Richie Slater Crosses the Interior
Richard Slater – Englishman, explorer, cultural spelunker, and during a particularly trying economic downturn in his native Liverpool, a bin-man – gathered his strength. New York City had been kind to him but was draining him of precious lucre. He’d spent his time well – hung out with a couple of Dutch tourists (scions of New Amsterdam’s plucky founders), wandered wide-eyed through jazz-and-folk crucible Greenwich Village, and in great fear and trembling had discovered hash browns. But it was time to go. “I left New York because I was having too much fun, spending too much money. I needed my money for California.”
Slater’s plan for crossing America was as thought out as a fall down the stairs. “It was day-to-day,” he confirms in happy singsong. Seeking escape velocity from the superdense isle of Manhattan, he saw in Philadelphia a smaller metropolis whose attainable outskirts would be of benefit to the improvising hitchhiker. “I took a Greyhound from New York and stayed an evening in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, a colonial-era traveler’s house called Chamounix Mansion.” Someone mentioned Philly’s famous Liberty Bell and the Englishman waved the idea away. “I wasn’t really that interested. I thought ‘aw, it’s just a bell’. Maybe I was still feeling upset about the War of Independence.”
“Hey, English!”
When Slater got to St. Louis, the hostel his late-edition guidebook had promised was nowhere to be found. “So I’m walking around with my backpack, it’s getting late and I’m thinking I may have to just splurge and get a proper hotel. That would cost me a few days’ worth of food.” He was about to give it up and check in someplace when he bumped into another backpacker. “He knew of a place, and I followed him.”
Another brick edifice and Slater’s new acquaintance knocked on the door with what seemed familiar purpose. “The door opened,” Slater says. “We went in and were invited to put our backpacks in this little hallway. Then we were led upstairs.” At the top of the stairs a makeshift chapel opened up. Without breaking stride Slater negotiated a quick 180° pivot but the crowd lumbering up the steps blocked his exit. “I realized too late what this was.” Eighty or so people occupied folding chairs in various attitudes of sprawled piety. A few of them shot sleepy glances at Slater, then turned back to the preacher’s emphatic exhortations on sin, a lake of fire, and a promised period of damnation – distressing news that nevertheless seemed to have a tranquilizing effect on the congregants. Slater took a seat, crossed his arms. A bed’s a bed, he reasoned, crossing his arms. But I am not repenting!
Following the sermon the parishioners were told to strip. “Basically,” Slater says with a look of mild sorrow, “take all your clothes off and put them in the basket in front of you.” Ten other guys, all of them reportedly huge and hulking, nonchalantly peeled their clothes off and wadded them into the basket. They seemed to know the drill. Our Richie Slater – in what we may call American Vacation Freefall – saw few options. He gingerly removed and neatly folded his clothes, placing them carefully in the provided basket to the fascinated stares of the other boarders. “I’m standing there in my boxer shorts, me and 10 very large, extremely naked gentlemen.” Slater politely folded his hands over his tropic zone, rocking on his heels and smiling amiably. ‘EVERYTHINGGGG!’ a loudspeaker boomed in basso profondo, Slater flinching so hard his arms flapped. No need to shout, mate! He delicately removed his boxers and laid them in the basket. “Then I shepherded myself into the communal shower with these 10 other guys….”
Lights out in the common room. Fed, stripped, showered, and disoriented, Slater lay in his bunk in rescue mission pajamas – “Very clean,” he notes with an approving nod. Presently, voices called out in the dark. ENGLISH! HEY, ENGLISH! Slater looks at me. “They called me English,” he explains. HEY, ENGLISH! “Yeah?” WHATCHA DOIN’ HERE? “…I’m on holiday.” A pin drop silence and the darkened bunkhouse erupted in helpless, gasping laughter. YOU COME ALL THE WAY FROM ENGLAND TO STAY HERE?! The hilarity got louder and deeper until the place was a howling riot. Richie Slater pulled the sheet up to his chin. “It’s a long story,” he offered under the racket.
Git Along, Little Doggie
He kept moving. America opened her arms to Slater, frightening him badly. The indefinable “New World” was a tilt-a-whirl experiment abruptly sprung from a screamfest with a crazy old king, and it showed. In the wide-open Oklahoma panhandle – an expanse such as Slater had never seen in his life – two forlorn country roads intersected in the middle of nowhere. The driver stopped and let the car idle. Slater stirred uneasily. “Why are we stopping?” The driver pointed. A ragtag procession of kids and adults in parade finery marched in front of the car as Slater, slack-jawed, watched through the bug-smeared windshield. “There was a little cart with bales of hay and a couple of mums waving,” Slater says. Through the heat haze he could just make out a nearby country hamlet. “The place was only three blocks long. There was nobody to watch the parade. The whole town was in it.”
The night was falling fast in the outskirts of Dumas, Texas when Slater hopped out of the car. To his amazement, Slater saw in the growing darkness what looked like a covered wagon in a field. “I hiked over there and jumped in.” Slater felt a new species of American awe, that of the open country and the lonesome pioneer spirit that forded the frontier. “This is what it must have been like when the settlers were coming out. I could hear crickets and things. It was something.” He awoke the next morning, stretched luxuriously, hopped out of the covered wagon and had a look around. “There was a strip mall about 200 yards away.” He turned and looked at the wagon. “It said Junior’s Gift Shop in huge letters. It was a prop for the mall.”
By the by, Richie Slater made it to Los Angeles and hopped a bus for Santa Barbara. When he saw the Pacific he knew he’d made it. By arrangement in Santa Barbara, he called on friends of his mother, couch-camped for a few weeks until he got his footing, and began the long, strange odyssey that, on certain evenings, finds him ministering to you tableside at the legendary Stonehouse Restaurant. He’d come a long way, not realizing that the plane he stepped off at JFK was the first leg of arrival at another home in the world. He would fall in with a new group of friends to add to his Liverpool tribe. He would meet his dear Catherine, and a future he could never have apprehended.
Five years later his pal Robbie would come to America for a visit and see for himself his buddy’s new life. Who knew it would be five years? Who knew any of this was going to happen? And what had Robbie said on giving Richie that paperback? ‘‘You’ll want this where you’re going,” or some such. On the flight to the States Slater had pulled the paperback out and riffled through it. “I thought, ‘the hell is this? I read a few pages of it. ‘I’ll read it when I get to California.’” That so long at Heathrow – had Robbie grasped the moment in a way the nervous and distracted Richie couldn’t? In Santa Barbara Slater again dug out Robbie Shack’s parting gift. A little worse for wear, it now seemed a map to a new landscape. Slater grins. “He’d given me On the Road.”
