The Bright Lights of San Francisco

After college and in the middle of winter, two of my friends and I decided we would drive from Aspen to San Francisco for a change of scenery and who knows what else...that what else was something else as it turned out...Nick, I and Meredith took turns driving Meredith's convertible and headed for Utah, Nevada and California...of course, there was something lurking in every state just waiting for the three innocents to appear...in Utah, we got pulled over for speeding about 90 on sheer ice (hey, it was a smooth icy highway until the state police pulled us over)...we had to appear before a territorial judge at 3 in the morning and fork over a lot of money unless we wanted to go into the jail cells which were conveniently in the next room...we paid up and left, happy we had not had to leave collateral behind, such as our skis on the car rack...whew! Outta there, ready for adventure number two, waiting for us in Winnemucca Flats, Nevada...stopped at a diner/truck stop and with the three of us sitting at the bar, a guy to my left, a dissolute version of Grizzley Adams, after getting an eyeful of the very attractive Meredith, asked how much it was gonna cost him to have a few minutes with her...neither Meredith nor Nick were privy to this exchange and I knew they weren't listening so I told the menacing Grizz to meet us down the road to the east in 30 minutes...it felt a little awkward to be selling Meredith to what could have been white slavers, but you gotta do the best you can in that situation...we left with me saying not to look back and to just drive, making sure it was west...
Nothing but partying in SF, I mean, after all, what we had been through...however, being the sensitive poet type I had to fall and it had to come in Chinatown when I had my first and only photoelectric seizure of my life...saw Chinese laundry lights leave electric sign and head for me and when they got close, out I went...tried to tell cop my name and age and didn't work out...ended up at now-extinct Harbor Emergency Hospital where the white jackets only let me out after I agreed to down some Thorazine and check into Sf General...checked in, checked out and in between docs tried to find needle marks believing I was a junkie and disbelieving that I wasn't...no, no, no, my parents were traveling in Europe and unavailable for consultation...
In the years that have gone by I have lived in the snowbelt and seen many flashing lights from snowplow trucks in the winter...there is never one that I see that I am not reminded of San Francisco, ah those lights...