hitchhiking

I am bored and rereading old journals for entertainment/evidence of tortious behavior. Perhaps you would like to reread my old journals too:

2/11/02

At 4:30am on Friday, woke in a stupor. A hurriedly made us scrambled eggs and we got on the subway to catch the first Metro-North up to Wassaic.

By eight we were there, wherever the hell “there” and “Wassaic” were – it was the coldest day of the year, and there was snow on the ground and chills beneath our coats. The commuter rail ride was full of loudmouthed idiots and stuttering jolts of wakefulness. So, two hours of sleep. I was barely sentient. We stood right at entrance of the parking lot and stuck our thumbs out eagerly. Awkward, unfamiliar with the familiar motion, I held my thumb out stiffly, as though my punchy thrust alone would convince a driver to stop. Immediately we were picked up by a shaved-headed man driving an enormous pickup truck. A and I sat in the backseat – a backseat in a pickup truck? – and L took shotgun.

I suppose people who will pick you up when you’re hitchhiking are bound to be eccentric themselves. They’ve been hitchhikers before, or they’re fantastically kind and empathetic, or they’re lonely nuts looking for some entertainment, or they’re psychopaths with blood dripping from their teeth from the last fresh kill. Everyone warns about the latter, but during my one day of hitchhiking, I found that overwhelmingly people are just curious to see why three girls would choose to freeze by the side of the road, holding a makeshift sign reading “VERMONT PLEASE.” No killers, just kindly eccentrics with extra room in the cab.

There were fourteen people, and I don’t know if I can remember them all. The guy with the shaved head was a bass-playing father of two, who maintained databases at WeightWatchers.com. He shouldered a six hour daily commute for the extra money – he wanted so badly to tell us how much he made, but also struggled with some misplaced humility, and eventually said, “Let’s put it this way: I make as much as Alan Greenspan” – and sometimes he had to sleep over in the office. He was on his way home, to Connecticut, after one such night and had caught the first train home. In his rare free time, he played the bass. He wanted to start a band, or play with other people, but since his main interest was punk rock, he had a difficult time finding anyone but acne-scarred sixteen-year olds with no musical talent whatsoever.

We never learned his name, just as we never learned the names of most of the people who picked us up. He dropped us off near Route 22 (I think) and we paused to enjoy moldy bagels in a mostly empty diner. Throughout the day, we stopped indoors out of necessity. The day was truly freezing. Though I wore long underwear, a t-shirt, a fleece, a quilted sweatshirt, a down vest, wool socks, wool mittens, hiking boots and a scarf over my pile hat and sweatshirt hood, I was constantly on the brink of frostbite. I thought looking bundled would make us extra pathetic, and extra attractive to those potential hitchers.

The next person to pick us up was sort of an odd old man who had gone to NYU long before. Apparently he chewed on his hat while he spoke, but I didn’t notice it. He gave us a long ride in his Subaru jellybean car, and dropped us off at a bend just a few yards from the Appalachian Trail. By this time, I’d been able to stop behind a gas station and kick to pieces a cardboard box. We scribbled our pathetic invitation “VERMONT PLEASE,” and waited for a ride.

The next man was a jargon spewing stonemason who talked to us about the challenger explosion and September 11th. He had all sorts of folksy, indecipherable clichés to tell us, but most of them I’ve forgotten.

Brian picked us up next. “I’m supposed to go to work but if you’ll pay for gas, I don’t mind being a little late,” he said as we clambered into his huge 1980s American boat car. “Maybe I’ll take you up to Great Barrington.” He drove us all the goddamned way through Massachusetts, through that crappy town Picks or Pitts or whatever its called, an hour and a half out of his way, to that town Wellington? Whatever the fuck! I fell asleep for the last ten minutes of his ride, but not before discovering 1) his children’s names were PollyAnn/PollyJean/PrincessLee and Bronson, “Bronson” because Bronson’s daddy was Brian and he was “Brianson,” 2) Brian was trying to settle a divorce and he had been living in Massachusetts for 14 months waiting to return to his home on the North Carolina coast, 3) Brian hitchhiked all the time, and once had been picked up by a guy in Mississippi with a busted windshield who said only one word the entire ride – “Rocks,” when Brian asked what happened to the windshield, and 4) Brian had impulsively bought a motorcycle and impulsively tracked down an old school friend who’d moved to Vermont. Brian was fucking rad. He knew how to be a terrific hitchhiker’s ride: talk your ass off. Hitchhiking is not a charity but a transaction; for a ride, the hitchhiker agrees to be the ear for the self-centered talker, and a mouth for the lonely listener. We heard so many stories, told so many of our own that day, and met and left strangers having exchanged odd trivia about our lives.

