“Well, me,” I told him, “I’m going down to Aransas Pass. I’m going to work on the shrimp boats there.”
“Yeah?” He looked at me, considering. “Now that don’ soun’ like a bad idea. I may just go along with you and do some of that myself.”
“Well, yeah,” I said, “that’s an idea …” though picturing myself entering the unknown Gulf coast town with this otherwise affable mammoth was not the most comfortable image I could muster.
Thirty miles on, though, his car began to stall, giving out, finally, with a carburetive groan. We rolled to a stop. I left him—it was raining again—walking around the hulk, kicking at one tire after the other. “Wha’ you think wrong wi’ it?”
“Jesus,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know anything about cars.”
“I don’t know nothin’ ’bout ’em either.”
Twenty yards up the highway I got another ride.
Still a later one was in an old car with a pudgy kid in black-framed glasses and a threadbare T-shirt who liked comics and astronomy and vampire movies and who explained that tonight was the dark of the moon and that just before midnight we’d be passing under it. Initially I’d decided not to tell him anything about my connection with science fiction. But after fifteen minutes, I finally mentioned that I’d written some SF novels, that Ace had published them, what my name was—then sat back, basking in his astonished enthusiasm, which poured out in his excited southwestern accent. He was sure he’d seen one of my books, sure he’d even read it. (From his fragmentary description, though, I was sure he hadn’t.) I felt the strange combination of discomfort and pleasure such attention brings. And ten minutes on he had to let me off, anyway.
Later that night, in a raging downpour, with lightning flicking luminous whips into the fields around me, I slogged beside the highway along the shoulder, mud to the knees. Traffic had stalled in some monster jam. And, yes, it’s impossible to hitchhike in a traffic jam at night in the rain. I was holding the guitar case in both my arms in front of me. The reason I wasn’t on the side of the pavement was because there was only about eight inches of asphalt between the cars and where the road dropped off into the slough through which I waded.
The thing was maybe fifteen feet ahead, before—even with the headlights—I realized what it was:
On a concrete pedestal, like Childe Roland’s dark tower reconstructed of glass in this lightning and rain-lashed field, a phone booth rose by the road. I had to climb up into it. I couldn’t get the guitar case all the way in and close the door at the same time—but it was enough to make the automatic light come on inside. Probably because of the rain, nobody in the traffic jam three feet to my left had gotten out to use it. I fingered a dime from my sopping jeans, thumbed it into the slot, and called the operator, while the rain and the neon light that haloed the square aluminum ceiling and the stalled headlights on the highway made a kind of beaded curtain on four sides. “I want to make a collect call …”
After a very long time, I heard someone on the other end: “A collect call, for Marilyn from Chip … will you accept the charges?”
“Yes,” I heard her say.
“Hi, there,” I said. “How’re you doing?”
“How are you?” she demanded. “Where are you?”
“In Texas, I think. At least that’s what my last ride said. But I’m not all that sure. It’s pouring rain, and I’m waiting for the dark of the moon—in a traffic jam, somewhere right out in the middle of the countryside. It’s not the best time to hitch a ride—so I thought I’d call.”
“You’re hitchhiking at night?” she asked, surprised.
“I don’t know which is better,” I said. “That or the day. In the sunlight, all you see is one squashed-up raccoon after one squashed-up skunk—all down the road. Hey, you’ll never guess who I ran into, earlier today.”
“Bob,” she said. “I got off the phone with him about twenty minutes ago. He told me you two just met up like that. He said you were all right.”
“More or less. I guess. Where was he?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “In a motel somewhere.”
The rain blew through the partly open door to splatter against my face. “A motel,” I said. “Wouldn’t you know. What’s going on with Joanne?”
“Well,” Marilyn explained, “she’s still working the late shift as a waitress up in that all-night Bickford’s on Twenty-third Street. I’m at the magazine during the day. So we don’t really see very much of each other.” I got the impression she was just as happy that way. “What are you doing?” she asked me.
“Dripping mud and water all over this phone booth. I’ve been trying to run this kind of scam—if you call it that. A lot of people who give you rides pick you up because they think you’re a local, and know the area—so that you can give them directions somewhere. I’ve taken to memorizing about four square inches of the road map each time I leave a ride. Then, when someone stops and says they’ll give me a lift if I can tell them how to get to Grover’s Corners, I just say, ‘Well, you can go three miles up and turn off to the left, go till you get to New Goshen, then make a right on 26 for six miles or so, then keep to your left till you hit it—or you can go about thirteen miles down the road and double back right onto 26; that way you’ll probably get there faster because you avoid the bad roads with all the ruts’—that last part I just kind of make up. It’s gotten me three thirteen-, fourteen-mile rides out of my last five. And they get there, eventually—at least I hope they do. Look—” I wiped water away off my mouth—“will you just talk to me about any old thing for about ten or fifteen minutes?”
“Okay …” Marilyn said, with the hesitancy that meant all chat had fled her.
“Tell me about literature or something. Right now I’m about as wet and muddy and miserable as—up until an hour ago—I thought it was possible to be.”
