I was going to try to do a thing for my hundredth entry where I would ask a friend to write up their own recollections of something we had both experienced and then post the two stories together – essentially double blind. I thought it would be interesting to compare the two accounts and see what things we remembered differently and what details we agreed on. I didn’t end up finding anybody that wanted to collaborate in that way and I don’t even remember what the hundredth piece ended up being about.
This isn’t that.
A few months ago my friend Katrina wanted to get in touch to see what I remembered about a hitchhiking trip we had taken from New Orleans to Chicago in 2008. She didn’t even know that I was in the middle of an autobiographical writing project but she was working on a memoir of her own and was hoping I could jog her memory on some of the details. We talked on the phone for almost an hour. Mostly I was reminding her about different rides but there were also a few steps I had totally forgotten until she reminded me.
Katrina just sent me the draft of her memoir so far and I’ve spent the last couple of days reading it. Despite the similarities in our two projects they are really quite different from each other. Katrina is writing her manuscript as an offline document and will try to find a publisher when she is finished. Hers is structured, and intended to be read, in straight chronological order. Of course I am also hoping to end up with a published book but I write the pieces so they can be read in almost any order and put them online where they can be read by anyone the moment each piece is finished.
I’m not sure if either of our approaches will be more effective, hers is certainly more traditional, but I hope that we both are successful in finding publishers. I wanted to start on this piece a couple of nights ago but found Katrina’s draft of her manuscript impossible to put down once I started reading it. Despite some overlap in nomadic lifestyle we’ve led very different lives. I used to see Katrina around shows in Chicago but she hardly mentions going to any and never refers to bands or artists by name.
I like how something that was so important to me is hardly worth a mention to her. I used to travel halfway across the country just to see some bands play but in her stories Katrina always travels to see friends or often for its own sake.
Anyway I decided to write my own account of our shared journey. I was always going to cover this trip sooner or later so right after reading her account is as good of a time as any. The story starts in New Orleans on the Halloween of 2008. I’ve covered it a little bit in a 2010 New York piece called Play Something Slow and Sexy and will most likely describe even more details about this Halloween in some future piece but for now I’ll add a single anecdote.
Lester was living in St. Louis when The Rockaway passed through town and spent a lot of time around the rafts. Lester is mixed race and has worn his hair in dreadlocks for as long as I’ve known him. Tall and thin of build, he is generally in good shape from his interests in circus performance and acrobatics. Around The Rockaway he was notorious for his prowess in Sleep-Fu – if you shared cramped sleeping quarters with him his arms and legs would begin striking out seemingly of their own volition the moment he lost consciousness.
By 2008 he had made the move down to New Orleans and for that year’s Halloween he went as “the wild man of Borneo”. The name has been used by wrestlers and sideshow performers but its earliest use came from European explorers giving fanciful descriptions of the orangutan before it was known to science. I’m pretty sure those descriptions were the inspiration for Lester’s costume – he painted his body and tied copious amounts of brown and orange synthetic braiding hair around his knees and elbows.
The big party toward the end of the night drifted over to a dive bar at the edge of the French Quarter called The John. Lester had a bit too much to drink and fell asleep in a seated position just outside the entrance. Tony Bones was playing an “Emilio Estevez” pun game with another friend that followed this basic format:
“What do you call Emilio Estevez when he’s really jacked from lifting?”
“Emilio Chest-evez!”
“What do you call Emilio Estevez when he’s in church?”
“Emilio Blessed-evez!”
The two of them had been going back and forth like this for most of the night. Generally the prompts were easy enough to guess but Tony Bones came up with one that stumped his opponent:
“What do you call Emilio Estevez when he’s passed out on the street?”
When the other guy couldn’t figure it out Tony gestured broadly at our unconscious friend:
“EMILIO LESTER-VEZ!”
Now that I’ve typed it out it doesn’t seem as funny as I remembered it. So much of the buildup was listening to these two guys make the same sort of weak joke for hours and then finally come up with one that was unexpected and relevant to the current situation. Somebody wearing a big cardboard giraffe head was concerned for Lester but we made sure that he got home all right.
