Tag: Hitchhiking

Missouri 2008 : “It seems pretty weird that something could ride around in a truck for ten years and then just walk off one day!”

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This will probably be a shorter story because other pieces scrape right up against the edges of it. Things pick up right after the end of the final Miss Rockaway Armada chapter and then lead into a train ride which after a lot of digging I figured out is briefly described in The Bus Chapter Five. Now that there’s so many of these I occasionally get the feeling that I’m repeating myself or perched on the edge of an incident I had described the opposite side of elsewhere.

Sometimes it can be hard to remember exactly where this happened because almost anything can remind me of something else and there’s little anecdote orphans all over the place. Before I got back into writing Rockaway stories I had ended up with some bits and bobs and even entire chapters that are Rockaway stories in everything but name.

This bit is going to be about my first time going down to New Orleans to experience Mardi Gras but just the hitchhiking part. This also worked out to be my first long distance ride on a freight train but Alexis wanted to catch a specific train that runs between Memphis and Metairie. To get from Saint Louis to Memphis we’d need to hitchhike.

I forget how many different rides it took us altogether but I just want to talk about one truck driver anyway. At this point I already had a handful of experiences hitchhiking with truck drivers but in a lot of ways they pretty much just run together. It got me thinking about how rarely I actually bother to provide complex visual descriptions of the characters in these stories but for truck drivers this is especially challenging for one particular reason.

They’re practically invisible.

Society doesn’t want to see them – we’re only interested in the products hidden away inside their trailers for which they represent a necessary inconvenience. You notice when your local store suddenly doesn’t have the thing you were looking for on the shelf but the person that needs to drive all night to get it there doesn’t cross your mind. Even as a hitchhiker your primary interest is something in whatever your destination city is no matter how much you love the little bits of color along the way.

The other thing about truck drivers is they’re kind of drained of color – especially if they’ve been doing it for a long time. Just like the faded upholstery in an old car they’re right there for every mile of highway and every hour of glaring sunlight even if they throw on a pair of BluBlockers sunglasses. Also even though long distance trucking is actually a very diverse profession I’ve only ended up in long rides with the white ones.

One of these did refer to himself as a “coon ass” in sloppily lettered stick and poke tattoos covering every inch of his exposed skin but besides that he didn’t look too different.

It makes sense. If they’re contract guys instead of owner operators the white guys are going to be a lot more comfortable flouting the company’s “no riders” rule as if it didn’t apply to them while their black and brown counterparts are going to be aware that a single slip up will mean their asses. Even if they are owner operators there are plenty of good reasons to feel less safe giving hitchers a ride.

It’s not so much what we might do to them as what we might accuse them of.

Back in 2000 a special cabinet started popping up in arcades called Sega 18 Wheeler. It was designed to mimic the cab and controls of a big diesel truck and if you picked the Japanese character you get a custom vehicle covered with flashy LEDs and cultural decorations around the windshield. Now that I live by Mount Shasta I constantly see Sikh truckers on the road who decorate their vehicles with special art for fallen comrades similar to tribute airbrushed t-shirts in the hood sphere.

One of those makes a good featured image for this chapter but unfortunately I’ve never had a chance to ride in something like that. It’s usually a monochrome Peterbilt with air ride and a dark wood like walnut for the switch panels. Those do have a cool look, and I always make sure to complement a driver on a sharp, well maintained ride, but if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.

Anyway it’s hard for me to remember exactly what the driver in this story looked like. He probably had a baseball cap that had grown to look like it was part of his head and denim pants worn down around his keys and wallet. A bit of a belly in front but completely flat in back – the usual result of truck stop food, little exercise and long hours trapped in a single seat. A beard going white and a sleeveless tee with an eagle or something on it.

You know what truck drivers look like.

The ride had been unremarkable enough. Maybe he was the driver who asked me to make sure not to brush my hair as he’d never be able to explain away a long black hair to his wife. Light hearted jokes like that. The fact that there were three of us hadn’t been a problem – there’s a lot of room in those cabs with attached bunk area in case you’ve never been in one. It was an overnight ride and the energy abruptly changed at the crack of dawn.

