Nowhere
Man
Living in a nowhere land
The Beatles, "Nowhere
Man"
In 1964 President Johnson was touting the "Great Society" while he shipped hundreds of thousands of draftees to Vietnam. The student protest movement was taking over dormitories and college administration buildings, attacking the ROTC and burning flags. Gasoline was cheap and jobs were not hard to pick up. Jean-clad hitchhikers with bedrolls on their backs dotted the highways. Everyone was listening to Bob Dylan, the new prophet of the streets, and to the incredible Beatles, who had appeared on Ed Sullivan's show and were shaking the earth with their music.
Among those caught up in Beatlemania was twenty-year-old Michael MacIntosh. He quickly learned all the Beatle songs; and when their motion picture A Hard Day's Night appeared, he sat in theaters hour after hour, watching, listening, projecting himself into the picture. Fresh out of the divorce court, his mind was stunned, and his soul was frozen by what had happened to him. He found it easy to fantasize amid the crash and jangle of the dusty, cavernous, dimly lit steel foundry. Like hundreds of other
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young men of the sixties, he dreamed of a lifestyle like that of the Beatles. What they said, he thought. What they did, he wanted to do.
By October he had put in a full year working and had $350 in his pocket. He would go to London and look up the Beatles. He talked another young steelworker into quitting, and together they set out in a 1964 Ford Falcon. They drove first to the San Francisco Bay area, where Anne was now living. Michael had refused to believe she was married and still hoped for a reconciliation. His hopes were soon dashed as he could not find her address. They stopped in Hayward, where his friend went into a bar and Michael entered a telephone booth on the street to call his former roommate in Portland. While he was talking, a small, glassy-eyed man approached the booth. Michael opened the door to tell him he would soon be out, whereupon the man pulled a stiletto and lunged at him. Michael slammed the door on the man's wrist and the knife clattered to the floor. He then began hitting the man on the hand with the receiver while yelling into the mouthpiece for help. The assailant opened the door, collected his weapon, and disappeared before the desired help came from Portland.
The journey continued, the pair taking turns driving, sleeping, and reading the latest James Bond suspense novel, Goldfinger. They arrived in Manhattan ready to take on the town, eager to find out what the "truth" was that Bob Dylan was singing about, convinced that like James Bond they could acquit themselves in any situation. After taking lodgings in the Sloane House YMCA, they set out for the Hudson River docks, aiming to work their passage across the Atlantic. The visit proved fruitless, as the union hiring halls had no interest in them. At night they wandered up to Times Square, where transvestites beckoned to them from Forty-second Street doorways,
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and a badly beaten man with a bloody head staggered out of an alley, begging for help. They stared at the porno shops and bought an astrological chart for fifty cents. The world was indeed an amazing place. In the Peppermint Lounge they ogled the celebrities dancing the "twist," a new dance Chubby Checker had invented and introduced.
One evening, wearing blazers and neckties, they were approached by a black man. "Hey, guys, do you want a little action?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Well, do you want some girls?"
"Well, yeah."
"Follow me then, but don't walk with me."
"Oh, sure." And after looking around furtively, he disappeared around a corner. They followed him. This was the big city! This was life! He took them to the subway, made two changes of trains en route, and they finally ended up in Harlem, surrounded by ugly tenement buildings. After keeping his two customers waiting for a considerable time on a stairway landing, the man returned with two large companions.
"What kind of girls do you want?" one of them asked. "Indian Mexican, Japanese, or what?"
"Golly, we don't know."
"Well, give us your money. Your wallets, your watch, your rings, all your valuables."
"Why?"
"I hate to tell you, but these girls steal. It's O.K., we'll put it all in an envelope and register it at the desk. You'll get it back."
It sounded odd, even to a naive twenty-year-old from Oregon. Michael gave him a little money and his friend gave him more. The three men then disappeared upstairs, and after a while someone came up from below carrying
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grocery bags full of liquor. "Where are you going?" asked Michael.
"I'm going upstairs."
He soon came down and Michael commented, "What's it all about? It sounds like a party going on up there."
The man smiled. "You're the party," he said.
A cold feeling crept over Michael as he realized the man was telling the truth. He and his friend went down to the street and saw fifteen or more members of a youth gang approaching them, flashing switchblades. They backed away facing the gang, until they reached the corner, where they turned and ran for their lives. When they reached the subway entrance they saw a policemen walking his beat, wearing his rain slicker. They told him what had happened, how they had been ripped off. Would he go back and get their money for them?
