Have you ever had a conversation truly free of consequence?
People pick up hitchhikers because they feel sorry for them standing in the rain, the blowing snow, the bitter cold, the cruel sun; because they’re bored; because they’re shitfaced and need somebody to grab the wheel; because they want to call another person home to Jesus; because they need somebody to keep them awake; because they’re people who recognize that another human’s miles of need don’t disappear just because they’re no longer in the mirror.
Hitchhiking is getting involved for a couple of minutes, a couple of hours, a thousand miles with a person you would never know were it not for happenstance, luck and a shared fate. At the end of the minutes and miles, parting will happen and there will be no last names. Conversations are rattle-mouth stupid, deeply personal, ego-laden, spellbinding, dull, giggly and high, slurred and drunk, cries of despair so wrenching a driver pulls his longnose Peterbilt onto the shoulder to sob out his loss, all entirely free of consequence, no debt to upbringing, environment or occasion. And no shared future.
Once in a while there is silence, no conversation at all, the driver doing right and nothing more.
Everybody — doctors, cowboys, housewives, tie-dye hippies, traveling salesmen – everybody picks up hitchhikers (except lawyers, lawyers never pick up hitchhikers). They drive shiny Cadillacs, rusted Beetles and loaded Freightliners. They pull over slowly and cautiously or explode the brakes and skid smoking tires onto the shoulder, flashing right red invitation. Through the open passenger window, cautious greeting, assessing, judging, sometimes bartering (windshield sticker from the day, “Ass, Grass or Gas, Nobody Rides for Free”). And, of course, the questions that determine the future: “Where are you going?” and “Where are you going?”
Standing thumb out, back to the horizon, watching fate motor toward you and wondering whether this one or that one will be your ride into the future is hot, cold, wet, frustrating, boring, infuriating, and, ultimately, liberating having cast off the bonds and obligations of dollars and schedules, trading them for the largess of humanity, offering in exchange for a flick of the turn indicator and nudge of the wide pedal, entertainment, companionship, sated curiosity, the joy of giving, bread broken and shared, and maybe, just maybe, a damn good story.
Of course, there’s risk. For everybody. People die out there.
It was December, 1974 and I was living in Solana Beach, California. I’d joined the Army in October but wasn’t going on active duty until April. I’d been trimming trees and painting houses since I’d graduated from high school in June and I was broke. My mother had moved to Minnesota and I thought I’d spend Christmas at her house, maybe get something to eat while I was there.
Standing in the dark on an onramp to northbound Interstate 15 in Barstow, a fifties Chevy truck braked onto the shoulder, Gold’s Plumbing stenciled on the blue door in chipped and faded gold paint. The window stayed closed and I pushed the button on the door handle and the door swung open and the guy in the passenger seat fell out of the truck into my arms. I caught him and the guy driving, young guy, grabbed his sweatshirt, and between the two of us we wrestled him upright onto the seat, “Kid brother, fell asleep. Where you headed?”
“Minnesota.”
“Louisville. Money for gas?”
I had twenty on me, I could spare a couple of bucks for a good ride and part way to Kentucky was a good ride. I nodded, “I can help out,” and threw my bag in the back of the truck, pushed the kid into the middle of the seat and climbed in.
“Skeet.” He nodded his head toward the kid, “Eddy,”
I reached across and shook hands with Skeet. Eddy reached out his hand and I took it, his fingers were cold and limp and didn’t return my grip. When he pulled the hand back, he let his body slump against me and laid his head on my shoulder.
Rumbling up the freeway at fifty miles an hour, Skeet asked Eddy if he wanted a cigarette. He didn’t wait for an answer; he lit a Kool and handed it to him, Eddy reached for it and dropped it. It was glowing on the floor between our feet and I picked it up, took his hand and wedged it between two fingers. His head didn’t move against my shoulder when he put the cigarette to his mouth and took a pull. Skeet offered me the pack and I took one, too. Skeet had the truck heater on high and the windows closed. The air in the cab was a hot, thick fog. It was a good ride.