We’d smashed some decent miles but he’d just pulled into a lot to stretch his legs and brew some coffee. He pulled out a miniature three cup drip pot while happily chattering away about how great it worked and how he’d take regular Folger’s over the fancy stuff every time. He suddenly froze.

After what seemed like a quick internal debate he asked us if we’d seen a small Tupperware container of ground up beans. We told him we hadn’t and made an exaggerated show of shifting our bags and bedrolls to the side so he could see every inch of his bunk. There was no sign of the thing. He popped open a Coca-Cola from his mini fridge and took long drags from a Marlboro Light while staring vacantly into space:

“You know, it seems pretty weird that something could ride around in a truck for ten years and then just walk off one day!”

We didn’t say anything. What was there for us to say? A tense silence lasting the time it takes to smoke a single cigarette settled over the scene. At the end of it he shook himself with new determination. From the moment he’d stiffened up when his search came up empty he’d been purposefully avoiding our eyes but now he made sure to give each of us a meaningful stare:

“Whatever. I’m gonna step outside to take a piss. I’m sure it’ll be here when I get back!”

He was halfway out his door when his eye caught a mug full of loose change in his cupholder. He reached back in to grab it and held it close to his chest while shooting each of us a final glare. He closed the door behind him.

Finally we were free to talk among ourselves:

“What the fuck? This dude thinks we stole his coffee! We gotta get the fuck out of here!”

The situation was palpably absurd. What would we, who were on the road without electricity, do with a couple of dollars worth of unbrewed coffee? It wasn’t the instant kind and it’s not like you can just eat the stuff.

Still it hardly mattered. The sense of menace was real enough and his demeanor had clearly shifted to that of a rattlesnake. He was on the ugly side of sudden caffeine withdrawal and paranoia. We had no idea what weapons he had or what else he might blame us for if we didn’t slip away now. I was already reaching for the handle of the passenger door when the driver’s side one flew back open with the reassuring sound of lighthearted laughter:

“Man I suffer from CRS sometimes! Can’t remember shit! I was laid out in my bunk puffing a roach yesterday when the DOT guy came to the window! There’s a little hole that goes to my cargo containers (little spots for personal property that lock and are accessed from outside the truck) and when I dropped the roach in the coffee must have fallen with it!”

He never apologized for the accusations that he hadn’t quite directly made but the danger had clearly passed. The change mug returned to the cup holder. As the pot of coffee was brewing he eagerly wafted the rising hot air into his open nostrils:

“Oh man, the juice! If God made anything better he kept it for himself,,,”

I’ve heard a lot about truckers and harder stimulants and saw a lot of meth when I was homeless at a truck stop but never came across it hitchhiking. I didn’t need to. Plain old caffeine was plenty scary enough.

We rode a little farther with him. It wasn’t all the way to Memphis because we got to Memphis when Alexis ran up to an entire rugby team leaving an ampm. They were actually going the whole way to New Orleans for a game but we only wanted to ride as far as Memphis so we could do freight.

They took us all the way to the yard which was nice as it’s a bit out of the way.

They were about what you’d expect. Mostly talked about getting fucked up and partying but there were a couple of them broing down hard over Twentieth Century American Short Fiction:

“JD Salinger? Those are some good ass short stories! You read Hemingway bro?”

Probably just took a class or something.

Louisville, Kentucky 2008 : “Why do they look like Jimi Hendwicks?”

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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 had 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 it’s 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 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 it’s 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 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 until we got picked up by the first regular car 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 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 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 with exiting because he dropped us directly onto 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 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 it’s 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.

Saint Louis 2008 : Trains, Talismans and Juggalos Part Two “The Do-Anything Say-Anything Zone”

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[Photo Credit: Tod Seelie]

At the end of the last chapter I was riding in a gondola between Chicago and Saint Louis with Brodie and Leg. I had written last time that giving everybody acid wasn’t a good idea but that might not necessarily be true. We would have gotten pulled off the train and arrested either way and it certainly made the couple hours we spent locked in cement cells more entertaining. It also slightly reduced whatever possession charges I still have in Central Illinois because the acid was clearly packaged and not particularly well hidden.