On to the hitchhiking trip. I was relatively inexperienced with long distance hitchhiking. My first time had been in 2007 when I accompanied my former fiancée I call Rocky to her home town of Columbus, Ohio. She showed me the ropes with going to truck stops and asking friendly truckers to ask around on the CB radio if they weren’t going in your direction. Over the next year we hitched together a few more times and I made a handful of other trips with friends from the rafts.
The way Katrina remembers it I brought along Snake but I could have sworn that her and Snake were already going together when I decided to join them. Sometimes I change people’s name in these stories to protect their identities but Snake is just a nickname I gave Natalee as a shortened form of “Nattlesnake”. Anyway the three of us already all knew each other from Chicago and were all headed there at the same time so it made sense to try to make the trip together.
I liked to start a trip by going to a truck stop on the outer edge of whatever city I was trying to leave. The Mardi Gras Truck Stop on Elysian Fields isn’t really that – it’s still within the limits of the city proper and is little more than a gas station with diesel on every pump and a lot of vertical clearance. There weren’t even any trucks parked there for overnight breaks so we started off standing on the on-ramp across the street with a sign.
We were out there for a long time. I have a memory of seeing stripped down floats being driven back to whatever lot they are stored in outside of parade season but this sounds more like something you’d see right after Mardi Gras than right after Halloween so I could be mixing up memories. I know that we were on the verge of just giving up and trying to find a bus or something to take us further out of town when we got our first ride.
The young Black college student who picked us up wasn’t going very far out of town. He basically brought us to the other side of Lake Ponchartrain across the long narrow expressway that sits on the water. When he dropped us off it was practically sunset and it’s pointless to try roadside hitchhiking at night.
The spot we were dropped off at had some prefabricated sheds and houses that were set up as advertising models. We theoretically could have checked the doors to sleep inside one of them but we didn’t bother because the same field had some sections of oversized cement pipe. Sleeping inside one of the pipes was enough to keep us warm and protect against the dew that formed the following morning.
Getting an early start and being out on a major highway helped things move along a lot faster the following day. We got picked up by an abnormally horny and pervy truck driver. I knew that traveling with young attractive women greatly increased the odds of getting rides from long haul truckers but most tend to enjoy the female company without trying to push things further.
This guy wasn’t most truckers.
He kept himself entertained by composing and singing bawdy songs into his CB radio. They weren’t very good so I don’t remember too many lyrics but one of them ended with:
“She was a filthy lot lizard with cum on her chin…”
He had a whole radio schtick going where he would insert mock advertisements between the songs. Somewhat predictably these were all sexual references and innuendos as well:
“This song was brought to you by Kotex. Not the best thing in the world but it’s damn close to it!”
The only thing that made the ride tolerable was that he never worked up the courage to directly demand or proposition anything and we all just pretended to not understand the things he was hinting at. After a few songs he asked Snake and Katrina:
“So… Are you girls bi?”
They both said “yup” while staring straight ahead into space. This was followed by a long uncomfortable silence. He must have thought that they would start making out with each other the moment he asked and when that didn’t work it took him a while to work up the nerve to try again. His next statement was directed at me:
“You know what I’ve always wanted to do? Just drive a truck around with a couple topless girls inside and freak out all the people in cars by flashing them through the windows!”
I responded to him with mock enthusiasm:
“Dude! That sounds awesome! You should totally do that some time!”
The emphasis on those last two words got across that none of us were remotely interested in helping him live out his fantasies and he went back to singing into the CB and showing us cheesy memes on his phone. He had one of a baby on a breast that said “The Original Happy Meal”. We were with him all the way until it got dark again.
I don’t remember a lot of navigational details but he probably picked us up in Louisiana and brought us through Alabama and nearly all of Tennessee. We were all going to try to sleep in the back of his cab and continue traveling with him on the following day. He was annoying but seemed like he wouldn’t directly push boundaries and was covering a lot of ground.
It wasn’t too long before Katrina woke up with a start to him attempting to put his arm around her. That woke us all up and made us realize we needed to get out of his truck. Somebody looked at a map and realized that for the last couple of hours his route had started to bring us in the wrong direction.
