planet of the apes
It started following an all-day Planet of the Apes marathon held at a budget theater a mile or so from my parents’ house. I had seen the original movie nine times, waiting always for Zira to ask, “What do you think he’ll find in the Forbidden Zone, Dr. Zaius?” The area in question was a vast wasteland, off-limits to the intelligent chimps and warmongering gorillas who inhabited this world turned upside down. As Bright Eyes, the defiant astronaut stranded on this planet, Charlton Heston escapes his captors and rides into the Forbidden Zone accompanied by the mute human supervixen he has chosen as his mate. Their horse trots over barren deserts and sandy beaches until they come upon the half-buried remains of the Statue of Liberty. Suddenly realizing that he has been on his home planet throughout the course of the entire two-hour movie, Charlton Heston dismounts his horse and kneels in the sand. “Damn you!” he cries, shaking his fist at the blistering sun. “Damn you all to hell!”
I had entered the theater on a bright, humid morning but when I left, dazed and candy-bloated, it was dark and raining. I thought of calling my mother for a ride, but she was off wrapping potatoes in tinfoil for my sister Amy’s Girl Scout troop. That left only my father.
“I’ll be there in five minutes,” he said. In the background I heard mention of the term “three-eighths.” Not three-eighths of an inch, but three-eighths of a point, which meant he was watching the financial report and had already taken off his pants for the evening.
I called back an hour later and he answered saying, “I’m on my way out the door right this minute.” A studio audience laughed and hooted from my father’s end of the phone. The situation comedies had started. This meant he’d been asleep in his chair. He would sit there snoring until someone tried to change the channel. “What are you doing?” he’d yell. “I was watching that!”
It was even worse on weekend afternoons, when you’d call for a ride and hear nothing in the background. This meant he was watching golf, hours of silence interrupted every so often by the commentator whispering, “It’s been bogey, bogey, double bogey for Hogan, who’s nine over par coming into the fourth hole here at Oakland Hills.”
You could outgrow your clothing waiting for my father to pick you up. I called a third time and he answered groggy and confused. “David who?” he asked. “What movie, where?”
I left the shopping center, walked across the road, and held out my thumb. It was just that easy. My father was always stopping to pick up hitchhikers. We’d be packed into the station wagon, on our way to the pool or the grocery store, and he would pull over, instructing us to make room for company. It was always exciting to have a stranger in the car, young men we could torment with questions. Our father, his cock-tail tinkling between his legs, was outwardly gracious but also suspicious. He toyed with our guests, acting as though their stories were just that, stories, something they made up as they went along.
“All right, ‘Rudy,’ I’ll be happy to take you to your ‘grandmother’s’ house so you can pick up your ‘laundry.’” He would shake his head and chuckle. “Always happy to help out a fine young man such as yourself.”
“No, really,” our passenger would say. “She is my grandmother, I swear.”
“I know you swear,” my father would say. “Twenty bucks says you’ve got a mouth like an open sewer.”
As long as they were young, he was more than happy to pick them up; but the old ones — forget it. We would spot some stooped and weathered granddad standing beside a beat-up suitcase and call out, “There’s one! Dad, stop.” Ignoring our request, our father would drive past these men as if they were painted cutouts advertising a restaurant called Tramps or Hobos.
I held out my thumb, certain someone like my father would pick me up but instead, it was an elderly woman, her helmet of hair protected by a plastic bonnet. She rolled down her window and shouted as if the two of us had some long-standing beef. “Goddamn you, get your sorrowful butt into this car.”
She wore a pale blue uniform, the outfit issued to the cashiers of a local supermarket chain. “What are you, fourteen, fifteen years old? I’ve got a grandson about your age, and if I ever caught him hitching a ride, I’d stick my foot so far up his ass I’d lose my shoe. What the hell do you think you’re doing, taking rides from strangers? What if I was to have a pistol or a switchblade knife? You couldn’t fight off a house cat, and don’t bother telling me otherwise, because I know your type, Mr. Wisenheimer, I know your type only too well. What would your mother think about this foolishness? Where are your people?”