As we approached a town called Sullivan the train began to slow down and Brodie was pretty sure it wasn’t siding. He figured that a motorist had seen us and called it in and said we would probably need to get ready to run. We hadn’t been super careless like the last ride I described but we had been peeking over the side a bit to look at the scenery. We mostly put our heads back down when we passed through yards, towns or busy roads – Brodie was a very experienced rider.

The train came to a stop with our car directly between two road crossings and local police SUVs were pulling up to both of them. This was when we realized that they knew exactly which car we were in and we must have been spotted by some kind of automatic camera pointed downward at the tracks as the trains came into town. There probably wasn’t too much we could have done about this besides lying motionless under our sleeping bags with the hope of blending in and that’s a pretty miserable way of riding.

We were just in the wrong kind of car – too much visibility.

There was nothing around but a field of knee-high corn and it was obvious that there was no point in running or trying to hide – plus we weren’t really in the mental state for that kind of thing. We threw our packs and bags over the side, hopped off and started rolling up the sleeping bags and getting ready to move. I also had an eighth of mushrooms and a single Adderall pill in my bag, drugs I’d been carrying for a while but never seemed to feel like taking, so I briefly considered either tossing them, hiding them or just eating it all. They were already jogging toward us with their guns out though so I decided to leave them where they were and hope that they’d be lazy about searching our bags.

The Sullivan Police had pictures of trains on their patches and I was thinking of using one as the header photo but it looks like they’ve changed the design and I couldn’t find any pictures of the old one. I got the impression that their town was quiet enough that all they really did was catch up freight riders. They were excitedly boasting to us and each other about how many they had managed to catch in the last week alone.

They seemed especially proud of having pulled off a group of Mexicans because then they got to hand them over to immigration. They’d probably just recently gotten the fancy automatic camera installed and since then it had been like shooting fish in a barrel. They made us put on our backpacks and then handcuffed us in the front so we could carry them over to the pickup truck they were going to transport us in:

“Let them hoss their own shit!”

They told us that if we wanted we could wait for another form of transport instead of getting transported in a truck bed but we wanted to get the whole ordeal over with as quickly as possible. They had pulled up in SUVs but they probably didn’t want us getting their seats dirty. They made a lot of comments about how dirty we were, how we smelled and that sort of thing.

They took us to a tiny cement substation with a couple of cells for processing. The whole building was roughly the size of the public bathrooms found in parks and rest stops. Inside there was a desk with a computer, some long cement benches they handcuffed us to for processing, a few thin cells and a couple shower stalls. They constantly shuffled us between these spaces for the entirety of the time we were there so that two of us were never together long enough to talk to each other.

We had to leave our bags on the damp grass outside so they could search through them. There was a lady cop behind the computer while I was being processed and for whatever reason she was chatting me up. I forget how she worked this detail into the conversation, maybe she asked me where I was going and why and I told her I was headed to California to play a concert:

“I used to live in Seattle. It was after the whole grunge thing was pretty much over but it was still pretty cool living there with all that history!”

“How’d you end up in a dead end town like this? You move out here for a guy or something?”

“Ooof, don’t even get me started…”

She seemed like she was on the verge of passing me her phone number or asking if I wanted to go get a coffee when we were released until one of her male colleagues with rubber gloves on slammed all of my drugs onto the counter. I immediately took responsibility:

“That’s all mine.”

She gave me a look like I had somehow betrayed her and didn’t talk to me again. She evidently didn’t know very much about the Seattle music scene she was excited to share a city with if she was shocked and offended by a relatively benign and harmless bag of mushrooms. The male cop went through the different baggies with me to identify their contents. I confirmed what the mushrooms and Adderall pill were but I also had a baggie of powdered Syrian Rue that looked like a generic brown powder.

