CHAPTER 33 -OKLAHOMA

Oklahoma- Nothing like the musical! -Paula Poundstone

After announcements in the student union, a scruffy kid climbed the stairs to the stage, took out a guitar, and tuned it. Positioning the microphone near his mouth, he sang: 

"Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes made of ticky tacky, Little boxes, all the same. And the people in the houses all go to the university, And they all get put in boxes, little boxes all the same".

He finished and we clapped. Mr. Gauld walked on stage, applauding under a corona of hair and intensity. 

"Great job!" He raised his arm for a big handshake. 

The kid shook Joe's hand and left the stage. 

"There's our Pete Seeger!" Joe extended his other arm toward the boy. "We're putting this song in the 'folk' section of America's Spirit!" Then he paused and looked over our heads like a Mount Rushmore face. 

"Do you know what this song is about?"

A few people raised their hands, but it was rhetorical. 

"The great Pete Seeger popularized this song about conformity. About mediocrity." 

Joe always tapped into some larger, inarguable truth. His words had become golden to me and my family. 

"If you go into any public school in this country, you'll meet those kids who color inside the lines! Ask them how they are, and they'll say 'fine,' but they're not. They're 'Smiling Zeros.'"  

Joe was validating the view I had had earlier on LSD. I knew in my heart that 'the system' was messed up. I also was heartbroken I wasn't making it at Hyde. I wanted to be awesome like Margot, a pretty Chicagoan with a Procol Harum t-shirt sitting beside me. She was a 'leader'. 

Margot leaned over and whispered, "Vanda, where do you go?" 

I had spaced out into a daydream about a rebellious kid I saw walking around Hyde with a buzz cut they called 'getting a buzz' and a 'Smiling Zero' placard around his neck. I felt his humiliation. I was also so glad it wasn't me. But was I next? 

"Hunh?" 

"When you space out. Where do you go?" she repeated.

I didn’t even know I had gone anywhere. I sure as hell didn't know people could see my coping mechanism. Unresolved feelings had to go somewhere, I guess.  

I zoned back in. 

"Every individual is gifted with a..." Some kids yelled, "Unique potential that defines a destiny!" 

"And that's what Hyde is all about, Joe said. "If you run away from Hyde School, you'll never make it in life because you're running away from yourself." 

Joe's verbal arrow thwocked into my heart and vibrated.  

Was that true? I tended to make Hyde right and everyone else wrong. But was this education so special that the ones who couldn't hack it, like me, would be losers forever? 

I told Mr. Hubert I wanted to 'make it' at Hyde, but that I was growing resigned about giving them what they wanted. He held my hand and looked into my eyes. "Hang in there. This is a tough place." 

Where does a kid get a sense of what's possible for his life if not from parents or teachers? Musicals, of course. While watching Oklahoma! rehearsals one day, an urge arose in me so strong I would carry it with me for several semesters: I wanted to be one of the girls in pretty dresses spinning with picnic baskets. I wanted a big, dumb boyfriend who was happy playing his guitar on the porch and eating my vittles. Yes, vittles. More than anything, I wanted out from under the expectations people had of me. I wanted anonymity. 

Maybe some vital life urge in me knew I was still all fucked up about my brother and that I'd have to fight everyone to find the space to grieve.  

Suddenly every word Joe said, instead of being a valentine for his educational vision, became a push out the door. 

On a March morning, while Maine was still wet and dark, with 30 dollars in my shoulder bag, I wrestled open the thick dormitory door. I moved downhill past the Student Union and out across the football field, then through the cross-country trails that led to a street behind a hotel near the freeway. 

This time I wouldn't be stopped. I had tried once before but a kind English teacher who lived near the freeway swung by in his station wagon. We sat and talked in his library with his wife, the school nurse. I cannot remember what we said, but he was a kind man. And he didn't rat me out like he was supposed to. 

If you run away from Hyde, you're running away from yourself! You'll never make it in life! 

That thought ran through my mind as I ran toward I-95. I crossed over the median to the side of the highway going South because who would go North from Maine? That's almost Greenland with perverts. 

Embarrassingly enough, I had Oklahoma in mind. I knew it was South, and inland quite a bit. 

I stuck out my thumb. The grand thoughts that had enchanted me and my family about Hyde, thoughts I had hoped beyond hope to align with, were moot now. I'd probably break my mother's heart, but my parents had signed a contract not to let us back into the house if we couldn't hack it at Hyde. 

I knew Hyde didn't take kids over 20, so I'd have to find a way to stay away until then. 

I tucked my chin into my turtleneck and said his name out loud into the crisp air, 

"Gauld, Gau-ld, Ga-uld"  

Brakes squealed, and a Chevy drove backward toward me. I jogged to it like my brothers had taught me, with my striped shoulder bag plopping against my 29x34 Levis. Even in all this emotional tumult, I still wanted to look cute, and I did.  

The guy pulled alongside me and opened the door. 

"Whare ya headin'?" He asked. 

"Probably Boston first! Maybe Portland. Just out of here! "I said brightly. 

We rode in a weird silence. 

"Are you a Mainer?" I checked where the door handle was. 

"Ayuh," he said, laughing like it was the funniest impression ever. There was a teeth problem I couldn't figure out in the dim light. 

"Look, he said I'll drive you to Portland, but how about a little head?"

