One for the Road

by Tony Horwitz

  “Zis is a stick-up,” he slurs, patting his hand against a lump beneath his shirt. It could be a few stubbies in a brown bag. Then again, it could be a gun. “Zis is a stick-up,” he says again. “Sheilas, take off your jewelry. Blokes, hand over the wallets.”

  No one moves. Suddenly even the sleep-nots seem to have achieved deep and untroubled slumber. “For Chrissakes!” he shouts. “Izza stick up!” Still no one moves. Then the driver returns and shoulders the drunk out of the bus. “Get outta here!” the driver yells, vaguely irritated, as if he often deals with drunken highwaymen at this particular stop.

  It is still two hours before sunrise when we arrive in Katherine. My plan, as much as I have one, is to hang out at the bus depot until morning, then try to hitch a ride from there. That way, if no rides materialize, I’ll be able to hop onto the next bus to Darwin. A half day by the road in Kununurra has shot my confidence in ever catching a ride again.

  But five minutes at the station forces me to change my plan. Katherine’s bus depot is like bus depots everywhere: dank and depressing, and smelling as if its floors have been swabbed with some evil mix of urine, stale coffee, and cigarette butts.

  So once again I make the Long March from downtown to out of town. How many times have I done this, I wonder, hiking past a mile or two of silent shopfronts? Orange, Dubbo, Cloncurry, Tennant Creek, Kimba … I know the face of commerce in every outback town … Norseman, Albany, Geraldton, Carnarvon, Kununurra. And everywhere the same as this: an endless stretch of angle parking and footpaths shadowed by awnings.

  Across a bridge, and finally out of town. I can dimly make out a grassy field on the left—a park maybe—and beyond it the empty road to Darwin. Wrapping myself in a blanket, I lie on the ground to wait out the night.

  At first light it becomes apparent that this is quite a popular park. There are Aboriginal men everywhere, wrapped in blankets and strewn across the grass like Nubian mummies. No sleep-nots in this crowd. I make an imaginary entry in Jack Pearton’s log book, in a column labeled “Strange places I’ve spent the night”: in a ditch during a cyclone, in an abandoned bus in the Nullarbor, at a pub with no publican in Rocky Gully, and now in a makeshift Aboriginal camp.

  Slowly, as the sun lifts its gaze across the park, the men come awake and wander off toward town. Then the truck traffic begins: huge, three-trailered road trains, strafing me with gravel and sending up clouds of dust as they shoot through to Darwin. An hour after that—rush hour in Katherine—the local traffic begins, headed toward an industrial park around the next bend. Brawny men in dusty four-wheel drives with Monday-morning faces: unsmiling, haggard, hung over. Then the housewives, headed in the opposite direction, to drop the kids off at school or to do some shopping. Then the housewives returning from town, with grocery bags in the passenger seat instead of kids. I know the face of commuter traffic in every outback town.

  Nonetheless, I make the hopeless gesture of standing there with my finger out, grinning like a maniac. No one’s headed to Darwin, obviously, and even if they are, they aren’t about to let me into the family sedan.

  By mid-morning I feel spent, which is how I’ve felt for the last few days, except now it’s acute: when the heat arrives in another hour or so I’ll just disappear into the dust. Even the hike back to the bus depot seems beyond me, though the shame I feel about bus travel has long since departed. I’ll crawl to Darwin on my hands and knees if that’s what’s required.

  I wander into the park to piss behind a tree, leaving my “Darwin Pls!!” propped against my pack, facing the northbound traffic. As soon as I unzip my fly, I hear the sound of rubber hitting gravel. Great, now I’ve not only been abandoned in Katherine, but I’m about to be ripped off as well. While taking a leak.

  “Don’t rush yourself, mate,” the driver calls out, as I come running from behind the tree with the pained expression of pissus interruptus. “I’ve got to pee too,” he says.

  It is the first ride I’ve ever caught by sticking out my dick instead of my finger.

  My fellow pisser is a sympatico driver named Trevor. The fraternal recognition is instantaneous, at least for me. He is middle-aged, wearing stubbies, a T-shirt, and thongs. But a crumpled suit is falling off a coat hanger in the back. Beside it are half-folded shirts, a toiletries bag, and other signs of a man who makes his living on the road. Plus a stack of cheaply mimeographed flyers, some handmade posters, and a pile of small cards labeled “membership application.” Having once been a member of Trevor’s trade, I know what club it is he’s hawking.