I’d gotten everything from the self-proclaimed shaman guy that lived in Chicago who is mentioned in some other chapters. I’d made the mistake of buying things I didn’t really feel like taking just because they were hard to find and then carrying it around until it got me in trouble. I explained to him in detail what the powder was:

“That’s Syrian Rue, peganum harmala. it’s a naturally occurring MAO Inhibitor that is used to boost the efficacy of other psychotropic drugs but it doesn’t do much on it’s own. It isn’t currently scheduled by the DEA.”

He took my explanation at face value and separated the Rue from the things I could actually be charged for. I wondered afterward if I had said the other bags contained Turkey Tail Mushrooms and a Vitamin C tablet with the same level of conviction I could have gotten away with all of it but that probably would have been pushing my luck. At the very least the Adderall pill had an easily verifiable imprint.

Brodie’s photography monographs hadn’t been published yet but he had either done a few lucrative gallery shows at this point or gotten a decent advance from his representation and he offered to pay everybody’s bail or whatever they were calling the money to be allowed to leave. He stood by the desk with his debit card for a few minutes then concluding the charges he was able to creep by me and whisper into my ear that it sounded like “he was buying thousands of dollars in X-Men cards”.

Brodie would most likely not be “road ready” for several hours to come.

They had us all take showers before they cut us loose and made fun of the fact that nobody seemed to want to use the packets of harsh chemical shampoo they provided us with.

Leg threw out a clumsy and club footed excuse while emerging from her shower:

“You see I just don’t really care for the toiletries, you know what I mean???”

Everybody was doing a pretty good job of just coming off like ditzy train riders and not letting on that we were tripping but Brodie did spend a suspiciously long time staring down into the drain. He later said that there were globs of something down there that looked like the liquid form of the T-1000 from Terminator 2. The cops smirked at him and attempted a joke:

“You sure you didn’t consume some of those mushrooms before we picked you up?”

Brodie answered back both in a way that could be construed as evasive and in a somewhat robotic voice:

“I’ve consumed mushrooms that come on pizza before…“

The cops didn’t really push the issue. I guess they can’t really charge you for being under the influence of drugs except for maybe a public intoxication charge but there’s always the threat of being taken to a psychiatric hospital for 24 to 48 hours if they knew that you took LSD and feel like being extra. They didn’t do any of that.

They took us outside where we discovered that the contents of all of our packs were still spread out on the grass. During my heaviest years of magical ideation, roughly 2008 to 2012, there was a sequence of objects I came to view as magical talismans and essential tools for my practice. This included a silver plated pewter goblet, a conductor’s baton or wand, a rubber witches nose, a studded leather cap and a Ukrainian knife with a goat’s hoof handle that was supposed to be cursed.

At this early stage it would have been limited to the dagger with leather scabbard I used for the Living Hell performances and a small glass bottle in the shape of a maple leaf that I mixed my Florida Water with other fragrances in. Anyway the Sullivan police stole the dagger. None of them ever mentioned anything about it and the part of Illinois we were in was popular for hunting so it’s extremely unlikely that there would have been any law against me carrying it. One of them probably just thought it looked cool and decided to keep it – cops do that sort of thing constantly.

They loaded us into one of those prisoner transport vehicles that’s divided into two sections in the back – kind of like the trucks that dog catchers use. They did allow all of us to ride on the same side of it. Out of the three of us Brodie was clearly the least psychedelically experienced and he had been doing an admirable job of holding it together but his self control was starting to slip. He turned to me:

“Are we in the do-anything say-anything zone?”

The back of the truck was separated from the cab where the cop was driving but there was a tiny window so he could see and hear us. He smirked into the rear view mirror. I told Brodie to hang on just a little longer:

“No we’re not quite in the do-anything say-anything zone yet but we should get there as soon as we leave this truck.”

The cop was driving us to the next county over so that if we did get in trouble again it would be another department’s problem. He knew that our immediate destination was Saint Louis so he gave us general directions to get to Effingham from where he dropped us off. He said it would probably be easiest to find a ride heading to Saint Louis from there and departed with a final piece of advice:

“Guys, don’t get on another train. Catch a ride or hoof it but if you get back on a train you’ll just get caught again.”

