My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays

by Davy Rothbart

  I jammed my foot on the gas pedal, once, twice, and again, to no avail. A quick glance at the gauges, which apparently I’d been blind to, told me all I needed to know: we were out of gas, beyond empty. The engine hadn’t so much thrown its hands up and quit as submitted to an instant, powerful slumber. A trucker in the semi behind us laid on his horn, and I hit the blinkers and guided us off the highway onto the wide shoulder, where we slowly drifted to a stop.

  “What’s wrong?” said Anna. Without AC, the desert heat quickly began to flood the cab of our pickup.

  “Out of gas,” I said with embarrassment.

  I’d always prided myself on being a masterful marathon driver, but I did have the tendency, from time to time, to run a tank dry and find myself stranded. The ramp where we’d gotten on the interstate was only a mile or two back, but it was in the middle of nowhere, and I was sure I hadn’t seen any gas stations. I looked at my phone—no service out here; I couldn’t call for roadside assistance. There was only one thing to do, the same thing I’d done the other half dozen times I’d found myself in this sort of predicament: hitch a ride. It couldn’t be that far to the next exit, I figured, where I could fill a gas can and catch a ride back. But with dusk moving in, and headlights popping on in the opposite lanes, I knew my window of opportunity was closing fast. It’s not so hard, most of the time, to catch a ride in daylight hours; after dark, it’s next to impossible. No sense dillydallying. “Look,” I said to Anna, “I am so sorry. I’m a total idiot. Just hang tight, and I’ll be right back.” I jumped down from the truck, faced the oncoming traffic, and stuck out my thumb.

  The very first vehicle to pass us was an old black van with dark tinted windows. Its brake lights flashed red, and I watched it swerve onto the shoulder, fishtail a bit on a patch of windblown gravel, and come to a stop about a hundred yards ahead. I took off, jogging after it, and watched two figures emerge from the passenger side and head toward me. We met in the middle, halfway between my truck and their van, a small, wiry man in his forties, nose and cheeks brushed red by the sun, wearing a black T-shirt and a desert-camo baseball cap that said It’s Miller Time! and his shy-looking son, shirtless, maybe fourteen years old, with dark, stringy hair and the first wisps of a mustache, only an inch or two shorter than his dad.

  “What’s the story?” the man shouted, over the howl of passing semis, a touch of beer on his breath.

  “Ran out of gas. Can I get a ride?”

  He gave me a quick once-over, taking note, it seemed, of the temporary tattoos clustered around my neck from my chin down, cholo-style, disappearing into the collar of my shirt. “It’s a ways to the next town,” he said. Then he pointed at my neck, with a degree of suspicion. “Who’s that?”

  “Which one?” I had no idea which tattoos had ended up where.

  “Funny-looking guy with the beard. That your dad or somethin’?”

  “Oh, that’s got to be Ai Weiwei. He’s this Chinese artist and political activist. Always under threat of being locked up by the state because of his views.”

  He gave me a look. “A rebel, huh? I like that.”

  I nodded, not sure if he meant Ai Weiwei or me. Cars went shrieking past, just a few feet away from us. It’s strange how safe it feels to be inside one, rocketing along at eighty-five or ninety miles an hour, and how dangerous it feels to be on the shoulder, changing a flat tire, or hoping a stranger will give you a lift, as traffic whips by.

  “Any weapons on ya?” the guy asked. “Pistol? Knife?”

  “Nope. Nothing.” I patted myself at the hips: See? I’m not packin’.

  He glanced at his son, rubbed his chin, smiled for the first time, and said, “Well, come on then, let’s hit it,” and hurried back toward the van, his son at his heels. I turned quickly, waved my hand, and flashed Anna a thumbs-up, though from that distance I didn’t know if she could see me, and then whirled after Miller Time and his boy. When we reached the van, the dad hopped in up front, riding shotgun, and the boy popped open the side doors and climbed in. The back of the van, I could see, had been stripped of its seats, and from the darkness, a pack of kids crowded across the floor gaped at me blankly, like a family of raccoons peering from inside a storm drain. Loud country music twanged over the radio. Behind the wheel, a robust middle-aged blond woman sang along. She craned her head around. “You coming or what?” she shouted.

