Chapter 1 of Last Journey by RomTom

People loved our old Bicycle Bus. Whatever they were doing they stopped and looked when we passed by. Whatever they were saying, they stopped in mid-thought, their minds stunned. What a wonderful thing it was. So rare. So original. You know those little Golden Books for children? If someone made a Golden Book about the Bicycle Bus everyone would think it was a wonderful fiction about a fantastic impossible vehicle and the people who drove it around through forests and mountains and riverbank roads and seashores. But who could believe it was real? Well it was real. Very real. It was our life.

The bus itself was awesome, a rolling antique --a 1941 International. Very few fifty year old vehicles are used daily on the roads today. Our bus ran every day, covering prodigious miles. We drove it down the freeways of the Northwest United States, I-5, and I-90, on long hauls, often at night, when the traffic is thinner. Because the old bus is slow and easily clogs daytime traffic.

Nighttime driving was always great. There would sometimes be a small light on inside while Ellie cooked up a meal as the miles flowed past. Smells of spaghetti and trout in the evening and oatmeal or pancakes in the mornings were a part of the Bike Bus lifestyle. You could smell good cooking going on wherever we stopped.

The interior lights made a golden glow in the night. If you were to glance through the windows you would see art everywhere, covering the walls, oil paintings and photography. And books - books - books on shelves on every wall. And my wife Ellie and myself puttering around. The rear of the bus was our snug bedroom complete with 12 volt color TV and 12 volt VCR. Well built cabinets contained clothing and other belongings. The living area held a wood stove with a glass viewplate. In our magic bus we were always warm, busy, well-fed, well-read, and happy.

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By the winter of 1989 we had lived in the old Bike Bus for a little more than five years. The bus had never given us a problem we could not fix. But it was so old! And the brakes were not good. Even though I changed the brake lining and replaced the wheel cylinders there was no way to make the brakes adequate to the mountain driving we did. We learned to drive slow to keep them from heating up, especially after the rear brakes caught fire once on a steep downhill grade. A passing motorist put out the fire with an extinguisher, thankfully. Replacing the entire brake system would mean replacing all the wheels and hubs and brake innards entirely with a newer system. That would cost thousands of dollars that we didn’t have. So at the end of 1989 we looked for a new bus.

And we almost bought it too. We found a big diesel pusher highway bus for $3200 – and we had managed to save about $2800. But the guy would not let us owe him the remaining $400, which we would have surely paid. So we had to leave and drive down the road in the old bus – and wouldn’t you know it? The Bicycle Bus blew it’s engine that very day, on the I-5 freeway, just north of Roseburg. It cost $150 just to be towed five miles into the shop. And they charged us $2500 to get it running again. The Bike Bus has an old 391 cubic inch six cylinder Black Diamond Industrial Engine and the parts are very expensive. When we left that shop we were broke again. And we didn’t even have a warranty. Because we ran out of money paying them more and more. First they said it would cost $300 to fix it. Then $600. Then $1000. Then $1500. On and on. And we were stuck there. When the money was gone they said it also needed a new oil pump. I told them the money was gone. They said “too bad.” No oil pump, no warranty. The end. At least it ran well. Maybe there would be no problems…We were on the road again.

So that is where we were, in Eugene, when 1990 arrived. We’d been spending winters there for the past several years. Central Oregon is relatively warm in winter. Snow is rare. People ride bicycles all winter long, which is good, for us, since we repair bicycles for a living. If you love nature, as we do, Eugene is nice too, because it is a small city in the midst of mountains and verdant fields. Countryside and even wilderness is only minutes away from Eugene in any direction.

And there’s all kinds of things to do. I’m especially fond of the cafes that allow a person to drink a single cup of coffee and sit for hours. Impoverished students need places like that to do their homework in the company of stimulating companions. Ragtag artists need such places to get together with one another and compare riffs and metaphors and visions.

I spent many hours each day in Allan Bros Cafe typing away on my trusty little Tandy laptop at my book, “COMPORTING ROADWISE”.

Coffee shops of this sort aren’t much like the average coffeeshop you would find anywhere else. I have sat in many a coffee shop across America where they resent it if you so much as read a book while drinking coffee. The waitress comes up to you and says curtly: “This isn’t a library. Drink up and get going.” That’s what makes these Oregon coffeeshops so great. They are cultural centers where people meet each other, sometimes regularly, like every day. They’re sort of a communal living room. People did Tarot readings. People did bead work, stringing necklaces and bracelets.

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I may have stretched things a bit when I took a deerskin hide into Allan Bros and made leather bikinis. But no one said anything. I think I could have even sold one there if it hadn’t been winter.