"Hey, Punk," said the officer, "I'm not going to get killed for you."
"But you're a —"
"Get moving."
After three such weeks of the Big Apple's hospitality, and with no chance of getting to Europe, the young men drove back to the West Coast nonstop in two-and-a-half days. Michael's first attempt to get away from Portland had ended in failure.
During the winter of 1964-65 Michael lived by finding odd jobs and writing bad checks. At times he became so depressed he would stay in bed for days, feeling lonely, frightened, and empty. When his money ran out he would wander into restaurants, order meals, eat them, and leave without paying. He acquired so many traffic warrants that he was hounded by the state police.
Michael had always wanted to go to college. Since childhood it had been his dream to enroll at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Having completed his high school
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studies and received his diploma while at Fort Ord, he now wondered whether there was a chance. Ruth had moved to Eugene to be with Grandmother Ella, and in the spring of 1965 Michael decided to pay them a visit. In Eugene he was able to work for a university professor of political science, coding tests, but the pay was small, and Ruth was unable to help out. Michael's efforts to borrow money for tuition and books failed. Then when he looked at the entrance requirements for matriculation at the university, he found that his high school grades did not qualify him, and the examinations were too tough. Baffled, he returned to Portland where he wrote more bad checks — and spent a night in jail.
Michael was unemployed when he received another notice from his draft board. In those days the draft was a specter that hung over the heads of millions of young American males. He decided to skip town. His brother Kent was now married, working on an assembly line making rockets for North American Rockwell and living in Seal Beach, California, south of Los Angeles. Michael located a friend who was driving south and joined him. Michael soon fell in love with the mild climate of southern California, and he went to work delivering pizza in Long Beach. The job didn't last, so Michael, now twenty-one, began collecting unemployment compensation and bouncing from apartment to apartment, living with newly made friends.
The Beatles had just released a new song, "Nowhere Man," that captured Michael's imagination. Where was he? He was nowhere, man. He saw himself as a fun-loving, happy-go-lucky, joke-telling, woman-chasing, beer-drinking average guy. But inside he was a completely different person — lonely, empty, insecure, with no self-confidence or self-esteem, completely void of purpose or direction.
In this frame of mind Michael took a fatal step. Some
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friends gave him his first hit of marijuana. Thus he was introduced to the drug culture (about which he had been warned all his life), a world that was soon to entangle him in a pit of torment.
It was a new year, 1966, and Michael came to a great decision: this was the year he would join the Beatles. Europe had never left his mind since he had watched that Ed Sullivan show. The problem was, he had no money. But he telephoned his stepfather, Ozzie, whom he had not seen for years, and asked him to help him out. "I'm having some problems," he told him. Much to Michael's surprise, Ozzie sent him a hundred dollars. With a buddy, John Summers, Michael started to hitchhike across the country. The plan was to find work on the Atlantic seaboard after which they would shoot to Europe. But they forgot one thing: nearly all of America outside of southern California was locked in winter.
They reached Illinois half frozen and headed for Aurora, where John's sister lived. Soon they found work in a machine shop in nearby Batavia, working drill presses and driving lift trucks. It was a bitter comedown for Michael. He hated it. What am I doing here, he mused, living in a cheap room over a tavern, dragging out at five-thirty in the morning and walking two miles with no boots in a temperature of 24 below zero and living off thirty-five-cent cheeseburgers and fifteen-cent beers?
As soon as he had accumulated enough money, Michael quit his job, said good-bye to John, took a bus to O'Hare airport, and caught a plane to Miami for no reason other than that he had heard it was warm in Florida. But Miami Beach was not what he had been told it was. He took a room in a Cuban refugee hotel where no one spoke English — it was all he could afford. He was also starting to grow paranoid, becoming suspicious of everyone. He would pull hairs out of his head and lay them on his suitcase
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to make sure no one was going through his effects. (If the hairs were moved when he returned to his room, he would know someone had been in the suitcase.) James Bond was getting to him. Thinking he could land a glamour job on a Caribbean cruise ship, he began hanging around the docks and steamship line offices, but to no avail. One ship's captain looked him over and barked, "Young man, you're not a sailor. Get out of here!"
