Free Train Tracks by Michael Savage Page A

a greasy bag, thrown under the seat by an old lady going to her retirement; and chicken again, this time the “Southern Fried” variety at a bus rest-stop in the middle of an Atlanta winter night. I always loved fried chicken as a boy, and this was really going to be a treat. To gorge on greasy chicken thighs and breasts in the heart of Dixie, where I had heard they had first perfected the recipe.
    The only factor limiting my enthusiasm was the time. I was asleep like Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman’s grizzled drifter in Midnight Cowboy ) on his death ride, sweaty and in a fit of sorts, when the jouncing Greyhound abruptly stopped. The lights were flashed on. “Rest Stop, everybody out,” shouted the bus driver, and he came down the aisle prodding each and every one of us, even the old chicken-bone lady, reminding me of the cartoon cop of the past who cracks his billy across the soles of the sleeping park bum.
    Maybe he got a kickback from the rest-stop owner, I really don’t know, but everyone on that bus was hounded into that eatery, the doors to our carriage locked; there was no escaping it. I would have Southern fried chicken, even though I was slightly nauseous beneath that three  A.M. Georgian night sky with stars as sharp as fractured mollusks in a barrel.
    It was OK, that’s all. Too crusty, too greasy. Of course, today I know it was probably cooked in lard, and that the saturated fat would account for my early death had I kept on with my dietary ignorance. But the slight case of indigestion I nursed all the way to Jacksonville gave me that slight something to think about, which oh so softly pushed me into the arms of Morpheus.
    Miami
    In those days (c. 1958), you could get a full breakfast for thirty-nine cents. Two sunny-side-up eggs, fried in butter, one slice of grease-ridden ham, two slices of white toast suffocated in butter, coffee, and juice.
    I loved every bite, but have never again eaten anything like that. Now it’s one healthful (and bland) dirge after another. But I’m still alive, which is an achievement in this world. Balancing your wants against your needs without becoming homicidal or suicidal is success, though I will admit to approaching both states several times along the road.
    Kerouac’s On the Road had just surfaced at Queens College. Harold, the older, fat boy in the crowd, smilingly fished it from his tentlike trench coat one rainy autumn day in Flushing. He told us younger guys, milling around between classes, that the book portrayed a wild car ride across America. Free sex, saxophones, and drugs on every page.
    As they say today, it was a real “page-turner.” My first, really—unless you count that book I read when I was about eight about some guy who flew a seaplane into Arctic lakes, saving Eskimos and trappers.
    Kerouac’s odyssey was not about saving others; he was on his own road of salvation, seeking drama through thrills, not yet knowing that peace within came only when the trips were over and you could sit on a balmy pier watching the gulls while thinking about where you had been and what you thought you were doing there.
    Now, it is true that Tolstoy died in his eighties, covered with snow on a train station bench after setting off on one more journey. And that there is something defeatist about saying you’re through traveling while still young and healthy.
    This attitude is true sacrilege in a nation obsessed with motion. But, like Kerouac, America too will learn her limits and I hope it’s before we burn out in an old armchair in front of a television, drunk and drugged, watching another one of our endless foreign “peace” missions.
    But Harold’s book was just the kick I needed to unchain myself (so I thought!) from clan and caste. So during midsemester break, it was my first bus trip to Miami, followed in later seasons by a wild nonstop car ride, eight of us packed into a fast hemi-Dodge, and later