In 1973, hitchhiking to Vermont, in beautiful, forested and mountainous upper state New York, I was disappointed. An entire military convoy was passing by. No possible rides there. To my surprise, a lieutenant in a car stopped.  Being from opposite ends of the Vietnam War, we exchanged ideas about sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll and Vietnam. When he confided he was thinking of resigning as a point of honor, I said, ‘How can someone who kills have honor?’  He explained his situation. When I left, we both had been educated in a way no other encounter could have taught us.

With more than 15,000 miles hitchhiking in the USA, I had met many wonderful people who had opened their hearts and homes to me. I contemplated this phenomenon. I finally concluded that a passing stranger is safe to reveal and examine secrets with because the stranger doesn’t know anyone involved, and will be gone – kinda like a moving confessional priest.

Once overseas, with Media America and its upper-middle-class advertising image broadcasted around the world, I have been grateful for those hours shared with ‘regular folks’.  Sometimes, when I would become entranced with Media America, I reminded myself of these experiences, and reaffirmed the fact that Media America was not Real Life America at all.

Sadly, once in France, still feeling guilty about Vietnam in 1985, a German explained, ‘Any country with the power that the USA has would do the same. It’s the government, not the people.’  

I responded, ‘We’re taught from childhood civics classes, ‘Government of, by, and for the people.’

Now with Iraq on, it is much more obvious that the government is not of, by, or for the people. Why? Follow the money…… 

Every war enriches the rich, and kills, maims, destroys and harms the poor.

I think we need a war on arms manufacturers – like what we have started with cigarettes. We can aim at the two countries which benefit the most from making and exporting killing machines: the USA and Canada.

Peace & Love,
Zola

PS: I really don’t know how I got from hitchhiking to the above last sentence! I guess the Vietnam-Iraq War tie-in did it….

PPS:  I’ve been thinking…. With an all-volunteer military, the 3% who govern the 97% of Americans insured there would be no media-embarrassing anti-war demonstrations. The poor are already in the army, and the middle-class and middle-class wannabes are in-debt for life with college loans. Pretty good planning on the part of that dangerous, secretive, plotting, conspiracy-making 3% who own the means of production.

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It's pretty outrageous! Friends said I was a 'great' writer, and this reviewer agrees!

See ya,

Zola 

Zola, dear--finished Ch. 2. Zola loses again, eh? As I was reading, I realized that I had heard about that guy before - in a couple of your letters in 1981-82.You were much harsher on him then than in 1980 when you buried him in the Poet's Corner, although he was not a poet.

Some observations--not judgments--regarding Ch. 1 & 2, generally speaking, the reader might at first sympathize with Zola's tribulations with her lovers, but I can understand how someone might think that  by the end of 2, Zola herself is becoming less than admirable. Her complaints in both chapters of "How can you do this to me?" could be construed as mere whining. What has she done to warrant her not  being treated with great respect? Not only has she been screwing Mick and Shawn during the same  period (if I understand the narrative correctly) but she also has been promiscuously screwing a plethora  of nameless and faceless and undistinguished one-night-stand at the same time. The word "whore"  might come to a reader's mind. (Did you intend such a meaning?). Why does she do this? Is something  missing from her life? Is she addicted to orgasm? Is it just for the hell of it?

Which brings me to the "sexual revolution" part of the title--although Zola lives during the so-called mass "sexual revolution" of American culture during the 60s and 70s, she does not mention this social phenomenon at all (so far, that is). Is the reader to infer that Zola herself is the embodiment, so to speak, of the revolution? Her promiscuity is no secret, nor does she intend it be; rather, she seems to be proud f it--as if it is some great feat, which it is not, of course, for the old in and out always has made the world go around (regardless of the collateral damage engendered by it--murder, rape, robbery, jealousy,
lust, war, lying, cheating, stealing, &c. The old Shakers had this one right.).

The reader might also wonder what Zola herself has been doing to save the world. This period is the hippy, dippy, speed freak, pot head, and flower people era when dropouts wanted peace--well, as long as they did not have to pay the price for it. Zola might want peace and the end of the threat of nuclear war  and suicide and murder, but the reader does not see her in any anti activity.

Your work is about Zola. She might be judged as being,among other things, superficial and selfish and pessimistic and disingenuous at various times--not a perfect person at all, as no one is, certainly, but she is not an evil person in any sense or insensitive. If I may borrow a line from LONESOME DOVE, she  is just  trying to make her way through the territory, but she has to pay the price for hooking up with the  wrong people and making bad decisions.

I suspect that you would not mind if the reader were sympathetic to Zola, even to the point of being empathetic. What did you have in mind regarding the reader's perception of her? What do YOU think about her?

Her mentioning writing poems and stories and her ability to make sophisticated allusions and her great desire to get a high level education contribute to her being far more than an airhead sexual revolutionary. She is intelligent, so the reader must hope that she will find what she needs.

Please regard all this as possible interpretations for you to consider. Of course, you cannot change the  work now, nor should you. Zola is well done, whether anyone likes her or not. I am very curious about her
character in the other chapters.

Peace and love always,
Friend in Georgia

By the way, you wrote in a letter dated Dec. 1, 1981 that you had just begun Ch. 3 and that you had planned at least 12 chapters for the book! That was 26 YEARS AGO!

I am still mulling the narrator's direct address to the second person who is not there and must rely, so
to speak, on the memory and integrity of first person Zola.

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You're right, Zola is a nut case. Dysfunctional family. How can one talk about a period of history when the period hasn't been named?  Promiscuity was a very BIG part of the so called sexual revolution. If there had been no birth control pill - you can be sure I'd not have said YES as often as I had done. The same for most women, I think, at least those of us in college back then.

Once I realized the idiot in Chpt 2 shot himself up with a drug, I should have dropped him then and there, but youthful love-hormones are incredibly blind. I would have saved myself from my own stupidity and not allowed an idiot to hurt me.

 And no, she didn't screw them both at the same time.... she didn't screw Chpt 1 until Chpt 2 guy said he was going to Vietnam.  Maybe later... but in the beginning, Zola did have some morals. Then she got addicted to orgasms, the conquest, the adventure of traveling in a man's mind. Alcohol, marihuana and even LSD - the guys used to seduce her too.....

 Heck she had a great body! The campus had three guys to every woman! Men, to me, were like the Ocean was to Columbus and hundreds of other explorers. I really did grow up with only six sisters and an absent father who was around enough to scar me. Natural curiosity about men lead me into some sordid situations.

How'd you like the end - when the guy ends up with a low-IQ woman? I thought that was hilarious, personally.

Yes, I really value your comments. You're helping me prepare for criticism from people who don't know me and won't be as kind as you.

See ya,

Zola