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Alyson and Rickey met when they were both traveling with the hippie caravan that followed Grateful Dead concerts. Alyson began trailing the band just under a decade ago, when she was a college sophomore in Charleston, S.C. Rickey joined the Dead followers a year or so later, at the behest of a friend who lived in a bus parked on the dirt roadsides of China Basin, where Rickey also parked his bus.
For Alyson the tours were only a summer sideline to efforts toward a college English degree, which she hoped would help turn her into a writer.
Rickey, however, remembers the Dead tours much in the way a one-term politician remembers his brief time in office, or former athletes remember being on top of their game.
After leaving his biker mom and crank addict dad as a teen-ager, Rickey lived from couch to couch in Oakland. He made money any way he could -- odd jobs, odd scams, and whatever else happened his way. This training gave him the skills to become a Duke of the Dead Tour.
He and his friend Randy Turley skippered a series of beat-up buses across the country, hauling paying teen-agers from concert to concert, selling scrambled eggs, beer, and sodas in stadium parking lots, while Rickey sneaked contraband into the concerts themselves. Rickey recalls a half-dozen Deadhead girlfriends, endless mad-rush road trips, and a parking lot commerce scene where he was always the center of attention.
"Money was easy in the parking lot. I used to call the money we would earn from fares 'people miles,' " Turley says. "I could carry four to five times as many people as a VW Microbus, and took around three times the gas. I had a sliding scale -- money, trades, or people who talked me into it for free."
If you get Rickey started talking about his Deadhead days, he won't stop for breath.
"Before each show we'd stop at a Ralphs supermarket. Those stadiums are miles from any store, so we'd buy beers, juice, sodas, milk. You wouldn't believe how much milk we could sell. We'd grab cases of maxi-Pampers, anything. What you could really gouge them on was juice: three bucks a bottle, two for $5. We'd get it for $1.25 a bottle, the same price as LSD," he says.
The fun ended in New Jersey seven years ago, when police found a phone-book page full of acid blots on Rickey. He was sentenced to nine months in jail, and he stopped hearing from his Deadhead friends.
Except for Alyson, the jewelry-making college girl who was so easy to laughter and so quick with a confidence. She and Rickey had gotten together soon before his arrest. At first, he didn't think much more of her than the other women he had slept with on tour. When he went to jail, though, she continued to write, and they became lovers by letter.
When he got out, Rickey moved to rural South Carolina to be with Alyson.
He couldn't sit still for long though. The people were nice and the countryside was beautiful, he recalls. But it was a lot less exciting than the Bay Area streets he had grown up on. So he went out West. He and Alyson promised they'd write each other.
After a few letters, Alyson began to wonder which she wanted more: an English degree or the Duke of the Dead Tour. She quit college.
"I came out here on a Greyhound with a footlocker and $200," she says. "I had only gone to college to be able to write. And my plan was to make jewelry out here until I could write something."
After briefly living with Rickey's mom, they moved to the streets, parking their bus alongside San Francisco's China Basin and in the Central Basin warehouse districts. It was a life Rickey enjoyed, but Alyson was quick to spot drawbacks.
"We were getting malnourished and getting sick all the time because we were living on the street," Alyson says. "Rickey would have liked to continue living on the street, but he sort of swallowed his pride."
So they drove the few blocks from the illegal dirt street parking spaces of China Basin to the then-$600-per-month ones on Townsend Street.
At first living in the RV park was a lot like street life. A steady stream of Rickey's street friends crashed on the floor. There was barely any space in Rickey's 1952 International Harvester school bus to stretch one's legs, let alone cook or clean.
After a few months, though, Rickey had an epiphany. He didn't like seeing Alyson miserable in his tiny bus. So he went hunting for a bigger one. He poked around, got some advice from bus mechanic Randy, and found a beautiful, 1976 Gillig -- the Cadillac of school buses. It was 40 feet long, had a high roof, and plenty of space inside. He paid a junkyard $2,000 for it, drove it to the RV park, and gave the smaller International Harvester to Turley.
Rickey came to like taking showers every day in the RV park bathroom. He liked having electricity, and he liked parking his bus in a space where the cops couldn't tell him to move along. Most of all, he liked being with Alyson, and he liked how Alyson thought the world of him.
Before long, and without saying much about it to Alyson, Rickey started making more improvements. He began tenuously, then proceeded vigorously to turn the bus into a first-rate motor home.
Now, a guest can sit on one of two couches Rickey has fashioned in the bus version of a foyer. Farther back in the bus comes a kitchen, complete with an electric stove and oven, a full-size refrigerator, a stainless steel sink, and ample cabinet space. While there is some finishing work left to do, the kitchen looks for the most part like a truly professional job: The top sides of the cabinets are rounded to fit flush with the domed roof of the school bus, the sink is housed in a Formica countertop, and the cupboards reach from the bus' side at the same height as Alyson's shoulders.
