I don’t see where to post directly on the blog (would like to) but I rode the Rabbit in 1970, westbound. That trip is described in my novel Tattoo Charlie. The partner bus at that time was called the Purple Haze.

Excerpt (pretty much true…all writing requires a little touch-up):

The Gray Rabbit was an alternative transcontinental express bus that ran from New York to San Francisco. There was a sister bus, called the Purple Haze, which ran on an opposite schedule. The fare was sixty-nine dollars either way — cash only, nonrefundable, pay on boarding, no questions asked and no reservations taken. Strictly first come, first served.

I hitched down from Burlington to New York City, then took the subway to Washington Square from Fifty-Seventh Street, where my last ride had dropped me. It was one of those rare, clear blue Manhattan days right after a cold January rain, a blustery northwest wind kicking up little trash devils that whirled, story high, then collapsed, cigarette cellophane fluttering back to the pavement in pirouettes of despair.

As soon as I entered the square I saw a group of freaks with backpacks on the west side, gathered around a boxy single decker bus painted dull, gun-metal gray. The baggage area was open, and in the front compartment was a full range of spare parts for the bus, practically a complete engine; people were loading their bags in the rear compartment.

I took my book bag out of my backpack, re-cinched it, and shoved it underneath. The inside of the bus had been converted from seats to one large open space that was sprinkled with pillows. The last eight feet in front of the bathroom was lined with double decker bunks scabbed together out of two-by-fours and plywood, with bare mattresses on top. I went back to the luggage compartment for my sleeping bag and pad.

Half a dozen people had already staked out spots along the side of the bus and were seated cross legged on cushions. I got a great spot: all the way at the back of the open space on the driver’s side, where I could lean against the front of the bed structure and keep an eye on things.

There were just under thirty people on the bus when we left, depending on whether you counted the two drivers (it was hard to tell them apart from the passengers). As soon as we crossed the George Washington Bridge, headed west on I-80, someone pulled out a shoebox full of grass and started rolling joints, and the stench of the Meadowlands was soon hidden by the sweet fragrance of Oaxacan.

The trip was scheduled to take two and a half to three days, depending on traffic, weather and breakdowns; if all worked out we would arrive in San Francisco sometime Tuesday. The first day was all woods and snow, a straight shot through the Pennsylvania mountains known all too well to truckers and hitchhikers. There wasn’t a whole lot to look at, and besides, there were a lot of people to meet and stashes to compare. One public spirited soul — we called him Spacer, though I found out later that his given name was Stanley — spent most of the first afternoon standing at the front of the bus, rolling joints for the driver from a baggie set on the dashboard, and asking him about life on the road.

Around dusk, the other driver, a guy named Neal who had been asleep in the back, came up to take his turn.

“Jack,” he asked the guy at the wheel, “how you holding out?”

“Great. Dude’s been rolling joints.” Jack passed the joint to Neal, who was now leaning against the chrome bar separating the driver’s seat from the passenger area.

“I can take over if you want,” said Neal, taking a long pull. “Give you a little break.” Just NOT like the pilots on a long-haul 747.

He passed the joint to Spacer, who picked his stash off the dash and stepped down next to the door to make room.

“Cool,” said Jack. He stood up from the driver’s seat and stepped down into the foot well with Spacer, the bus still cruising along a solid fifty-five miles per hour down the right lane of I-80. Neal sat down behind the wheel, adjusted the seat, and set about his chosen trade.

At that time the freeways of the usa were just that: little strips of territory which really didn’t belong to the places they passed through. It was true that every state had its cops, some better, some worse, more or less tolerant of people just passing through; but as long as you never went into town, and you didn’t go over the speed limit, and didn’t attract attention, then you could go coast to coast, living your own life, and never be disturbed by The Man.

There was one guy on the bus who seemed to be counting on that. He was wearing a letter sweater (“M”), jeans, and a fatigue jacket. His hair was only slightly longer than crew cut, his boots black, steel toe lace-ups; he didn’t smoke and he didn’t drink; on this bus he was an oddball.

Everyone referred to him as Duffel Bag, because he spent the entire trip sitting on a large olive drab duffel bag he’d leaned against the side wall of the bus. The general assumption was that he was carrying twenty keys of smoke or something, and that if anything happened to it he was in deep shit.

The Rabbit took a southern route, down across the Midwest and the Plains. Late morning on the second day, we got off of I-44 in Joplin, Missouri and Neal pulled into a small, nearly empty shopping center where there was a Grand Union. Somebody took up a collection for beer, wine and food, and a delegation was sent inside to shop. We were sick of being on the bus and glad to be out of the frigid northeast winter, so we all got off, except for Duffel Bag, who sat on his bag reading Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man.

