Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America

by John Waters

  All my staff bursts into hysterical laughter when they see me walk through the front door looking like a drowned rat. “Real funny!” I yell, pissed. “If I have to give back the book advance, how will I pay you?” I go upstairs, slam my bedroom door, and dry off. What a terrible idea I’ve come up with, and now I can’t get out of it.

  The next morning, I sneak out before dawn. At least it’s not raining. It’s unseasonably cold, but I can’t expect our weather research across the nation to be perfect even if it was based on average temperatures for the second week of May. Once again I’m at the light. “You just want attention, don’t you?” hisses a woman, who I can tell is debating going through the light just to avoid me. Trying to be friendly, I smile and say, “There’s a gas crisis—I’m being green,” but she pretends not to hear. “I’m sick of reading about you in the newspapers!” she snarls, and pulls off the second the light changes.

  Finally, a car stops and I rush to get in. By now, I’d accept a ride from Freddy Krueger. But no, this guy is a different kind of horror. I can smell liquor immediately when I get in the car. Old sub wrappers are on the floor, mixed in with empty half-pint bottles of whiskey. The air conditioner is on so high that I can see my breath when I open my mouth to thank him for picking me up. He slurs his name, “Stew,” when he introduces himself and pulls out in traffic without turning on his blinker once I tell him I’m headed to I-70 West. “There Stands the Glass” by Webb Pierce, one of the most god-awful country songs about liquor, comes on the radio, or at least I think it is on the radio until I see Stew is playing a homemade CD of this dreadful song over and over.

  “Where are the seat belts?” I cry in nervousness after fumbling around both sides of the passenger seat. “I cut them out,” he admits with a boozy laugh. “I hate those things. How am I supposed to mix drinks all strapped up?” I realize quickly that Ride Number One is not only an asshole but probably driving with a revoked license. “I’ve got eleven DUIs,” he brags, “but fuck ’em.” “Look ahead,” I plead, realizing he’s had his eyes off the road for quite some time. “Oh, don’t you worry,” he lectures, wagging his fingers as he careens onto the entrance ramp of the Baltimore Beltway, “I drive good when I’m drunk! Those Mothers Against Drunk Drivers bitches make me mad! M-A-D mad!” he adds, and bursts into plastered laughter at his bad joke.

  It starts raining again. I’m immediately concerned that Stew makes no move to turn on the windshield wipers. He unscrews the cap of another half-pint of hooch and chugalugs it down. “Goddammit,” he curses as he frantically tries to wipe away the condensation building on the inside of the windshield. “Can you see on your side?” he asks with anger. “No!” I scream. “Turn on the wipers!” “Ahhh, those pieces of shit don’t work!” he snarls. “Well, stop then,” I beg, “just pull over. Please! It’s dangerous!” A truck passes, splattering even more water on the windshield, but Stew seems unperturbed. He takes out his cell phone and starts texting out loud, “O-F-F T-H-E W-A-G-O-N,” as he drunkenly tries to type the letters on his keyboard before turning to me and hatefully admitting, “That’s to my sponsor—that dumb turd—he thinks he’s better than me.” “You’re gonna kill us!” I shout, lurching toward the dashboard controls, trying to figure out how to turn on the defroster. Stew throws down his phone in fury and starts flicking the switch to the wipers on and off, and for a few seconds they actually work. Just in time for me to see him mow down a small dog that is running across the highway. “Watch out!!” I scream, but it’s too late. For such a small animal, I’m amazed at the loud thump it makes as it is crushed and sucked up under the axle of Stew’s car. “Stop!” I yell in a panic. “Let me out, you’re drunk.”

  Stew just laughs and holds out the bottle, offering me a slug. “No,” I protest. “At least let me drive!” But before he can answer I see he has veered off Route 70 toward Cumberland. “Hey, I thought you were going to West Virginia,” I scream in alarm. “I don’t know where the hell I’m going,” he mutters in alcoholic distress. I grab the wheel just in time and force him to swerve around a parked car he is headed straight for, pulled over on the side of the road. He slams on the brakes and my head hits the dashboard. Luckily the air bags don’t go off. I guess they’re broken, too.

