My own situation was the reverse of this purposeful slumming as outlined by an underground author from Lowell, Massachusetts. The only requirement was that he stand idle on an on-ramp and wait for a ride, wait for the narrative to find him, which, in his self-important mind, was bound to assume an epic cast, with him as the hero – or anti-hero, the latter being the more romantic protagonist. Hitchhiking was a passive way for him to gain literary experience. Once done with college, he would go slumming on the highways of America. He would, like, spread himself out over this crazy continent, get his kicks alongside all the beautiful outcasts, the same people whom mom and dad instructed him to scorn as bums. The rambling Beat novel served as his Bible, as a template for living independent of adult responsibility. On the Road came to him as an inspiration in his darkest hour, which usually coincided with the realization that he may have to get a real job. He was the first person to see, to really see, man, the emptiness of the American Dream. He became obsessed with the idea of Nirvana, of achieving a higher state of consciousness, of separating himself from the competitive marketplace. He sat at the feet of counter-cultural professors bemoaning, in the abstract, the Levittownization of America. A Kerouac wannabe – or, Jack-abee - was a book-reader and aspiring writer alienated from his uptight parents, as well as from his small and big business-centric home community, but not enough to convince the Jack-abee to refuse having his college tuition paid in full by the same Babbitt-esque parents. Once upon a time, whenever a young American man, or kid, became committed to a drifter lifestyle, to throwing himself into the Great Wide Open, to exploring the “highways and byways” of America, the reason could usually be traced back to Jack Kerouac and his book, On the Road. My travels developed into a predictable pattern: I would reach a destination after a grueling ordeal, obtain low wage employment (be it as a 7-Eleven clerk in Denver, a short-order cook in a bar in Cocoa Beach, Florida, an ink-mixer at the Palm Beach Times, a trash-man in New Orleans), then get the urge to recite my latest adventure to my audience back home, whereupon I would walk out to the nearest on-ramp and somehow make it back to Levittown to recharge for the next foray into the unknown. During the next three years, I thumbed it a total of eighteen-thousand miles, suffered the claustrophobia of two continental bus trips and boarded two one-way airline flights to Denver. I left West Palm Beach in February 1980 to hitchhike to New Orleans and onward to California. (This is an excerpt from my book The Education of a White Boy: An Honest Discussion on Race, which recounts how my hitchhiking adventures shaped my racial attitudes.)