Rawhide Down_ The Near Assassination of Ronald Reagan - Del Quentin Wilber [10]
Hinckley was not accustomed to such places. The twenty-five-year-old son of a wealthy oil executive, he had grown up in affluent suburbs near both Dallas and Denver. Unlike his older brother and sister, Hinckley had been an indifferent student. After graduating from high school in 1973, he sporadically attended college but never earned a degree. He enjoyed writing poems, stories, and songs; he also spent a lot of time playing the guitar but was too shy to perform in public or for his family. At twenty, he moved to Los Angeles with the intention of becoming a professional songwriter, but he failed at this, too. With little money or sense of direction, he had spent the past few months living mostly with his parents in Evergreen, Colorado, a wooded suburb just west of Denver.
But returning to Evergreen was no longer an option: a month ago, his parents had kicked him out of the house and refused to give him any more money. To finance his life on the road, Hinckley had stolen several gold coins from them and then sold most of his remaining possessions. His funds ran so low that he was even forced to pawn his guitar and his beloved typewriter for $50. He also sold most of his small gun collection—including a .38-caliber revolver, a Mauser rifle, and a .22-caliber handgun—to a man named Larry in a shopping mall parking lot.
Down to his last few hundred dollars, he decided to make a final attempt to reclaim his life by flying to Los Angeles and trying to sell some songs to music producers. He drove to Evergreen, parked his white Plymouth Volare in his parents’ garage, and asked his mother to drive him to the airport for his Western Airlines flight.
As he stepped from the car, his mother handed him $100 in cash. “Well, Mom,” Hinckley said, “I want to thank you for everything. I want to thank you for everything that you have done.” It was the kind of thing people say when they don’t believe they’ll ever see a loved one again.
When he arrived in Los Angeles, his determination to make a new start faltered. He didn’t even try to sell his music; instead, he wandered the streets of Hollywood, noticing little beyond the drunks, bag ladies, and prostitutes. That night, he had trouble sleeping, kept awake by noise from the next room and by the cacophony of Hollywood street life coming through his window.
The following morning, he pondered suicide, a subject never far from his mind. Once he had even tried to overdose on pills, but now he was imagining more creative and public ways to end his life. Recently he had become obsessed with a woman and had begun thinking about how to stage a dramatic death in front of her. He also imagined killing her and then killing himself. He couldn’t decide which scenario he preferred, but either way he realized that it was pointless to stay in Los Angeles. The woman was a college student in New Haven, Connecticut; he didn’t know whether she would be willing to see him, especially since she had brushed him off several times before. But it was worth the risk.
On Thursday, March 26, Hinckley packed his things; at eleven a.m., he walked to the Greyhound bus station. He decided to travel first to Washington, D.C.—he’d been there several times and was familiar with its downtown—and then catch another bus to New Haven. His ticket cost $117.80.
The four-day trip was a blur of fast food and brief stops: Las Vegas, Cheyenne, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh. Traveling through Utah, he awoke from a brief nap to find the bus hurtling through a massive snowstorm. He spent much of the trip slouched in a window seat, watching the scenery stream by or reading The Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger’s novel of teenage angst and alienation. He identified with the story’s main character, Holden Caulfield, but the book was also special to him because he knew that John Lennon’s assassin had pulled it from his pocket and leafed through it