Prodigal Son

It seems like you never know what is going to happen. Events continued to take a turn for the worse as I continue my story.

Having left the county from hell we headed towards Boston. My friend K. new a girl there that he had met a couple of years ago while attending the University of Arizona for a brief time. I don’t remember the exact details now, but we dropped off our two companions at the start of Interstate 90 as their goal was to hitchhike the entire Interstate to its terminus in Seattle. By the way the both made it back safely in just a few days.

Before heading over to K’s friend Debbie, we dropped our van off at the shop. It was suffering terribly from an electrical problem. We decided to also have them remove the broken bolt in the engine block so the oil leak would be fixed.

The only source of money we had was from K’s cousin. K had made a stop in Nebraska to visit his cousin going to school there. He managed to borrow $200 from him, which was lucky since neither of us had any money. We went over to Debbie’s and it was okay for the first night. We went out to a nightclub and did some partying. We couldn’t really leave until our van was fixed since we had no where to stay without it.

It turned out to be most unpleasant as we pretty much overstayed our welcome. K and Debbie were fighting as well. If we had left after the first night it would have been different, but as it turned out we had to stay for 3 nights while they housed and feed us. It was a relief to leave, its no fun being an unwelcome guest.

So we went to pick up the truck and when we got the bill it was $154. Whoa! The electrical problem was only $35 but there turned out to be a lot of labor involved with getting the broken bolt out. After paying the bill we only had a little over $10 left.

This was a very bad state of affairs. We suddenly lost any ambition about finding a job and saving money to go to Europe. We decided that our only option was to sell the van and then drive back to Seattle in K’s car.

To accomplish this we would have to spend our last $10 for ad in the paper. To place an ad we needed a phone number for people to call. Our usual mode of operation when entering a city is to find a park that we can stay at. Boston has a nice place called Carson Beach which is right on the water and close to downtown. We went over there to scope it out being very conscious of the fact that both vehicles were low on gasoline so we had to conserve. As luck would have it there was a beach house with a pay phone.

We placed the ad and asked people to call between 4 and 6 pm as we didn’t want to have to hang out at the phone all day. Within a day our ad was running, but before it hit the paper we discovered that the beach house closed at 5pm! So we only had a one hour window for calls to come in.

The whole thing was sort of a downer, as if we weren’t all ready pretty down. We didn’t have much food left in the van and we had no money to buy any more, so we were hungry a lot. The only consolation we had was we were at the beach and the weather was nice. Across the street from the beach was Columbus Park, which had a track. I had my running shoes with me, and as I often do when under stress, I would spend time running around the track.

I suppose I could have called home and my parents would have sent some money. However I was feeling like the prodigal son and the thought of asking for money was out of the question.