He drove off. Brodie let out a massive sigh of relief:

“Holy Shit! I am high! I’m so high! I’m tripping my ass off!”

Leg was smiling to herself:

“A pig said hoof it!“

I put a reassuring arm around Brodie’s shoulder and led him over to a small pile of broken chunks of asphalt so he could climb up on it and jump off a couple of times. I thought it would help him feel more in control the same way I used to jump off of a 60 foot pylon into the Mississippi River every morning as a quick wake up while the Rockaway was docked at Cement Land. He was basically fine to do whatever but we needed to start hitchhiking so the sun wouldn’t go down on us in another small farm town and unless we got a “hip” ride this would probably go smoother if we didn’t talk about how high we were in front of the drivers.

It’s possible to hitch hike without a sign but if there’s any way of making one you’ll be a lot better off. As long as the letters are large, bold and legible passing motorists have no choice but to read them and then they’re already thinking about you. It’s the magic power of the written word – try to look at a word in a language you understand and not read it, it’s impossible. Riding trains always involves some degree of hitchhiking if only to get to and from the remote train yards so we would have already been carrying cardboard and sharpies.

Making a sign is a bit of a gamble because writing the name of a distant destination city can get you lucky with somebody who’s going the entire way but it can also cause potential rides to not pick you up because they don’t think they’re going far enough. For this reason I generally like to just write a Cardinal direction, like “South” in this case, but I might have just written “Effingham” as it wasn’t that far. Generally speaking you want to keep moving even if a ride is barely going any distance but there are some exceptions.

You wouldn’t take a ride from a truck stop if they were only going a couple of exits and potentially dropping you off where there isn’t a truck stop for example.

It took a couple of rides to get to Effingham but I can only remember the first one. A crew cut army looking guy took us down the road a bit to an AM PM. I’m not sure how Brodie ended up in the front seat. Leg and I were a couple at the time but I almost always take the front seat when hitchhiking with a group because I’m good at talking to strangers if that’s what a ride wants. The guy attempted to make conversation:

“It’s gotta be rough hitchhiking in this heat, huh?”

Brodie was staring at his He-Man and the Masters of the Universe sleeping bag:

“It beats fighting monsters all day…”

The driver didn’t try to make any more conversation. It was almost dark by the time we got to Effingham. Effing Effingham – I wound up in this same town again a few years later and when the story gets there you’ll see why I have a little more hatred for the place than most of the anonymous small towns I’ve drifted through. We tried to find a ride but eventually we had to consider finding a place to sleep.

The local homeless tweaker guy named Kenny had noticed our arrival and offered his advice:

“You’re probably thinking of sleeping in the woods out back but you don’t wanna do that and I’ll tell you why: there’s snakes and spiders and who know’s what back there. What you wanna do is go sleep underneath that freeway bridge over there: it’s still windy but it’s dry and there’s no spiders and nobody will bother you. How do I know this? Because I slept there last night and the night before that and I’ll be sleeping there tonight.”

The moment he walked away we all agreed that it sounded like a very bad idea to go sleep where Kenny was. He might have been just trying to help but he seemed a little too eager to have us over there and know where we were sleeping. We could have easily outnumbered and overpowered him but it just seemed like a bad scene.

I think we just grabbed some cardboard from the dumpster full of flattened boxes and laid it out next to the dumpster and slept on it. This wouldn’t have worked long term but we were only staying the night. We had talked to a truck driver around midnight who’d said that he was heading to Saint Louis first thing in the morning and he could take us. He also said that he had a free shower ticket for buying a certain amount of diesel he wasn’t going to use and asked if any of us wanted it.

I was surprised when Brodie took him up on it considering how recently we had showered in the police station but he said that he’d always wanted to see what the truck stop showers looked like. He seemed to just be genuinely interested in big rig trucks and truck culture: a couple of years later he was working as a heavy duty diesel mechanic and the last time I talked to him he had started a transportation company and was driving one himself.