We stopped for gas just off the freeway, seems like I remember it being a Texaco. Under the fluorescent lights, I got a look at the two of them. Skeet looked tired. Standing next to the truck pumping leaded regular, his eyes were a faded grey-green, his skin in the flickering blue light yellow and dry like he hadn’t slept in a long time. His hand on the nozzle was big for his body and muscly and stained with what looked like mud or dirt. His upper lip was smashed and scabbed black.
Eddy, he stayed in the truck, his head leaned back against the rear window. Standing next to the open door, I could see that his left eye was scabbed and crusted with pus and sticking out in a swollen lump. Below his eye, the side of his face hung limp like the bones had been smashed and what was left was pulpy flesh held up by sagging black and purple skin. His right eye was open looking back at me. He was smoking another Kool; when he took it out of his mouth, he crooked the fingers holding the cigarette to motion me close and I leaned in so my ear was near his mouth. “Out of the ballpark,” he whispered so I could barely hear him. I stepped back in time to see the lips on right side of his mouth twitch upwards for just a flash like he was trying to smile.
Skeet saw me talking to him, “He’s okay, he’s going to be fine.”
“How old are you guys?”
“Thirteen. I’m fifteen.”
“What’s in Louisville?”
The handle of the nozzle clanked. Skeet banged it back on the pump and walked around to the passenger door, “Come on, Eddy, let’s take a piss.” Eddy put his arm around Skeet’s neck. When he tried to stand, his legs wobbled and buckled like he couldn’t control them. Skeet grabbed his belt and mostly carried him into the gas station. I leaned on the truck and smoked my cigarette.
Back in the cab, Eddy asleep on my shoulder, I asked Skeet what happened.
“The old man was drunk and beating on me. I heard Eddy yelling at him to stop and when he didn’t, I guess Eddy grabbed his slugger and came up behind him and hit him, hit him so hard I could hear the hollow crack of it and his blood sprayed on my face and the wall. The old man turned around like it was nothing, like he hadn’t been hit, grabbed the bat and hit Eddy in the face with it. Eddy went over backwards and the old man dropped the bat and stood there staring at him lying on the floor bleeding and not moving. I picked up the bat and hit him in the back of the head with it and kept hitting him until he fell on his face on the floor and quit moving. I took his keys and wallet and we got in the truck.”
Two o’clock in the morning, we rolled into Las Vegas, got off the freeway and drove around looking for a gas station. We were headed back out of town when Skeet ran a yellow and a block later the red lights lit up behind us, “Fuck, Rollers. Eddy, we ain’t going back, don’t worry about it.”
The cop came up to the window and asked Skeet for his driver’s license, the red lights bouncing off the windshield and flickering through the cab. When Skeet told him all he had was a permit, the cop told us to get out and stand on the sidewalk.
“Let’s see some IDs, boys.”
I handed over my license, “I’m just a hitchhiker,” I told him. He ignored me.
Skeet had his arm around Eddy holding him up. “Let’s see some ID, kid.” The cop held his light up to Eddy’s face, “Holy God, what in hell happened to you?”
“He fell and banged his face. He’s okay, he’s fine.”
“Where you boys from?”
“California. We’re going Kentucky to live with our mom.”
“Whose truck is that?”
“It’s our dad’s company truck. He works for Gold’s.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
He fiddled his gun belt for a while just looking at us then he said to me, “You, over here.”
He stood with his back to Skeet and Eddy tapping my driver’s license against his flashlight, tap, tap, “I’m off in a few minutes and I don’t want to deal with this shit. So, here’s what we’re going to do; I’m going to get in my car and you and those two boys are going to get in that truck. You’re the only one with a driver’s license so you’re going to drive. You’re going to go straight for three stoplights, you’re going to take a left at the third one, you’ll see signs for the interstate. I want you to get on 15 and drive until you pass a sign for the Las Vegas city limits. Once you’re out of my town, I don’t care what you do. But if I see you again, you’re going to jail, all of you. I’m going to follow you just in case you get lost.” Tap. He handed me my license.
