The summer before he knew her she was on a two-month bus trip to almost the northern tip of Alaska and back where just about every new hallucinogenic drug known at the time was used aboard. Brons was left with her parents, her ex-husband was the driver and paid most of the costs of the trip, some West Coast writers and artists and a couple of well-known beatniks from the East joined the bus for a few days at a time, “I think I banged every guy on the bus at least twice, including my husband, though I didn’t know it was him both times till after we woke up. That’s the kind of adventure it was, free and fun and powerful and out-and-out unpredictable and outrageous and the most lovingly communal of moving communes, where you made peace and even sweetly balled the ones you once loathed. You would have freaked out in a day if you were on it, no matter how many chickies you could have laid, and pissed everyone off with your stodgy worries and complaints and morning regimens and needs like exercise and a newspaper and coffee and if you didn’t shit by ten A.M. every day you’d get frantic,” and he said “I wouldn’t have minded the sex with the different women, if they were clean. But I doubt I could have done it with anyone else if you were along, maybe because I wouldn’t have even needed to — would that be the same with you?” and she said “Of course not. That’s what the trip was about. To lose it for a week or month or however long you’re aboard; but all the conventional ways of living, I’m saying, which are okay for when you’re home,” and he said “Anyway, the drugs, since I’ve a predisposition to bad trips — I blame it on my hyperactive imagination — would have driven me close to insane if I’d taken them. So I never would have chanced going on it and you would have had the bus to yourself, not that any of your friends would have invited me.” A twelve-hour psychedelic movie was made of the trip, a great deal of it financed by her ex-husband, and they occasionally went to parties where parts of it were shown, once with a group in the room accompanying it with flute, drum, bell and saxophone music and another time where a woman did shadow puppet theater against the images on the screen, and each excerpt was so slow, set-up and preachy about the delights of various drugs and their individual medical, therapeutic and dietary uses and incompetently shot and edited that even though she was in a lot of it, mostly high and looking silly and acting amateurishly and dressed in costumes and paper hats and masks and things but a couple of times in a more somber, natural mood and just holding a lit cigarette or iced tea and talking normally about how she enjoyed the long trip and being with her friends and seeing the interesting and dramatic scenery but missed her kid, that he usually, without popping any pills or smoking pot like the rest of the people watching it from mattresses and pillows on the floor, soon fell asleep.
