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1. "Your in the gutter," I heard her say. I tried to tighten up my eyes. Blazing through the morning was the center of a June New Orleans sun. "What in God's name are you doing?" I didn't know her, but her crisp nursing uniform made me answer: "I'm going to see the Gibby." "The who?" Well it didn't matter anyway with my fat booze hulk attempting to step up to a lady on her way to work. Crossing Basin Street in her arms into a kind of coffie shop had me thinking about making love. But that I would not have; not on this journey. After re- fusing the hospital, she left me at a table muttering on her way out, "you'll never make it to Los Angeles." She was almost right. As the sixty-two chevy with the fins was weaving with this hitch-hiker in the back seat watching other hitch-hikers give the mother fucker to our one hundred miles an hour along the then low, thin and thieving road to El Paso, I watched shocking lights jam at us as we seemed to slide along the great bow of a semi, that suddenly geared down like a steam engine to let us slip through a naked black hole back into the reality of the world. I didn't get laid or buy anything in Juarez; I just walked across the bridge twice. And I didn't worry on my way to, or out of Tucson. This hitch-hiker had sixteen cans of Iron City Beer in his suitcase. Picked up in Pittsburgh, just to make the