by Lars Eighner
“That’s what everybody says,” Mike said. He was not flattered. No one is when the obvious is pronounced. Mike said he would get us a ride in no time.
I doubted anyone would pick up two men and a dog. Mike alone could get a ride easily, and so I advised him. He would hear nothing of it.
Sunday morning passed without a nibble. We got no ride, but were not passed by many prospects. We saw many convoys of concrete I-beams, which reminded me of the unfinished interstate in Phoenix, a bit of natural foreshadowing. We saw also BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) cars on their way to San Francisco. They already bore their logos. I believe even Mike was discouraged by ten o’clock. He asked me if I had any money. Naturally I lied and said I was broke. He went to the store for cigarettes, saying I should take any ride I might get while he was gone. I did continue to try to get a ride until I saw him returning. I was not sure he would be back. He had bought a pack of cigarettes for each of us. By noon we were hungry and the water bottle wanted recharging. I left the gear with Mike and went to the store. That was taking a chance, but Mike had won a measure of my confidence.
At the store I bought some bologna and bread and took on water from the rest-room tap. So far as I could tell, Mike never moved off the bags while I was gone. When I offered him a sandwich, Mike said he thought I had said I was broke.
“I lied,” I said. I looked him in the eye and could see this stratagem and my frankness about it was appreciated. No one after all needs a fool for a partner.
During lunch we discussed the situation further. I again doubted the wisdom of trying to travel together. But Mike insisted that things would work out. Sure enough, shortly after lunch Mike stopped a pickup. But the pickup was far down the road before it stopped. Lizbeth and I with the gear were slow to catch up. I expected the driver to take off with Mike. The driver told me later he saw only Mike and would not have stopped if he had seen me and the dog. But Mike had insisted on waiting for us.
The truck bore a very ponderous machine. Lizbeth rode with it and I feared for her should the load shift.
We were very crowded in the cab of the pickup, mostly for the ice chest. Fortunately the driver drank little. He was a tall lean man, perhaps not yet thirty. He was dressed as a drugstore cowboy. And he did not remove his black hat. The machine in the back, so he said, was an electric motor. It was a prototype of a motor with a winding that improved efficiency beyond any achieved before. This sounded suspiciously like perpetual motion. I questioned the driver. The prototype, far from being perpetual motion, only improved efficiency by a few points. Even so slight an improvement, however, was worth millions for the energy it would save.
The driver said the prototype worked at the inventor’s laboratory in Montana, but evidently the machine was damaged in transit and had not performed properly at a demonstration in Florida. Unfortunately, the inventor, for whom our driver worked, was an eccentric who never left his laboratory. The machine had to be returned to him for repair; he would not come to it. Moreover, the inventor’s fortune was made. He saw his machine as a public benevolence in a world starved for energy. He expected the world to come to him for it and saw no reason to disturb himself to prove the worth of his gift. Our driver’s fortune, however, was not made. His employer paid him well, but that was not like being rich. Rich was what our driver hoped to be, for he was to have a large share of the proceeds if he marketed the invention.
In any event we were welcome to ride so long as we wished, to Montana if we chose.
I knew I wanted out in Phoenix. Mike, however, was unsure. If he were to go to San Diego, he should get out in Tucson; if to L.A., then Phoenix. He had said one place was as good as another, yet he fancied the idea of Montana.
At the first stop our driver removed his hat very briefly to wipe the sweat off his head—a thing he could do because he was prematurely bald. The hat was vanity. Mike and I tried to kid him out of wearing it on the road—for he would surely be more comfortable without it, and now that we knew his secret there was no point in his wearing it. The driver kept his hat on.
When Mike went to the rest room the driver asked me about him. Mike did not have a wallet, an ID, a belt, or a coat. That he might be an escaped prisoner had occurred to me too. I said we met only the night before.
We passed into Arizona about dawn. I was happy when we put Tucson behind us. Mike said he would continue with the driver as far as Flagstaff, but I could see he had decided to go to Montana. I was again invited to come to Montana too, and had I no better plan I might have accepted.