“My parents?” I hesitated a moment, realizing there was no reason I had to tell this woman the truth. Chances are, she’d never see me again; and if she did, who’s to say she’d recognize me? I told her my father was attending a peace conference in Stockholm, Germany, and that my mother was a long-haul truck driver on a run to the West Coast with a loadful of… panty hose.
“Right,” the woman said, tamping her cigarette into the smoldering ashtray, “and I breast-feed baby camels in my backyard just for the freaking fun of it. Just tell me where you live, Pinocchio, and save the baloney for lunch.”
She pulled up in front of my parents’ house just as my father was leaving to pick me up. “Truck driver, my pretty pink ass,” she said. “Now I want you to get into that fancy house of yours and stay there before somebody carves his initials into your skull. You were lucky this time, but if I ever catch you out there again, I’ll run you down just to spare you the misery.”
I started hitchhiking on a regular basis. Aside from the convenience, I enjoyed spending time with people who knew nothing about me. I was free to re-invent myself, trying on whichever personality happened to suit my mood. I was a Broadway actor studying the regional accent for an upcoming show or maybe a California high-school student, here to track down the father I’d never known. “Word has it he goes by the name T-Bone, but that’s all I have to go on.”
Some people pulled over almost as if they’d been expecting me, while others slowed down, studying me before coming to a complete stop. They were black ministers and retired locksmiths, lifeguards, dance instructors, and floor sanders, and usually they were alone. Raleigh wasn’t that big a town, and most people didn’t mind going a mile or two out of their way for a stranger. “You should spend some time here, Maurice,” they’d say. “It’s a friendly city with plenty of opportunities for a talented concert pianist like you.”
I never hitchhiked farther than the city limits until I went off to college and fell in with a girl named Veronica, whose life resembled one of the stories I’d invented. Her mother had died while confined to an iron lung parked in the family’s dining room. Veronica was fourteen at the time and received the news while experiencing her first acid trip. “You want to ruin a perfectly good high, that’s the way to do it,” she said. Her father had remarried twice over the past four years, dragging her through two sets of stepfamilies. The experience had taught her to fend for herself. She was adventurous and independent in a way I’d never known, well instructed in the arts of camping, cigarette rolling, and sneaking out of second-story windows. Our college campus was isolated in the mountains of western North Carolina, far from the region’s celebrated tourist attractions. We started off by taking day trips, first to Gatlinburg to see the fake Indians and then to Cherokee to see the real thing.
She was a take-charge kind of person, and together we crossed state lines, hitchhiking as far away as Nashville and Washington, D.C. At the end of the school year, I transferred to Kent State and Veronica packed off to San Francisco, where her brother set her up with a job in a movie theater. Her letters made my life sound hopelessly dull and predictable. “I could set you up just like that!” she’d write. “All the popcorn and hard candies you can eat, and it won’t cost you a nickel. Free movies, a clean place to shit — you’ll have it made!”
I lasted a year before deciding to join her, making the trip with a fellow named Randolph Feathers, a second-year college stu
dent I’d met at a party. Randolph was creating his own major in Beat literature, a subject that warranted no further attention as far as I was concerned. His collection of stained, first-edition paperbacks reflected his belief that this was to be a spiritual journey, presided over by the ghosts of his bongo-playing heroes. In order to prepare himself, he had grown a goatee and bought an Australian bush hat that he’d decorated with pins and buttons espousing the numerous political causes close to his heart. Veronica had taught me that in the hopes of squeezing out a few extra miles, it was wise never to debate or rile a driver. If they believed in, say, the enforced sterilization of redheads, it was best just to say, “Hmm, I never thought about it, but maybe you’re onto something.” Randolph’s hat guaranteed we wouldn’t be riding in any air-conditioned Cadillacs. To make matters worse, he decided to bring along a guitar. We hadn’t even gotten our first ride before he pulled it out and began composing one of his mournful ballads. “Standin’ on the highway, thumb up in the air/People passin’ by, pretendin’ not to care.”
