"Man, I'm scared shitless."
I'm doing my best to telepathically communicate this thought to my best friend Terry, sitting beside me in the backseat of a faded white 1964 Chevy Impala. Terry's on my left and some guy who looks like a redheaded version of Sluggo from the Nancy comics is on my right. The guy in the front passenger seat is pretty plain looking; nondescript except for black horn-rimmed glasses and a haircut that looks like maybe he's recently gotten out of the military. The driver has long, greasy, black hair, combed straight back, and is wearing a white T-shirt. He has his arm out the window and occasionally the wind lifts his sleeve, revealing a jailhouse tattoo that reads, "Family".
It's 1975 and we're hitchhiking from Berkeley to Austin. These guys picked us up between Bakersfield and Mojave. Except for the broken muffler and the hot wind blowing through the rolled down windows, we ride in silence. They haven't said more than ten words to us since we climbed in about twenty minutes ago. They barely speak to each other and don't even look at us. Terry's a natural born comedian and pretty fearless in conversation with strangers, but after about five minutes of trying to make small talk and drawing zero response, he gives up and we resume our silence, exchanging curious looks.
It's late summer and it's not a good vibe.
Terry and I had a normal routine for hitchhiking. You walk up to the car and the first thing you do is size up the occupants and ask how far they're going. (You try to avoid short rides. The short rides always seem to drop you in the middle of nowhere.) If they appear okay and are going far enough, you get in and make small talk for a few minutes, usually answering the same three monotonous questions: "Where you from? Where you going? How'd you end up out here?" What you really want to do is just enjoy the air-conditioning and maybe one of you catch a nap after sizing up the driver some more.
We had two rules: Don't get out in the middle of nowhere, and don't hitchhike after dark. These rules sorta' went together. It can take forever to get a ride in the middle of nowhere and you don't want to take a chance at night. If you get stuck somewhere until nearly sunset, you try to find a semi-hidden spot off the road where you can get some sleep and try your luck the next day. Of course, it's harder for two people to hitchhike, but it's a lot more fun. We once spent 36 hours stuck on the side of the road trying to catch a ride out of some unmarked spot on the map. We also spent one of the finest nights of our lives sharing a bottle of wine and a Big Mac, sitting by a tiny campfire on a hill overlooking Flagstaff and I-40. You never know, but eventually you learn that it's best to just get out at the next town or before they turn to go another direction and drop you off at some crossroads out in the sticks.
Sometimes we'd get a jackpot ride where somebody pulls over and offers you a beer and a sandwich before telling you to stretch out and catch a nap in the back of the van because they're going about 400 miles in the same direction you are. That's when you cough up what you can to help with gas.
This wasn't one of those rides.
Terry and I hitchhiked all over the country and had been in Berkeley a couple of weeks when he found us a place to stay in a little room on the top floor of a frat house just off campus. It was rented out while the students were gone for the summer. Terry had made friends with John, one of the frat guys that had stayed for the summer and we got jobs working with him at Dovre Hall, across the bridge in San Francisco, where he was the part-time building manager. Dovre Hall was owned by the Sons of Norway and it was an old community hall with an auditorium and some meeting rooms. There was also a bar, the Dovre Club, tucked into one corner of the building. It's now the San Francisco Women's Building and the Dovre Club got evicted and moved to another part of town several years later.
John's duties consisted mainly of answering the phone and unlocking the building every evening so a local theatre company could rehearse their production of Noel Coward's "Blythe Spirit" in drag. Our job was to sweep up, then slip in the back door of the bar and relieve the walk-in cooler of a case of beer. After rehearsals we'd lock up and take John's VW bug back across the bridge for a night of drinking.
Years later I learned that the Dovre Club was run by a gentleman named Pat Nolan, a fierce supporter of the IRA and the Irish Northern Aid. Rumor was that more than one fugitive from Interpol sat at the bar of the Dovre Club in those days. I suspect it wouldn't have fared well for us if we'd been caught stealing from him.
