You sure could say one thing about L.A., Bobby Joe Austin was thinking as he sat on the street corner and looked through the want ads. The sun was HOT! He dabbed at the moisture beading his upper lip. Back home in Texas it got hot, sure, but not like this . . . maybe there it got absorbed into the cotton fields or something. But this place was hot as hell!
He went back to his perusal of the newspaper. One of the guys at the crash pad he’d found himself the night before had given it to him.
Hippies! Down in Port Arthur, people didn’t like hippies very much, but up here in Southern California they’d been Bobby Joe’s only friends, and had even seemed to go out of their way to help him, a complete stranger. It was weird here, the way people behaved . . . they were always nice to you and all, giving you a ride when you were hitching and a place to stay, but, wow, could they be strange! Like the two guys he’d stayed with last night. They’d picked him up hitchhiking down the Pacific Coast Highway and given him a place to stay—their apartment in Venice—just like that. And...