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By Root 319 0

little body. At the farm we didn’t have running cold water, let alone running hot water. That and our inadequate insulation and heating made bathing rare. Occasionally we’d get the stoves roaring, heat up a lot of hot water, and do sponge baths, but it was a lot of hassle and didn’t really do the trick anyway. Usually we did without and got pretty filthy. I didn’t mind it much. It seemed like a healthy alternative to the spick-and-span neurosis of a shower every day, if not twice, plus underarm deodorant, etc.

I had always figured that if there were a plague that was going to sweep over the world, it would come out of some citadel of modern medicine, a place where the selective evolutionary pressure was so tough on germs that a superstrain would evolve that sulfuric acid couldn’t touch.

But then there was this thing in my crotch. I called it my pet. I had had it off and on for years. I guess it was a fungus of sorts. It didn’t do much except itch occasionally. When it got out of hand I’d sock it with a little iodine or Desenex until it straightened out. But for some reason I never killed it off completely. Virginia never picked it up, so I figured it wasn’t very contagious. Perhaps I was the only place where this thing could live and I didn’t want to add to the long list of things made extinct by man. You could say I was sentimental about it.

Another place I might have bred a nice enough plague was in the mouthpiece of my saxophone. Sometimes it was years between washings. All sorts of cute little things grew there.

I turned on the water as hot as I could stand it and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed. No filthy hippie me. Good-by old dirt, good riddance. A fresh start, a new me. Clean, superclean. How nice to be in the shower and not worry about Auschwitz.

I used up what I figured was my seventy-five cents and got out, dried myself, looked in the mirror, and noted that a little weight was coming back.

Clean, clean, clean. Feeling good, good, good. Clean me, clean clothes. Driving out to good old Joe and Mary’s in good old Car Car, taking each hill as it comes, each curve as it comes, in tune with the car and the road as much as with the boat and the lake. One foot in front of the other, simple, so much fun. How many other people ever really drive a car? I mean really drive a car or really steer a boat or really, I mean really, really eat an egg or prune a tree or take a shower or eat a steak sandwich? Lucky, lucky me. What a swell planet.

Up the hill and down the hill, shifting just right, so as not to screw my clutch. It was the clutch more than anything else that made driving Car Car an art. One foot in front of the other, the secret of making my car go. The secret to my getting out of the nut house. It’s so simple, such a gas, and it works, works, works. No reason for people to be such jerks, jerks, jerks. No reason for wars, either. If everyone would just catch on to this one foot in front of the other thing maybe the shit would just stop happening. Maybe, maybe, maybe. Who can say? Crest and surge and shift and turn. “There’s the VW bus. That must be the place.”

DINNER, ETC. I liked staying with Joe and Mary. I usually found an evening with Joe and Mary just the change of pace I needed. I liked it for the same reasons Virginia and some of the others felt uncomfortable there. It was a vacation from hipness.

I didn’t feel at home with them as I did with hipper hippies, but there were plenty of times when I didn’t feel like feeling at home. There were times when I wanted some hot tea, central heating, electric lights, a nuclear family. Innocence. They would have hated to hear me say that and I never admitted it to myself in so many words. My feelings about Joe and Mary were just one more thing I felt vaguely guilty and defensive about. Getting away from the farm for a bit was nice. It wasn’t fear of being cut off, it was just that people, events, weather all mattered so much up there.

I didn’t want my life to be a series of evenings with Joe and Mary, I wanted the ups and downs. But it was nice to be with