  Suddenly Stew pulls a handgun from under his seat and I freeze. But it’s not me he’s threatening; it’s the “nosy bastard” authorities from his past that have tried to “interfere” with his “joy of drinking.” “Goddamn judges,” rages Stew in torment as he fires a round of bullets out the window. “Put the gun down, Stew,” I say in the most evenhanded voice I can muster. “Fuck AA!” he shouts for the world to hear. “Bill W., I’ll blow your brains out, too!” he threatens the long-dead founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Before I can even attempt to pull the gun away, Stew gets a stunned look on his face and then projectile-vomits. I grab the wheel, he grabs it back. The stench of his puke covering his side of the windshield seems to give him no pause. Still retching as he drives and braking erratically, he slows down as he unsuccessfully attempts to wipe away his own bile with one of the many brown-paper bags that litter his car. I gotta get out of here. I open the door halfway and see the gravel beside the road whizzing by. I look back at Stew and he grabs my travel bag away from me and pukes again. I jump out anyway and land painfully on the side of the highway but manage to roll just as I’ve seen stuntmen do on movie sets.

  Stew keeps going. My jacket is ripped and my pants are shredded on one knee, which I see is bleeding. I don’t think I broke any bones, though. At least I’m alive. Off-route already. Now with no luggage. Still in fucking Maryland.

  BAD RIDE NUMBER TWO

  ADAM

  I pull up my pant leg and see I’m really scraped up. I limp up the road and can feel the stinging on the side of my face from hitting the gravel. I see a car coming and I stick out my thumb, but even that hurts because my shoulder feels pulled from its socket. Where are my fans when I need them? A fairly new Nissan Sentra passes by and I glimpse the driver do a double take and then slam on the brakes. I hobble up to the vehicle like that character Chester in Gunsmoke. I look inside and see a harmless-enough-looking overweight nerdy kind of guy behind the wheel. A real Confederacy of Dunces type.

  “Taffy Davenport!” he yells, and it only takes me a second to realize he’s reciting dialogue from one of my movies. “Thanks for stopping,” I say, jumping in and happily buckling my seat belt to the sound of “Hitchin’ and Hikin’” by Johnny Sea, playing on his CD player. Great. A country song that laments a failed hitchhiking journey. Just what I don’t feel like singing along with. “There’s just two kinds of people, Miss Sandstone, my kind of people and assholes,” he answers, mimicking Mink Stole’s delivery from Pink Flamingos. “Can you just take me somewhere near I-70 West?” I beg. “Oh, meeting someone? Who?!” he answers in a faux rage, repeating another line from my movie so obscure that even I can’t place it at first. “Okay,” I answer, realizing this fan won’t quit, “just let me off somewhere going west.” “Going to a gang bang or something?” he responds, this time channeling David Lochary. “No, just a road trip,” I answer, refusing to play along with his little dialogue game. I mean, I’m flattered he knows the lines that well, but jeez, give it a break. “We were just wondering,” he continues in character, “where you were planning to spread your VD today? That’s all—hussy.” He shrieks with laughter and I just sit there in stupefied silence. My cheek hurts. I pull his rearview mirror over and see the bruising already coloring one side of my face. “Beauty, beauty, look at you,” he mumbles just as Paul Swift did, fumbling his lines in Female Trouble, “I wish to God I had it, too!” He sees me wince in pain at the cut on my leg and switches to a whole other monologue. “I love the taste of it!” he rants like Divine. “The taste of hot, freshly killed blood!” Suddenly he grabs back the mirror to his side of the car and takes an exit I’m sure I don’t want. “Hey,” I yell, “I told you I need to go west!” “You know I hate nature,” he answers, again swi
tching film references, this time to Desperate Living. “Look at those disgusting trees,” he quotes Mink Stole’s character, Peggy Gravel, “stealing my oxygen!” “Let me off,” I shout in panic, but he just speeds up. “All natural forests should be turned into housing developments!” he screeches, still in Mink mode, as he swerves into a driveway of a suburban house and slams on the brakes. “I wish I could stuff my whole head in your mouth and let you suck out my eyeballs!” he growls in a piss-poor imitation of Turkey Joe’s line in Desperate Living, dialogue that I used to be proud of and now curse the day I wrote it.