Two weeks in Florida were enough. Michael wrote a check on a bank in Eugene, Oregon, using an account long since closed. That enabled him to fly back to Chicago. Perhaps, he thought, he could return to his job in the Batavia machine shop. On reaching Aurora he borrowed ten dollars from some girlfriends, was rehired at the shop, and survived for a week on a pound of bologna, a loaf of bread, and a gallon of milk. Then with his first paycheck he got into trouble. After spending all day Sunday drinking, he became involved in a tavern brawl and was thrown out into a snowbank in an alley. Bruised and battered, he made his way to his cheap hotel in Aurora where the woman clerk helped him to his room after he fell down the front stairs.
Two nights later Michael sat in a bar until closing time, then went out into the snow and walked to the Fox River, which divides Batavia and Aurora. He started to cross the bridge, but stepped out instead on one of the abutments and sat with his feet dangling above the dark water. Chunks of gleaming ice floated underneath him. Somehow he sensed that a crisis was approaching in his life. Nobody knows I'm here, he thought. I'm drunk. My family is in splinters. There's no reason for me to live. I have no place to go except to that crummy room. I have no hope. If I were to drop into this river, who would know about it? Or care? There's no sense going on like this, drinking, fighting, messing with girls and hurting them.
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David talked about goals, but what goals do I have? Life is like a great big movie, and I have no part in it. I could slip over the edge and —
Lights flashed at the end of the bridge. Michael held his breath. Perhaps he did have a part in the movie! It was a police car. They would find him. Perhaps they were even looking for him, wanting to stop him, to help him. Think of it — his attempted suicide averted at the last minute by the arrival of a rescue squad! It was like a television script. The squad car moved onto the span and drove slowly to where he was . . . then continued on across the bridge to the other side. Nobody saw where Michael was perched. The police were after other game — a pedestrian who had crossed the bridge ahead of them. They picked him up. Michael was disappointed, then indignant. They don't care, he reflected. Nobody does, not even the cops. But in his indignation he made up his mind not to jump. After all, he reasoned with typical MacIntosh logic, a person could freeze to death in the water with all that floating ice!
A day or so later he quit the machine shop for the last time and started west. Hitchhiking on Route 66 in midwinter was hazardous. Once he was picked up by a homosexual and made a fast exit. He was stopped by police, dropped off in the country at night with no light but the stars, befriended and fed by Texas college students, and set down by one driver at a farm crossroads where there was no traffic in any direction. Someone had told him about the lovely white sandy beaches on the west coast of Mexico, and Michael decided that whichever way a car was going, he would flag it down and eventually head for Mexico.
After spending interminable days and nights on the road, Michael arrived in Juarez, Mexico, across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. In the bus depot, with his
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hair now quite long, he was mistaken for one of the Beatles and dubbed "El Ringo." Michael liked that. He took a bus across Mexico to Mazatlan, a west coast seaport that was fast becoming a tourist paradise. He found it as he had been told: a place with gorgeous beaches, balmy climate, and lots of young Americans on the loose.
Michael fitted easily into the surfing crowd. Someone lent him a board and he began to enjoy himself. He booked into a hotel that was overrun with outsized cockroaches and thought of moving his sleeping bag onto the beach until a friend pointed to the tracks made nightly over the sand by pythons and rats in search of garbage.
Living on tacos and Cokes, tanning his body and enjoying the surf, Michael was making the acquaintance of the "expate" California crowd when he discovered that the big topic of interest was a new drug called LSD. Michael had been reading Freud and Adler, the better to understand himself; but now a book called Me, Myself and I was placed in his hands. It was the account of a woman who had taken LSD under the care of a psychiatrist. Michael had never touched the drug, but he found her experiences intriguing.
One of his new friends, an attractive blonde, told him she had taken LSD several times. "I don't think I could," Michael said. "I'd go crazy or something."
"No, it's O.K.," said the surfers who were on the beach with them. "It's cool. You'd be surprised." That night he read further in Me, Myself and I and thought, Maybe that drug could really help a person out, if you took it under the right conditions.
Next day the blonde girl said, "I'm going back to California. Do you want a ride?"
"Yeah." The best times Michael had ever had were in the sun in California. I don't ever want to be lonely again, he
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thought. I want to make something of my life, and California is the place.
It seemed like going home. They drove in her Chevrolet Monza and arrived in Newport Beach in March 1966, a few days before Michael's twenty second birthday. He was in a happy mood; the dark water of the Fox River was behind him.