I went and stood under the portico of the store, a simple tar and gravel, flat roof affair atop four inch pipe posts bolted to a concrete pad shading the west-facing facade from the midday sun. I wanted to be a discreet distance from the bus as we had a number of proud and aggressive shop lifters on board, liberators bound and determined to free up precious material resources still in the hands of chain stores and petty capitalists — and in those days the owners and managers of businesses in rural America tended to notice when a bus full of stoned hippies pulled in and the snack racks emptied, yet sales only added up to ten or fifteen dollars. And then they got on the horn to the local Sheriff.

When the Sheriff arrived, he would have found a tribal circle of hippies sitting on the warm tarmac not ten feet from the bus, smoking joints and drinking wine. There was no way I could have, or would have, or should have taken my backpack out of the bus — that would have been too extreme a reaction — but I did take my book bag with me so in a worst case situation I would have my books and my money, and could melt into the puckerbrush as the cops surrounded the bus, then hitchhike the rest of the way out to California. Not pleasant, but better than jail.

I was ready for the worst, but once the shopping was done, the circle broke up and everyone loaded back on to the bus without incident. I waited until the last possible moment just in case, and as soon as I got on, Neal closed the door, popped off the parking brake and turned the key to preheat the diesel.

Unfortunately, that was the wrong sequence, and with the brake released, the bus began to roll slowly down the slight grade toward the front of the supermarket. In a panic, Neal pumped on the air brakes, but without the engine they had no pressure and the bus coasted inexorably forward, directly into one the metal pipes supporting the portico, breaking it off its base on the concrete curb and slightly denting the chrome work on the front of the bus. The engine caught just as the bus crossed the walk, headed for the front of the building, powered the brakes, and the bus came to rest only an inch or two from the main entrance, front wheel on the door mat. The portico post would have smashed the “IN” door, but the wheel had tripped the switch and the door snapped opened.

Neal jammed the gearshift into reverse, but the balding, mustachioed manager of the supermarket was already out the “OUT” door by the time Neal had backed off the curb.

“What the Hell is going on here?” He screamed, his bloated body shaking so violently that his clip-on tie came undone and dangled upside down from the verge of his belly, held only by the tie-tac just above.

Neal reset the brake, opened the door and jumped out, hand already on the shirt pocket where he kept the cash fares.

“Don’t worry, man, we’ll pay for it,” he pulled out the roll of bills and began peeling off twenties. “Everything’s cool. It’s cool. We’ll pay for everything.”

Eventually they came to an agreement. The manager pocketed a wad of twenties, clipped his tie back on and went back in the “OUT” door. Neal grabbed the canted up base of the post, and heaving his hundred and fifty pounds against it, bent the pole back into position, though it floated uncertainly half an inch off the concrete.

Then we were in Oklahoma. The landscape subsided once we crossed the Mississippi: first rolling hills with pockets of oak, hickory and walnut in the hollows, the Ozarks dimly visible on the horizon off to the south; then the trees petered out; soon, the hills settled, like ripples on a pond, and the land became plain flat. Somewhere just before Chandler, Oklahoma, we passed the Purple Haze, coming the other way on the eastbound side of the Turnpike.

I felt lucky not to be on that bus — a true antique — but not because of its age. It was the same kind of bus that was in the movie Bus Stop, where it stops way out in the desert, and Marilyn Monroe gets off…but this one was painted bright, Moby Grape purple from the tip of the big roof scoop on the rear to its streamlined, anthropomorphic nose with bulging, acid eye headlights.

We were supposed to be headed west, to San Francisco, me to my dream of a life with Kelly, or at least a life of freedom in the woods, and the others to who knows where, but Neal seemed to have other plans, because at the next crossover he wheeled the Gray Rabbit across the median and headed back east, accelerating far past his standard fifty-five miles per hour. It took about five minutes to catch the Purple Haze.

As soon as the two buses had stopped, everybody but Duffel Bag was out the door. We were all desperate for another chance to stretch and escape the stench of the toilet on the Rabbit, which was close to overflowing. While Neal and Jack and the drivers of the Purple Haze consulted on the weather they’d face in the second half of their respective journeys, the travelers from both buses congregated on the shoulder of the road, and with that incredible combination of ignorance and bliss that came, I guess, from spending your Sixties in North Beach or the Village, sat right down on the scrub land by the well-tolled, access-controlled, highway-patrolled Oklahoma Turnpike and started visiting the best way they knew how: comparing stashes to see who had the most asskicking pot, the widest array of psychedelics, the most outrageous folding, water-mediated bong, chong, chillum or toke pipe. I stood a little off toward the drivers and grabbed a toke when the first joint came along, but it just made me more paranoid, so I got back on the bus.

