Running Away With Bob Dylan
When I was 15, I ran away from home.
Actually, I hitchhiked away from home.
I told my mother that I was going camping with my friend Barry Alphonso and got him to vouch for the lie. My mother dropped me off in Pacific Beach near the on ramp for highway 5 and not too removed from where I find myself dwelling now.
Barry met me on the turnpike and gave me a golf club. I think he thought it was for protection and I thought it was to help me walk, as my backpack was loaded with too many clothes.
But now I think it was a flagstaff; a fasces of power to herald my embarking on adventure. I had $20 in my pocket, a rolled up sleeping bag an overloaded backpack and a fasces of a golf club.
I said goodbye to Barry and stuck out my thumb on the turnpike and thrust it into the wind.
I had no idea where I was going, I just wanted to go.
As far from navel gazing San Diego as I could.
My father had moved out of our recently bought house a couple of weeks previous to my embarkment. My mother and he had been fighting for years but recently the arguments had got louder while my sister and I cowered in our shared bedroom, confused and bewildered by our world falling apart.
And then my dad moved out and took an apartment.
My parents played that typical futile, delusional adult trick of hiding it from the children.
My sister and I knew better, our world was ending.
At 15, I was beginning to listen to music that wasn’t classical or show tunes. I started with Simon and Garfunkel, The Sounds of Silence, then Bridge Over Troubled Waters. And then Bob Dylan who changed my world. Highway 61 Revisted left an indelible mark on me. From the Triumph Bonneville that he strides on the cover (my first ever motorcycle), to the road trip I was now setting off on at 15. Dylan had a terrible voice like mine but it didn’t stop him from singing, sneering and spinning imagery that lifted me far above suburbia with it’s over watered golf courses,
apartheid gardners and stupid, stupid sports teams.
Bob Dylan wrote the truth and then recited it while he strummed an acoustic and then electric guitar. His gravel encrusted voice shaped mine. Dylan taught me not to trust authority, that the police were not my friend, that the government was corrupted by its own power, that the world was a mystical carnival of sighs and how to make love to a woman on a roof top at night under a canopy of stars and dreams.
I had no idea where on earth I was going but damn if I wasn’t taking Dylan with me, in my head, in my heart and on the soul of my shoes.
I had a vague idea of San Francisco where my parents had once driven us, my sister and I to. I had loved it. To me, San Francisco was the Emerald City and San Diego was a dust bitten Kansas.
It took me at least a dozen rides and several days to get up to the Bay Area. I passed the time on the side of highway 101 singing songs of the road. The Boxer, Homeward Bound, Mr. Jones, She Belongs to Me and of course the incomparable Like a Rolling Stone. No walkman, no headphones, no wireless stream; just the sound of my lungs flying with the wind.
In Bakersfield, I hopped a train car that was luckily heading to Oakland for the last leg of my pilgrimage. I had slept under bridges, in open fields on cowboy ranches, city shelters and Christian refugees on the way and the train car gave me a respite from seeking shelter.
When I crawled out of the train car, blinking and squinting at the orange sunlight in the Oakland trainyard, I smelled the dawn, it smelt like freedom.
I panhandled enough change to get to Berkeley and spent the night sleeping in People’s Park. The protests, the revolution, the 60’s were well over but there were still vestiges of change in the air, of lingering desires for another way of living than endless repeating episodes of Leave it to Beaver.
My brother was actually enrolled at UC Berkeley when I passed through but it didn’t even occur to me to contact him. He was a half brother from my father’s first wife who had died in a lunatic asylum. My mother had raised my brother until he eventually went to college. Then I was born and we’ve never got along since.
I was on Telegraph Avenue asking for spare change.
A man in a suit handed me a five dollar bill and I was set.
Enough to get to San Francisco, the City of Love, where I would find the Wizard and ask him for a new heart, a new brain, new courage and the way back home. All in one.
The Bart let me out downtown and I hiked up Pike street to get to Haight Ashbury where the revolution was still happening.
Of course it wasn’t.
There will still free concerts in Golden Gate Park and the smell of burning marijuana was woven into the morning fog like a blanket.
The hippies with their brightly coloured scarves and tie dye rags made the streets undulate with color.
I walked up the Haight until I got to the point of this story:
A window above the steps to a walk down basement proclaimed:
THE HAIGHT ASHBURY SWITCHBOARD
I walked down the steps, turned the knob on the door and entered a hallway lined with benches. The benches were packed with travellers, backpacks in freon of them. Men, women, boys and girls, some my age and some younger all waiting to be registered. Once our names were on the list, local residents would stop by and the girl at the desk would shout out something like, ‘4 places in a shared room, a couch, a back garden, floorspace for 2, a couch, 2 for a bunk bed’. and other variations of the same.
This was the Haight Ashbury Switchboard where people who needed a place to stay came to put their name on a list and people who had room in their houses and apartments would show up to give somebody a place to stay.
This is how the Hippies and the Revolution solved the homeless problem. People who needed hospice went to a place where other people came to give hospice.
For no money!
There were also other resources like free food kitchens, drug and suicide counselling, access to libraries but always, 
always a place to sleep safe at night. I spent 2 weeks in San Francisco cared for by strangers, by people of open hearts and minds who had enough to spare a wayward 15 year old runaway, running away from his collapsing word.
That’s how you solve homelessness:
YOU FUCKING GIVE PEOPLE HOMES!
Or at the very least a temporary safe place to crash that’s not on the streets, until they figure out where they’re going.
When people are lost, you give them directions. You help them find their way.
That’s what decent people do.
Nothing has both shocked and struck me dumb since my return from Europe to my native Calfornia than the treatment, nay, mistreatment of the homeless.
This state is the richest state in the richest nation on this earth. California ranks like the 5th or 6th richest economy on the planet. It rivals the wealth of whole nations. And yet, and yet the selfish, self obsessed, glutenous PIGS that reside in this state can’t be bothered to offer the most meagre of resources to alleviate the suffering of others.
People treat the homeless like scum here and it’s the most disgusting socially acceptable attitude I have ever encountered.
Voltaire said that you can judge a society based on how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable. His words not mine, but his judgement is mine and I condemn the lifestyle, the privilege, the hypocricy, the victim-blaming that fuels this Consumer Capitalist nightmare that is California.
It’s not rocket science or brain surgery.
When people don’t have houses, you house them so that they don’t languish on the streets. Sure, you get something from them for the privilege, but you don’t ignore them, you don’t spit on the homeless for not having what you have, however you happen to get what you have that they don’t.
If someone is lost, you give them directions.
If someone is hungry you feed them.
If someone is homeless you give them a home.
It’s a right, not a privilege.
Just like living, loving, working and dying.
igorgoldkind
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