I'm not talking about Jack Nicholson's Bobby Dupea abandoning Karen Black's Rayette Dipesto at a gas station in rural Washington. This I understand. Dupea comes from an eccentric musical family and, despite his job history as an oil worker, regards himself as an intellectual rebel artist. He'd rather slit his throat than submit to a conventional middle-class Bakersfield life as Rayette's husband (and perhaps as a father to their unborn child). And so, like a chickenshit junior high-school nihilist, he decides to escape.