We were pretty irritated about that because we had been very clear about where we were going and the route we wanted to take to get there. Now that he was being directly confronted about getting handsy and taking us the wrong way he instantly became extremely apologetic. He promised he could fix the situation for us and started calling into his CB to find another trucker to get us back on track.
We were ready to just jump out of his truck wherever we were and get our bearings in the morning but he found somebody super quick. The driver of the next truck was fairly new to long distance trucking and seemed like he didn’t want to be giving us a ride. He must have felt pressured by the more experienced driver the moment he answered the call for “anybody westbound”.
This next driver was going a couple hours back toward our goal but first he needed to either pick up or drop off a load. I forget which one it was but the effect on us was effectively the same. It meant he needed to drive into a fenced off lot and wait around for hours until workers either brought or took his cargo. He wasn’t an owner-operator so it was important for us to stay hidden in his cab the whole time so the company wouldn’t know he’d picked up riders.
It took almost the whole night and he was visibly nervous and uncomfortable the entire time. I imagine he was a lot more guarded talking to other drivers on the CB after that. He dropped us off somewhere in Kentucky and I can’t remember if we found another sleeping spot or if it was already getting light again.
The next ride was our third and final trucker. He was a tall and gangly white man with stick and poke tattoos all over his arms and hands that said variations on “COON ASS PRIDE” in sloppy lettering. We learned almost immediately that this was a term for Cajun as he told us endless stories about getting into arguments with people that thought the tattoos were racist slurs against black people.
The way he told these stories it was like he never realized that “coon” could be a word without “ass” coming directly after it. He might not have realized when he first got the ink done but after so many arguments you’d think he’d realize why people were getting offended. Either way we weren’t about to argue with him over it and he brought us a decent distance into Kentucky.
We weren’t standing out for very long when we got picked up by the first regular car of this leg of the trip. A clean cut white man in his mid twenties started telling us his life story the moment we were back to moving. He’d grown up in a very traditional church and married a young woman from his congregation without ever dating or having any prior sexual experience. They quickly bought a house and had a couple of children in rapid succession.
He said that things had begun to feel different at home and after a little bit of investigation he discovered that his wife had been having an affair for nearly the entire time they’d been married. He said that since he’d discovered this he started fantasizing about being harmed or killed as a way to escape from his life. When he said this next part he locked eyes with me in the rear view mirror:
“I’ve started to be more and more reckless and I’ve been putting myself in dangerous situations like picking you guys up…”
His energy had seemed a little off since we’d first gotten into the car but now I recognized it was a blend of genuine fear and excitement. He seriously believed the stories that all hitchhikers were serial murderers, or at the very least violent thieves, and he was practically pleading with us to harm him in some way.
The whole situation sounds like it could be a premise for a heartwarming movie where we’d take him on a series of wacky adventures and all learn a little bit about life and ourselves along the way. It wasn’t a movie though and we were only interested in getting a ride. He dropped us off on the outskirts of Louisville and went on his way. I wonder if he continued to chase danger after our brief encounter or realized that he would have to finally seriously confront the issues in his life.
Neither option would particularly surprise me.
I know next to nothing about Louisville except for it being the home town of Slint and Will Oldham. I’ve always wanted to spend more time there but this brief visit is the only time I’ve seen it. We got picked up by a gawky guy with glasses and acne. He was excited to have hitchhikers in his car and kept saying he wished he didn’t have to work so he could take us all the way to Chicago.
The fact that I’ve never learned to drive has made me kind of absent minded when it comes to noticing cars and it’s difficult for me to describe most cars that I’ve only ridden short distances in. I’m going to guess that his car was, most likely, a piece of shit because the entire time we were riding in it he was playing a comedy reggae song on his stereo about his car being a piece of shit. The lyrics were simple and repetitive:
“My car sucks! My car’s a piece of shit!”
Every few years I poke around a little bit on Google to see if I can discover the name and artist of the song but I don’t have too many details to go on. In case it isn’t glaringly obvious I would be very happy if any of my readers know of any comedy reggae songs about a car being a piece of shit.
