Jackpot.

The food stamps kept Huey and me going a little longer, but the sad fact was that being out of money was beginning to take a toll on our spirits. The few dollars we made from giving tours we spent on gas, because we had a new use for our failing car, dumpster diving.
Huey taught me this art, at which he was a real pro. It involves timing, knowledge of when the perishables are thrown out, and lots of stealth. Most dumpsters are locked up the same time the store closes, and the out of date produce thrown into them just minutes before the end of shift. So you have to be there, in the shadows, ready to pounce right after the load is thrown in and the clerk goes in the back door to finish up. At the Safeway we liked best this was always around nine thirty, Mondays and Thursdays, the serendipitous moment. And the take was always plentiful, bags of cheese, perfectly good, with only the expiration date on the package superannuated, eggs, milk, bread, packaged meats, enough food for a banquet.
I forgot to mention vegetables and fruits, but there was even one more plum to pluck at this particular store. One of the employees was a thief and we noticed him one-night tucking away a box in a dark corner, making several trips. When he went back in we discovered it was filled with boxes of chocolates. We only took one small package so he wouldn’t notice the loss, but those chocolate covered cherries feasted us for a week.
I think I could have gone on forever in this lifestyle but around mid-December the car died and put an end to all that.
Without the car we were helpless. We were in the middle of nowhere, the nearest store being several miles away. And the car was not fixable. The last month we drove it an ever-bigger cloud of black smoke trailed us. The rings were shot. Then one day on the freeway in Oakland the engine seized. A tow truck driver gave us a few bucks and a ride to the boat.
We each lasted a few more weeks. Dejection set in. Huey packed up first and said ‘goodbye’. I forget where he planned to go. Maybe there was a Grateful Dead concert somewhere. I did attend a Grateful Dead concert almost exactly a year later in Oakland, New Year’s eve, 1980. I was hoping to find him there and wandered through the large, standing crowds in search of him, but I was too high on mushrooms to search well. I didn’t find him and he faded from my thoughts, until now.
A few days before Huey left an event befell us so strange that it begs recording. It was a gray, drizzling Friday or Saturday evening. We had nothing to do and were hungry so we started walking along the main road into Alameda without a plan. It was a bare, long stretch, with plenty of cars going by but no pedestrians as there were no buildings there, just a useless sidewalk and empty land. Up ahead half a mile the town started with an intersection, with houses and stores on the other side. We had no money and were pissed that a weekend night was passing us by in such a dismal state.
Way up ahead there was a bus stop and we could see from afar a bus pull up and a person get on. We continued walking this straight, lonely stretch and were talking about how hungry we were. As we approached the empty, glass bus stop we noticed two white paper bags on the wooden bench. We sat down, opened the bags and found two complete Chinese dinners, still hot, with plastic forks and sauces and napkins. The bus passenger must have forgotten them. We sat and immediately dug in, consuming the dinners with only a few, quick expressions of utter disbelief between the sounds of mastication. We walked back to the boat through the rain, stuffed, amazed at our fortune, two of the happiest mortals on earth.
I stayed on at the boat one more week, until the Christmas mail arrived. One was a check from my mother for a hundred dollars and the other a package from my sister Janet, a bread-sized loaf of Christmas cake so thick and heavy with nuts and fruit it could sustain a person for a week.

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