I hadn’t planned on lying, but it seemed a good move to embellish my stories, to pad and touch them up a bit. I stood by the side of the road, thinking that I might as well have broken wild stallions or caught trout with my bare hands — the point was that I had taken life head-on, with no regard for the consequences.
I got an interminable ride with a window salesman who spent six hours saying, “You just take and take, don’t you? Out there with your thumb in the air — not a care in the world, just grabbing whatever you can get. Yes, sir, you take and take until you’re ready to burst. But what about giving? Did you ever think of that? Of course not — you’re too busy taking, Mr. Handout, Mr. Gimmee, Gimmee, Gimmee. Me, I’m what you call a ‘taxpayer.’ Tax, it’s a… tariff that working people have to pay so that someone like yourself can enjoy a life of leisure. I give and I give until I’ve got nothing left! Nothing! Then I turn around and give some more. I give and I give to all of Uncle Sam’s little takers, every last one of you, but what’s in it for me? I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s time I get a little something in return. Yes, indeed, maybe it’s about time we try that shoe on the other foot for a change. You, my young friend, are going to wash my car, inside and out. And you’re going to pay for it!”
He exited the interstate and headed for a car wash, the roof of which supported three artificial seals buffing a limousine with their motorized fins. The man stood beside the bumper supervising me as I shampooed and waxed his car.
“That’s right, put a little muscle into it! Next I want you to empty those ashtrays and vacuum the interior, top to bottom. Come on, speedy, let’s get cracking.”
I had no problem with the work, but his coaching style was driving me out of my mind.
“How does it feel to be giving for a change? Not much fun, is it? Hurry up now and buff those hubcaps, I want to see them shine. Buff, boy, buff!”
I’m buffing, I’m buffing. Give it a rest already, I thought. Every headlight represented his bald, gleaming skull, and I worked the rag as if it were a sheet of sandpaper. I polished everything from the antenna to the license plate before he handed me my pack and drove away, tooting his horn as he merged into the afternoon traffic. I got a ride back to the interstate and then another that landed me twenty miles beyond Charleston, West Virginia. The sun was low and I hoped I might catch a long ride before it got dark, something that would maybe carry me through to the state of Ohio. It was cold outside and my hands were chapped from washing that lunatic’s car, the skin rough but my fingernails shining with wax.
I waited twenty minutes before someone slowed and stopped twenty yards down the road. It was a pickup truck advertising an air-conditioning-and-refrigeration company. Often someone, some wise guy, would stop in the distance only to drive off laughing after you’d exhausted yourself running to meet him. In response, I had developed a casual trot.
The man’s shirt introduced him as T. W. His fingers were soiled with grease, and the cab of the truck was littered with candy wrappers and soda cans. I asked him what T. W. stood for, and he told me it stood for T. W. His last name, he said, started with an a, “So when you put it all together, it has a nice ring to it.” He had an open, childlike face, the features set into a continuous expression of wonder. It was as if he’d spent the last ten years in a coma and woken up to find everything new and sensational. I told him I was a medical student completing my residency, just a few more months and I’d be graduating at the top of my class.
“Really? Be a doctor and operate? On people? You must be some kind of smart to be a doctor. Operate on brains, you say?”
I’d said I’d been doing it for years and that it wasn’t nearly as hard as it looked. It might seem odd for a twenty-year-old brain surgeon to be begging rides from strangers, so I told him I was hitchhiking to satisfy a bet I’d made with one of my classmates. “Fifty dollars says I can make it from Duke University to Kent State in time for tomorrow’s frontal-lobe conference,” I said. “It’s not that I need the money or anything, this is just something we doctors do to blow off steam.”
