he stops along the edge of the highway, he seems amazed that I’m actually going to go through with it, especially since it’s October and cold, and I only have a hundred and fifty dollars that my father gave me for college expenses (beer) for the month.
“You sure?” he says, standing at his open door. “It’s raining, man. It isn’t too late to go back.”
“Adios, Mountain. Thanks for everything.”
“Good luck, man.” He pumps my hand—for a moment I think he may shed a tear—then he turns all at once and climbs stiffly back into his car.
The highway is nearly empty and the passing traffic makes a lonesome ringing sound. I stick out my thumb. The rain increases. People don’t pick up hitchhikers the way they used to, not with serial killers, social parasitism at an all-time high, and cloudy-headed malcontents like bad hangovers from the sixties terrorizing society simply because their parents are rich. Nevertheless, I imagine I will end up in Wales or Asia, in an opium den or the bed of a glamorous, diamond-studded harlot who will teach me the secrets of the Orient. I can still see the university on its safe little knoll, peeking up through the mist of the mighty redwoods. I think of going back. All I’d have to do is say I’m sorry.
A bashed-up red Pinto pulls over. The window rolls down. A fat blond guy wearing a jade earring leans over. “Where you headed?” he says, wiggling a can of Coca-Cola at me.
“East,” I say.
“I’ll give you a ride to Elko,” he says, with a wink.
“Elko?” I say.
“Nevada. I’m going to visit my sister there.”
The rain beats on my head. I climb into the car. In a Pinto you sit nearly on the ground. Behind you is a gas tank that will explode into flames with the slightest impact. Talk about a flaming asshole. My benefactor smiles at me like an angler who has caught himself a nice trout. The floor below me is a landfill of Coca-Cola cans. I wonder if those people who apologized to the Citizens Action Review Board are smarter than I am. Undoubtedly they are. Jesus Christ, and I almost had a B average.
5.
OUT ON HIGHWAY 80 JUST OUTSIDE ELKO, NEVADA, a’73 Oldsmobile pulls over. The window slides down. I crouch to peer in. Two ruddy young men in white shirts are smiling at me. “Where you going?” they say.
“East,” I say.
“How far east?”
“Africa, maybe,” I say.
They continue to smile, like a couple of fresh lobotomies. Weirdos are out here by the thousands. Cold, heavy drops of rain begin to slap the pavement and the back of my neck. “We can take you as far as Salt Lake City,” says the smiler on the passenger side, who has snake nostrils and two front teeth extracted from a Goofy mask.
“Okay,” I say, climbing in clumsily out of the rain. The driver stares at me from his rearview mirror. The passenger turns to grin with those root stump teeth, arm laid up along the seat.
People think hitchhiking across the country is romantic and fun. It isn’t. It’s terrifying and cold. It makes you miserable in your guts. It makes you want to go back home and be satisfied with a Jell-O life. The freaks are all on your wavelength, and they all want something from you. Like the first ride I caught from Arcata with that spooky Coca- Cola addict with the jade earring, who wanted to get a motel when it started to get dark. And he kept asking me about my girlfriend and my sex life. Having studied psychology, I know how perverts behave. I told him to drop me off at the next stop, said I needed to keep going, but he laughed, as if he felt sorry for me or by the mercy of demons was giving me a Get- Out-of- Sodomy-Free Card, and took me straight on through to Elko, where his sister supposedly lived, though he went around the block twice after he dropped me off, and later I bought a bag of Planters’ Peanuts and a cream soda and spent the night in the bushes at the China Ranch Park.
I wish Mountain had come with me. I think back to that first semester when he and Karlo returned from a shooting expedition, and as the rifles were being put away in Mountain’s room, Mountain’s gun discharged accidentally. The bullet whizzed past Karlo’s ear, nearly killing him. Mountain cried. The sight of him blubbering like a child welded his soul to mine. I find I’m already missing him. And if he were here now these two buffoons wouldn’t even think about trying anything funny.
Since I first put up my thumb—and especially now as I settle into the backseat and the two weirdos continue to stare—I’ve been thinking of a friend of mine from the old neighborhood, Troy Katchpole, who got raped by a one-armed truck driver at the age of sixteen while hitchhiking through Tennessee. Before I set out on this trip I always thought privately that Troy could’ve avoided his fate with the depraved amputee. He should not have checked into a motel room with a guy he didn’t know, and even then he should’ve been wary and at the first sign of queer behavior made some excuse about getting ice and scrammed. But now, out here stark alone, trying to stay out of the rain, the darkness coming, I have a sudden rush of complete empathy and understanding for Troy. Because hitchhiking is the ultimate self-solicitation. The minute your thumb goes up you’re meat on the side of the road. You’re like a hooker standing under a streetlight. The whole point is to get picked up by a stranger. And once you’re in someone’s car, you’re in their possession.
But these scrubbed young men are weird in a different way. They are the Chumley Brothers, Elder and Elder Chumley, Mormon Elders, that is to say, and considering the possibilities, a good spin of the hitchhiking wheel. And since I am a captive audience, the Chumleys waste no time getting to doctrine, the sacred history of the Americas inscribed on golden tablets (lost, of course), the Angel Meroni (rhymes with balone-eye), American Indians as one of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, and John the Baptist in Upstate New York in 1829. Once a radical, murdered by the cowardice of orthodoxy, Jesus is now a shameless tool of conformity, the centerpiece to the greatest sales pitch on earth.
Yes, Christ, second person of the Trinity and foundation of world order and intelligibility, came to LA in the early sixties but was mistaken for a folk singer. I marvel laconically in this grandmother-scented Olds with its immaculately dark carpet, and nod along as if I have never heard more hallowed verse. The fact is, I have simply stopped wasting my breath on overzealous religious types who know more about God than I do. Most zealots in my experience are either hiding something or running a scam. All rejoinders sink in the tar pits of their dogmatic forebrains. They aren’t happy unless they’re arguing. They only pretend that they have ears. If they picked up God Himself along the side of the road they’d probably still argue with Him.
And it’s nice that they really don’t care about me, where I’m going or why, how I’ve come to this execrable state, begging rides in October in the rain. They don’t even see me really. They blab on for hundreds of miles as the windshield wipers thump at the steady autumn rain and I wonder if they really think I am suddenly going to convert, join the choir, and find myself some nice wives and settle down. Not that I wouldn’t love a blast of virtue and old-time religion—believe me—I would, but if I were God I would not want people moaning at me or constantly bitching or rattling trinkets. I would appreciate an occasional acknowledgment, yes, a thank you or a plateful of cookies (no, wait a minute, that’s Santa), but I’m God, the Creator. I’m absorbed in the full spectrum. Sin, conflict, suffering, and rigged dog races all fit into the scheme. If you have faith in Me, let Me do My work. Don’t hump My leg. Don’t nag me about the weather and your bursitis. Stop all your gimme gimme. And don’t make up fiddle-faddle about golden tablets (lost, of course) while killing and ostracizing other groups because their fiddle-faddle about
