I left California in the spring of 1984 to go to Arkansas where my dad lived. I had a little gray BMW 2002, a guitar, some clothes, and some money and a keen desire to be gone from my life as it was.

I played music at the town square and bummed around Arkansas for a while. I met a girl and she became my girlfriend. She was born and raised in Pine Bluff, Arkansas and she was a country girl through and through. In fact, she was the late night/early morning DJ at the country radio station in Pine Bluff. She had a serious fascination with California as many did in Arkansas. California to many there was a distant idyllic paradise. And then there were those who hated California or at least the Californian’s who had escaped and invaded their southern paradise.

And my car was an albatross. Most people had no idea what kind of car it was, and if they had an inkling, they thought it was some kind of morphodite Mercedes. And since I got out of my car when it stopped places, people looked and acted like I was an albatross as well.

I had to get a radiator cap so I went to the auto parts store in Pine Bluff one day. I went in and talked to the guy at the counter. He didn’t need to see my license plate, He didn’t need to see my license plate, (my accent hadn’t turned all the way), to know I was from off somewhere else. I told him I needed a radiator cap for a 1969 BMW 2002. He asked me to repeat myself so I did. He had a funny look on his face and he wasn’t turning his pages in his parts book, just looking at me with a half smile and gleaming in his eye.

He said, “Ya ain’t from ’round here, are ya?” and he snickered a bit.

I agreed I was from Off and told him my car needed the part anyway. He smiled even bigger and said, “I ain’t got no bee em dubya parts here. You probably gonna have to head on to California to get that.”

I felt kind of uncomfortable though he wasn’t being nasty with me, just a bit threatening. But I talked a bit with him and he had the local country radio on. I told him the early morning DJ was my girlfriend and I was staying at her place sometimes. He got a big smile and told me he was friends with her. And then we joked about my car part predicament. As it turned out we found a Volkswagon radiator cap that worked, so I bought it. But he shook his head and told me, I would never amount to much around there “drivin’ no damned bee em dubya.”

A few days later my girlfriend and I went driving. We headed north to Mountainview where my dad lived and the music happened, but I decided I wanted to see where my mom’s family came from up north of there, so we drove through the mountains and when we came to Mountain Home, close to the Missouri border and a fair size town, we stopped at a nice place to have dinner.

It was starting to get dark when we were leaving and when I pulled out of the parking lot I noticed a cop car going the other way and he looked right at me. That always makes me suspicious so I watched in my rearview mirror and sure enough, he did a quick u-turn and hit his lights and pulled me over.

He wasn’t an asshole but he was concerned about why a “foreign sports car” with California plates was driving through town. I gave him my license and registration and he looked hard at it. Then he looked at me, then back at the license, then at me. He said, “Your license says you have brown hair, looks more gray to me.”  And he handed the license and registration back to me.

He said he got a call about an attempted robbery and the folks complaining said the perpetrators got away in a gray sports car and that’s why he stopped me. I told him we had just eaten in the diner where he saw us first and didn’t try to rob anyone. He was actually calmed down and I don’t think he thought we were the bad guys,  but he asked if I would mind following him to the station so they could have the complainant come down and see if we were the would-be robbers. So I drove my car to the station.

He invited us to sit in an office to wait and he offered us coffee and told us where there were some candy machines if we wanted candy. We sat in the office. And he left. I’m sure he was checking out my story with authorities in California. Or maybe he was playing darts, I don’t know. But he let us sit there for a long long time.

He came back in the room and told us we were still waiting on the folks to come to identify if we were the bad guys and told us to hang still. My girlfriend was getting pissed and she told him she needed to pee and wanted to know why we were being held there. She hadn’t spoken before but her Arkansas drawl was the real deal and she wasn’t being kind in her tone. He straightened right up and asked her where she was from. She told him who she was and said she was from Pine Bluff.

He asked her, “Are you Joanna, the morning gal on KSSN?” And she said yes. He told her he recognized her voice from listening when he was down in Pine Bluff for visits and the asked, “Why didn’t you say that’s who you was?”

After that everything was peaches and sweet cream. He apologized profusely to her, Lots of misses and ma’ams, and then looked at me with some kind of new respect and apologized to me for any inconvenience and walked us out to my car.

We drove back to Mountain View just in time to join the pickers at the Square for some tunes and grins! And I wondered all night and to this day if there was really any robbery attempt.