Thinking about the election, I got to thinking about Jack Howard.

Jack Howard is a fictional character who keeps popping into and out of my unfinished novels. Years from now, my biographers will try to discover what real-life person inspired the creation of Jack. Here’s a few clues…

Jack Howard introduced me to a lot of things, like Kerouac and Zen. Thomas Merten. Harry Chapin. The American West.

I met him one night at an IHOP. It was 1975. I was 27 years old and already a hot-shot investigative reporter at a major St. Louis metro – a public figure, dancing on a table for tips and applause.

My byline was always on the front page, above the fold. I drank with politicians and cops; had whirlwind affairs with girls from advertising and with a disco club stripper majoring in elementary education at St. Louis University, a Jesuit institution. I was making a name for myself. I was the young guy from a small town way up north making a name for himself in the big city. People I’d never seen before would come up to me on the street… “Hey, aren’t you…?” There was talk around the office that I'd be sent to the Washington Bureau.  I was out there, in the public eye, but I did my best thinking alone, late at night, in a booth at a nearby IHOP, after I’d smoked some pot.

I’d noticed Jack in there before. He wore a red bandana and had a green turquoise bracelet. One night I overheard the waitress say to him, pointing towards me: “Do you know who that is over there?”

Jack was unknown to the world. Anonymous. Invisible. He was what journalists and public figures fear the most, what keeps them in line – the fear of being anonymous, like just another one of them, the people on the street.

Jack had spent most of his teenage years in the juvenile justice system after his father died and his mother had to work two jobs. He was a few years older than me and during the 60s started restlessly bouncing back and forth between the West Coast and his old room upstairs in his mother’s house in a weathered section of St. Louis. Once, he said, he’d met Bob Dylan hitchhiking on the road. He took pills for anxiety. Ran for miles, sometimes twice a day. Read literature written by the Beats. Couldn’t keep a job. Wrote poetry. I was in awe of his poetry, like nothing I had ever experienced in any of my college classes, but because he barely had a high school education, he figured it couldn’t be any good and every time he got really drunk he’d burn what he’d been writing.

Jack and I became friends for life. He died a few years ago.

In the spring of 1976, I had a couple weeks of vacation coming. One night in the neighborhood bar we frequented he said to me: “How ‘bout we take off in your old Volvo so I can show you the West.”

So far, I’d never been more than a few miles west of the Gateway Arch on the Mississippi, where the early pioneers began their journey up the Missouri to find their place in the wilds of the western lands still unclaimed according to laws handed down from a European culture.

Like the early pioneers, as soon as Jack came of age and the juvenile justice system freed him to do as he pleased, within the law, he started roaming all over the West, picking peaches in Western Colorado, apples in Washington; sleeping out in the open, in communes, a night in an Albe1queque refuge mission, Santa Monica beach pads getting stoned with surfer dudes. He got a doctor to say he was crazy, so he didn’t have to go to Vietnam.

“Let’s do it!” I said, hoisting a bottle.

I couldn’t wait to take off to see the West for the first time. The real West. My head was full of images of it. I grew up watching Westerns all the time on television or at the Braumart. It was like people riding horses on the moon kicking up swirling clouds of moondust across treeless expanses to the horizon, deserts, mountains… small wooden towns holding on for dear life – Gunsmoke, the Cisco Kid, John Wayne coming through the swinging front doors of the town’s one saloon, and you knew something was going to happen.

The night I was getting packed and ready to go in the morning, Jack said something to me that I would never forget. “Just remember,” he said, “no matter what you expect, it will be different.”

And he was right.

Crossing the Texas panhandle, I saw an entire miles-long freight train off in the distance from beginning to end all at once in an instant, something I would never have expected to see.

Years later, after I got exiled from the press and went to nursing school and became a VA nurse before I became an over-the-road trucker, I would often recall what Jack had once told me.

I was working midnight shifts on the hospital’s long-term care unit. Old vets were dying or just waiting for it. They were always glad to see me come on duty. Other nurses skimped on the morphine so’s not to get them addicted. But I gave them all the doctor said they had coming, and they appreciated it, and later in their dimly-lit hospital room they would tell me stories about things they'd seen a lifetime ago and then, as had become our habit, they would ask me once again what I knew for sure.

I always gave the same answer: "No matter what you expect," I'd say, "it will be different."

The tip of a needle disappears into parchment flesh.

They close their eyes...