Not too far into the next morning we were dropped off on the Saint Louis side of the Chain of Rocks Bridge which is pretty much across the street from Cement Land. Not too far away a handful of old cabooses sat on a disused portion of track hidden behind walls of overgrown vegetation. Some people had started staying on them during the final days of the Rockaway but now Brodie, Alexis and Jacki had moved in full time ever since The Garden of Bling got burned.

Jacki and Alexis had gotten a couple of bantam chickens, I think their names were Chicken Nugget and Lenny Kravitz, and spent most of their time watching the chickens fight and dig up bugs. It seems like a missed opportunity that it wasn’t “Henny Kravitz” but it was probably a rooster – the kind with big hair and bell bottoms made of feathers. Bob Cassilly was getting frustrated that people from the rafts were still living on a piece of property he eventually intended to develop but they were out of the way and I don’t think he ever got around to kicking them off.

While I was exploring some of the surrounding overgrowth I must have disturbed a bumblebee’s tiny hive and it attacked and stung me. It doesn’t hurt nearly as much as a honeybee’s sting but they don’t die from stinging either and they can do it over and over. I wasn’t wearing a shirt and it directed its serial assaults to the spot where Christ’s fifth wound is – it looked like it was pelvic thrusting against me as it stung me over and over. I was too shocked and surprised to think about brushing it off until it had gotten a good five jabs in.

It kind of feels like a dull ache combined with a slight burning – maybe like a combination sunburn and Charlie Horse.

Brodie was staying in Saint Louis but me and Leg would be continuing onto the Bay Area. I forget if the original plan was to ride trains the whole way but we went to a Kinko’s near the arch so I could make us a pair of counterfeit Greyhound Passes. The new plan was to take a bus to Amarillo, Texas and catch a hot shot to Northern California from there. Brodie photocopied a few pages and maps from his Crew Change and gave us the phone number for a friend of his called LBK.

Amarillo, now that is a seriously weird town. I’ll get into it next time.

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Cabazon, California 2017 : “A Garbage Bag Full Of Desiccated Flesh”

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I kind of chased my tail in a circle and ended up back where I started while doing some background research for this piece. I was trying to find out the identity of the dusty abandoned steak house that held the garbage bag from the pull quote and had convinced myself that it had to have been The Wagon Wheel from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and Paris, Texas. I even found a photo of the interior after it became a dusty abandoned steak house and it more or less looked like the dusty abandoned steak house I remembered.

The only problem is that The Wagon Wheel was demolished in December of 2016 and LaPorsha was pretty sure that we did the whole desert thing in the Summer of 2017. I checked my e-mail and we had become site hosts at the Thousand Palms Oasis in August of 2017. I looked a little closer at the satellite map and remembered the chain link fence and rubble where The Wagon Wheel would have been. It looks like the dusty abandoned steak house in this story is now a brightly painted Mexican Restaurant called Los Victors.

The inside doesn’t look anything like it looked when it was a dusty abandoned steak house with a garbage bag full of desiccated flesh. It actually looks quite a bit like the Burger King which was getting me even more confused but the Burger King is definitely still a Burger King. The chairs in one of the pictures did look a bit familiar, they probably kept those. It would be easier than throwing them out. I decided to just not stick a picture on this one. I’m sure you’ve seen the dinosaurs, everybody’s seen the dinosaurs.

Our first RV was a 38 footer on the Chevy 454 chassis, a real monster. There was never much wrong with it from a mechanical perspective except that it would start running hot from time to time. We were in the desert anyway so everything was hot. Structurally it was a different story. It had a good side and a bad side. On the bad side the covers had fallen off of the storage compartments and taken the siding with it leaving bare plywood. Not that it ever actually mattered, these aren’t the kind of stories where little details like this will matter later.

We had been running hot when we first pulled off the highway into the Thousand Palms truck stop and for a while we got away with parking in the back where all the trucks were. In the beginning we used the little black diesel Mercedes we also had to go up to Joshua Tree and check out spots to rent land to park on but there’s nothing like living in the desert to let you know that you don’t want to live in the desert. Eventually they started noticing that there were a few RVs back there that didn’t move and we had to start moving around and parking on the streets.