  “Danny, give the man a hand and help him up,” said Miller Time.

  His son and another boy reached out their hands and hauled me in, and before they’d even closed the doors, I heard the wheels spinning in the gravel and catching hold. I lost my balance and pitched to the floor at the back of the van, and as we shot off westbound, Miller Time cackled with glee, slapped the dashboard, and hollered, “That’s right, boys, the Black Stallion rides again! Giddyap! Giddyap! C’mon, git!”

  *

  Gradually my eyes adjusted to the darkness. There were five boys in the back with me—Danny and a red-haired friend of his, lying with their legs out, propped on their elbows, passing a handheld video game back and forth and fiddling with their cell phones; two younger boys, eight or nine years old, sitting cross-legged, sipping red straws from Burger King soda cups, watching me with wide eyes; and one giant, oversized boy with buzz-cut hair who looked between all of them in age, eleven or twelve, but was by far the largest of the bunch, hunched closest to the front, facing me, gazing with fierce concentration at a small plastic toy held inches from his face.

  “What you got there?” I called out to him, over the country song’s rock-and-roll ruckus.

  He made no response, but one of the younger kids leaned toward me and hollered, “It’s a game. You got to get all the marbles in the right place to win. Can’t nobody do it, though!”

  I nodded and sat back. I was wedged between Danny and his friend and a stack of a dozen hard, black plastic cases, long and flat, the kind that might house electric guitars. “Your dad a musician?” I asked Danny, but he was playing his video game and didn’t seem to hear me, and the two younger kids stared at me without a response.

  I looked out the back windows. Darkness had fallen, and all I could see was the glare of headlights behind us, red taillights in the eastbound lanes. I wondered how Anna was faring, stuck in the hot cab of our pickup. It occurred to me that I should’ve pulled farther onto the shoulder—each passing truck, I was sure, was rocking the whole vehicle. I checked my phone to see if I had service yet, and saw that my battery had all but drained itself, searching for a signal.

  Up front, Miller Time turned his head and shouted, “All right, you boys ready for some more of this?” Danny winced and shook his head with an embarrassed smile, but the two youngest boys faced forward with looks of delight. I had no idea what to expect.

  Miller Time rolled down his window, and as the hot, singed desert air whipped inside the van, he took off his hat, leaned his head outside, and stood, so that his whole upper body was flapping in the breeze, silhouetted against the sky’s dark-red, post-sunset glow. We pulled up alongside the cab of an eighteen-wheeler in the right lane, and he shouted, “Hey there, look at my titties!” and lifted his shirt, showing off his lean, hairless chest. He pumped a fist, asking the trucker to tug on his horn, and when the trucker responded with two short, bellowing blasts, he gave a wild, victorious whoop and dropped back into his seat, laughing so hard his whole body shook. “That was a good one,” he called back to us. “Come on, let’s do another!”

  Some truckers honked their horn; others didn’t. But it was undeniably hilarious, the surprised, amused looks on the truckers’ faces, and the joy that Miller Time seemed to take from springing himself on them. I wished Anna was with me to see it. The woman piloting our van—Miller Time’s wife? girlfriend?—played gamely along, speeding to catch up to each semi and then falling in right alongside them until he flashed them his chest, before she pounded the gas and we zoomed away. “I wanna try,” said the youngest kid, steadying himself on his feet and working his way up
front.

  “You crazy?” shouted Miller Time with a laugh. “You’d fly right out the window!”

  Finally, he sat back, rolled his window up, popped his cap back on, and turned his attention to the radio dial. The country station was fading, and he switched it to a metal station and began singing along to a metal tune he didn’t seem to actually know, shouting nonsense lyrics and thrashing his head. Danny and his friend exchanged bemused, worried glances. When the song ended, he found a hip-hop station and started rapping along, making up the words, and waving his hands in the air. This, apparently, was what it took to finally win over Danny and his friend. They broke out in big, goofy smiles and laughed out loud. All the while, the oversized kid with the buzz cut never took his eyes off his marble puzzle, sullen as a swan in winter.