I didn't know the term, but I knew it was sexual. I didn't answer, and we rode on, me plotting an escape within an escape. 

We pulled into a gas station. The Mainer pumped his gas and I jumped out and ran to the highway. I heard "Aw, shit" behind me and a trucker immediately stopped. We drove straight to Boston Commons.  

How the hell did we find each other back then without cell phones? Somehow, I spent that night with a friend from public high school, a tall guy with a red afro --white, like everyone from my hometown. He wrote for a subversive newspaper with a few other intelligent bad boys. They wrote about the whole fucked up Vietnam/Nixon bullshit. Now he was Ivy League. He loaned me his real backpack, happy to be aiding and abetting my escape. We were the underground, man.

I sat in Boston Commons. An Asian lady sat next to me. She told me she could read my fortune by my bone structure. 

"You have to be strong for the life you signed up for. You've already had to be strong. But be careful not to be too strong," she said, and I nodded at her profundity. 

We went to a free lunch at her 'center.' I ate as much as possible of the strange ethnic foods under the banner 'The Church of Scientology.' They wanted me to return the next day. I said I would, but I found my way to a highway on-ramp.

Another trucker drove me to downtown Baltimore which I believed still kept me on track for Oklahoma. I went into a nice hotel and found the bathroom in the lobby. In a stall, I changed into a brown velvet dress and heels I had packed. I climbed over the stall, leaving my stuff locked inside. I whipped my hair into a French twist and walked into the lobby bar. A man started buying me drinks. I helped him get drunk, retrieved my backpack, and went to his room. The following day he assumed we had had sex. That cracked me up. Except for Ralph, I was a virgin. 

Somewhere outside Richmond, VA, a tipsy salesman picked me up.  

"Just had a liquid lunch, if you know what I mean," he winked and drawled. 

"Great!" More like breakfast, I thought and settled in. Like my dad, he was the kind of drunk who drove OK. 

"My name's John, and I'm going to Greensboro, North Carolina," he said.

"I'm Mikki," I said. We lugged along in his older model sedan. 

When we were near Greensboro, John told me he would connect me with someone who could help me. We ended up at a restaurant/bar/motel in a rural area outside Greensboro. We walked into the darkened bar, and John conversed with a lady wearing false eyelashes, lots of makeup, and a high hairdo.

"Ya think you can give this cute little girl a job?" John asked.

The hairdo looked me over. 

"Maybe. You have any skills?" she asked, as if that word had long e's in it. 

"What?" I was in a foreign land.

"Have you ever... Oh, honey, skeells. Like, you know. Well, if I have to explain," she stubbed out her cigarette in a gold tin ashtray on the bar, annoyed.

My naiveté was apparent. "I don't have a lot of work skills."  

"How old are you, sweetheart?" Madame Swampthing asked with something like pity in her tone.

"17." 

"Oh. That won't work." She turned to John, who had started drinking again. 

"Do not bring me under-aged girls," she hissed in a whisper. 

"I got enough trouble with that bible-thumping cop. Won't leave me be." 

John had several more drinks before he dangled the car keys in front of me and asked me to drive him home. 

On the freeway, our CB radio began to crackle. 

"Oh, shit," John slurred. 

A woman with a very tall hairstyle in a station wagon with about five kids in the back pulled up alongside us and yelled into her CB radio.

"Johnny Johnson, explain to me who that little tramp is in the car with you!" 

"Who the hell is that?" I asked Johnny, half-asleep beside me. 

"Breaker one fucking nine. Oh please, Bernadette. S'just a young lady I'm helping find a job," he slurred into the radio. 

"One of my wife's friends. Frigging Cosa Nostra of the backwoods." 

I dropped John off at his wife and kid's place and walked back to the freeway, hitchhiking to a coffee shop. I could spend forty cents on a bottomless cup of coffee and figure out my next move.

A handsome dark-complected boy about my age came over, and we talked and flirted. He told me he was a gypsy, which was very exotic. When he had to go, we vowed to stay in touch, to write letters. These were the pre-Facebook times when a web of human contacts mattered. 

Some golfers came in and took the booth next to mine. Seeing my backpack, one of them asked what I was up to. 

I told him I was a pregnant runaway. I don't know why I added the new lie. The real reason was too complex. Plus, it was dramatic. 

They took me to some big golf to-do for the day, and I got to see the subculture of rich white NC golf, a whole thing if you don't know. 

"Maybe my secretary can help you," one of them said. We went to a pay phone to call her.

"Bring her over," she said loud enough for me to hear. 

Wanda White was single with two young girls. I was to babysit in return for a place to crash. 

"Honey, are you taking any vitamins?" Wanda asked me. "You're supposed to be having tests and things." 

I knew I was over my head. 

"I'm not pregnant," I told Wanda. 

Wanda let me hitchhike around during the afternoons as I looked for other work. 

I ended up in Myrtle Beach, staying with some girls I met at a party there. They took me to their house in Charlotte, North Carolina, not Oklahoma, but a place to stay. I called Wanda to thank her and began to work babysitting for the new family.

I was alone in the grand old Southern house with the toddler the night the gypsy boy called. I had fortunately written a letter to a friend back home with his phone number as a contact. He told me there was an 'APB' out for me. He told me to call my brother, who was weirdly at home, not college. Something wasn't right.