I’d sooner pick up someone waving a pistol than holding a guitar. He’d lie barefoot on the side of the road with his head propped up on his rucksack, exercising his toes and wondering why we weren’t getting any rides. “It’s a heartless cut-throat world, so callous and so cold/I hope to get to Frisco, before I’m bald and old.”
Outside Indianapolis we were picked up by two young men in a Jeep who introduced themselves as Starsky and Hutch, names borrowed from the brazen, coltish heroes of a popular television show. They were wired and loopy, washing down their over-the-counter amphetamines with quarts of warm malt liquor. When asked where they were from, Starsky made a gagging gesture.
“That’s the code for ‘Delaware,’” Hutch explained.
Starsky gave the finger to the driver of an orange Gremlin. “State bird,” Hutch said. He took a swallow of his malt liquor and belched, proclaiming it the state motto.
Noticing the tank was low, they pulled into a service station, where I offered them some gas money, hoping they might view my thoughtful gesture as payment enough. Starsky said he had it covered, adding that he could sure use some fudge. “Not just chocolate, but fudge. Why don’t you go on into the mart there and see do they have some.”
It’s always best for one person to remain with the car just in case the driver gets an urge to take off with your packs, so Randolph stayed behind, squinting out at the flat, uninspired landscape and fulfilling Hutch’s request for “Free Bird.”
I bought a bag of potato chips and a block of something fudgelike and returned to the car just as Starsky was replacing the gas cap. “Jump in, chief.” He eyed the attendant headed our way to accept payment, but just as the man reached the pump, Starsky peeled out of the station, driving over a concrete embankment and onto the interstate.
“I’m not sure how cool this is,” Randolph said. “What about the police?”
“Police?” Starsky turned to look behind him. “Hey-ho, buddy, we can outrun the police, no fucking problemo.” He stomped on the gas pedal and the Jeep advanced much like a plane moments before taking to the air. We passed other cars as if they were parked, Starsky hunching forward with the clenched, determined look of a bombardier preparing to destroy a village of unsuspecting peasants. He yelled out for Hutch to hold the wheel while he opened the packet of fudge, and the Jeep swerved into the other lane, barely missing a tanker filled with diesel fuel. Horns blared and brakes squealed, and for the first time in my life I thought, This is how people die; this is exactly how it happens. Randolph’s hat flew out the window, but even if the violent wind had taken his guitar, I doubt I would have been able to appreciate it. This wasn’t a situation that allowed me to laugh at someone else’s misfortune. He and I were in this together. We would either die or spend the rest of our lives on the back wards of some hospital where nurses would come regularly to massage our comatose limbs and whisper words of encouragement. Beneath his goatee and tie-dyed T-shirt, we were whining, trembling brothers, frantically searching for the nonexistent seat belts and grabbing onto each other for support and comfort. Starsky and Hutch seemed to enjoy our pathetic display of fear, jiggling the steering wheel and cutting off other drivers just to watch us cower and pray. We covered an enormous amount of ground before Starsky pulled over to relieve himself behind a billboard. It struck me as odd that he could steal gasoline and threaten the lives of countless strangers, yet feel the need to hide so completely while peeing. He walked far into the tall grass, and Randolph and I took the opportunity to jump out of this death trap, our quivering hands barely able to grip our packs. “This is great,” we said. “Really, this is exactly where we needed to go.”
Starsky zipped up his fly and exchanged places with Hutch, who drove a few hundred feet up the road before backing up to where we stood. “And another thing,” Starsky said. “Your fudge ain’t worth shit.” He reared back and pitched it in our direction before taking off down the interstate in a cloud of exhaust and whipped gravel. The fudge hit the billboard and bounced onto the road, where Randolph stopped to pick it up. He brushed it off and took a few bites before saying that it tasted just fine to him.
We reached Colorado, which was just as I had seen it pictured on calendars: cloudless blue skies and heroic mountains dotted with magnificent firs. Just like a calendar, with no cars, people, or houses to sully the view. Randolph used the downtime to compose a few new songs. “I’m well aware, they were from… Delaware.”