  I appreciated the guy’s good-natured clowning, but it felt like we were passing a number of exits without getting off the highway. Granted, they’d all looked completely barren, not a gas station in sight, but every mile we drove west was another mile I’d have to hitch back, and I was getting worried about leaving Anna alone for so long in the middle of nowhere. I felt eager to resume the conversation with her about our joint future, which felt, each moment, to be slipping further away.

  “Where you guys headed?” I called out to Danny, over the thumping beat.

  “Home,” he said.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Downey.”

  This, I knew, was a blue-collar suburb of L.A., though I couldn’t have pointed it out on a map. “Where you coming from?”

  “Oh, just out in the desert,” he said.

  “Hiking?”

  “Nah. Shootin’.”

  “Yeah? What do you hunt out here?”

  “Nah! Shootin’!”

  He gestured toward the black cases I was leaning against. “Wanna see?” Without waiting for my response, he crawled around me and popped the lid on one. Inside was an enormous black machine gun, maybe the biggest gun I’d ever seen, like something out of Die Hard. “Pretty sweet, right?”

  “Yeah. Wow.” I felt stupid for having imagined that they were all musical instruments.

  “It’s my dad’s. He was in the Marines,” he said, by way of explanation. “Now he’s a fireman.” He shifted the cases around, lifting each lid to reveal an astounding, frightening array of automatic weapons, one after another. Growing up in Michigan, I’d seen my share of hunting rifles and shotguns, but never this kind of Desert Storm arsenal. “Hey,” he said, “let me show you mine.” All of a sudden the music went silent and his dad’s voice boomed from the front.

  “Danny, what the hell are you doing? Don’t mess with those while we’re driving, you know better than that!” Chastised, Danny hustled back to his seat on the floor next to his friend. “You see that?” Miller Time said to his girl, incredulous, speaking loud enough for all of us to hear. She shrugged, and after a moment, the music came back on.

  Danny’s friend, the red-haired kid, eyed me and said, “Hey, were you in prison?”

  “Me?” I said. “No. Maybe a night or two in jail.” If my neck tattoos made me seem like that much of a badass, I thought, I’d have to get the actual ink done. “What made you think that?” I asked.

  “Danny told me,” he said. He held up his phone, and grinned. “We’ve been texting.”

  “You guys have service?” I pulled out my phone but it was still out of range.

  “Yeah, I thought that’s what you told my dad,” explained Danny. “When we picked you up. You said you were locked up. Or just got out or something.”

  I understood the confusion. “Oh, no, I was talking about Ai Weiwei. This guy.” I tapped my neck, and explained how the Chinese authorities had often harassed him for his political muckraking.

  “That your friend?” asked the red-haired kid.

  “Well, I don’t know him personally. But I admire his work, I suppose.”

  “My dad’s in prison,” the kid said. “But Danny’s dad takes me shootin’.”

  “Hey, hang on a minute,” I said. After half an hour on the road, we’d finally reached civilization, signs for fast-food joints and a truck stop cropping up along the shoulder, and it looked like at last my phone had reception. I tried dialing Anna, doubting she’d even have service, but her phone started to ring, rather than going straight to voice mail, and I felt hopeful that I might get through. Then the ringing stopped and the line went quiet.

  “Anna!” I said. “Are you there? Can you hear me? You doing all right?” But as I waited for a response, my phone made a bloop and cut out, powering down on its own, out of juice. “Damn,” I said. I could’ve asked Danny or his friend to use their phone, if I’d known Anna’s number by heart.

  “Your wife’s stuck back there, huh?” said Danny.

  “Yeah,” I said, and experimented with the words: “My wife.” It gave me a little charge, like touching a nine-volt battery to the tongue.

  Some old, melancholy country song filled the van, and we coasted into the right-hand lane, approaching an exit. I realized that there was only one thing to do, and that was to say fuck it, take a chance, roll the dice, and move with Anna to London. We could even get separate places at first, so that we could date for a while like normal people, before moving in with each other. It would be hard to leave all my friends and family in Michigan behind, but after years and years of fighting to find the perfect girl, why give up on something just because it required sacrifice? If things didn’t work out, I could always come home again, and if they did work out, well, maybe one day I’d be able to convince Anna that we should move back to the U.S. It was thrilling beyond measure and at the same time a little bit heartbreaking to imagine myself, a few weeks later, getting dropped off by my dad at the airport in Detroit, hugging him goodbye, and telling him, “All right then, I’ll see you when I see you.”

