Today’s segment is written by Mary Ann.
continued from Monday…
Robert was the kind of person you instinctively felt you could trust. I gathered that his instincts did not immediately tell him the same thing about me. No sooner had Prentice introduced us than Robert, who had seated himself directly across the table from me, began his analysis. Was I friend or foe? Could I be trusted? I was being examined as if I were an exotic species of bug, and he an entymologist.
He would never have challenged Prentice’s judgment, not out loud. He wouldn’t dare voice a suspicion of me. Robert was too smart for that, and Prentice was his friend. In time, Bob would come around.
I didn’t want to seem distant, but my thoughts were more on food than Robert. I was hungry… no, I was starving. The last time I’d been so hungry I had eaten a cold can of pork and beans directly from the can. It’s funny how hunger makes anything appealing.
For months I had been existing on one meal a day and more coffee than a person should drink. I smoked back then. Cigarettes were cheaper than food, and coffee at the cafe where I’d been waiting tables was free.
Every cent my left hand spent was pried from the grasp of my right. Every penny spent, I constantly told myself, kept me one cent farther from Austin and Prentice. There had been so many things to do, urgent things that would not wait, things only I could do. Prentice was waiting in Austin, and that thought carried me through each day.
Our plan centered around the university, that sprawling 40-acre campus abuzz with forty thousand students and throngs of hippies, political agitators, Hare Krishnas, Process People and entrepreneurial street vendors who packed the sidewalks of “The Drag” and spilled over into the streets that bounded the campus. We could be invisible there. Things would be quiet, at least for a while.
Prentice had spent the past six months establishing himself as an inconspicuously familiar part of the campus landscape, solidifying a small network of friends, and making preparations for the plans we would take up together once I arrived. The most important of those plans, always the most important, were entirely personal.
We had waited so long, struggled so long, overcome so much. Finally, in Austin, we would be together, this time for good.
When the waitress dropped the steaming pizza on the table in front of us I had to restrain my instinct to grab, tear and eat. I showed no restraint in the quantity I consumed. I let myself go to the joys of bountiful food and the one love of my life. The food I could have lived without, Prentice I could not. For the first time in a very long time life was good.
* * *
At the first opportunity I checked all of the exits from the building where I would be living for the next thirty days. There were stairwells at both ends of the hallway outside my room, and both led directly to the first floor lobby. A metal fire escape passed just outside the window in my room and offered a quick route of flight to the ground at the southern wall of the building near Rio Grande Street. Going upward the fire escape led to the roof.
Prentice was in a room identical to mine one floor above me. The same fire escape passed in front of his window. He had planned for all contingencies. Experience had taught him to be careful.
We gave the fire escape a couple of trial runs. The first test saw us on the ground outside the building in under forty seconds. We started the clock when Prentice opened his window and jumped out onto the stairs. He stopped at my window, helped me open it, and sent me in front of him on the descent to the bottom. The time was good, but it needed to be better.
The second test took longer. Much longer. There was a long delay just inside my window.
Night had fallen by the time we walked down Guadalupe Street in front of The Co-Op and crossed the street onto the west mall of the campus. I wanted to see where I’d be going to classes. Getting back in school would be wonderful. Everything was wonderful. Prentice and I were together and, for that time, where we needed to be.
To be continued…
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Wasn’t Austin great in those years?!!! There has never been any place quite like Guadalupe Street late 60s early 70s. I got lost there too and loved every minute of it. Would love to turn back the clock.