Most Likely You Will Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine: July, 1976

As I left New York City on the bus heading south, I realized that I may never see my friend Pat again. As it turned out, our paths were destined to cross a few more times. Because several readers of this blog asked if Pat and Gloria are still together, I'll go a little off my travel track.




Pat and Gloria broke up within a few weeks of when he joined her in upstate New York. He headed back to California. Eventually, Gloria came back to Huntington Beach, too, and I believe they briefly got back together, but the fact of the matter was that Pat had tried to grow up too fast. After high school, his parents had told him they would send him through college if he ever became serious about it, and our trip through the Rocky Mountains influenced him to pursue a course of study at Utah State University to become a forest ranger. He was probably the wildest man in Logan, Utah, but he earned his bachelor's degree. He never became a forest ranger, instead working at Home Depot.





Somehow we hooked up again when he lived in Orange with two roommates and drove a Porsche. He said Gloria had married an old guy with gray hair who wore suits, so I guess she had gone for the anti-Pat. I remember he said an old woman asked him, "Isn't it a shame a good looking young guy like you has to get a car like this just to get women? Okay, she made a more graphic reference than women, but you get the point.



A few years later, he moved to Poway, a few miles from where I lived in San Diego, which was about a mile from the local Home Depot. He would come by on his way home from work in his topless Jeep and play video football games with my son Jay and I. Jay, who was about eleven, would beat us both badly. Perhaps that influenced him, reminding him how much he liked kids, and he began taking classes to become a teacher. At that time, Pat also worked as a doorman at a country nightclub on weekends. One of the nightclub patrons, Cindy, a tall blonde about ten years younger than him, treated him very nicely, so of course he kept pursuing other women until she caught him.


The last time I saw Pat three years ago, he looked about the same, with noticeably less gray than the rest of us. He had been married to Cindy for a couple of years. They had recently bought a house in Ramona, a cowboy town about twenty miles northeast of Poway. He had quit drinking and partying completely, and in the place of wild Pat was a very somber Pat, who is a good role model to the grade school children he teaches. Upon arriving at my house after suffering through Los Angeles County traffic, Pat said, "If I had to live here, I'd kill myself."




When we played football, he commented that he thought I was faster than I had been in high school, so I guess my old gray looks can be deceiving. I've tried calling him a few times since that last visit, but I don't receive any replies to my messages, so either there's a problem with his messages or he doesn't want to be reminded how old he is. One day, however, we'll probably meet again.




By the way, I put a link to a great remix of the old Bob Dylan song, "Most Likely You Will Go Your Way" under "Short Escapes" in the right hand column. Check it out.