I got behind the wheel and turned the key and pushed the starter pedal, the truck coughed and fired up. I squashed the clutch, ground a gear dropping it into second, first gear was a granny gear in those trucks, and we rolled down the street, took a left where he told me to and got on the freeway. The cop didn’t follow us up the ramp.
The sun was coming up when we stopped for gas, we’d been in Utah for a while. Skeet shook Eddy, asked him if he needed to take a leak. Eddy didn’t move, “He’s asleep,” Skeet said and got out and filled the truck with gas and I gave him ten bucks. From Utah, there are a couple of routes across the Rockies, Interstate 70 through Denver or Interstate 80 through Salt Lake City. Skeet had told me they were planning to take the southern route through Denver. I’d told him then that either route worked for me, that it didn’t matter. Now it mattered and I told him I was going north through Salt Lake.
Interstates 15 and 70 come together in a desert on the western slope, desolate, gray, enormous and, other than long curving slabs of interstate concrete and the occasional tiny truck or car, empty of humanity. Skeet pulled the truck onto the shoulder of the eastbound 70 exit. As I was getting out, Eddy slumped toward me, his good eye closed, his eye lashes resting on the pale, young-child skin of his cheek. I touched his neck, feeling for a pulse. His skin was cold and after a minute I said, “Skeet, I can’t feel his heartbeat.”
“He’s still sleeping. Push him over here so I can hold him.” We laid him on his back so his head rested on Skeet’s lap and I closed the door. As I grabbed my backpack, I saw a baseball bat lying in the bed of the truck; it was in two pieces, split longways starting at the label and running through the barrel, the long, straight grain exposed by the split a pure and shocking white against the stains.
I shouldered my pack and walked back down the ramp toward northbound 15. As I walked, I kept looking over my shoulder. The truck never moved.
Remi (brown poodle brat) and I are driving to Death Valley to take pictures of the Geminids meteor shower. We left Saturday morning. We spent Saturday night at a truck stop in Valentine Nebraska, our camper truck parked in a line of idling semis, a sort of bring-your-own-sleeper-cab bunkhouse. The truck stop had a McDonalds and I had an Egg McMuffin. I didn’t tell Remi, although I think he was suspicious.
We left Valentine at 5:30 Sunday morning headed west driving Nebraska Highway 20 which runs along the state’s northern border. Good road, cliffs and buttes and curves in unlikely juxtaposition to movie-set ranch scenes and vastnesses where the prairie meets the horizons all around. It’s a beautiful, beautiful part of our country.
But in the morning, driving into the western dark, you can’t see the towering sand and stone geologies or the grazing cattle in the pine-treed and hilly distances or the snowy, hay-bale dotted expanses, all you can see is the headlight tunnel and the road and the hood and the blue, white and red gauges.
For many miles Sunday morning, the planet Mars, thirty degrees above the horizon and winking red, aligned exactly with the dashed white center line of west Highway 20 and the furthest reaches of our headlight beams while in those same moments, I watched in my mirrors as the eastern sky behind us turned red to blue. And the only sound was the murmur of the diesel and the gossipy whispers of the tires to the asphalt.
In the quiet, I thought about life being so quick and jerky and that it’s in these moments when fate and good fortune put us between the stars and the sun, that joy and peace are relearned.
I grew up in Del Mar, California, a little beach town just north of San Diego. I was born in 1956 and so was just gaining consciousness in the late sixties, early seventies. The Monkees are on my sound track. Del Mar wasn’t Berkeley but it wasn’t hick, either. Today, Interstate 5 hauls the vast majority of goods and people in and out of San Diego but in those days, the PCH, the Pacific Coast Highway, Highway 1, was the major north-south thoroughfare and all that traffic went right through Del Mar which at the time had two stoplights, 3999 friends and neighbors and me, and a decent break at the Eleventh Street beach.