Then one day a taxi driver saw me working on the leather and sat down and suggested I try to sell them to the strippers at the “Mustang Ranch” out on west llth avenue. I hadn’t ever been in a strip joint. Because I am not much of a beer drinker for one thing. But more to the point, it’s a different thing, being at a nudist hotsprings with people of all ages. I mean different from watching a nude girl dancing on a stage for money. The hotsprings are as innocent as a newborn babe and the bars are just bars.

Our culture is a nudist culture. At the hotsprings you don’t often see counter-culture sisters dancing nude for everyone just for the ancient beauty of it. But the beer guzzling truckers at the “Mustang Ranch” watch beautiful nude dancing non-stop. If you stop and think about it you have to accept the fact that the nude feminine dance is one of the most ancient arts of the human race. So maybe there is something good in those places. Oh well, there I went.

I took my leather bikinis over to the Mustang and was pleased when the dancers liked them. I watched them dance and got to know them. There were even a few genuine hippy ladies dancing there. No long-haired guys though. Erotic art-dancing is considered exploitive to women. But the dancers don’t think so.

The women liked turning the men on. Their eyes sparkled when they noticed that they had really struck a nerve. What an amazing artform!

“Kat” was the first dancer I really got to know well. She told me she’s been dancing for seven years, which makes her a kind of an old-timer in the business where lots of the girls are only nineteen or twenty. They are attracted by the money, the tips that men put on the stage to get a few seconds-long special dance directly in front of them: one or two dollars at a time, sometimes a five, more rarely tens and twenties. Girls at the Mustang felt good if they made a hundred dollars per night. Some extra sensual beauties had no problem doing that, maybe even two hundred. Other less-blessed cuties had to settle for a lot less.

Kat considered the sensual dance to be ancient art and she was a consummate artist. Belly dancing was her style. Her specialty is the “Dance of the Seven Veils”. She is more concerned with the artform than the money she might make. When she does the Dance of the Seven Veils she completely ignores their money -- she dances for the art itself.

I made Kat a bikini and a fur hat which she used in her act. I bought a C.D. for Kat, Toni Child’s “Union” Album. I especially like the song, “Walk and Talk with Angels”. She would dance to it. And we did a couple photoshoots.

Our best shoot took place at the Bring Beach in Springfield. That’s a hippy swimming area alongside a river behind the Bring recycling plant. The winter day was cloudy and all the plantlife was golden and dry. We had the place all to ourselves. Wintery as was the day, I wondered if there’d be much color at all. But it’s amazing how beautiful the pictures turned out.

Kat’s close friend was a fellow dancer, Mary, an eighteen year old beauty blessed with amazing sultry eyes. Mary moved into an apartment across the street from Kat so I would usually end up visiting both.

I had met Mary before -- in her home town in southern Oregon when we parked the Bike Bus there and fixed bikes. I had fixed her bike one day. She didn’t want anyone from her hometown to know she was dancing nude at the Mustang Ranch.

She was raised in a hippy-Catholic family. She told me that even when she was a little girl people would comment about how she resembles the Virgin Mary. I thought so too. Mary was full of love... And endowed with the sweetest of feminine attributes... When she was seventeen she met a boy and fell in love and got pregnant. Her Catholic step-father flipped out. He swore there would be no unwed mother in his house. He would not have his reputation sullied. He insisted that she get an abortion.

Mary had always been a dutiful and obedient daughter. This would be the first time she rebelled against her step-father. She didn’t want to get an abortion. She tried to figure out if there was any way she could find employment and support the child herself. But that’s a very difficult thing for a young girl to do without her parent’s help. And the tiny town certainly offered very few possibilities. While she searched desperately for an alternative solution the months passed. Finally there was no more time. She was already more than four months along, beyond the first trimester. Her step father ordered her to either get the abortion of leave his house forever. So she had the abortion. The baby was really too far along for an abortion. But the doctor did the abortion anyway. Afterwards the doctor made the mistake of telling Mary the child had been a boy.

All of a sudden, like a bolt of lightning from the sky, Mary realized what she had done. She had allowed them to kill her son. She was in shock. She knew she could never live in the home of her step-father ever again. He had caused her to make the tragic error. She needed somewhere else to live. So she came straight to Eugene, so sick from the abortion she could hardly walk. Still she managed to trudge down streets seeking employment. There didn’t seem to be anything but nickle and dime jobs. Then she heard about the Mustang Ranch. They hired her instantly.

At first she was modest and danced only semi-nude. But the modesty passed quickly and the panties fell to the floor. By the end of the first week she was already one of the biggest money makers in the club. So her financial worries were over. And with Kat for a friend she was doing all right for herself.