“Sure,” Marilyn said. “All right …”
So we talked.
Maybe fifteen minutes later I said, “When you get off, would you drink a nice hot cup of coffee up there and think of me real hard while you do it …?”
She laughed. “All right.”
“Okay. ’Bye.” I hung up, took a breath, and stepped back into the rain—and went down to my shins in fucking mud. I started slogging again.
Fifteen minutes later, some guy with a beard and a beer in his fist cranked down his window and shouted out: “Hey, you from around here?”
I squinted through falling water. “I live around here,” I said. “Why?”
“This goddamn traffic jam—we gotta get to Shreveport, man. Somebody told us there was a little road we had to take …?”
Shreveport, I thought, where I had been at only three-thirty the previous morning. It was maybe three hundred miles away.
In the last filling station john, an hour ago, for twenty minutes I’d pored over the netted inches of my map. Between fifty yards and a hundred-fifty yards ahead I knew was a turnoff, to the left, onto a two-mile connecting road that fed into a major highway that swooped grandly back up north into Louisiana—right into Shreveport. I hoisted up my guitar, and thought, Dear God, forgive me.
Then I called back: “Hey, no, man—you can’t get there that way. That road’s been out for six months. And in this weather? You’d never get across it. You’ve got to go down maybe forty, forty-five miles. That’s where the highway up to Shreveport comes down and crosses this one. It’s right where I’m going. You wanna give me a lift, and I’ll take you right there.”
“Okay, man,” the guy called. “Get on in the back.”
I climbed up on the road and got in the back door. The car stank. Muddy and slopping, I slid over on the seat.
“Come on,” the guy said. “Close the fuckin’ door, man. You wanna beer?”
There were three guys in the car and two cardboard cases filled with empties and another case about half finished. All three guys were raunchy, dirty, loud drunks. On the dashboard, the beige glow from the ca
r’s clock—miraculously still working and, I guess, on time—said it was just before midnight.
I thought back to The Jewels of Aptor and Graves’s White Goddess and wondered, idly, what inverse lunar goddess I’d fallen under the protection of.
Whoever she was, I thanked her for the jam: neither the guy behind the wheel nor either of the other two were in any state to drive. We got through the next ten miles at no more than five an hour. (A couple of times we got bumped from behind; a couple of times we bumped the guy ahead. Fortunately neither decided to get out and make a stink.) The evening’s major occupation for all three was pissing in beer cans held between their thighs (“Man, don’t jerk the fuckin’ car like that. You got me pissing all over me and the fuckin’ floor!”) and heaving them out the window.
Forty-five miles down the road the highway going up to Shreveport would, indeed, after minor fibrillations, cross this one. They would be on their way with only seventy or eighty extra miles to drive. And I would be fifty miles closer to Aransas Pass.
But when, forty-five miles on, I climbed out of the car and set them on the road to Shreveport, the rain had stopped. I lugged my guitar out over the slicked highway.
Did I get to spend a few of those post-midnight hours—with some guy who wanted to ball—in a motel? Or did I, bouncing and dozing beside a dogbox with oncoming head- and highway lights playing over the truck windshield, only dream about the one Bob had managed to scare up from a passing driver? Whatever memories the writing of this account have fixed and clarified for me, that isn’t one of them.
But the next afternoon, I got let off in Freeport, Texas. It was sunny and breezy and warm. As the car pulled away, I punched at the sky, yawned, then lifted up my case to walk a little.
There was a tale connected with this Texas Gulf town that Bob had told Marilyn and me several times. Two years ago it had been the scene of a drunken binge involving half a dozen boat workers, in which Bob had smashed windows and broken into somebody’s office. A bunch of them had been arrested; and Bob, in the course of being transferred from one jail to another, had managed to get away and out on the road to hitch farther on down the Gulf. But Freeport, he’d assured us many times, was the one place in the United States he knew, for sure, his name was down on the books and he was wanted by the law—and thus the one place in the country he wanted to stay out of at all costs.
I was remembering this as I looked down between the houses, where I could see flashing water and a few masts and pilings. Maybe, I thought, I should go down and get a look at the tides on which, a few hundred miles farther south, I’d be working. But that, I suppose, is why I was so surprised when, up the dockside street, I saw Bob ambling on the far sidewalk.
He saw me, grinned, and called out, “Well, howdy, stranger!”
I just laughed. “Fancy meetin’ you here,” I said. I shook my head. “This is certainly the last place I expected to see you!” As I said it, though, there seemed a certain inevitability to it. “How come you’re here?”
He shrugged. “This is where the ride let me off. Ain’t seen the place in a while. It’s kind of interesting to look at it all again.”
“How long you been here?”
“’Bout three, four hours.”
I figured there was no point in saying anything.