  “John Waters!” screams a frightening-looking woman way too large and old to be wearing the tube top she’s featuring—also too early in the season, in my humble fashion opinion. She comes charging down the front path. I freeze. My “biggest fan” leaps out of the car and falls to his knees in front of this lady, who seems used to this role-playing behavior. “Oh, Mother, it’s me, Divine,” he cries. “I was just humiliated in front of the media!” Wait, I think, that’s not a line from any of my movies! But just before I can nail him on his mistake, I realize, yes, it is! It’s from the sequel to Pink Flamingos—Flamingos Forever, which was never shot; only the script was published in book form. To be honest, I could have found him a funnier line, but this idiot isn’t asking for direction.

  “I knew you’d meet my son, Adam,” Mom yells as she grabs me in a bear hug. So that’s his name! Adam. Good. I’ll remember it for the restraining order if I can ever break away from this insane woman, who is smashing her large breasts into my chest before planting a disgusting kiss on my lips. “Good morning, Francine, you’ve put on another twenty pounds,” she screams to Adam, also channeling dialogue from my films, but moving on to one of my more mainstream efforts, Polyester. “My own mother’s insane!” roars the son, reverting back to one of Mink Stole’s shrill lines from Female Trouble.

  “Adam’s perfect for your movies,” shouts the now belligerent stage mother. “Let him audition!” she begs, and I am at last relieved to see she is talking in a nondialogue way. “Send a résumé in to Pat Moran,” I respond as always, “she casts all my movies. Don’t call her—she hates that,” I add, trying to protect her from nutcases just like these two. “Do ‘Gator,’” orders the mom to her son, completely ignoring my professional advice. “Hey, Taffy, come suck your daddy’s dick,” he shrieks, obviously unembarrassed to repeat X-rated dialogue in front of his mother. “‘Queen Carlotta,’” she orders with excitement, like some kind of agent from hell. “Seize him and fuck him,” he shouts in Edith Massey’s nasal voice, without the slightest trace of tiring of this tedious routine.

  “He’ll blow you, too, if that’s what you want,” offers up Mom without batting an eye. “Right, Adam?” she asks her son with a grin before turning back to me and explaining, “He’s got nothing against the casting couch if that’s what it takes.” “Whip it out and show it hard,” he wails, continuing on as Queen Carlotta. “Come on, Daddy, fuck me! Don’t bother with the head! The V of my crotch is what needs attention.” I wrote this? I wonder in horror. Then I run.

  Even that doesn’t stop them. “Run, you bastard, run!” the mother screams, imitating another obscure line Divine used to threaten a mailman who just delivered her a gift-wrapped turd for her birthday in Pink Flamingos. “Pig fucker!” Adam bellows for the world to hear, obviously not caring that the neighbors would have no clue as to why he is shouting obscene dialogue to his mother on their front lawn. “Lick my royal hemorrhoids,” I suddenly yell back, finally driven to such distraction that I am reduced to searching my own inventory of filthy soliloquies to communicate with these fanatical idiots.

  But that only seems to enrage Adam and encourage him and his mom to get violent. “Get him, Bonkers!” I hear Adam yell, quoting the name of the dog that commits suicide in Polyester. But this Bonkers ain’t depressed; he’s insane like the rest of his household. He comes tearing out the front door, teeth bared, charging right toward me. Despite my injuries I run for my life, and that really hurts. “We will outfilth the asshole or assholes who sent this and then they must die!” screams Mom, sounding somehow even more formidable than Divine did in Pink Flamingos. “You have exactly fifteen seconds to get off my property, motherfucker, before I break your neck,” wails the son in a desperate bid for faux Dreamland Studios stardom. I painfully climb up the chain-link fence of another house, dive over to safety just in time to escape the dog, which is nipping and snarling at my heels, and feel my BlackBerry fall out of my back pocket and land in enemy territory. The dog barks in a rage and suddenly squats down and takes a shit on my phone. Adam and his fucking mom shout their approval.

  BAD RIDE NUMBER THREE

  FAYE

  Hey, what’s this? A car stopping for me and I haven’t even stuck out my thumb? Could my hitchhike luck suddenly be changing? “Need a lift?” says the hard-as-nails-looking lady behind the wheel. “Sure,” I yelp as I leap in and give the finger to Adam and his asshole mother as they watch in the distance, hopefully pissed that I got a ride so quickly.