He said that he could take us across the river into Jeffersonville but first he’d need to pick up his little brother from Elementary School. The three of us sat in the back as he pulled up to the school and gave his brother a Super Mario licensed juice drink he’d found at the gas station. The younger boy looked back at us and gasped in excitement:
“Why do they look like Jimi Hendwicks?!”
The older brother answered back in a thick Kentucky drawl:
“Aw man, they’re travelin’ that’s just fashion!”
They both seemed excited to be close to representatives of a bohemian lifestyle outside the small town mannerisms they were used to and the whole thing was very wholesome. When he said that he could only take us across the river though he really meant it. There must have been a way for him to turn back around without exiting because he dropped us directly onto the edge of the concrete bridge with barely any shoulder.
Before we could get a good look at where we were stepping out and potentially argue he was already gone. It was a very nerve racking position to be in – the first cop to see us would almost certainly intervene because our location was genuinely hazardous. There didn’t seem to be a safer shoulder or exit we could even walk to but luck was with us and our next ride pulled up barely a minute later.
Every thing about the girl who picked us up was goth except for the fact that she dressed conventionally and wore no makeup. She was so pale that it verged on albinism and her straight blonde hair was nearly white. She told us that she came from a very traditional Christian family but was following her dream of going to mortuary school against their wishes.
She had just started to live on her own and had a pet squirrel and goth boyfriend. She was excited to show us pictures of both of these things on her phone. Her boyfriend looked like he was a good ten years older than her and had long black hair and the kind of ‘90s grunge chin stripe that was somewhere between a soul patch and goatee. She seemed excited about all of the unconventional things in her life and the opportunity to talk to some other nonconformists who “got it”.
Despite having a legendary music scene it seemed like Louisville and it’s surroundings were positively stifling based on the two interactions we had with sympathetic drivers. It makes sense – so many of the people I met in late ‘90s Chicago viewed San Diego as a counterculture Mecca but growing up there myself made it feel conservative and claustrophobic.
I had forgotten that we spent the night at Snake’s cousin’s house in Indianapolis until I went back over the details with Katrina. She was a bit of a hippy and very welcoming – it felt good to spend a night indoors after the last two nights of dealing with the elements. I had also forgotten about the truck full of Mexicans who let the three of us lay in the bed of their pickup truck the next morning.
All together we’d been making very good time – we scarcely could have made it any faster if we’d had our own car and driven ourselves. Now that I’ve read some of Katrina’s memoir I appreciate more how much of a good luck hitchhiking talisman she was. I kind of knew that finding rides would be a lot more difficult as a single man but it would be a few more years until I’d actually try it.
Short distances were usually fine. Earlier that year I had tried and failed to catch a train out of Memphis and decided to catch Greyhound instead. I’d taken Megabus to get down and found my way to the railroad yard by calling Rotten Milk and having him check satellite images. He was happy to do it because it made him feel like a specific character from a superhero cartoon that he used to watch but I forget what he said the character’s name was.
Once I was there I didn’t know what track to catch out on or what to look for. I jumped onto a junk train moving slowly through the yard but ran off into some marshland when some workers started shouting at me. I found an antique fire truck to spend the night in and allow my shoes and socks to dry back out away from my feet.
The next morning the sun was pushing through the windows and the meadow was absolutely riotous with birds and insects. I started walking down the road that would return me to downtown Memphis with my thumb out for a ride. Cars only passed every twenty minutes or so and none of them were stopping. I saw a turtle with a cracked shell and a leech on its back trying to cross the road.
I carried it safely to the tall grass on the other side and had an intuition that the third vehicle after this would pick me up. Two cars zoomed by and then an old man in an ancient pickup took me all the way there. The way I was into witchy woo woo stuff back then I didn’t ask the old man if he was the turtle – I knew he was the turtle and I knew he was a regular old man with a truck.
When I finally tried long distance hitchhiking alone a couple years later I wasn’t into that kind of magical thinking anymore. I failed to get to The Gathering of the Juggalos and got arrested instead. Back with Snake and Katrina there was one more ride to get us to Chicago. I’m not going to write anything about it though.
You’ll just have to read Katrina’s book whenever it finally gets published.
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 