We got some lunch at the small-town-Texas drugstore. Bob flirted with some high school girls in the booth behind us and managed to get job offers from one of the girls’ passing brothers and from another’s cousin who was also in the store. Listening to Bob’s banter—in which the last months were as absent as they had been from my talk with the family off to see their son in the army—I realized that Bob was far more comfortable negotiating this landscape than the complexities of New York—which meant he was more comfortable here than I could ever be. I’d known for some time that if you put me down on the streets of any large city, I would be able to survive. But I hadn’t realized there was a whole technique, equal in its intricacy and wholly unknown to me, by which somebody like Bob, dropped in a town like this, could survive equally well.
Afterwards we went back to the waterfront and sat on a couple of dock pilings, watching the boats. “So you got yourself into a motel last night. How’d you work that?”
“Oh, man—” Bob began. “When you left me yesterday on the road, I got picked up by this guy with some brand-new foreign sports car not two minutes after you rode off in that jalopy. Most guys at least say hello, how you doin’, where you goin’—before they start feelin’ you up? But this guy was right on me, soon as I got in! He told me he’d buy me a good dinner, a motel room where we could sleep—that’s where I called Marilyn from. He wouldn’t even let me call collect.”
“Sounds good. What else happened?”
“I told him about you.”
“Me?”
“And your big black dick.”
“Bob,” I said, “why don’t we call it medium-sized and kind of coffee-colored?”
“You’re coffee-colored,” Bob said. A breeze shattered the water at our feet and lifted his hair. “But your dick’s darker than the rest of you.” He shrugged. “I been too close to it, man. You can’t tell me no different.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, you know, most guys—you tell ’em you got a partner, and they think you’re settin’ ’em up for something. But not this guy. He was all excited as he could be. He said havin’ two guys at once was what he was really into—you’d just taken off not five minutes ago, so we drove all up and down that highway, three, four times, lookin’ for you. For at least two hours.”
I sighed. “The first couple of rides I got were both thirty-, forty-mile jobs.”
“Yeah,” Bob said. “But if you’d just gotten a five or six miler—” which I knew now was four out of five of the rides you caught—“you’d a’ had one good steak dinner, the nicest shower, a good night’s sleep, and a blow job—” he shook his head—“that wouldn’t quit!” He grinned at me.
“He sucked like he wanted you to come back, huh?”
That made Bob howl. “What were you, hidin’ in the back seat of that yellow Dodge I got me a ride in two days ago?”
I looked up. “You think it’s going to rain again?”
“Naw …” He squinted into the sky. “That looks like it’s over with. For a while, at least. Come on.” Foamy lace lazied below our shoes. “Let’s go call Marilyn.”
We did.
Collect.
The clouds were white and high in a lazuli afternoon. Crowded into the phone booth at the head of the dock, now Bob, now I, now Bob again poured out cascades of details from the past days, laughing long-distance while Marilyn told us what the woman who was her boss at the magazine had said the previous morning and asked us for the fifth time how we kept managing to run into each other, as surprised by the phenomenon as I. For those ten minutes on the phone, it was as if, with the sun burning the back of my neck and the water sloshing down below the dock planks and Bob’s usual smell, showers notwithstanding, become something astonishingly rank with three days on the road (but I guess it was his clothes; my own were doubtless worse), all of us felt as if—despite all barriers—we were, in all ways, together again.
When I hung up, Bob backed from the booth. I stepped out, hefting up my guitar case.
“Well,” he said. “I guess we got to get back on the road.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess we do.”
“Come on. I’ll walk you up to the highway.”
When we got there, Bob went back up on the bank and sat. “Go on,” he told me. “Oil up that thumb and start it purrin’.” I didn’t even wonder why he was having me go first. I strolled a few yards down the road and put out my fist.
A car would pass. Bob would call some obscene comment about how I wasn’t working my finger hard enough. And I’d glance back at him, shaking my head.
In twenty minutes I got a ride.
56. Sometime after that, in New York, at the
round oak table in the kitchen, while the phone sat on the windowsill, Marilyn wrote:
Across the mud flats and wide roads, over rivers and borders,
by bus, truck, trailer, car and foot,
my two loves have gone, the dark and the fair.
Truck drivers, salesmen, schoolgirls on vacation
taste the salt fruit of their bodies.
They breathe strange air; strange hands press their shoulders.
Strange voices speak to them …
Along the highway despair and dead animals
steam on the macadam … Miles apart, in a mud-wide state
from red hill to scrub brush …
They sing out loud and the long road is empty.
Together, briefly, they sit on splintered pilings.
Thick, spit-yellow foam slaps at the Diesel hulls.
Storms are in the Gulf; the catch is north.
North on an old coast, landlocked on my island
dry in soot-thick summer, I spin their warmth.
I loop their names in words. One road is closed
to women and conspirators. I plot. I sing.
Mother of exiles, save them from wind and rage.
Mother of journeys, let the sea to be kind to them.23
56.1 Later that evening, I stood before a small white building with tall grass on either side. Stenciled in green letters on the wall by the screen door were the words COLORED ENTRANCE, with an arrow pointing off to a side door. It was the first segregated eating establishment I’d ever found myself about to enter.
The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village Page 51