Page 4 of Before We Say Goodbye
He realized the kindness of her gesture and how much of an arse he was being. He chased after her and kissed her forehead. “Thank you, my dear. I’ll see what I can do.” To himself, he thought,And why not, with all the time I have on my hands? The vines these days, they grow on their own. The wines make themselves.
Back in the present, Otis breathed into the empty feeling he had inside and peeled open the journal. The spine cracked. Of course, he’d never written a word. With the bitter taste of having failed at her assignment, he returned the book to the shelf and continued into the kitchen to get his coffee. Back in the office, Amigo was happily waiting and leaped toward Otis at exactly the wrong time, knocking the coffee all over the chair.
“Aye, aye, aye, dog,” Otis said, watching the coffee drip down the leather. “You must be more careful.” He was proud of himself for not losing his temper, though perhaps he’d lost the last of his tempers somewhere in the haystack of grief.
On to the third cup of coffee, he returned to watching the news with Amigo cuddled up on him like a bloody Havanese. While the talking head spoke about a crime spree in Seattle, Otis found himself looking back at the darned journal, sitting up there taunting him and testing him and eyeing him as if he had some sort of responsibility to it.
He turned up the volume on the television and tried harder to focus, but his eyes kept going to the shelf.
Bec’s voice echoed in his ears. He repeated her words in a mock tone fit for a four-year-old. “It’s not about the product; it’s about the process.”
Otis fought off the idea for another few hours, but he eventually pulled the journal off the shelf and sat at his oak desk and tracked down a pen. As Amigo curled up at his feet, he said into the air, “You see, Bec. I’m full of surprises.”
He wondered where to begin.
“Just write, you buffoon.”
Something clicked inside, and he felt his hand and the pen moving, almost without his instruction,almostlike the way his hand had moved the first time he and Bec had toyed with a Ouija board.
The letters collected on the page, forming words and then sentences, slowly dragging Otis back through time.
Everyone has a moment in their lives that changes everything. For me, it was when a hitchhiking hippie princess squeezed in beside me on a crowded purple bus traveling east from San Francisco. From the moment I set eyes on her, I was thunderstruck ...
Part I
The California Years, 1969–1993
Chapter 1
Our Own Orbit
August 1969
A purple bus with white daisies, decorated by amateurs with paint not meant for an automobile, waited for stragglers on the corner of Haight and Ashbury in San Francisco. Deep inside sat Otis Till, packed in with a host of barely dressed hippies getting high and singing Woody Guthrie songs along with a long-haired shirtless man strumming a guitar with a rainbow strap. A hand-rolled cigarette hung from the mouth of Sally, the bus driver, and he stood counting heads, his lips moving behind a thick golden beard.
Bumping into Sally as the man passed out flyers days earlier, Otis had been intrigued. Besides the drive from Montana to California, he hadn’t seen much of the US. This was a chance for a quick adventure before his freshman year at Berkeley, one last romp before four years of a serious commitment in the pursuit of a career in journalism. He’d been in the city only a month, having come early to get a taste of his new home. Even in Montana he’d heard that San Francisco was the center of the universe for budding freaks and renegades and lovers and seekers and lost souls who were tired of stumbling around like zombies following the footsteps of their parents, tired of letting the governmentdecide who to fight, weary of racing from school to a job that was nothing more than a hamster-wheel-waiting-room for death.
Though Otis was indeed a lost soul, he was a long way from a hippie, but they intrigued him, this life they lived ... or, at least, tried to live. How nice it would be to drop out of the rat race and go in search of what mattered, whatever and wherever that might be. Not that being a journalist was exactly racing with rats. More like observing and documenting them. He admired the profession and looked up mightily to his father, who’d been a news correspondent forThe Daily Telegraphin London before assuming his current role writing for theBozeman Daily Chronicle. He’d garnered shelves full of awards and even written a couple of books along the way. Though Otis wasn’t the writer his father was, he believed he’d get there in time. He was not quite seventeen and about to start Berkeley as one of the youngest freshmen on campus, an honor he’d earned with a work ethic instilled in him by generations of workaholics.
If anything, he felt torn between the man he expected to become and the parts of him that hung around in the fringes of his soul, the person who wouldn’t mind taking a few years off to chase music festivals and expand his mind with psychedelics. He might even find a worthy reason to keep working like a dog.
For the last month Otis had been working at a car wash and crashing in an accordion closet of a two-bedroom flat with two Texans who were trying to open a barbecue joint. They listened to loud hillbilly music, and their place constantly smelled like ketchup and molasses, but the cheap rent and endless supply of pork were hard to beat.
Though he certainly hadn’t planned on leaving San Francisco so quickly, the intrigue of this journey to Woodstock had been too tempting. Otis was trying hard not to take another peek at the tennis-ball breasts of the topless woman with hairy underarms who stood in the aisle catching up with a friend, laughing with abandon, as if flaunting her goods were a normal activity among strangers. Had shetried that on a bus in Bozeman, both men and women would’ve raced to throw a horse blanket over her as if she were on fire.
Along with the luck of a naked woman in his view, he also had an empty seat beside him. With this crew of yahoos, who knew how long that might last, but for now, he had a place to keep his satchel and room to breathe. It was almost like they all knew that he was an outsider. Americans could be so invasive sometimes, as if they had a completely different sense of personal space. Of course, his father had taught Otis that he had to learn to fit in to get a good story. Otis was trying, but this was a tough crowd.
Considering the way he was dressed, his button-down shirt and Sherlock Holmes hat, he supposed there was no hiding who he was. He couldn’t quite bring himself to grow his hair out and stick a flower behind his ear and wrap bracelets around his wrist and dance in circles to the rhythm of twenty-five unlearned bongo drummers.
When someone had asked if he’d checked out Zeppelin, Otis had looked up to the sky, wondering whether he’d missed a big balloon.
The guy had laughed. “The band, man. Led Zeppelin.”
Otis looked at him like he spoke Mandarin. “The band man?”
The guy put his hands on Otis’s shoulders and peered deeply into his eyes. “It’s gonna be all right, brother. It’sallgonna be all right.”
“That’s quite good to know.”
