André J. de Saint Phalle: Thumb Out: 1970’s Hitchhiking Memoir

The Things That Came Back

André J. de Saint Phalle — Mon, 04 May 2026 15:27:07 GMT

A few weeks ago I published Thumb Out, Volume One of The Spaces Between — the story of the summer I was twenty-one, when I dropped out of college, stuck out my thumb on the side of Route 22, and headed for California with a backpack and a 1943 Harmony Cremona archtop guitar. The book covers seventy-two days on the road in 1973. It also reaches back into earlier years, because that’s how memory works — the road keeps unlocking doors you didn’t know were there.

Three objects from that journey ended up shaping the book.

A guitar I bought for eighty-five dollars at Manny’s on 42nd Street. A tambourine that came down off the stage from Pigpen’s hands at a Grateful Dead concert. And three translucent stones — white, pink, and yellow — that I found in a dream on a bluff above the California coast and wrote down in my journal the next morning.

I lost the first two. The third never existed in the first place.

My original 1973 road “Record” with the two books that I combined to produce “Thumb Out” — along with my 1940 Harmony guitar, tambourine and dream stones.

This week I gathered the stand-ins I had collected over the last 6 months for all three of them, set them up on a table in my house, and took the photograph above. This is a post about why.

The guitar in the photograph is not the guitar.

The original was that 1943 Harmony Cremona archtop. It went four thousand miles with me. Through Pennsylvania rain, Colorado mountains, redwood fog, the desert. Jerry Garcia held it once at the Grateful Dead’s office in San Rafael, sat on an amp, played a few bluesy bars, and called it a cannon. These old ones, they’ve got songs already inside them. The wood remembers everything. He pointed out the Brazilian rosewood fingerboard and the wooden trapeze tailpiece — wartime build, metal scarce, needed for bullets.

Not long after Jerry held it, it was stolen out of my campsite in Santa Elena Canyon while I slept. I woke up to a depression in the dust where it had lain all night, and footprints — not mine — leading to the road.

That guitar carried Jerry’s hands. It carried Pigpen’s tambourine in the same backpack. It carried every campfire and every silence and every song I tried to learn in the dark. And then it was just gone, the way things go when you live on the road.

The guitar in the photograph is a 1940 Harmony Cremona, the exact same model, purchased last fall on reverb.com, since fully restored by a professional luthier. Same headstock. Same F-holes. Same Brazilian rosewood fingerboard. But this one is pre-war, so it has the original metal tailpiece — not the wooden one they switched to in ‘43, when metal went to bullets. Not the original. A stand-in.

The tambourine is also a stand-in.

The original came from Pigpen’s hands at Irvine Auditorium on October 16, 1970 — Bob Weir’s birthday, my freshman year at Penn. Acid on my tongue, ten thousand organ pipes overhead, the Dead playing electric communion. Ron McKernan handed it down off the stage. I carried it home that night to a yellow room I’d painted on cocaine, and the tambourine sat there on the floor catching light while everything else in my life rearranged itself.

I lost it somewhere in the years that followed. I don’t even remember where. That’s the worst kind of losing — not a dramatic theft, just slow attrition, the way objects slip out of your life when you’re moving too fast to notice.

The tambourine in the photograph is black plastic with brass jingles. It doesn’t have Pigpen’s fingerprints on it. But when I set it on the table next to the guitar, something in me recognizes it anyway.

The crystals never existed.

I dreamed them on a bluff above Bixby Creek in October 1973, three months into the road. In the dream I was barefoot in warm African mud, walking through golden grasses toward a village where everyone had grown up together. I came upon three translucent stones, each the size of a peach pit. One is white, one is pink, and one is yellow. I gathered them, cleaned them in a stream, and put them in my pocket.

I wrote the dream down in my journal the next morning. White for clarity. Pink for the heart. Yellow for what I could not yet name. The three stones traveled with me for fifty-three years inside that journal, never as objects, only as words on a page.

