Dr Neil Nepola.
Three nights ago an audience of fifty young peple showed up for the first screening of OCTOBER CROW. The crowd were mostly tgere for Brigette who is a star. But my dear friend of fifty-four years was drivinf from Staten Island. He was running late.
To stall tge impatience of the young, I regaled the audience with a tale of how Neil and I had hitchhiked across the USA in late August 1973, ending up trying to catch a ride to the East Coast on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. Scores of hippies bound for colleges across America after another Summer of Love in the Bay Area competed for a lift. Cars and vans stopped every thirty minutes to pick up a traveler. Once a math major in university I calculated our waiting time. At least a day. My first economics class at Boston College started in four days. Getting there on time looked unlikely. I only had $23. Neil, could have flown, but he hadn’t wanted to abandon me.
A few hours later a crapped out Pinto driven by a frazzled mother with a young daughter crammed in a backseat packed with what looked like all their possessions stopped and asked if one of us wanted a ride to Denver. Neil shrugged and said, “You go. You have to finish college.”
“Are you sure?”
Neil was leaving the States for med school in the Phillipines two weeks later.
“Yeah, I’ll see you in Boston,”
I jumped in the Pinto and we drove East. Marilyn had left her husband, a dancer in the Cockettes, a transvestite dance troupe. She had a friend in Denver. I took over the wheel. Her daughter was quiet in the back. Once she fell asleep, Marilyn joined her and I drove through the night, stopping once for gas in Reno. When we reached the Bonneville Salt Flats, I stopped at a desolate rest area. Neither had anymore drive in us. Her daughter asleep in the Pinto, we crashed in my sleeping bag. That night we made hippie love. At sunrise we awoke veneered by the dead lake’s brine. Hours later we showered in Little America. Later that afternoon Marilyn dropped me in Cheyenne and turned south to Denver, saying she’d meet me in Boston.
Doctor Nepola showed up a day later at my house in Bug Village.
“So?”
“Yes.”
“Good, because I would have been really pissed if you hadn’t.”
Forever friends.
ps Marilyn showed two weeks later.
With her daughter. I thought hell yeah. Instant hippie family, except my next door neighbors called her name. They had gone to college together. Shocked she and her boyfriend Andy was there. Shocked was I when she accepted their offer to crash with them, realizing I had been cock blocked. The young audience were gobsmacked by the tale.
Last night Andy’s son was in attendance.
Neil was greeted with a standing O.
A small word and a long life.
ps the screening was a success.
Several minutes later when I introduced Neil the audience rousing applauded as my medical saviour and legendary traveler. Then the lights dimmed and the screen filled with the image of Alex standing by a grave.
The first seconds of October Crow.
Seventy nine minutes to go.
ps everyone loved the movie. Even Doctor Nepola.