  “I did some labor organizing myself,” I tell him as we drive off toward Darwin. “A union of timber workers in a place called Meridian, Mississippi.”

  Trevor laughs. “Mate, welcome to the Mississippi of Australia.”

  Trevor is an abattoir slaughterman when he’s not organizing for the Meatworkers Union. And for the first hour of our drive, he educates me about boning buffalo and bargaining with the boss. The Northern Territory, like America’s Deep South, is hostile turf for union men.

  Somewhere between Katherine and Darwin I fall asleep, then stir awake as we pass through a monotonous expanse of crowded freeways and suburban subdivisions. It is Darwin but it could be anywhere in urban Australia: arcades, high-rises, traffic.

  I step out into the blinding light of a Top End afternoon. At first glance, Darwin resembles an oversized Alice Springs, hiding its face behind concrete-and-glass buildings and acres of suburban sprawl. Of course, Cyclone Tracy blew away most of the original town in 1974, so at least Darwin has an excuse.

  I don’t need a tourist guide to find the real Darwin. In a place that drinks more beer per capita than any other on earth, there’s little mystery about that. But I am not ready for the pubs, not yet.

  Holding my cardboard sign overhead to ward off the sun, I hoist my pack and go in search of a bed. Five minutes and fifteen dollars later, I’m rewarded with a rabbit hole just off the bitumen: a chamber that is stark naked except for a bed, a drippy air-conditioner, and a broken refrigerator. Standing by the bed, I can almost reach out and touch all four walls. I open the fridge in the vain hope of finding something cold to drink. There is nothing but a cool pool of water on the bottom shelf.

  I collapse on the motel bed with my pack still on, like a shell-shocked soldier falling into a foxhole. It has been about a month since I left Sydney, plus two weeks of travel from the city to the center, way back in January. Not a long time for a journey, really.

  But hitchhiking time should be measured like the years of a dog’s life. Each day must be multiplied by a factor of seven to account for the intensity of climbing into strange cars with strange people headed to strange places. And there’s always the chance of encountering a homicidal maniac to stretch each moment by a few more factors than that.

  My supply of small talk and my energy for new faces is depleted. I feel as I sometimes do at the end of a long week of newspaper reporting, when all I want to do is stop extracting information from people I’ve never met and will probably never speak to again.

  Physically, I’m even more burned out. My legs and arms are covered in lumps; some from bug bites, some from scrambling through the scrub in the dark, some from the gravel lodged in my flesh by passing road trains. My head aches from sunburn, glare, and lack of sleep. And my stomach has become a Sargasso Sea of meat pies and beer. Another few weeks on a roadhouse diet and I’d succumb to scurvy, cirrhosis of the liver, or worse.

  I am lying on the motel bed in Darwin, listening to the air-conditioner drip at 2 P.M. on a Monday afternoon, when the recognition comes. It is a thought that has played at the fringes of my consciousness for the past seventy-two hours; now, with my defenses down, it congeals into a simple declarative sentence. My career as a hitchhiker has come to an end.

  Someday there may be the stray itch like the longing for a cigarette, resurfacing years after kicking the habit. And certainly there will be other travels, other adventures. But setting off alone, with a swag and on
ly my finger to move me along—those days are done.

  I greet this insight with wistful relief. I’ve exhausted the discipline, or it has exhausted me. And the world has changed with me, of course. When I started hitching in the mid-seventies, it was an article of faith among young people that a hitchhiker should not be passed; a van or Volkswagen on the horizon was as good as a bus ticket. Added to that were middle-aged parents with children of their own on the road, plus ex-Okies, ex-servicemen, ex-beatniks and anyone else who had traveled by thumb or forefinger at some point in the past. All together, that gave you a fair slice of the population to rely on for rides.

  But gradually the old brotherhood of the road is disappearing. Maybe it’s just that the Volkswagen drivers of the seventies have moved onto Volvos and BMWs, sealed off from the world of the roadside traveler. Or maybe it doesn’t take much for people’s natural suspicion to reemerge. A few Sons of Sam, the occasional Midnight Rambler, and Edna starts nudging Norm to keep on driving.