The crystals in the photograph are the first time they have ever existed in the physical world. Citrine, rose quartz, clear quartz. They are stand-ins for objects that were never lost because they were never real to begin with — and yet they were the most real of the three, because the dream survived when the guitar and the tambourine did not.

Here is the part I didn’t expect.

I wrote most of Thumb Out before I went looking for any of these objects. The book was already done. The guitar was on the page, the tambourine was on the page, the three stones were on the page. The writing didn’t need them.

But the writing pulled them into the world anyway.

I went and found a 1940 Harmony Cremona and had it restored. I bought a black tambourine. I bought three crystals — citrine, rose quartz, clear quartz — and arranged them on the table where I write. Not because I needed them to remember. Because the act of writing for two years had made them necessary in a different way. They had become real on the page, and the page wanted them in the room.

That is something I didn’t know about memoir until I was deep inside one. The book doesn’t just record what happened. It calls things back. Sometimes it calls back the original — Jerry’s exact words from a 1973 afternoon in San Rafael, surfacing unbidden after fifty-three years. And sometimes it calls back something close enough to stand in for what was lost, because the loss itself has become part of the story.

On May 23 I’ll be signing books at Bear Pond Books in Stowe. The guitar will be there. The tambourine. The three crystals. Talismans, all of them — not the originals, but truer than nothing, and the only kind of evidence a memoirist gets to bring.

The wood remembers everything, Jerry said. Even when the wood is different wood.

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THUMB OUT - 1970s Hitchhiking Memoir

André J. de Saint Phalle — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 02:44:16 GMT

“A masterwork of American road literature that captures a specific moment (summer 1973) and makes it eternal. Saint Phalle’s prose is deceptively simple—clear sentences, vivid details, dialogue that breathes. But beneath that clarity runs a current of poetry.”

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For Charlie and Anni

That moment -

you both walking toward me

coming up Oregon Road

backlit in the dying light

holding hands

You’ve both been in my heart

since mama brought you home

You still are

Epigram

(Author readings are embedded at the top of each chapter)

Every young man tells himself a story about who he’s going to become.

My dreams were blocked.

Every resource denied.

All that was left was the side of an American highway.

Thumb out.

Scared shitless.

But I felt a growing confidence that if I just put one foot in front of the other and walked out that door, I would make it.

I had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

“Raw, unflinching 1970s hitchhiking memoir blending family trauma, Vietnam-era tension, Grateful Dead mysticism, and vivid road encounters. Strong voice, evocative prose, no filler—reads like Kerouac raised on acid and Allman Brothers.”

THUMB OUT: A Reader’s Sampler

André J. de Saint Phalle — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 13:16:12 GMT

A few months ago I made a decision that surprised me. Surfing the Interstates — the 1973 hitchhiking memoir I’d been carrying for fifty years and finally published in 2025 — wasn’t a standalone book after all. It was the middle of one.

What was missing was the boy before the road, and the man who came back. Both of them needed their own pages. So I wrote Boomerang — the four years before Surfing the Interstates and the seven years after.

But it didn’t feel right to have them as two separate books. I decided Boomerang was the bread and Surfing the Interstates was the meat. So I made a sandwich.

The result is Thumb Out, Volume One of The Spaces Between Memoir Series.

Two voices share the book. The opening and closing acts are told in the reflective voice of a seventy-four-year-old man looking back — sentences that breathe and circle and take their time. The middle act — the road itself — is written in a cinematic present tense: short, fragmented, verb-forward, the way the road actually felt when I was twenty-one and broke and scared.

Below are three short excerpts, one from each act. Together they show what Thumb Out is and how it moves.

FROM ACT ONE — BEFORE THUMB OUT

Chapter 1: Purple Barrels

I wasn’t ready. Everyone knew it except the one person whose opinion mattered.

