There was silence in the cab for a while. When we headed up Lamar, Sherman's son said, "These red lights are a pain; they ought to get rid of them so you could get somewhere."
"Yeah," I said, then you could play Russian Roulette at every intersection." The boy flushed and looked out the window. Sherman stared straight ahead.
I took them to another ritzy address in the hills west of Lamar.
"Here, Driver." Sherman reached across the back of the seat and handed me a battered Five with scotch tape holding it together. The bill was $4.55. "Keep the change," he said.
When I got home that night, I pulled out the five and showed it to Laurel. "Guess who gave me this today?"
"Who?"
"The biggest prick associated with UT," I said.
"That could be lots of people," she said
"Tank Sherman," I said.
"Are you going to keep it as a souvenir?"
"Hell, no," I said, putting the bill back into my money pouch.
I've thought many times about that day. I sometimes wish I had stopped the cab, thrown him out, punched him in the nose and said, "This is for the trees on Waller Creek!" But I didn't. I didn't, just as I hadn't taken the step to save the trees. Ancient history.
By the end of the 'Seventies, little of the promise of the 'Sixties had materialized. There was more, rather than less of the "dying" civilization, more violence, more controls, more materialism.
The prophets who called for a New Age in the 'Sixties were making money from the 'Seventies, selling insurance. It was indeed a new age, an age with the steel-hard Nixon attitude about power and money. It was ironic that the decade began with Nixon's fall, for it was his mentality that heralded the tone of the 'Seventies.
Even the old longhairs were realistic about the times; artists and craftspeople had learned to merchandise their products, courting the wealthy, socializing with the powerful. People who were anathema seven years before were now business associates. We learned that the survivors were the television game shows, cops, corporations; the losers were dreamers, poets, revolutionaries, conservatives, the poor. Yesterday's activities disappeared into the white race along with black militants, drug freaks, commune dwellers and new age farmers. Native American awareness evolved into "Billy Jack" movies. What looked at one time like a Southern Renaissance ended up as "Smokey and the Bandit".
In place of the vital, palpable presence of Spirit, so strongly felt in the 'Sixties, we now had dozens of religious cults, spawning bandit evangelists so slick at shucking bucks on television that they could underwrite loans to universities bearing their names.
