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me."
    Finally I get
organized and we progress. After two centuries, one of them pregnant, we finally pull up to the
two chicks who are thumbing. I manage to pull over without hitting any parked cars or the two
hitch­hikers. Morrison opens the door for them and they crawl into the back seat.
    One of the girls
is a real looker. Maybe sixteen or seventeen. Blond the way girls can get only in the Cali­fornia
sun. Tall with wicked long legs you could sense through her tight blue jeans. Thin and
high-breasted, face set in that phony cover-girl pose.
    But her friend is
a place called hunger. She looks like second place in a two-man hatchet fight. Overweight, mouth
two sizes too big and too too much in the chest, if that's possible. Putting your head on her
stomach would be like putting on a pair of soft pink head­phones.
    I smile at the
good-looking one in the rearview mir­ror but she's smiling at Morrison, who's turned in his seat
to face her. I turn and look at the other one and she's staring at me the way a shark stares at
its next bite of swimmer. I close my eyes and sigh.
    "Hey, where are
you guys going?" asks the pretty one. She shakes her head, throwing her long blond hair off her
face like a wild horse tossing its mane. Morrison smiles at her and she smiles back. "My name's
Sandy."
    She points at her
friend. "And this is Gail."
    Gail asks again,
"Where you going?"
    I look at Morrison
and he shrugs. Neither of us know.
    "Probably to
jail," I answer, "the way I've been driv­ing." I forgot to tell Jim I didn't have my driver's
li­cense yet. I had one but the picture only looked a little bit like me and the name was nothing
like mine at all.
    "I'm glad no cops
saw that U turn. I'm glad no cops saw anything, period." Suddenly I feel
superparanoid.
    Morrison ignores
me, offers the bottle of wine to the girls in back. "Uh, we haven't exactly decided where we're
going. We're just kinda going. You chicks got any ideas?" Morrison's forgot the unlit joint, now
very wet from wine, still hanging out of his mouth.
    "Far out," says
Sandy, blinking her cat-cold green eyes. "Me and Gail were just out cruising. We were thinking of
maybe going down to the Strip to see if anything is happening."
    "We'll go anywhere
you want," says Morrison as I start the car moving.
    I just pull back
into traffic when I hear the sirens.
    "Oh shit! I knew
our luck was too goddamn good to be true!" Guess we did one too many intersections. That last U
turn had to be the clincher. Kiss our collec­tive asses goodbye. Wine in the car, beer in the
car, dope in the car, underage chicks in the car, me under­age in the car and without a license.
Also one central bad-news secret too depressing to mention let alone think about. Dream a little
dream of reformatory blue.
    "I hear sirens," I
say, starting to ease the car back over to the side of the street.
    "Christ!" says
Morrison, draping an imaginary noose around his neck and hanging himself with it. "I forgot we
should have put wax in our ears so we'd be safe from the sirens."
    Morrison starts
grabbing up dope, booze, slamming the window down for instant ejection.
    "Let us out!"
That's Gail, the furiously fat one with too much of everything. She starts to open the door
be­fore I even get stopped and I have to swerve to avoid depositing the opened door on a parked
car. Gail shrieks and nearly falls out.
    Me, I nearly pass
out. We streak across the center line. Too enthusiastic about saving the door, I miss an oncoming
car in the other lane by such a short distance it's almost molecular.
    Morrison drops all
his illegal goodies, nearly falling under the dashboard. Both chicks in back scream bloody
murder.
    That's when I say
the hell with it. I fasten on to the wheel with a death grip and whip it around. Gun the engine
and we do a stunt-man turn.
    "I'm
running!"
    As U turns go, it
almost didn't. I slammed into the side of a parked car, zigged crazily off of it, zagged