For a brief time our brush with disaster brought us closer together. We repeated the story to drivers much like a long-married couple, one of us finishing the other’s sentences. The experience seemed to fit neatly into Randolph’s Beatish notions, and he spoke with growing frequency of karma and redemption. On one hot, sunny afternoon we found ourselves beside a clear, rushing river, its bed paved with smooth stones. There were no potential rides coming our way, so we took off our clothing and swam, looking down at our feet, where long, silvery fish exhausted themselves by heading in the wrong direction. The riverbank was carpeted with fragrant pine needles, and rabbits skittered through the meadow. It was, for me, one of those moments when a director might sail through the air on his cherry picker shouting, “And… perfect! Take five, guys, it’s a wrap.” While I marveled at the beauty of it all, Randolph knowingly nodded his head, referring by page and chapter to one of the books he carried in his bag. He seemed to have it all down, like a tourist holding his Michelin guide and nodding with recognition as the bus approached London Bridge. My brotherly feelings faded and were finally laid to rest a few days later when, polishing off the last of our water, he loudly belched and asked for a word that might rhyme with Utah. I didn’t sleep for days.
We were stopped at the California border and asked to hand over all our fruits and vegetables, on the off chance they might introduce some new species of fly or weevil to the dry, beige fields surrounding the inspection point. I was never one of those easterners attracted by the romantic pull of California. Still, though, it felt liberating to enter a part of the country where no member of my family had ever been.
Randolph softly strummed his guitar, and I surrendered my three rotting plums as if they were my old-country surname. We crossed the border in a peach-colored Mustang belonging to a speech therapist from Barstow, and I turned briefly in my seat before vowing never to look back.
The San Francisco that awaited us bore no resemblance to the bohemian think tank described in Randolph’s tattered paperbacks. The streets were crowded not with soul-searching poets but with men wearing studded vests and tight leather chaps. This was not a Beat town but rather a beat-off town. Veronica had found us rooms at a residence hotel run by a caramel-colored man whose curious Eastern religion involved bright orange robes, incessant chanting, and hand-cuffs. Randolph stayed for ten days, returning home by bus shortly after a neighbor cornered him in the hallway, asking if he might be so kind as to enter his penis in a blind taste test. Veronica and I left three months later,
headed up to Oregon, where we hoped to make a killing picking apples and pears. Killing accurately described the work, and once it was over we limped up the coast to Canada, back to California, and across the country, stopping wherever we liked. It was the realization of my high-school fantasy, except that Veronica bore little resemblance to a proboscis monkey. She was, however, the perfect traveling companion, poised and even-tempered. As a couple we received rides from strangers who might not have stopped had we both been men. These were single women and truck drivers who claimed they needed company yet rarely spoke a word. Sometimes people would invite us into their homes to spend the night on their sofas. “The bathroom’s down the hall, and I’ve laid out some fresh towels. I’m trusting you not to steal the TV or hi-fi, but help yourself to anything else, it’s all garbage anyway.” Other nights we slept in abandoned houses and open fields, under bridges and lean-tos, and on one occasion, in the parking lot of a Las Vegas casino. We headed down to Texas with the sole purpose of seeing an armadillo, then swept north, arriving in western North Carolina in mid-November. The next stop would be Raleigh, and wanting to postpone the inevitable, I thought I might visit some college friends in Ohio. It was the longest trip I’d ever taken alone, but having logged so many miles, I felt I was up to the challenge. Time had wisened me, I thought. Without modeling myself on someone else, I had managed to transform myself into a reckless, heroic figure, far more noble than the characters described in any of Ran-dolph’s trendy beatnik poems or novels. My college friends would view me as a prophet, and my presence would cause them to question the value of their tame, predictable lives. “Tell us again about your three days on the Mojave,” they’d ask. “Weren’t you frightened? Does rattlesnake really taste like chicken? What did you do with the fangs?”