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Show RTVER book, I'd have to throw it away and start from scratch. I was too tired to start pushing the same damn rock up the same damn hill. Rosie left California in April to live on the tobacco farm that Richard Stockdale had rented in North Carolina. We parted on good terms (for all our ups and downs, we were still in love), and once she had left I could see quite clearly that you don't know what you've got till if s gone. Depression and loneliness drove me completely wild. I was broke and ate nothing but potatoes and drugs and I ate more drugs than potatoes. The good craziness that had fueled me for so long began to go black. I fell in with bad companions and for the first time in my life I drank a lot. I wondered, "How low can you go?" I'd just begun to find out. Rosie sent a letter from North Carolina-God's own garden, she called it. She said that land could be found back in the mountains along abandoned farm roads for $50 an acre. Living at Lonestar had convinced me that land was the answer, land in some place forgotten by the twentieth century. From what I'd seen the summer before in the Smokey Mountains, North Carolina seemed like it might be the place to settle down. Rosie even waxed lyrical about the mountain people. "Man," she wrote, "people here are not cynical, slick, false, devious, skeptical or sophisticated: they are as honest and passionate as you could imagine." I was stuck in California. Even on the edges of the worst insanity, you could feel the heat. The sea of asphalt that surrounded Bonny Doon was beginning to rise. During that dark springtime the Staffler heirs sold Lonestar and the surrounding four-hundred acres to a development corporation that made big bucks paving over natural wonders. They wanted to turn the acreage into a golf -128- |