Besides the truck stop Thousand Palms intersected with tribal lands enough to have a casino so there was a decent sized homeless population for a town its size. There were a few out of the way spots for camps but we ended up meeting the other RV people as soon as they pulled us all out from where we were hidden in the rows of trucks.

The first RV that we parked by was occupied by a friendly older white trash couple. No matter how many times we told them that we didn’t use meth, or “white” in local slang, they never seemed to get the message. They would offer it to us as exchange when they needed a jump or come by the window when they were having trouble finding some:

“Got any shit?”

One day they were visited by a woman with a car and job, probably a stripper, who needed a spot to hang out and get high. She had an entire litter of Husky puppies with her and LaPorsha was talking about how cute they were and saying she wanted one. The old woman in the RV lowered her voice to ask how much LaPorsha would be willing to pay for one.

You could see the gears turning inside her head. I’m sure if we’d offered a hundred dollars or more she would have made it happen – one way or another. We really didn’t need a dog, much less a potentially stolen one, so we said we weren’t interested. This couple wasn’t around for long. One morning their RV was gone and we never saw them again.

These guys that lived in another one used to cook meth and steal diesel from construction equipment but were getting by on just being the only RV with a working air conditioner. Whoever had gotten a social security check or other come up would buy gas for the AC and share drugs with these guys to have a spot to hang out that was out of the heat. It was like the cheaper version of a room at the Red Roof. They had a tiny television next to the door that constantly played a loop of their only DVD – some obscure hood crime movie from the ‘90s I forget the name of.

We didn’t do the same kind of drugs as everybody else but one of the guys was helping us flush our radiator on our way out of town. We were driving toward Los Angeles for no compelling reason. I mean we needed to go by the DHS Office to renew EBT and that sort of thing but we could have done that without moving the RV at all. Our RV had gotten so hot that we were having trouble starting it and we were grabbing some more water from a building where what looked like a juvenile eagle was watching us from the roof.

“Heat is the enemy of electricity.”

On the freeway things were going fine until LaPorsha’s driver’s seat suddenly turned into a sauna. Steam was rising all around her and it seemed reasonable to assume that it was probably coming from the engine as it was directly under her. I’m not much good with anything motor vehicle related but I was able to pull off the doghouse and use a flashlight to find where a hose had gotten loose, we’d left in the relative cool of night. Reattaching it was easy but there was also the issue of all of the water in the radiator having changed state and dispersed into the atmosphere.

Considering all of the issues that we’d had leaving Thousand Palms, and the surplus of empty space in our vehicle, you might have expected that we would have been carrying another radiator’s worth of the stuff but that wasn’t the case.

We had pulled off in walking distance to a rest stop so I walked down to discover that the water to all of the fixtures and faucets had been shut off as it was no longer in use. By this time the sun was starting to come up. A truck driver with three or four black chihuahuas had pulled onto the shoulder ahead of us and he did have water but only small bottles of this weird zero calorie Concord Grape flavored stuff that wasn’t even carbonated that I wouldn’t have put in a radiator even if there was enough of it.

I did eventually get thirsty enough to drink some. It tasted like obscure new forms of cancer.

We had to try to hitchhike to the next exit to get more water. A cop pulled off to tell us that we couldn’t hitchhike but she’d drive us there. The next exit was the Cabazon Dinosaurs. Apparently the Dinosaurs were built to help bring business to the then-demolished Wagon Wheel Restaurant that wasn’t the dusty abandoned steak house. I don’t know if this is still the case but at the time they had been bought by some Christians that turned the insides of them into a Creationist Museum about how dinosaurs never actually existed.

It’s actually possible that in 2017 the Dinosaurs were no longer even owned by Creationists because I didn’t even go inside this time. I had looked inside in 2012 at the tail end of the Trapped in Reality tour. I know whoever owns them now paints them up for different holidays and stuff. In 2017 I fell asleep under the stomach of the apatosaurus as it was the only place with shade and some possibly unrelated Christians gave me a bag of food. Doritos, Gatorade – that sort of thing.