“Well, I’ll see to it that you win that bet,” T. W. said. He explained that he’d cut out of work early and would be more than happy to drive me to Ohio, seeing as he was a night owl and hadn’t spent time with a doctor since his foot had been crushed by an air-conditioner a few years back. “Look at me,” he crowed, “riding with a brain doctor!” We could get started just as soon as he dropped some documents off with a friend. He left the interstate and drove onto a series of highways and winding country roads before arriving at a tavern. It was a squat cinder-block building lit with beer advertisements and a neon sign that announced the existence of a pool table. He invited me to join him, but I was underage and had not yet developed a thirst for alcohol. “You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll just sit here and study for next week’s lobotomy.”
It killed me that T. W. actually believed I was a doctor. Once we arrived in Kent, I’d probably have him drop me off in front of the infirmary and walk the few blocks to the dorm. I hoped that between now and then we wouldn’t witness any roadside accidents, but if we did, I’d just tell him I wasn’t licensed to practice in this state.
It was dusk when T. W. entered the bar. I watched the sun fade behind the surrounding mountains, waiting one hour, two hours, three, until it had grown too dark for me to collect my bag and leave on my own. I had no idea where I was, and few cars passed along this road. There were no streetlights, and I could hear dogs barking off in the distance. When it started to rain I took my pack from the bed of the truck and carried it up front, rooting around for an extra sweater and a pair of socks I could wear on my hands. A car pulled into the parking lot, and I watched as the driver emptied his dash-board ashtray onto the gravel before entering the bar. It seemed a fitting gesture for this sort of place. Staring at the lights of the tavern, I wondered who might choose to live in such a dinky, do-nothing town. From what I’d seen, it was nothing more than a collection of tract houses built around a convenience store. The landscape was pretty enough; you might pass through and admire the mountains, but wouldn’t a person then move on to someplace more important? Travel was supposed to broaden your mind, but without Veronica’s company, it had a way of depressing me. The more places I went, the more I realized I didn’t matter to anyone except the family I’d left behind — and who knew them besides their friends and neighbors in a town just as pointless as this one? Raleigh would be granted a larger dot on the map, but when seen as a whole, the multitude of strange towns and cities conspired to nullify my shaky myth of self-importance. It brought me down to think about it, so I turned on the transistor radio and listened to a call-in show, the evening’s topics ranging from an upcoming tractor pull to the hidden dangers of untended space heaters. Heat. It was like reading a restaurant menu to a fasting prisoner. I listened to the callers and imagined their snug, cozy homes, watching as icy clouds huffed forth from my mouth, dissipating in the frigid air.
T. W. staggered out of the bar about ten o’clock, nearly six hours after he’d entered. He had his arms around a jubilant, long-faced man and an obese woman who held her pocket-book over her head as protection against the rain.
She said something, and the men doubled over laughing, practically vomiting with merriment. I was in a foul mood but knew that I would have to swallow it, the way I always did when I was relying on someone else to do me a favor. Whatever its merits, hitchhiking robbed you of your God-given right to complain. I would have to pretend I hadn’t noticed the time or temperature. “That was fast,” I’d say. “No, I’m perfectly comfortable, just rubbing my hands together because I’m excited. What’s up?” One look at him and anyone could tell that T. W. was drunk. He waved good-bye to his companions and proceeded to activate the truck’s engine, jabbing the key here and there as though the ignition might have moved during his long absence and now might be anywhere.
“Those people are my friends,” he said. “I’ve been knowing them all my life and
they’re good, fun people, you got that?” His face had lost all traces of innocence and had become hard and dogmatic. “Friends. Personal, private, god-damn friends. They’re my friends, my own fucking friends.” He repeated the word several more times, pounding his chest for emphasis. “Friends. They like me. I like them. We go back.”
Something told me we wouldn’t be driving to Ohio anytime soon. We reached the interstate, brightly lit and teeming with traffic. I offered to get out, but T. W. wouldn’t hear of it. “Oh no,” he said. “You’re coming home with me. Home to my house with me. I’ve got the place fixed up nice with rugs and TVs and all kinds of shit like that. No way are you going out alone on a night like this. Forget that crap about school and college, those people don’t matter for shit.”
