Losing Big Sue's car

Oh did I tell you about Sue's car?  Sue had an old jalopy that Steve and I and one of the guys who didn't pay actual rent but contributed what he could, took the car to Chicago.  Somewhere on the Stevenson expressway it died.  We got it off somehow but then it kept dying.  We didn't know anything about cars or have any insurance, or well anything.  In the trunk there was a coffee grinder that had once been used, not very successfully, to grind some pot and it was full of pot residue.  So there was that.  We limped it into some residential neighborhood and removed the plates and slunk away like thieves in the night.

I had an ex-girlfriend from whom who I wrangled a place to stay that night, and the other guy found someplace else to stay and that left Steve alone to face Big Sue.  We were all a bit afraid of Big Sue, she was well big, and she had that thing some people have where she bossed people around.  Just the way it was. For years afterwards Steve would remind me of how we had deserted him and left him to face Big Sue alone and tell her that we had lost her car.

Steve did not have the best of deals growing up.  His father was an old country Slovak who tyrannized the family and especially Steve, the only son.  His mother was in and out of institutions.  On the outside he was all trash-talking bigmouth know-it-all, but inside there was fear.  Inside hippie communities there was always some fear of the surrounding straight people, especially authority figures, from cops to the conductor on the train to some old guy in a security guard's uniform/  There was always the matter of dope, you always had dope on you or stashed somewhere in your pad, and a little altercation and this could lead to this and that and you could end up in jail.  Not very likely of course, but it could happen.  And people in general did not like hippies so there was always that animosity although it was rare that something would come of it.

Living in this ranch house surrounded by the possibly prying eyes of all our neighbors we were a bit paranoid.  We had no furniture except mattresses, we had no refrigerator, it was winter and we used the backyard.  We never spoke to a single neighbor.  It snowed one day after Sue's car was gone, and the guy who had been with us when we lost the car noted all the other shoveled driveways and went out and shoveled ours even though, like I said, we had no car.  LSD was a factor in that.

But Steve was more paranoid than the rest of us.  Sometimes after smoking dope with Steve in the frontroom I would swing open the front door, exclaiming loudly, "Ladies and Gentlemen, the Great Outdoors."  Steve hated that.  "Shut it," he'd say, "There's people out there."

Because of the way we had rented the place, as two married couples only Steve'and I had our names on the lease.  Big Sue was no longer paying rent.  "What about my car?" was what she asked if we dared ask her.  Cindy had moved out, those hangers on that contributed a little were gone and there were maybe eight months left on the lease. 

Eventually Sue moved out, and Steve found someplace else to stay even though he was still paying half the rent on the ranch house.  I was working ten hour days six days a week tending bar at minimum wage and no tips.  Closing time was one, and I'd get off at two and tuck a six pack of Ballentine Ale under my arm and trudge the two miles through the snow and sit alone in the frontroom and drink my six pack and feel sorry for myself.  That ex-girlfriend had moved to Berkeley with her new boyfriend but now she was souring on him and writing me letters asking me if I wouldn't want to move to California.  Of course I would, but what about that name on the lease?


Possibly Tiger Country is a flaw in my remembering,  Actually now that I think about it I'm pretty sure that Steve did his basic in Fort Leonardwood and later came to Tiger Country (which i think has a nicer ring than Tigerland.  You know if you dawgs are hard up for something to write about I would love to hear your stories about basic training, especially those first few days when you went from being civilians to G I's.  I'd like to know what happened, but mostly what you felt about it.