This is a story about Gabriel and Judy and their business making and selling white cotton robes out of a shop in Del Mar. It was a little light blue stucco store front, east side of the highway facing west toward the ocean, a big window for displaying the robes, a laundromat next door, a little office above, half a dozen parking spots in front.
Gabe and Judy’s business plan was to ride the wave of the biggest menswear style-makeover in all of history; men, and also women, were at the same moment, any moment now, going to realize the inherent superiority of the white, all-cotton, calf-length, long-sleeve one-piece robe and throw off their rigid, socially conformist, uncomfortable, unhealthy, expensive, environmentally ruinous, flammable, uniform-of-the-man garb in favor of the wear anywhere and everywhere, always in fashion, You-Are-The-Power cotton robe. Gabe and Judy wore robes throughout their daily lives to show how truly comfortable and free they, the robes, were. Gabe and Judy were in their twenties and thin and had good hair so it made sense. Also, Jesus wore a robe. I don’t know what Gabe and Judy wore when they went to the bank. I never went to the bank with them.
While the robe hasn’t happened yet from a fashion standpoint, I do think their plan had merit. And they did teach me some things about business. Their primary new store, go-to-market initiative was to offer free homemade hand-cranked ice cream on Friday nights with a little open house so that the local moms and dads — college professors, engineers, navy pilots, our parents, you know, robe-types — would have some ice cream and try on a robe. Well shit, there were a dozen kids, ten to fourteen years old that I hung out with in that little town with no movie theater and within hours the Robe Shop had become the place to be on Friday night. And we’d make it an event, taking turns cranking and eating ice cream out of cones and paper bowls and coming up with new flavor ideas, strawberry, raspberry, banana, mango, apple (didn’t work very well). We suggested candy bars but Gabe and Judy were purists. Yet, despite all the fruit, heavy cream and cranking, no parents ever showed up. In fact, nobody I knew or ever heard of ever bought a robe from the Robe Shop. Nobody. Ever. But their ice cream was spectacular. From that I learned a couple of things about business; first, you can’t sell a bad idea with good ice cream, and second, good ice cream is really a good thing.
Another thing Gabe and Judy taught me about being successful in business was the importance of a diverse revenue stream. It seems they’d discovered this new market opportunity where guys who’d just run the border from Tijuana hauling weed often needed to liquidate a little product to fund their ride north. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to be carrying a lot of cash in that illegal border-crossing business. Small, independent guys, guys hauling half-a-dozen, maybe a dozen keys, would pull into one of the parking spots in front of the Robe Shop and walk out with some twenties and a friendly wave from Judy at the office window. She paid a hundred bucks a key. Sure, Grade A Mexican, you’d get twice that in the Bay Area, easy, but you ain’t in the Bay Area, Bro, the Bay Area’s five hundred miles north and you need gasoline and maybe something to eat to get you there. Gabe and Judy would break those bricks up and put the weed in baggies and sell lids, four fingers for ten bucks. Judy sold most of the weed to the rich kids in La Jolla, although some stayed in town. Gabe bragged to me once about all the money they were making. They disappeared after a couple of months. The robes just weren’t selling.
In Death Valley, there is no obvious wildlife, no insects, a buzzing fly every hour or so is an occasion. Aside the fly, the silence is not complete; a steady ideology of military war planes doing war plane things keeps the roar dull and constant. Sometimes the soundtrack is accompanied by an air show.
For breakfast, I had oatmeal. I threw in some golden raisins and mixed nuts and Leaves of Grass to bulk it up. There’s something about the desert that cracks open the mind to language; maybe it’s the scarcity of words, or the arid, hard-edged reality all around reminding you that life is brief and precarious, or maybe it’s just the thin, dry air. That’s not what this is about, but there it is.