Kat was more real -- more down to earth. Mary was a little bitter and kind of self-centered. Soon was caught up in the glamour of dancing and the easy money. But all that is forgivable considering what she’d been through.

I did my first photos of Mary in Kat’s apartment. A few days later I did some in Mary’s apartment. Then we went down to the river that runs through the center of Eugene. There’s some wooded areas that are beautiful and secluded from prying eyes.

Mary was brave. Derelicts often slept and drank their wine in those woods. We had a couple of them come upon us during the shoot. Mary crouched into a blanket and waited for the guy to leave. We vibed him away. I felt sorry for him. Imagine that poor man, so down and out -- and there in front of him appears an exquisite nude eighteen year old girl, and he is expected to turn and go away. Poor guy. He sure got the short shaft in life.

Some joggers noticed us too. Again Mary crouched and waited until they left. We were inside Eugene’s largest public park, just a stone’s throw from the paved bike trail. Yes. I’d say Mary was brave. And impish too. She giggled and made faces when people noticed her nude. Man she was cute. We did several rolls of film that day. We brought along Kat’s CD player and I also did some videos of her dancing in the woods. Later I edited the video in slow motion and set it to music.

The morning I photographed her I woke her up early. That eighteen year old hippy sister was sure all woman. Dancers work late and their muscles get sore. She they appreciate good body massage. I gave her a complete massage that morning to wake her up.

She’s such a small town girl. Her smile is simple and kind. But she has a serious side too, because of what happened to her. The interweaving of these two emotions causes her to appear quite different from anyone else. I’ve never seen a face like hers. And her raw sensuality. Yikes!

I got into the habit of going to the Mustang Ranch a couple times a month. I couldn’t afford more than that. Beers were $2.50. And you have to put a dollar out on the table now and then or the girls ignore you or treat you like you’re a bum. And I had a lot of things to spend ten dollars on other than that. But when I went to the Mustang I had a good time. Ellie always stayed out in the Bike Bus. She wouldn’t have fitted in there at all.

I liked to watch Mary dance. She was a beginner and was just learning the basic routines. But this sort of dancing came to her instinctively and she drove the men nuts. From the very start money no longer was a problem for her. She bought a hot red sports car. Her boyfriends were fast and rich. She was living in the fast lane. She made four hundred dollars a night, minimum, usually more. She was so good and so popular that she was in a league by herself. She came in whenever she wanted, whenever she needed money. They rearranged the schedules around her whims. She was that good. Then she began thinking ahead and making changes. Last time I saw her she was taking classes at the University and doing some stage acting and tv commercials.

I wish her all the luck in the world. I’ll always cherish the memory that she was a friend of mine for a little while. The story of her abortion moved my heart. It gave me a solid example of how abortion may affect a young mother. I must have spent hundreds of hours thinking about it since. We live in a vehicle and the streets are our home. There are many women like Mary in these streets, often seeking the counsel of another human being who has something to say that will help them decide what to do. Over the years I have from time to time had occasion to tell them about the girl whose step-father forced her to have an abortion and how it affected her.

I wanted to revise COMPORTING ROADWISE. It was like a passion inside me. I needed to do it. But wintering in Eugene in our Bike Bus made it difficult to fire up the Honda generator so I could have 110 volt electricity to run my computer. I needed some kind of "living room" where I could plug in my computer and plunk away on it from nine in the morning til seven in the evening if I wanted to. Allan Brothers Cafe was great, but it is always good to have a plan B. Our "plan B" was the Fifth Street Market.

Lee Boutel was the manager of the Fifth Street Market. One day as I sat typing on my lap computer he sat down beside and asked me what I was doing. I didn't know he was the manager of the place. All kinds of people occasioned to sit themselves down beside me and ask me about the computer, so I was getting pretty used to it. A lot of good conversations and friendships started that way. I explained to him that I owned the well-known Bike Bus and had a lot of free time in the winter and lately I’d been writing a book, and the Fifth street Market Coffee Shop was a good place to do that. He explained to me that he was the manager and that some of the owners had been wondering about me. But he said not to worry about it, now that he had met me. Lee turned out to be a writer himself. He asked if he could read a chapter or two. He was very sincere. I gladly gave him a couple chapters.A few days later we met again and he told me he really enjoyed what he had read, but he thought it was a little rough. He asked if I had a proofreader to help me with spelling and punctuation and making suggestions. And since I did not, he offered to do it for me. Lee became a good friend. He worked real hard on my manuscript. He did it for free. I sure didn’t have any money to pay him. The assistance he gave me was invaluable.