  A bit of eye contact and conversation is enough to dispel the distrust, which explains why I’ve been lucky getting rides at roadhouses and gas pumps. But if those same drivers passed me standing by the road, with only my forefinger and smile as a character reference, they weren’t likely to stop.

  I force myself off the bed and out to the motel pool, a brackish moat with water the temperature of molten pig iron. There is a single sunbather lying supine on the concrete. He is well tanned, but he has the drawn, hollow look of a man at the tail end of a bender. A fountain, no doubt, of pub-touring advice.

  “I’ve seen the sun rise for the past three days,” he confesses, rising on one arm to light a cigarette. Me too, I realize wearily. Four, in fact. He sucks at the cigarette. “One more night and I’m history.”

  Doug is twenty-five; I would have guessed thirty-five at least. He came from Sydney six months ago and has been living at the motel ever since, working at one of the bars at the Diamond Beach Casino—an establishment known locally as the “shearing shed” or the “chip factory.” Unfortunately, Doug moans, “they don’t pass the proceeds along.” But they are generous with the drinks, which is what gets Doug into trouble. His shift ends at 2 A.M. but he typically “kicks on” for several hours.

  “Too bad you weren’t here yesterday,” he says. “Depraved, mate. Really wild.”

  Apparently, as in the Nor’west, Sunday is the drinking day in Darwin. The action peaks in late afternoon at “the Rage in the Cage.” That’s when half of adult Darwin crowds into Lim’s Rapid Creek Hotel, a prisonlike pub with a concrete floor and wire mesh for walls. “The cage keeps the action in but lets the spew out,” Doug explains. “Also makes it easier for them to hose the place down the morning after.”

  Charles Darwin would be struck by the devolution of the species that has occurred at the Top End since the Beagle landed here in 1839.

  I ask Doug what my chances are of finding some action tonight.

  “Monday’s kind of quiet,” he says. He pulls at his cigarette. The smoke seems to give him some deep, primal nourishment. “But I think we can find you a rage at a few local venues.”

  Doug’s itinerary runs as follows: The Nightcliff for an apéritif (“leave early, before the fights start”), the Victoria Hotel to hear music (“group called Scrap Metal on tonight”), and Fannie’s Disco to kick on until 4 A.M. (“local joke about it: ‘go to Fannie’s for a stabbing’”).

  “There’s a gay disco on at the Settler’s pub if you’re into that,” he says finally. “Otherwise, just the casino and the usual run of a dozen or so pubs.”

  Like he said, kind of quiet.

  I invite Doug to give me a personalized tour. But he has to work until two. “Anyway, I’m getting too old for this. Three nights running is all I can take anymore.”

  I wash a few clothes in the pool and bake them in the late afternoon sun. It is a futile attempt at achieving respectability—and a misguided one. At the Nightcliff, where I arrive around sunset, a drinker is overdressed if his stubbies are the same color as the plastic on his thongs. It is also the sort of pub where a man feels naked without a tattoo on his arm.

  The pub is plain and smoky, and chock-a-block with bikers. Human limbs not encased in casts have the pale, shriveled look of having just been liberated from plaster. But it’s hard to see much flesh beneath the tapestry of tattoos. Most of the bikers are covered in both plaster and India ink—plus keys, studs, rings, chains, and maces. Every time one of the men moves toward the bar it’s like a knight in armor clunking across a castle floor.

  Beneath all the hardware is a racial mix reminiscent of Broome: whites, blacks, Chinese, Malays, and one man who has rendered his race indeterminate with tattoos. I can’t help staring at a particularly vivid scorpion on his upper arm, peeking beneath his T-shirt sleeve at the plaster cast that begins just above the elbow. The man looks Chinese, maybe Indonesian.

  “What ya staring at?” he yells. I was wrong. Genus ocker, species aggro.

  “Just your, uh, decorations. Could you pull up your sleeve so I can see the full show?”

  “I’d have to pull my pants down to do that, mate.” He’s glaring at me now. “What’s so funny? Hunh? What youse smiling about?”

  An involuntary grin always crosses my face in tense situations.

  “Do you want the full show, mate? Hunh?”

