THE thick Southern heat was beginning to diffuse our patience, and the girl next to me was getting very restless.

"When's this bus gonna roll?" she hissed from the back of the Greyhound, shifting around on the seat in a white chiffon gown. "Gawwd-damm!" she cussed, "when's this driver gonna get us to Winterhaven?"

She propped herself up on the seat in front of her and hissed with redheaded Irish sass, "Well, I'm just about ready to get up there and throw my dress over his head and TAKE OVER!"

Ten retired amateur golfers wearing CAT-Deisel hats turned their heads and smiled with bare tolerance at the sexy young "thang," cast some bawdy aspersions, and returned their thoughts to the giant plastic orange propped up over the citrus fruit shop. We had stopped at "The Orange Ring."

Perhaps encouraged by a smiling Anita Bryant on the billboard above, the golfers' wives re-boarded the bus with bags of real oranges to eat and sourvenir plastic oranges to keep, while Redhead June fidgetted, bumping her knees to the Rolling Stones' "Bitch" that blared from my cassette deck.

"This is a crazy place," June's road chum from St. Petersburg testified. "When I went to high school in St. Pete we used to sit around the lake and listen to music and drink beer and one day this Jesus Freak came up to us and started talking Jesus to us and jeez...he was weird! Well, we didn't really want to listen, so we just turned up the music and drank some more beer...."

I laughed sympathetically. A bunch of ten-year-old boys wearing Red Sox baseball caps started jumping up and down in their seats just in front of me, causing me to spill orange juice all over my lap. Their mothers brought them under control, but only after going beserk themselves. A band of spring-break student gypsies surrendered to the madness and lit up a joint.

We were a bus full of fed-up people. The magical summer heat had revived our fires, for months smothered by three-foot New England snowdrifts, and now we were burning bright and fed up--fed up with waiting, problem sets, deadlines, mortgages, schedules, responsibilities, and most of all, promises. We were out to put all the promises behind us, even as the road to Boston slid back behind us--who needs it?

Like the trailing aftermath of a tremendous fireworks display, we poured off the bus, into "Red Sox Country", already sunburnt and still cooking, consuming all our worries and frustrations in a wanderlust inferno. June and her road chum went to a bar to get drunk, the retired amateur golfers hauled themselves over to the Holiday Inn, and I was suddenly alone again, hitching up the road to the Red Sox training camp at Chain-O-Lakes Park out on Cypress Boulevard, where the Boston sportswriters were furiously clucking away at their plastic portable typewriters with half-crazed treachery written all over them. Body counts--buddies gone--a troop movement. Something had happened.

"I think it's a great trade," said Cliff Keane of the Boston Herald-American as he popped the top off a beer and sat down at a table with some other sportswriters and Red Sox coaches. "Locke-Ober South," the food-and-drink bar set up in the press lounge, was keeping the sportswriters all juiced up.

"Eckersley will help," Keane said, "but Wise pitched one of the best games I ever saw in spring training...since '68 when Jose Santiago pitched a beauty..." He took another belt and mopped the sweat off his head, burnt brilliant crimson and tinged with frosty gray hair.

Big deal, I though. That was the year the Red Sox dropped their first ten games and Jose Santiago was launched into that nameless baseball obscurity, on the fringe of memory, tossed in the stacks of bubble gum card limbo with Pumpsy Green and Jose Tartibull. Only a die-hard, hungry Boston carnivore like me, a Red Sox fan since childhood, would remember these names--these extinguished hopes of the past.

And there is nothing potentially more explosive than teasing a fatalistic Red Sox fan--a hungry breed of sports fan, a bug-eyed baseball lunatic who in the summer months follows every pitch and grabs for every grain of hope with the tacit, suppressed knowledge in the back of his mind that around August, no matter how many home runs Jim Rice hits, or how awesome Yaz is out there in left--the cold hand of fate will sweep down from New York or Baltimore or Detroit and topple all the dominos.

That night, I shambled over to the ABC Disco with some friends I made at the Winterhaven Mall. It was a "request" disco filled with pretty sedate people--slumped and smoking and going to the bathroom--except for a bunch of minor league ball players propped up behind the revolving merry-go-round bar playing "flick the cockroach." A big Thurman Munson clone walked up to me wearing a Harley-Davidson t-shirt and yelled in my ear that I wasn't drinking enough. A "Mother Harley" tattoo embellished his hefty forearm, set flatly in front of me.

I chugged my remaining rum-and-coke and bolted, motel room a serious five miles down the road. I reached in my bag, turned on the Stones tape, and stuck out my thumb.