false heart 5

I hitchhiked around the country on and off over several years after I left Atlanta. I sometimes mention it in passing to the right person, but mostly over the years I have kept that part of my past rather hidden because there is something slightly skeevy and dirty about hitchhiking. It conjures visions of escaped convicts and lowlifes of all sorts, and truth be told I was something of a lowlife when I was doing that. There is a certain forced simplicity placed upon you if you choose to live out of a duffel bag and rely on the kindness of strangers.

Strangers aren’t always all that kind. And neither is the road. You get hungry and cold and it isn’t very fucking romantic at all, truth be told. Fucking Jack Kerouac. He lied his ass off.

One fun story to give you an idea of how weird it gets out there between exit ramps is the Tale of the Panty Guy.

I was in California, somewhere in grove country, off of I-5. Fresno? North of there? In the great vast nowhereland between LA and SF. I don’t quite remember how I got there, but I was at a truck stop surrounded by nothing but fields on the side of the highway. The preferred method of the hitchhiker is to chat up potential rides by seeking out truck drivers when they are about to leave such a place, and find out where they are headed, and if they’ll be willing to let you tag along.

Believe me, the rejection rate among conversations like these rates right up there with auditions, car sales, and asking every woman you meet to sleep with you. One out of a hundred is pretty good, especially in this day and age of psycho killers on the road, drug mules, illegal immigrants and tight-assed trucking company lawyers in mortal fear of lawsuits.

So I had been there most of the day, getting refill after refill of bad coffee, my stomach all acid and bile, my tension as palpable as the hunger which gripped me like a starving pit bull gnawing on your calf. I go up to this lone trucker--the guys who traveled by themselves were usually more forthcoming, as they a) had an open seat up front combined with b) terminal loneliness and silence, and c) usually owned their own rigs and so could let any damn body they pleased ride along.

The guy seemed pretty average, a middle-aged, slightly scruffy, sort of wiry guy--typical trucker stock. They seem to have their own lineage, straight out of the Joad family, perpetually one step behind whatever elusive dream lay over the horizon. Forever catching up, but never catching up to that vague something or someone or somewhere that would take care of all their problems.

The guy said I could ride, said he was hauling a load of cars up north a little ways, but then would be returning to LA, my ultimate goal, so I was welcome to tag along. Having wasted so much time in that coffee shop I was fine with that arrangement.

We chatted for a couple of hours as he drove, normal bullshitting that goes along with the job of being a hitchhiker, before he brought out the big guns. He told me this:

“You know, it’s the damnedest thing. When I get ready to make a run, my wife packs all my clothes for me, you know, just because she’s like that, and I got other stuff I have to do to get ready. So last night when I get to my first stop, I go to unpack my suitcase, and would you believe it? That crazy woman packed all of HER underwear in my suitcase instead of my own! Isn’t that nuts?’

Yikes. So, although I can see where this is heading, I’ve got a ride all the way to LA, if I can just stick it out. Besides, we’re now even more in the middle of nowhere, and I’m trapped in his cab doing 65. Where am I gonna go? So I play it off as best I can, deflecting his obvious, clumsy inroads towards a sexual conversation. And we finally pull into whatever town we’re heading to with his load of cars, and I kill some time while they are unloaded. Once we get back in the truck and we’re rolling, I ask the guy how long till we get to LA.

And his answer is, ‘Oh, I have to go pick up another load up north of here, and take them to Bakersfield. Then I’m heading to LA in a couple of days. I figured you could stay in the hotel with me…’

No thank you. I managed to get him to stop at yet another truck stop along I-5.

With my boy virginity intact.

I didn’t even get a chance to see him in his wife’s underwear.