It was bad enough, I thought standing there on the shoulder, to drop out of college and run off to California without telling my parents, with no clear plan, no clear future beyond the induction notice that would surely come in a few months, no excuse for what both my family and Susanna, if not Kelly, would in the end surely see as a lack of courage, a lack of commitment, a lack of resolve; bad enough to be on this traveling bust of a bus, spewing sweet smoke out the windows across the heart of the continent, spitting in the face of society, and of sobriety, only one bad break, a simple traffic stop away from drug charges in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, from rotting in some county lockup in middle America waiting for trial, unable to raise bail without my parents finding out the whole sorry mess, without bringing shame on the family the way my uncle and my grandfather always knew I would.

Yes, that was bad enough, dumb enough, dangerous enough. But it was even worse on the bus with Duffel Bag. The others might have pegged him as a drug courier, but I knew damn well druggies didn’t sit around reading Marcuse.

“So, man,” I said to him, thinking that with the party animals gone, he might actually speak, “What’s your name?”

He looked up from his book. Nothing.

“My name’s Chuck.” Still nothing.

Finally, “Teko.”

“What?”

“I said ‘Teko’.” He was already looking back at his book, though I wasn’t sure he was really reading.

“Oh.” I asked, just trying to start conversation. “What school you go to?”

After a pause — maybe he wanted to get to the end of a sentence, and it was tough going — he looked up again.

“School?”

“Yeah. Your sweater…” I motioned.

“Oh…” I sensed he felt it was a mistake to have said anything. “Montana.” He said deliberately, like it was the answer to a game show quiz.

“Really?” That’s bullshit, I thought, he doesn’t act like a country boy.

“Yeah.” I guess he heard the tone of disbelief in my voice. “Tell you what,” he added coldly. “You mind your business and I’ll mind mine.”

With that he dragged his bag to the back of the bus, outside the bathroom.

“Jeez,” I said. “Just trying to be friendly.”

He went into the bathroom and closed the door all but a crack, I guess to keep an eye on the bag. Soon I heard him grunt. “Shit. Goddamn it!” which about said it for that bathroom.

I was certain that “Teko” wasn’t holding drugs. He was a Weatherman. I could actually see him buying that letter sweater at the Salvation Army store in Ann Arbor, Michigan in my mind’s eye — that’s where he was really from — and then taking a Greyhound to New York, loading up on stolen guns and homemade bombs, and heading west to pay a visit on the Bank of America with some of his friends that were on other buses or trains or planes and planning to meet him at some People’s Park or something.

And if “Teko” was sitting on a bag full of guns and ammo, then we were talng revolution, not just sex and drugs and rock and roll; we were talking serious jail time in Allentown, Cicero, Leavenworth, not just some little holding tank for peaceniks and petty larcenists, but maximum security for many years — many, many years. Nixon and Mitchell and J. Edgar Hoover did not like hippies on funky buses with large caches of drugs and guns.

But nothing bad happened. We dumped the toilet at some rest area in eastern New Mexico, and suffered through an hour of heat in Arizona while Neal and Jack fixed some minor mechanical problem, but overall, the freeway held.

We arrived in San Francisco on schedule and I immediately thumbed south down Highway 101 to Palo Alto.

“Everything is connected to everything else.” — Rube Goldberg

Quick note about this entry- this is part of a novel and as Shepard said: ‘pretty much true’.  Nicely written and gives a good feel of a rabbit trip.
But I have to ask -Jack and Neal were the drivers? How long were they on the road together?

 

Daniel Thaler

After hitchhiking from NY to SF in 1974 I had found a place to live. I took the Grey Rabbit back to NY and collected all my stuff, including a trunk full of LPs and my beloved stereo. I then took the Rabbit back to SF. I recall a delay in Eugene. Or. for some reason. The next spring I had fallen in with people from The Farm in Tennessee took the Rabbit one last time to NY to see an old girlfriend, who I had met on the Rabbit on the second trip. I convinced her to visit the branch of The Farm in upstate NY. We moved in. I stayed 4 years, she lasted a few months. I wish I had pictures…But the memory lives on.