  Before I can answer, a hand grips my elbow and begins leading me outside. The arm above it has no plaster and no tattoos, nor is there any hint of violence in the voice that accompanies it. “Steer clear of the feral natives. We’re a bit tamer out in the beer garden.”

  A moment later I am seated at a picnic table with a curious collection of drinkers. My savior is a man named Lloyd, who is passing through Darwin with a theater group. He likes coming to the Nightcliff to “soak up some local color.” His companions include a long-haired hospital orderly, a dissipated young actress, and a mammoth, shirtless Maori who doesn’t state his occupation. But he whittles deftly at a wooden spoon, then promptly sells it to another drinker for a few dollars before carving another.

  The others amuse themselves by counting ambulances, which scream down the adjoining highway at regular intervals—like every minute and a half.

  “Usually the ambulances are coming here,” the hospital worker says. “They were too late the other night, though. Bloke chucked in his cards before they got here.”

  Chucked in his cards? This isn’t the casino. “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “He croaked, mate,” the Maori says, running the penknife across his throat and grimacing. “Went out of here a stiff.”

  The death was nothing special; after all, the Northern Territory has a murder rate five times the national average. But a biker having his throat cut led to a radical reform at the Nightcliff: a large sign announcing that children are no longer allowed in the pub.

  “Killing’s one thing,” the Maori says, returning to his whittling. “But kids getting killed would be serious shit.”

  Apparently, most of the fights are started by “gin jockeys,” which the unabridged Darwin dictionary defines as “white males who get black women drunk, fuck them, and then beat them up.” The man I spoke with at the bar is one of this charming breed. When the gin jockeys ride in, usually on motorbikes, most of the black drinkers retreat rather than resist. But Aborigines hold sway in the public bar, where whites are unwelcome. Even gin jockeys respect the color bar.

  As the evening wears on, a few theories are floated as to why there are no fights tonight. The orderly argues that everyone is “too stoned” on a crop of joints that circulates openly in the pub. The Maori thinks everyone’s still a bit hung over after the serious Sunday drinking. And the actress blames the quiet on an end-of-month cash shortage.

  “It’s easy to be sober when you’re broke,” shy hypothesizes. I search the bar in vain for signs of sobriety. “Wednesday’s the first of the month,” she continues. “Things will be back to normal by then.”

 
At nine o’clock a few of the ambulatory drinkers kick on—or limp, rather—to the Victoria Hotel. The “Vic” is a tame-looking place in a downtown pedestrian mall: hanging plants, brick walls, and a huge ceiling fan that sweeps the sultry air one way and then another. Nor are there any bikers in evidence, but every other group in the world is represented: Rastafarians, rednecks, mung beans, American tourists, women in tight red dresses, Aboriginal men, white-haired hippies, a man with a bicycle. The place is a kind of Noah’s Ark of all the curious species that collect at the Top End.

  The band hasn’t started playing yet, but already half the bar is dancing. A shaggy-haired jackeroo clad in stubbies, singlet, and a grubby stockman’s hat is doing “the bump” with an Aboriginal man. They knock hips for a few minutes, embrace, and slap each other’s palms in a drunken “high five.” Then they return to their dates.

  Another two men perform a roughneck go-go routine from atop bar stools, waving their arms over their heads like caged girls at the back of a TV dance show. One of them falls onto the floor, taking his beer with him. No one seems to notice.

  Meanwhile, three men in black leather pants—Scrap Metal, apparently—are going through a seemingly endless succession of sound tests. “Testing. One, two, three. Testing.” Pause, haul in two more speakers, haul out two others. Plug in three hundred more leads. “Testing, one, two, three….” They litter the entire bar with wires and speakers and discarded fuses. When the music finally starts up, close to midnight, it is almost indistinguishable from the feedback that the speakers have been coughing out for the past two hours.

  I move on to Fannie’s Disco, which is only a few blocks down the mall. Thankfully, it doesn’t live up to its reputation for quickly drawn blades, at least not tonight. All I see is a blinding strobe light and a mass of dancers who are either blatantly underage or way overage. Two girls, who look not a day over ten, are teaching a gray-haired man in a safari suit how to dance. He holds their hands for a few minutes, then drifts off on his own, shuffling his feet from side to side and moving his arms backward and forward in a repetitive motion, as if opening and closing a pair of French doors. He appears very pleased with himself.