Meyer said that Wally had sold out his business and had been in Oaxaca since August first, looking for his daughter, Minda.
“It’s more than just looking for her, Mr. McGee. It’s trying to understand more about what the young people are looking for. Way back in January she wrote me that she was going to go to Mexico with some friends. Just like that. Well, I wrote airmail special to the University of Miami asking them if she left any forwarding address or anything like that, and they wrote back that she’d stopped going to classes way back last year, before summer started. She came on home last summer for about ten days and then went back. She told me she was doing extra work over the summer. I sent my little girl money every month. Then I just didn’t know where to send it, or where she was or anything.
“You know, I got to thinking, Mr. McGee. I had four establishments, located real good in nice shopping centers, turning a nice profit. I worked hard all my life. Connie died three years ago. We had one other daughter, older than Minda, but she died in infancy. I got to wondering just what the hell I was working for. My little girl came home and didn’t have much to say. She acted sour, sort of. It was like lying to me, her not telling me she’d already dropped out of college. Once I decided, it took me a long time to make the right deal on the stores. I figured this way. The only thing I’ve got in this world is my daughter, Minda. And if I can’t communicate with her, then there’s no point in anything. If I kept working we’d be in two different worlds. She couldn’t or wouldn’t move into mine, so what I have to do is move into hers. It’s the only way I’ll be able to talk to her when I find her.”
“You expect to find her soon, Mr. McLeen?”
“Wally, please. Yes, I’ve got it pretty well pinned down that sooner or later she’s coming back down here. I’m right in this hotel, right in the center of things. Room number twelve, on the second floor, looking out over the zocalo. When she gets back, I’ll be here.”
“Where is she?”
“Someplace in Mexico City, but there’s six million people in that city… What do people call you?”
“Travis. Trav ”
“Trav, you’re one hell of a lot younger than I am, but you’re older than these kids. I don’t know what you think about them. But I’ve been talking to them now for a long time, and I’ve changed a lot of my ideas, like I was telling Meyer. It used to make me so damned irritated just to look at those young boys with all the long hair and beards and beads. I figured them for fanatics and dope addicts and degenerates. I can’t stand that rock music and those songs about freedom. All right. Some of them are nuts, so far gone on pills and drugs, they’re dirty, dumb, sick, and dangerous as wild animals. But most of them are damned good kids. They care about things. They’ve taken a good long look at our world and they don’t like it. They don’t like the corruption, and the way the power structure takes care of its own, and the way we’re all being hammered down into being a bunch of numbers in a whole country full of computers. They believe that each individual person is getting so insignificant you can’t really change anything by voting for a change. You get the same old crap. So what they want to do is get away from all the machinery that makes Vietnams and makes slums and discrimination and legalized theft and murder. How do you get away? Well, you have to go against the establishment in visible ways, so nobody will have any chance of ever thinking you are part of it. And so you can identify the other people who don’t want any part of it either. You pick ways to dress and act and look that turn the establishment people off. You’re against the idea of accumulating money and things, so you cut life down to the simplest kind of food and shelter you can scrounge. Because establishment morality is a lot of hypocrisy, like Lenny Bruce pointed out, you say and you write the words that shock the establishment, and you turn sex into something simple and natural and easy. The art and the music-everything has to be something the establishment can’t stand. Because, little by little, or maybe in one big fire, you’re going to tear all the false fronts down and start everything over again, in a lot simpler and more decent way, without a lot of hangups about money and race and sex and war. I didn’t see where pot and pills and LSD fitted in for a while, but I think I do now. They want to turn on because they believe every person has the right to do anything to himself that doesn’t harm others. Society makes laws about that because society doesn’t want people to make themselves unusable to the power structure. If everybody turned on every day, what would happen to industry? They’re saying this, Trav. They’re saying, `I don’t want any part of things the way they are, man. So don’t tell me I’m ruining my life because I’m ruining just that part of me that you’d want to use up if you had a chance. The rest of me belongs to me to do what I want with. And what I want is everything you despise. So don’t make a lot of value judgments about a scene you can’t dig. You are all caught in the machinery, and you want everybody else to get caught in it, too. I make you uncomfortable, old man, because I get more out of every week of my life than you ever got out of a whole year of yours.”
“You know, they will talk to me about these things once they find out I’m not just trying to tell them the same old crap they’ve always heard. When they find out I want to learn what this is all about, then they’ll talk about it. And I’ll tell them how I feel about my life. What was so great about my life up till now? Mortgage payments, inventories, worries, sickness… and so damned many things! Color television and the new car every two years, and a lawn mower to ride on. Your friends die and you die, and what’s the point of any of it? Who ever misses you? Yes sir, like I’ve been telling Meyer, when I see my Minda again, I’ll be able to talk to her like I never could before. I talk too much about all this, and I guess I bore people, but I have the idea I want to spread the word about these kids. I want to be a sort of… a messenger.” He looked at me with a goggle-eyed earnestness. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Sure, Wally,” I said, comfortingly. “We dig you.”
He smiled. “Jesus! When I think of how the guys back in Youngstown would take it, I get the idea nobody over twenty-five can understand what I’m trying to say.”
“Wally I understand you’ve been trying to locate Walter Rockland too.”
“To see if he knew anything about Minda. She was with that group for a while. The groups that travel together keep changing. People split and new ones join. I told Meyer that my Minda and the girl that was killed, Bix something, they left at the same time and took a cheap room at the Hotel Ruiz. That’s over there, diagonally across the zocalo on Guerrero. They moved in sometime late in May. I saw the room. It’s on the second floor in the back. There’s a bath down the hall. There’s four kids living in that room right now. But only one was there when Minda and Bix moved in. One from the present group, I mean. He thinks there were six or seven kids there in the room while Minda and Bix were there, and as he remembers it, they left at the end of June or early July when Mrs. Vitrier invited them to stay in her guest house. Such a small room, and pretty beat up. You try to give your girl the best of everything. It hurts to think of her living like that. But what can you do? They just don’t want the things you can give them. Not this new bunch of kids. They’ve turned their backs on the whole thing.” He shook his head slowly. “Maybe it wouldn’t be nice for you men to go back and tell Bix’s father about things like that little room in the Hotel Ruiz. It could give him the same feeling I had, thinking of my daughter there at night, in some dirty sleeping bag in a dark corner, and some boy with a dirty beard laying her, and the others sleeping so close, or hearing it happening. Maybe he should think it is all like the posters and the travel ads… A daughter is not like a son.”