I was thirteen when my father pulled me out of Whitby Montessori School and sent me to the Phillips Exeter Academy. A year early, to save a year of tuition — the kind of calculation that made perfect sense on paper and no sense at all inside the life of a boy who’d just begun to find his footing. Paul Czaja, who’d taught me to sit with a photograph and let words come from the silence, thought it was a mistake. My other teachers agreed. The boy needed another year. I had friends now, or the beginnings of them — girls in Greenwich I couldn’t see outside of school because they lived thirty minutes away and I didn’t have a car, but still. The architecture of a social life, just starting to take shape.

My father didn’t care. Exeter was Exeter. The name carried weight. The boy would adjust. He had gone from Choate to Harvard.

I didn’t, not really. I survived.

This is the voice of the older narrator — full sentences, internal weather, the long view. This is how Act One opens, and how Act Three returns at the end.

FROM ACT TWO — SURFING THE INTERSTATES

Chapter 5: Thumb Out

Tossing and turning, I finally awake. Twenty-one and broke. Already past noon, the mid-July sun in its full glory. I’ve been crashing in Ledge Acres’ servant’s quarters in the back of our sprawling 1865 farmhouse. Jimmy Matsudo’s old room. One foot already out the door.

Getting up. Survey the clutter. 1943 Harmony Cremona, I’ve nicknamed “Mona,” safe in her battered hard case. Brand new Kelty backpack loaded — tent, sleeping bag, mess kit, few days’ food. Sony cassette deck with carefully recorded mix tapes: Dead, Allmans, Airplane, CSN. Colombian weed and Bambus tucked away. Water bottle full. Everything I own.

Wander the empty house. My father — moved to the city. The younger kids — scattered to camps and day school. The two older sisters — somewhere. My mother — has taken Nana to the Senior Center.

Passing the living room doorway. Stop.

The July heat can’t erase the ghost of that first Christmas at Ledge Acres.

The voice shifts. Verb-forward, fragmentary, present tense. This is the engine of the road sections — sixteen chapters of it, from leaving Ledge Acres to a five-day fast in a Texas canyon. The whole middle of the book runs at this rhythm.

FROM ACT THREE — AFTER THUMB OUT

Chapter 21: Caught In The Light

The two of us stood in the middle of the road, looking south.

And coming toward us from the direction of 684, over the crest of the next hill — golden hair first. Blonde and straight and fine, backlit by late afternoon sun. Turner light — low, slanting, the kind that dissolves edges and makes the world look like a memory even while you’re standing in it. Then their heads. Their shoulders. Small bodies in navy and white, Rippowam uniforms, collared shirts. Books in one hand each.

And their free hands holding each other.

Charlie. Twelve. Anni. Ten. Walking home from school.

They were the babies. Youngest two of six, and the only ones truly native to Ledge Acres — born at Northern Westchester Hospital, rooted in this place from their first breath. A solid decade of one address, one school to walk home from. They had lifelong friends. I’d moved eight times by their age and lost touch with all of mine.

The reflective voice returns. The boy who left has come home to a sold house and an arthritic dog, and his two youngest siblings are walking up the road. This is where Act Three begins, and where the book turns its attention to what was left behind.

Holding “author proofs” of the bread and meat that make my “Thumb Out” sandwich.

That’s the architecture. Two voices, three acts, one volume. The boy on the porch at thirteen, the man with his thumb out at twenty-one, the man who came back at twenty-two and had to figure out what to do with what he’d seen.

Kindle Cover Designer is a clunky, frustrating tool, but it works, eventually, kind of…

If any of that pulled you in, Thumb Out is available in paperback, hardcover, Kindle as well as an e-book for non kindle readers. The whole story runs about 110,000 words, twenty-eight chapters, the long arc from Exeter to the canyon and back to Pound Ridge.

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Volume Two — Sahara Dust: 1980’s Windsurfing Antigua Memoir — is in progress with chapters dropping here as they are written. Be sure to subscribe and receive them in your email.