  Our van curved off at the Indio exit, slow-rolled a stop sign, and swung into the lot of a Roadside 76 station. I hopped out, offering my profuse thanks.

  “It’s nothing,” said Miller Time. “We never leave a man behind in the desert. Hey, you want anything from Jack in the Box?”

  “No thanks, I’m good. But seriously, you guys, thanks again.”

  I closed the side doors behind me, and Miller Time, his woman, all five boys, and their Nakatomi Plaza–worthy stash of weapons rolled away in the van. Over the roar of the exhaust and the music’s receding din, I could hear Miller Time whooping it up, “Giddyap! Giddyap! C’mon, git!” And then they were gone, as quickly as they’d appeared.

  *

  “We don’t have gas cans here,” the ancient counter clerk told me, inside the Roadside 76 station, a half minute later. “You can try the Texaco, it’s a couple miles down the road.”

  Fuck. That meant a lengthy walk, or else begging one ride to the next gas station, then another back the other direction, toward the spot where Anna was staked out waiting for me, twenty-five or thirty miles east. But an old woman who’d overheard the conversation said she thought she had a spare gas can in her trunk, and returned a minute later with an antique-looking one, healthy sized, painted green and made out of metal, sporting a John Deere logo. “You sure?” I asked her. I’d seen these go for fifty bucks at estate sales.

  “Tell you what,” she said. “When you’re done with it, just drop it back here. Henry’ll get it to me. Right, Henry?”

  The old clerk nodded. “Okay, Darlene.” I thanked her and she went on her way.

  Outside I pumped three gallons in, and then started explaining my situation to anyone who pulled in for a fill-up, asking if they were headed east. But my luck had run dry: each of them edged cautiously away from me, as though I was one of those hustlers with complicated appeals for help you’ll come across in shady neighborhoods outside of baseball stadiums or floating around Greyhound stations late at night. They all seemed to be locals, with destinations close by, or at least claimed that was the case after taking stock of all the tattoos on my neck and my a
rms. The best bet, I guessed, was to cross the highway and work the entrance ramp for I-10 with my thumb out. I knew it could be a long wait. Few people stopped for hitchhikers at night; fewer still would want my old gas can spewing fumes inside their car. As I cast about for other motorists to accost, I saw, to my great astonishment and relief, that the Black Stallion had returned: the same black van that had stopped for me before was clattering back into the lot, its horn honking, Shave-and-a-haircut, two bits. Miller Time had his window rolled down, and he slapped the side of his door as they pulled up next to me. “Come on, Tumbleweed!” he called. “Hop in!”

  He laughed, as his woman steered us over a bridge and down the eastbound entrance ramp for the interstate. “What’d ya think?” he said. “We was gonna leave you for the coyotes?” He hooted and hawed, his enjoyment of the joke nearly equal to my surprise and gratitude at the sheer depth of their generosity. I tried to tell him how much I appreciated them coming back for me and he cut me off. “Nah, we just had to get some food for the little guys and some drinks for me. Here, ya want one?” He passed me a tallboy of Budweiser, which somehow seemed funny to me, with his Miller Time ball cap and all. “I told you,” he went on. “We don’t leave no one behind. Especially out here in the desert.”

  “Well, can I at least offer you a few bucks for gas?”

  He waved his hand, slightly offended. “Just have a drink with me.”

  I propped the gas can in the door well, far from the weapons cases and ammunition, settled into my spot way in the back, and we wound our way east along I-10 the way we’d come. The wild atmosphere of our westbound ride had been replaced with the quiet, focused intensity of mealtime. No one said a word; everyone was devouring their burgers and chicken sandwiches from Jack in the Box. Even the oversized kid with the buzz cut had given up on his marble game for the time being and double-fisted a burger and a chocolate shake. The radio was pumped up high, some classic rock and oldies station. I looked out the window at distant lights across the desert plains, nursing my Budweiser as the miles slid by.