  “I’m Faye,” my new ride announces with an assertiveness that somehow is a little off-putting. “I’m John and I’m going all the way to San Francisco,” I say, trying to be as friendly as possible without staring at the huge legs she is showing off in a miniskirt. The top of her body seems like another person’s: flat chest, normal hips, and a hint of turkey neck. But those legs! God, R. Crumb would love her to wrap these gams around his neck in sexual dominance. “Why’re you going there?” she asks in horror. “I have an apartment in San Francisco,” I volunteer. “So then why are you hitchhiking, stupid? Why didn’t you fly?!” I ignore the word stupid and pretend I’m having a conversation with a normal person. “I just wanted to see what America looked like on the ground,” I converse in the friendliest tone I can. “I hate San Francisco,” she mutters, ignoring my response, “all those stupid hills! No, siree, I’m not going there! I got everything I need in Kentucky!” Sensing another argument, I don’t quiz her about what those exact needs are.

  “Ever fuck a junkie?” she suddenly asks in the most nonchalant way possible. “What?” I say, giving myself time to comprehend her intrusive question. “You heard me. Did you ever fuck a junkie?” “Well … not knowingly,” I answer, trying to be truthful. “Why not? I love junkies,” she says with sexual militancy. “Aren’t you worried about hep C?” I stammer. “THAT PISSES ME OFF!” she yells. “Well, I’m just talking about how hepatitis is often spread through unclean needles,” I mumble. “You just judged an entire cross section of a sexual minority,” she challenges me with new hostility. “But I thought junkies couldn’t get it up,” I weakly argue. “Some people,” she boasts, jabbing her thumb to her chest, “LIKE a limp dick!” “And you have the right to your desires,” I timidly agree, praying she’ll change the subject, but oh no, she’s on a tear.

  “Are you a fag?” she suddenly demands. “Well … yes…,” I admit. “That’s what I thought!” she spits out with a condescending sneer. “It pisses me off,” she continues ranting. “Fags can ‘come out’ but others can’t be ‘strung out’? Is that it? Something wrong with ‘smack in the sack’? You people can bitch but we can’t itch?” “Of course you can,” I stutter before she cuts me off with “You homos should understand there’s such a thing as a ‘scag hag.’” “A scag hag!?” I repeat out loud, thankful, as always, to hear of a new sexual minority. “You heard me!” she rages. “Don’t needle tracks make you whack?” she continues with sloganeering confrontation. “Not really,” I admit in an understanding liberal voice. “Why not?” she challenges back. “Doesn’t a stiff rod on the nod make you shoot your wad?” “No,” I argue; “besides, junkies don’t even like sex.” “There you go,” she screams, “penile profiling just like the rest of you bum bandits!” “Hey, wait a minute,” I protest, finally hearing enough and deciding to give Faye a little of her own medicine. “I just was unaware there was ‘hot muff for hard stuff,’” I say, hoping my ne
w pro-scag-hag motto will lighten her mood. “That’s a good one!” she laughs. I’m relieved. For a moment.

  “Wanna see the pussy that’s driven a thousand junkies crazy?” she suddenly asks with a newfound hostility. “Well, no, I don’t,” I answer truthfully. “It’s nothing personal. You’re a lovely woman,” I lie, “and I’m very thankful you stopped to give me a lift, but it’s a little late in my life for me to ‘come in.’” I hope my little joke will take away the sting of my rejection, but it backfires. “You’re prejudiced against me because junkies don’t have the hots for you!” she challenges, inching up her skirt with an antagonistic exhibitionism and hitting play on her CD player. “Please cover up,” I beg as I actually hear a cut from one of the world’s worst gospel albums, The Addicts Sing, and see the freshly shaved V of her crotch. “I love women, it’s just that I’m not sexually attracted to them,” I explain over the tortured, clean-and-sober vocals of “You Are the Finger of God.” “Oh, it’s good enough for every junkie in the best recovery houses up and down the Eastern Seaboard, but it’s not good enough for you?” she seethes. “Get it or get out!” I look out the window and see the sun is going down. It’s night and there’s not even a house in sight. I look back at her bald mons pubis. Sophie’s choice. “I’ll get out,” I say with newfound clarity. “Fine!” she snarls, not even bothering to cover herself. “Faye’s way or the highway!” she declares, screeching over to the side of the road and slamming on the brakes. “Beat it, Mary,” she yells, and I do, happily. She peels out, spraying my already cut and bleeding body with gravel. I can still hear the Addicts’ awful music blaring as her taillights fade in the distance.