I imagined his house with its crummy paint job and dung-colored carpets, hoping it might be located on a well-traveled road. Once there, I could probably make a run for it; in the meantime, I’d just have to humor him.
“Big brain doctor, are you? You like to stick your fat little fingers in other people’s skulls and tinker around? Is that what you like to do? I’ll give you something to tinker with, hot shot.”
I was looking out at the road and didn’t see it coming. He grabbed me by the hair and yanked my head down onto the seat, holding me there with one hand while he reached into his jacket pocket with the other. The truck swerved and skidded onto the gravel shoulder before he took the wheel and regained control. There was something cold and blunt pressed hard against my jaw, and even before I saw it clearly, I understood it was a gun. Its physical presence inspired an urgency lacking in any of the movies or television dramas in which it plays such a key role. “You like that, do you?”
Only a professional maniac could ask such an inane question. I pictured his home with the same paint job and carpet, only now it was stacked with bodies, as this seemed the exact place where something like this might happen. Maybe he’d used his job skills and built a refrigeration chamber to prevent decay, or perhaps he’d bury me beneath some tool shed and the authorities would have to identity me through dental records. Dental records, my God. When was the last time I’d been to a dentist and why wasn’t I there now, my mother smoking in the waiting room and ripping recipes from the ladies’ magazines when the receptionist wasn’t looking. Requested to hand over his files, my dentist would probably say that I was asking for it by taking rides from strangers. They all would. My people would hang their heads, shamed by my stupidity, while T. W.’s friends and neighbors would appear on television to say, “He was such a nice man, we had no idea.”
I felt the truck slow down and take a turn. We were off the interstate now, probably on an exit ramp. He raised the gun to steady the wheel, and I scrambled across the seat, flung open the door, and jumped, thinking all the while of the many television detectives who seemed to do this on a weekly basis. My mother and older sister had sat with their faces pressed against the screen while I jeered and mocked their enthusiasm. Jump and roll, I thought. Wasn’t that what my mother had said as her hero leaped off a train with the enemy’s stolen blueprints? Jump and roll, jump and roll. I hit the gravel shoulder and tumbled into a muddy ditch filled with trash and brambles. My pack had landed a few yards away, so I snatched it up and ran, wondering what it carried and why. Behind me I heard the truck pull off the road, the door slam, and someone racing through the thicket. It was him, coming after me. I meant that much to him, and now I would have to work even harder to live because this man, he was determined. I thought maybe I should climb a tree, but that’s what you did when pursued by bears, wasn’t it? Maybe only the small bears climbed trees — the lighter ones — but still, how could I climb with socks on my hands? With the larger bears maybe you were supposed to lie down and play dead, but this was a man, so what was the point in even thinking about bears? He had a gun and now he would shoot me in the back or maybe in the head, bits of my skull scattered across the forest floor like the remnants of a melon. In the leg, maybe he’d take me there or in the shoulder, blow my arm off at the elbow and I’d consider myself lucky to massage my stump and dial the phone with the fingers of my left hand. What I needed was a weapon. Other people, hitch-hikers, told me they always carried a little something, a knife or a can of Mace, and I’d laughed, thinking there was no greater weapon than the human mind. You idiot. A can opener. Maybe somewhere in the bottom of my pack there was a can opener I could tie to a stick. Make a spear, that’s it, a spear! I’d seen them in the souvenir shops, decorated with beads and feathers. The Indians made spears, didn’t they, or no, maybe I was thinking of tomahawks, they made tomahawks, but how did they do it? Didn’t it take days or maybe even weeks? A broken bottle, a lance, one of those spiked cannonballs the knights used to swing around on a chain: I needed something in my hands, in my arms. I needed my mother; she’d put a stop to this. You leave my son alone! Where was she now and what was she doing? I’m sorry. I wanted her to know that and kept mouthing the word. Sorry, so sorry. Turning my head to look behind me, I fell into a knot of thorny bushes, thinking I should get up and run, but he was too close now. I could see him through the trees, silhouetted against the headlights. “Hey, you, Doctor Kildare or whoever you are, get back here.” He looked off to my right, and I realized he couldn’t see me. “I’m not going to hurt you. Come on now, get back in the truck. I was only joking. It’s not even loaded, look.” He pulled the trigger and the gun made a puny, clicking noise. “I was only playing with you, honest. Can’t you take a joke?” He slowly returned to his truck, bending to rifle through the brush. “Hey, shithead. That’s right, I’m talking to you. Get your ass back here. I’m through playing around.” He lit a cigarette and tapped on the horn, behaving as though I’d just stepped out to urinate and had lost my way back. “You want to sleep in the woods under a wet log? Is that what you want?” He rolled down the window and drove off slowly, the door ajar and the cab lights shining, whistling, as if for a lost dog.