Our time in Berkeley came to an end shortly after I got arrested for shoplifting a rotisserie chicken from the Safeway on Telegraph Avenue and spent the night in jail. The next day I went before the judge who suggested I "Go back to Texas and never return to California." Of course I ignored him and a couple of weeks later nearly got arrested again after drinking with some of the fraternity brothers and throwing hotdogs at passersby from the roof of the frat house. We saw we were pushing our luck in Berkeley and decided to heed the judge's advice and head back to Texas.
Somewhere on the road I had picked up a paperback copy of "Helter Skelter", Vincent Bugliosi's book about the Manson Family murders. Oddly enough, Terry and I had been hitchhiking through Sacramento the same day that Squeaky Fromme tried to assassinate President Ford. I'll never forget walking through downtown when the whole city exploded with sirens and police cars. The cops never even batted an eye at us as we walked through downtown, two dirty hippies with backpacks. Today we would've been detained and questioned for hours. So needless to say the whole Manson thing was fresh on our minds when we started hitchhiking back to Texas.
I'm eyeing the tattoo. "Family". It's not a good vibe.
I'm mentally running down options and excuses for getting out of the car when the engine lurches and sputters a couple of times, keeps going for about 20 seconds, then does it again before shutting down completely. We coast to a stop on the shoulder of the road. Silence for about 20 seconds. Finally Sluggo starts yelling at the driver that he told him to fill up before they left and now they're sitting here like idiots out of gas. The driver quickly turns around to yell back at Sluggo when Terry says cheerfully, "Hey guys, it's cool! We passed a gas station just a ways back! We'll run back and get a gas can and we can get going again!" He nudges me in the ribs and says, "C'mon, let's go!" I didn't have to be asked twice. He must've been reading my mind when the car died. We grabbed our backpacks from under our feet, jumped out of the car, and were gone before anyone could protest. We headed back in the direction we'd come from and were out of sight in no time. I asked Terry if he'd seen the tattoo and he said he was wondering if I had seen it too. We talked about the three guys and the whole experience while we half walked and ran down the road.
Terry hadn't been lying about the gas station. A little less than a mile back up the road was a little store with two gas pumps out front. It was a small whitewashed concrete building with just rocks and brush around it as far as you could see. Across the road from it was a steep hillside that rose about thirty feet above the bend in the road the station was on. Terry and I put our backpacks behind a kerosene tank next to the building and went inside. We grabbed a couple of cokes and a bag of potato chips, paid the teenager at the counter who said nothing, and went back outside. We sat down behind the kerosene tank for a couple of minutes and drank the cokes while we figured out what we were going to do. We decided to go across the road and up the hill and see if we could circle around and get past the car without being seen. We ate the chips, washed them down with the last of the cokes, then ran across the road and scrambled up the hill.
We had just topped the hill and stopped to plan our route when we heard distant voices coming from the road below. We looked down between some rocks and saw Sluggo and the passenger pushing the Impala down the road toward the gas station, with the long haired guy behind the wheel, steering. We could hear them talking as they got closer and one of them was saying, "They aren't even there! I knew they weren't going back for gas!" We froze like rabbits in some brush behind the crest of the hill and waited. After about a half an hour we looked again and could see them in front of the gas pumps, working under the hood of the car, trying to get it started. We hid behind the brush again and waited. We finally heard the engine turn over and after it revved up a few times, car doors slammed, tires spun on gravel, and the sound of the noisy muffler slowly faded into the distance...
We made it back to Texas and my dad tells the story of sitting on the front porch, home from work on his lunch break, and seeing a couple of worn out looking hippies walking up the street. As they got closer he realized it was Terry and me. We ate better that day than we had in a long time and there was much rejoicing.
I never hitchhiked again.
Terry is long gone from this world. Knowing his sense of humor, he'd throw his head back and howl and laugh when I say that he sort of went a piece at a time. Like some dark British comedy, he lost an eye, then an arm, then a foot, then he was gone. He's buried down in South Mississippi and one of these days I might make a trip down there and pay my respects to his marker. But like everyone that plays a big role in our lives, there's a thousand reminders.
I think about Terry when I travel through California. I think about him when I see a Safeway store or an old Chevy Impala.
I think about Terry every time I see a hitchhiker.
