Fleeing FSU

Letters to Richard,

When I borrowed that hundred dollars from CD and started walking west on US 90 out of Tallahassee, I had no idea where you were. Maybe New York. I had no idea where Snell was either. It must have been about October 1963.

I had run into depressing times. While John Donne’s “Three Person’d God” was totally incomprehensible to me, it wasn't my only failing. I was finding that my only opportunity to engage the fair sex was to walk close enough behind them to catch a snoot full of their young, sweet musk, in the spring when their shoulders were bare and their laughter was easy and often. It was tough. I had no car, no money, no style, no nothing. I had none of the social skills or tools needed to navigate in their world of money and practiced social graces. It was depressing. I concluded it was just not going to be. I needed to get out of there before self disappointment became a permanent part of my psyche. Inferiority, perceived or valid, can be terminally destructive. I hated the feeling. Fortunately, in all our many conversations with you and Snell I realized there was another world “out there.” My focus at FSU was not on learning.  Penetration and good times, yes. But not learning. I needed to get away.

To grow as a person, one needs to seek sights not seen and try things not tried. Brooksville had never been a place where one might seek awareness and knowledge, and it was now apparent that Tallahassee was becoming less than a positive experience. Given my small-town mindset, it took a lot of courage for me to step beyond my mental boundaries with no intentions other than to engage and learn about a larger world. While I was convinced that we are all just pawns of fate dropped upon this planet without choice, I also believed we are obliged to engage it and if we don't we are not worthy of having had the opportunity.

Hitchhiking in those days was an innocent and acceptable means of travel. It was not considered unwholesome or dangerous to impose upon the good graces of others who happen, as fate might have it, to be traveling in the same direction as you and who might be willing to share a ride. The Country had not yet suffered the loss of an ill-advised war, the assassination of a revered President and his brother, or the murder of a legendary black leader that would wound our hearts. Nor had the destructive scourge of illegal drugs yet infected our national innocence. We could still trust people we had never met enough to stop and invite them into our cars. Folks would pick you up if it appeared you needed a little help or maybe, out of curiosity, just to ask where you were going.

So it was on a cool Tallahassee morning, carrying my faux leather suitcase and wearing levi's and a powder-blue Troy Donahue nylon jacket that I held out my thumb and headed west in search of a road untraveled. Snell had said it is not the destination that is relevant. It is what happens along the way.

The day I left FSU, CD and I had walked from our apartment behind the Sweet Shoppe on the south side of the campus to Tennessee Street, a couple of miles away on the north side. Tennessee Street runs east and west through downtown Tallahassee and is also U.S. Highway 90 which will take you to New Orleans straight as an arrow, 400 miles west . My decision to leave that depressing time of my life brought with it a growing sense of release though what I was about to do had yet to sink in. I was eager to embrace what was ahead. I was 21 years old and unafraid. There was a comfortable, cool breeze out of the north.

We dodged the morning traffic and trotted across to the north side of Tennessee Street. CD stopped as we stepped up on the curb.

“Well, man, you really going to do it?”

“Guess so,” I said.

He smiled that smile which somehow always seemed to be on only one side of his face.

“Send me a post card.”

“Yep.”

There was a moment when we looked at each other not knowing what next to say. Then we shook hands firmly, and without looking back he turned and walked south, back across Tennessee Street and joined the growing groups of students on their way to class.

I started walking west toward New Orleans.

FSU was over.