My photos are diminished by my wretched technologies. The telescope is controlled by my phone, but doesn’t connect readily to my phone or disconnects from my phone or randomly makes me “observer” rather than “controller” or disagrees about passwords or some such random annoyance. Got some shots anyway.
I bought an old camera from a friend (hey, Paul) and had it modified for astro. Oh, happy me! The super hydrogen-sensitive sensor is washing my pics red; still red at lower ISOs but maybe useable. I shot a bunch. We’ll see.
But here’s the thing, when you lean your head back in your camping chair so that you’re staring straight up and the sky is flooded with stars and you can feel their photons that have travelled tens or hundreds of lightyears to pass through the lenses of your eyes and your skin and pour into your body so you’re filled with the light of eternity, the fucking trophy photos just don’t matter.
As a young man just out of high school, I rode my thumb across this country. That was 1974.
I slept in bar ditches alongside gravel country roads, in U-Haul trailers parked behind gas stations wrapped in moving blankets. I slept shivering in the backs of pickups and sweating in the rear seats of VW bugs. I slept on picnic tables at freeway rest stops and in front of a fifty-cent cup of coffee in a truck stop café. I slept on freeway on ramps, my back against a steel post for the ubiquitous black and white sign describing all things PROHIBITED, hitchhikers listed specifically. I slept in the sleepers of semi tractors, the air thick with the stink of bad breath, armpit sweat, ass and diesel, and sitting upright in the passenger seat feet braced on the dash against the buck of the cab. And I’ve not slept, because of fear, cold, hunger, or lack of opportunity in every possible combination.
Under freeway bridges, just below the deck, up and to your right as you drive under, there’s a concrete shelf four feet wide or so, three feet high, spanning the width of the bridge. Flat, clean, dry and mostly uncluttered with trash, they’re snug and tidy. I’ve laid out my sleeping bag on that shelf many times, maybe rolled a cigarette or a joint, and watched the trucks and cars coming out of the dark on my left, the twin beams flickering over the horizon growing brighter and more intense until the concrete path below is a ablaze in a dazzling brilliance so bright I reflexively blink and in that instant the brilliance is replaced by the ogre-roar of the diesel, a blast of oily air and the twin yellow streaks of the clearance lights all gone in an instant, and then the red fog of taillights twinkling into tiny red dots as they disappear into the dark on my right. And then I lie down in the deep shadow in my sleeping bag my jacket for a pillow and let the ogres lull me to sleep, dry, safe, invisible.
On September 8, 1974, Evel Knievel jumped the Snake River on his steam-powered “Skycycle.” Or tried to. The river canyon is a mile wide at his launch site, his parachute ‘malfunctioned’ just as his tires lifted off the ramp and he floated unhurt to the bottom of the canyon where he was “plucked from the river.” I was there but I didn’t stay, the entry fee was twenty-five dollars and I only had seven.
I spent a fine night under a bridge spanning the southbound lane of Interstate 5 in northern California. By dark, I was on the coast highway almost to Big Sur. I was standing on the shoulder thinking about where to sleep when Duck and Jimmy pulled over in a dusty red Cadillac Eldorado convertible, white top, red leather seats, New York plates. As I was trotting up, Duck opened the driver’s door and waved me over to his side. The car was a two-door, Jimmy was passed out drunk in the passenger seat so I had to climb in behind Duck.
It was dark, but climbing in under the dome light I could see Jimmy leaning unconscious against the passenger door, a bottle of Jim Beam in his lap. His mouth open, a string of drool dangling from his bottom lip and puddling on his suit jacket. He was snoring loud enough to hear over the sound of the car idling and me clambering in, shoving my bedroll in front of me. The car stunk like sweat and whiskey and new leather. I told Duck I was headed to San Diego.
He must have seen me looking at Jimmy because as soon as he was back in his seat, he reached over with his hand and gently wiped the spit off Jimmy’s mouth then wiped his hand on his jeans. He did it like he’d done it before.
