The brothers at the Colorado School of Mines took pity on the weary travelers and put us up. That was pretty good, we had some fun there. It’s a small school, about the size of RPI actually, and specializes in engineering. A bunch of Rocky Mountain nerds, in other words! We got along well with them. Lots of Coors beer, which at the time you couldn’t get east of the Mississippi. Some guys swear by it, but I’m not that big a beer fan. A couple of the brothers took us up to Pike’s Peak with Marty’s Buick, and then helped us change the tire when he blew one coming down. We also went into Denver to drink and chase girls at a few of the bars. We stayed there three nights, and weren’t all that sober at any given time.
We spent a couple of nights in Boise, completely bypassing Utah, which would have been the halfway point. There were no chapter houses there, and it didn’t seem like much of anything else. Big damn place, but hopelessly earnest. No drinking, drugs, fornication, or much of anything else that might be enjoyable. We bypassed it before we could be contaminated by the Mormons. It took us almost an entire day, what with the travel time, stopping for meals and gas, and so on. On the other hand, the brothers at Boise State were a bunch of real yahoos and cowboys. We were bedded down for the night, and the next day we were taken along to a bar with a mechanical bull. More Coors beer, more stupid shit going on. I’m glad we had the Instamatic along, because we ended up with pictures of all of us getting thrown by the mechanical bull. My picture damn near has me upside down, but my face was recognizable.
“Someday I will show these to my kids, just to prove to them their old man was crazy,” I told Ricky.
Marty came limping up, bowlegged. “Yeah? I don’t think I’m going to have kids now!”
“If the choice is putting an ice pack on your balls for you, or letting you die, you’re going to die, Marty!” I told him.
“This from an asshole mooning over a girl who hasn’t even given it up yet! If I want horseshit, I can come here and find a horse!” he retorted.
“I agree! You need to either start drilling that well, or give up the lease!” said Ricky, a geological engineer by major.
“He’s just going to ignore us and mail her another post card!” said Marty.
“Fuck you two, and the bull you rode in on!” I replied, without any heat. “I’ve seen the women you two have been sleeping with. At least I’m working on the proper species.” I pointed at Marty’s crotch. “You’d have better luck screwing the mechanical bull rather than riding it.”
Ricky laughed. “You know how rodeo riders have sex?”
I rolled my eyes, since I knew the answer, but Marty bit on it. “How?”
“After they get on top of their girl, they whisper in her ear that she’s just as good as her sister, and then they try to stay on for eight seconds!”
“Shit!”
Marty and Ricky were right about one thing, though. Every time we stopped, I’d buy a postcard and mail it to Marilyn. I’d always be looking for something a little offbeat. In Golden I had sent her one of a fellow falling off Pike’s Peak. Boise just had postcards with either stunning vistas or cowboys. I found one with a girl on a mechanical bull, and wrote that I was behaving myself, despite the temptations. It was too bad we were going to miss Donner Pass, since there just had to be some good ones for that!
From Boise it was off to Portland (Portland State) where we spent a couple of nights. The chapter house was a gigantic Victorian three story house, and something about it just didn’t seem right. In fact, it was sort of creepy. We went inside, following a brother named Biff and wandered around the first floor. It had about ten small rooms, all open to each other. “Man, what’s with this architecture?” wondered Marty.
I nodded in agreement. It was kind of strange. Ricky simply said, “I don’t know, but for some reason it’s kind of familiar.”
Biff had a big smile on his face. “It used to be a funeral home.”
Ricky’s eyes lit up. “That’s it! My grandmother died last winter and the funeral home looked exactly like this! Lots of little rooms all connected one to the other!”
“Yeah, that way they can run partitions between the rooms and have more than one body in residence.”
Ricky nodded vigorously. “And a lot of these old funeral homes were family owned and run, and the family would live upstairs!”
“Exactly. Come on, let me show you around,” said Biff. We got the real nickel tour, too. Out back was a four car garage, now devoted to junk and lawn care gear, that originally could hold four hearses and limos. Then he took us down into the basement, which had a number of curious features. For one thing, there was a driveway that went from the back to the front, down through the basement and back out to the front driveway. Midway through the basement was a room with a big stone table and drains and the most ghastly colored stone flooring. This was where the hearses would roll through and drop off the customers, who would get drained and prepped in the basement before being sent upstairs for viewing.
“Holy shit!” I said. “This is just, like, ghoulish! How can you sleep here?!”
Biff just laughed. “Piece of cake! Man, it’s too bad you’re not coming through this fall… All month long we run a haunted house for the neighborhood kids, and we have one hell of a Halloween Party.”
“BYOB — Bring Your Own Body!” I shivered. I’m not all that religious or superstitious, but it was more than a bit creepy.
A couple of days later, we headed out, and I think we all felt better leaving the place. Don’t get me wrong, they were great guys, but really, a funeral home? There are some jobs I just don’t want to have!
“I’m finally feeling safe again,” announced Ricky as we drove south. “I had to sleep with one eye open, just in case Buckman woke up at midnight and felt the need to gnaw my flesh like a zombie!”
I smiled at that. Ricky was actually kind of scrawny and tough, small, and wiry. Marty, on the other hand, was taller and a bit stocky. “Not to worry, Ricky. You’re kind of tough and stringy. Marty’s probably tastier. He’s well marbled.”
“Fuck you, Buckman. You feel like walking home?” asked Marty.
“Actually, Ricky, you’re suddenly looking tastier,” I answered.
We drove down to California on I-5. You don’t hit anything interesting until you get as far south as Sacramento and San Francisco. Mark Twain once said, ‘The coldest winter I ever saw was the summer I spent in San Francisco.’ No shit! It was the end of June and fog was present as we drove in!
It was in San Francisco that we finally got to see the Pacific, even if icebergs were off shore. Very scenic city, very pretty. I kept waiting for Steve McQueen to come roaring over a hill, all four tires in the air, in his Mustang. We spent two days at San Francisco State before driving further south, in search of warmth. Cal State Long Beach is only three miles from the beach! The three of us even debated over staying there and not going home, and only Ricky’s insistence that the Army would chase him and me down made us leave. The only argument otherwise was which was more important, a better body or a smaller bikini.
From Los Angeles it’s not quite a day’s drive to Las Vegas. It can be maybe four hours if the roads are clear and you’re leaving from the eastern side of the city, or five hours from the beach. It’s a lot longer if the California Highway Patrol is running convoys at 55 out to the Nevada line. It was late in the day when we pulled up in front of the chapter house at UNLV. As soon as we got out of the car a gorgeous blonde coed came down the front steps, greeted us, and led us inside. We barely had time to say who we were before somebody handed us a beer. Now that’s what I call hospitality!