It was time for them to head west with just the shirts on their backs and the shirts on their legs. Remember AIDS? Reagan had blown that 1-0 lead. It was their turn now, but they were seeing spiders, man. The barista must have laced the LSD with coffee. 

They felt that American wind whip across their bright-light-big-city faces when they turned the AC on. It was time to play a lot of Springsteen, exclusively on cassette, completely unironically.  They passed a group of college girls on a yellow school bus. Maybe they were in kindergarten. The zeitgeist was the same. 

They passed through the hippie communes of California, and out of the two they liked the Las Vegas one better. They saw four cars and six hundred thousand people in California. Place was a carpooling miracle. The gang pulled the car over at the first sign that read San Francisco, a Spanish phrase meaning “pull over here, por favor”. 

They were tripping hard. By morning they made it to a campground. By noon they opened the car door. Each tent had one righteous babe named after a rock formation. Crystal was easy on the eyes. Grand Canyon had legs so long that each one could hold five hitchhikers and did. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was fucking the third girl. 

Late into the night, the guys would ask each other, “What does any of this mean?” while parsing through a Tex Mex menu. Back then, the system was one big empanada, and the working man was churned into a delicious Latin goo.