Duck’s driving was slow, even for the curvy coast highway, braking the big car gently into the turns, the headlights lighting the stone barrier walls and beaming out over the black ocean hundreds of feet below, sweeping across stars and blue planets in a grand arc until the wheels were straight and Duck eased on the throttle and we motored gently on. Duck was just back from Viet Nam, Jimmy had picked him up in Ohio four days ago and bought him a pair of boots in Iowa.
Duck told me he thought Jimmy was a business guy. Something went wrong and he drove away. I asked if anybody was looking for him and he said, “Jimmy’s afraid of cops.”
Duck didn’t know what kind of business Jimmy was in, “I think he’s he’s got a wife.”
“He drunk all the time?”
“Until he sleeps it off enough to start drinking again.”
Not waiting for my questions, he said, “I sleep here,” he tapped the steering wheel , “if I say I’m hungry, Jimmy hands me twenties.”
“Him?”
“He eats whiskey. Case in the trunk.”
“Where’s he going?”
“No idea.”
“You?”
“I’m just driving.”
I woke up and we were in Morro Bay. The car stopped in a parking lot along the beach, Duck asleep behind the wheel. Jimmy was awake, sitting in his seat blinking at the ocean turning blue in the morning sun.
I told him I was getting out and he opened the door and leaned against the side of the car in his socks and crumpled suit while I climbed out, the drool stain dark and shiny on the lapel. He stood hunched over and swaying, gripping the window post with the hand that wasn’t holding the whiskey. “America’s a beautiful thing, remember that, son,” his words were quiet, slurred and clear. And I have remembered them, although for many years I didn’t think he was serious. He unscrewed the cap on the Jim Beam and looked out across the blue as I turned and walked away.
During the Jim Crow years, during the depression, during the war years, Bessie Stringfield, a Black woman born in Jamaica in 1911 (or North Carolina in 1912, depending on your source), made repeated solo motorcycle trips across the continental United States.
She was a wanderer, a traveler for whom the destination was not the destination. According to lore, she chose her itinerary by laying out a map and tossing a penny onto the paper, where the penny landed was where she rode. As a Black woman, she often couldn’t rent motel rooms and slept on the motorcycle, her riding jacket rolled up and laid across the handlebars for a pillow. When she was lucky, she was invited to stay in the homes of Black Americans.
Bessie supported herself performing motorcycle stunts in carnivals and racing flat track, a particularly physical and dangerous form of motorcycle racing. She raced disguised as a man and at times was denied the winner’s purse when organizers discovered she was a woman. That she won speaks volumes about her athleticism and riding ability.
She was married and divorced six times having lost three babies with her first husband (Stringfield is the name of her third husband who asked her to keep it because he was convinced she would be famous). Over the years, she owned 27 Harley Davidson motorcycles, worked as a motorcycle courier for the Army during the Second World War and ended up in Florida where she was dubbed “The Motorcycle Queen of Miami.”
Bessie died in 1993 having never quit riding.
Us guys who ride motorcycles, especially us white guys, like to imagine ourselves as tough, we’ve got the tattoos and the leather and the foamy beer stories. But let’s be honest, as generally pursued, motorcycling is not a difficult task; clutch, gears, throttle, brakes, all very straightforward and easy to master and generally as unworthy of approbation as walking or driving a car. And modern bikes and modern gear and modern roads and being white and male further insulate us from the demands of character. Tough, not story tough, real tough, the tough that reveals character, was a 5′ 2″ tall Black woman in her twenties riding alone on an unreliable motorcycle on bad roads through a country ripped asunder by economic strife, a country built on social and legal misogyny, a country where slavery and the Civil War were living memories, a country where, according to Wikipedia, there were “…4,467 total (Black) victims of lynching from 1883 to 1941,”
Bessie Stringfield was the first Black woman to be inducted into the American Motorcyclist Association Hall of Fame and the Harley Davidson Hall of Fame.