I found some of the plastic and cardboard cubes that vegetable oil comes in in the Burger King dumpster so we had something to carry water with and just needed to find a ride the three or four miles back to the RV. The manager of the Burger King said that he would take us if we were still there when he closed that night and that sounded better than trying to hitchhike again.

We did notice one other RV in the upper parking lot by the gas station so we decided to see if anybody was home and ask if they knew an RV mechanic. When I approached the window a pot bellied white man with dreadlocks dressed only in basketball shorts was startled out of his nap when his six or seven pit bulls all started barking furiously. He tried to quiet them down by repeatedly yelling “dudes!” at them. It wasn’t particularly effective.

He didn’t know an RV mechanic. I got the impression his didn’t run at all and the owners of the parking lot didn’t care enough to make him leave.

It was really hot and we had a lot of time to kill so I started poking around the dusty abandoned steak house. I can’t remember what the sign said the name had been before it had gone out of business, it isn’t the name anymore. Apparently the building was built in 2001. It’s hard to imagine a year where business was booming enough at the Cabazon Dinosaurs that somebody decided it would be a good idea to build a second sit down family restaurant but apparently there was one and it was 2001.

The door in back turned out to be unlocked when I tried to open it. There were a bunch of lizards hanging out in the doorway that had all apparently had the same idea as me about using a dusty abandoned steak house to get out of the sun. I’m usually pretty on it with the herpetology stuff but I don’t know what kind they were. A few of them were pretty big – about as long as a chihuahua but nowhere near as bulky.

I went to get LaPorsha so we could try to take a nap in there or at least spend some time out of the sun. It was really dusty to the point that it made it hard to breathe. There was a table that looked like the spot that other people who had killed time or squatted in the dusty abandoned steak house had killed time at: beer cans and empty liquor bottles. Sitting on a chair was a black trash bag full of the titular weird dried out slabs of some kind of flesh.

They kind of looked like this brown fibrous stuff that comes off of palm trees but the moment my fingers touched it I knew it was Animal Kingdom. I really couldn’t begin to guess what that stuff was or why somebody had dumped a garbage bag full of it in this place. My mind went to deer and I couldn’t help but think human and I was pretty much sure I didn’t feel like touching it, having my fingerprints on it or being anywhere near it.

The walls were mirrors for a lot of the space. The dust was thick on everything. I found.. I don’t remember what – tablecloths, aprons, curtains, some kind of relatively clean textile we could lay down to sleep on. Just barely bearable. The lizards weren’t coming around, they stayed by the back door ready for a raid. The light caught the dust in the air and looked unwelcoming. We slept.

The light from the windows began to darken, it was inching toward evening. We dusted off, collected ourselves, avoided the bag of god-knows-what and returned to Burger King. It was almost time for the manager to close but he had done a 180 personality wise. He mocked us for expecting him to keep his word – called us fools, idiots, crazy. He clearly felt guilty that he was reneging on his promise and attempting to put the fault on us to soothe his ego. We told him to just go.

One of his workers was worried about us and wanted to get us back safely. She lived all the way in Perris but had to drive all the Cabazon for a minimum wage fast food job. She had never taken hitchhikers before and was worried we might hurt her but still decided to take us. She was praying the entire way. A rosary made from glass beads cut to look like crystals hung from her rear view mirror.

We got back to our RV and I refilled the water. It was dark again, cool night to fight the heat. We drove until it got hot and weird again. Pulled off into a field by an Auto Zone in Beaumont. I can’t remember what I had to buy there but I feel like it was vaguely cylindrical and someone helped me install it. What I can remember is the smell of synthetic oil and rubber inside this Auto Zone – they all have it but this one was stronger than usual.

Once we were able to drive again we decided not to try to make the full trip to Los Angeles. We parked behind a mini-mall in Banning and got a bus instead.

Banning – we’d be coming back to a whole lot of Bullshit in Banning.

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