The Eden Express Read Online Free Page A

was able to talk the warden into letting me have a second phone call. I called my father, who called an old college buddy who lived in Pittsburgh. He got me a lawyer who sprung me.
    What made my brief stay in jail such a bitch was that I kept expecting to get out in just a few more minutes. I didn’t sleep. I just kept wondering what red tape was keeping Virge from getting me out. When I finally got out it was about two o’clock the next afternoon. It had been only eighteen hours, but it felt like years. Maybe I stretched it on purpose. Prison was an important part of life I hadn’t had a shot at before.
    So there I was, having done twenty years in prison mostly in isolation, a lifetime of being harassed by sadistic guards. In my spare time, I was a Jew in a concentration camp.
    Oh goody, a real-life experience, something to write about. Something to talk about, a good story. I wanted to be a good storyteller.
    A good storyteller is a good teacher, an entertainer. Story-tellers provide cohesion, myths, and expression for a culture. A culture was what I thought we were all trying to build. Either we didn’t have one or we wouldn’t have one much longer.
    It takes a story to find out what you think, and it takes a story to be able to pass it on to others. That was something that Swarthmore by and large missed. They had some funny idea that you could communicate and teach without stories.
    All hyped up on my real-life adventure, something new to digest, a new story to tell—“Out on bail” had a nice ring—I started telling Virge about what had happened in prison, what being locked up had felt like, what the guards and warden were like, some of the conversations
I had had with the guys on either side of me. I started working on my story, checking audience reaction, finding out what I really felt about it. I told Virge I thought it might make a nice follow-up to the draft story. I was thinking of doing a book of generational incidents. The innocent years. The aptitude kid, disillusion, dope, the draft, dropping out of the forty-hour week—and now the dope bust.
    Virginia was stony silent. At first I thought she felt guilty for being so dumb about not getting me sprung earlier. I guess it never occurred to her that they’d really only give me one phone call. I admit I never thought they’d really do that either. She had gone off with some nice folks we met outside the cop shop and got wrecked out of her mind on Cambodian dope.
    “What’s wrong?” I asked.
    “I can’t help thinking of how many million times I’m going to have to listen to you tell this story.”
    I thought maybe she felt that way because she was diddled out of so many real-life adventures because she was a woman. It was me, the man, who got to be the hero. I faced the draft, I got busted even though it was mostly her dope. It was significant that I decided not to work at some respectable job but no one expected her to anyway. From that angle her bitterness made a lot of sense.
    I said that maybe the last section of my generational collage should be a piece by her about why she hated my stories. I was looking for something to tie the whole thing together and that seemed like a brainstorm. She didn’t say anything.
    She gradually stopped seething but still wasn’t much interested in hearing about what had happened in jail. We’d be at Gary and Cheryl’s with ten hours of driving. They loved my stories and I loved theirs. I could hold out that long.
    Between Pittsburgh and West Branch, Iowa, we were stopped three more times by cops. It was like someone was trying to give me more
material. One guy was nice enough. He just wanted to tell me a tail-light was out. In Indiana we were stopped for a “routine check.” Since we didn’t have that “holding” look in our eyes, the trooper let us go after a quick once-over. In Illinois the rear light and the fact that my plates were held on by wire instead of bolts cost us $25. And finally we were