I worried that this might be a trick. Maybe he’d parked his truck up the road, planning to take me by surprise once I made a run for it. What if he were to circle back around? On the other hand, while I was hiding, he could be loading his gun or phoning the fellow members of his cult or posse, who would search the forest with clubs and a burlap bag in which to store my body. I stood up and crouched back down. Stood and crouched, again and again until, as if I’d been priming a pump, I shot out of the woods, down the hill, and into the center of the interstate, waving my arms and begging for someone to stop. The first two cars just missed hitting me, but the third pulled over. They were three college students headed home to Akron for the weekend. I told them what had happened, my voice breathy and high-pitched. “And then I jumped out of the truck and ran into the woods and he came after me with a gun and…”
“I don’t mean to pry,” the driver said, “but are you by any chance a faggot?”
His buddies covered their mouths and laughed into their cupped hands. This was not the sympathetic reaction I’d been hoping for. They’d picked me up hoping I might have some dope, and they were right. We smoked a few joints, and the driver popped in an eight-track of the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. That was my punishment. My reward was that they never spoke another word until dropping me off on the road to Kent.
I continued to hitchhike for the next few years, but after the incident with T. W., something seemed to have changed. It felt as though I’d been marked somehow. I had always counted upon people to trust me, but now I no longer trusted them. A driver would introduce himself as Tony, and I’d wonder why he’d chosen that name. They were liars, every last one of them. My suspicion was a beacon, attracting the very people I’d hoped to avoid. Drivers began picking me up with the idea I had more to offer than my gratitude. Drugs were the easy part; I carried them as a courtesy and offered them whenever asked. What threw me were the sexual advances. How much did they expect to accomplish at fifty miles per hour, and why choose me, a perfect stranger? When I thought of sex,
I pictured someone standing before me crying, “I love you so much that… I don’t even know who I am anymore.” My imaginary boyfriend was of no particular age or race, all that mattered was that he was crazy about me. Our first encounter would take place under bizarre circumstances: at the christening of a warship, or maybe a hurricane might bring us together in a crowded storm shelter. I thought about our courtship and the subsequent anniversaries, when our adopted children would gather at our feet saying, “Tell us again about your first date.” I suppose we could have met in a car or van but not while I was hitchhiking; it would have to be more complicated than that. Maybe the driver of my vehicle would suffer a heart attack, and he would be one of the medics. The important thing was that I wouldn’t be looking for it; that’s what would make it so romantic.
“You fool around much when you hitchhike?” The most overt were the men with the wedding rings and the child safety seats, whose secret double lives demanded quick, anonymous partnerships. I had an unpleasant experience with a married couple outside Atlanta. Two o’clock in the morning and they were driving their Cadillac nude from the waist down. They invited me to spend the night in their home, the husband casually masturbating as his wife styled her hair. “We’ll fix you something to eat,” she offered. “I’m a damned good cook, you can ask anyone.”
A few days later in Fayetteville I was driven down a dark dirt road by a man who offered to crush my skull like a peanut. Cowering in the bushes had become something of a hobby, and I knew it was time to ask myself some serious questions. I walked the eight miles back to town, boarded a bus, and never hitchhiked again.