Brian drove us for miles. Just south of Vermont, he let us off, pumped in some gas, and drove off kicking up gravel with his tires.

Next, a mother of four picked us up and drove us maybe one mile across the border. She was on her way to pick up one of her issue.

Did I mention how cold we were? My toes didn’t feel a thing until they’d been parked in front of a fire for an hour, hours later.

The next guy to pick us up was in his seventies. L and I lay on a wide piece of plywood in the back of a rapist van – a full-sized van with no windows and no backseats – because the man was building something and was transporting wood. Once during the ride he pointed out the window and cackled, “Heee HAW! That’s a punkin thrower! They throw punkins!” I didn’t get a look because I was busying keeping the plywood from severing my leg as it slid around the cabin.

Who was next? The cops? The low point of the day came at the intersection of Highway 7 and some strip mall runway. Highway 7 became a four-lane road and consequently unhitchhikable at that intersection, but we wanted to try our luck anyway. When a white Ford pulled up twenty minutes later, we ran ecstatically toward it. Men emerged from either side, and immediately my flight/fight instinct turned on and I started trying to turn my momentum backward. I saw them pulling things out from their rear pockets and I knew for certain they were going to kill us and continue to riddle our twitching bodies with bullets.

Instead, they flashed golden badges and wry smiles and said, “How old are you?”

“24!”
“22!”
“21!”

They chuckled.

“We got a report that there were thirteen-year olds hitchhiking, and we were in the area so we checked it out.” The clean-cut detective looked at us with smiles. “You don’t look thirteen.” He explained that it was illegal to hitchhike on route 7 during this stretch, but that they would drive us to 7A, where it was safer and definitely more legal, and a more attractive place to for drivers stop. They were the friendliest cops I’d ever met, and they ended up helping us out by taking us about five miles further north.

Just as we climbed out of the car, another small sedan pulled up. A blond woman called for us to climb in, and we praised our good luck. We waved goodbye to the astonished and pleased policemen, and pulled out of the gravel with a mother and a teenaged boy model. For the Ford Agency? Didn't know what that was, figured it out later. They were planning to pick us up while we froze at the mouth of route 7, but then they saw the cops take us and they followed the car until it stopped. Brilliant! How are people so nice? Maybe experiencing the angry hostility of New York strangers has warped my perception of humanity. The woman entertained us with her tirade against the sociopathology of an increasingly chemical-dependent populace, and her pretty son doled out droll comments and kept us laughing. Diana (I think) once apologized for lecturing us and her son remarked to us, “Well, you saved me a lecture,” we all enjoyed hearty, wholesome laughs.

I’m getting buns tired so I won’t recall many more rides. There are too many to recall with the detail that they demand: a twenty-year old girl with a high-school education listening to shitty Panamanian reggae that repeated the mantra “Quiero pussy! Quiero pussy!”; a prettyboy with a vanagon who was finishing up a culinary internship at some unfulfilling barbecue (or something) joint; a flaming guy with a “Celebrate Diversity” sticker who talked about his wife and son; a sunglasses plus SUV stud type who drove us right up to the door of XX LaPierre Drive. We caught a 90-minute ride in the back of a woman’s pickup truck, where we lay on our bellies on this woman’s crap – she was the process of moving – and fell asleep immediately, freezing. I thought we were going to rocket right out of the back of her truck.

12/28/02

Love Letters I Wish I'd Received:

Dear Bananarchist,

Of course, I will let you go down on me. I dream of it daily. Please, come now, come quick, and come alone.

Waiting,
Jodie Foster

P.S.: I just bought the new K.D. Lang album, and I can think of nothing but you.

P.S.S.: And of course, I will wear the denim overalls over the red union suit.