I was let out in Phoenix.
The interstate had been completed through town and the corner where we had stood the year before was no longer on the main route. Although it was still early, I recognized that I needed sleep. I found a gutted building; evidently it had been a bar, but its patio seemed an agreeable place and we bedded down there.
We walked most of the following morning through the streets of Phoenix as I attempted to find a suitable ramp onto the interstate. When I found one, I discovered large, verbose, hand-painted signs affixed to the lampposts, all on the theme WILL WORK FOR FOOD. I thought this inauspicious.
We were there until the end of the workday. A businessman gave us a ride out of town—to Avondale or Goodyear. If we had stopped here the year before, the ramp was much changed and the post with hitchhikers’ graffiti was removed. We slept by the ramp. The mesquite thorns were everywhere and I did not entirely avoid stepping on them. About nine the following morning we were picked up by a family of the area’s aboriginal people. They were husband and wife and two grown daughters in a fully loaded sky-blue pickup. Lizbeth and I could barely fit in a corner of the bed. They were going no farther than Burnt Well, which I recognized as the rest stop we were at the year before.
At Burnt Well, I secured Lizbeth and went into the men’s room to shave and wash. When I came out, the women I had ridden with had laid blankets in the main pavilion and were setting out silver necklaces for sale. I overheard that the cheaper pieces were about seventy-five dollars. They even had a credit card stamping machine.
The man was stationed with the ice chests and picnic baskets at a shaded table, some distance from the main pavilion, and there he drank beer so long as I observed him. In the early afternoon a man approached us afoot. He spoke cockney once-removed; perhaps he was Australian. He said he was traveling west and after he had finished his lunch he would pick me up if I were still there. He seemed fond of Lizbeth.
When he stopped to pick us up, he was driving a recreational vehicle, evidently custom-made. It was boxlike, utterly without streamlining. The driver’s seat was a hard, padded plywood bench, as was the passenger’s seat, although the latter was sideways. The vehicle had a kitchen and a bedroom. Nothing was well-suited for movement. Curtains fluttered, all the furniture had sharp edges, and in a tight curve, clothes on their hangers flew out of the closet.
My driver was not talkative, but I learned he would stop at a flea market in Quartzite. He told me Quartzite had begun as a recreational-vehicle park. A few old people had parked there year after year until they formed the core of a community. News of Quartzite had spread on the RV grapevine and more people parked there. Now Quartzite had a population of a million in season. The arrival of a McDonald’s seemed to old-timers a discouraging sign of institutionalization. And so it is when a few people have a good thing going and have not the sense to keep quiet about it.
We were soon at Quartzite, near the California boarder. Indeed I saw acres of RV park and the dread Golden Arches.
The driver let us off at a crossover and said if we were at the on ramp when he had done his business in Quartzite he would take us to Blythe. The on ramp at Quartzite was very desolate. Our best chance was the driver keeping his word.
I sat down short of the NO PEDESTRIANS sign and looked for the sunscreen in my bags. Presently a highway patrol car stopped. That was the first sign of law enforcement I saw in my travels in Arizona. I tied Lizbeth to the signpost and
tried to remember to keep my hands visible. My first impulse in such situations is to put them in my pockets or behind my back.
The officer was apologetic. “You’re on this side of the sign and I have no problem with that,” he said. He wanted only to ID me, a reasonable request, as the denizens of Quartzite seemed frail. The officer gave me a warning ticket, which said I had been in the roadway, but he admitted the infraction was a figment to make a record of the transaction. I observed the traffic in and out of Quartzite for a couple of hours. I do not know if the history of Quartzite as the driver told it is so, but all I saw confirmed it. Besides the officer, I saw only white people over sixty.
As I watched them pass in their RVs I realized they were Kerouac’s contemporaries. Here was the beat generation, ending their days on the road. I was stunned by the irony and shuddered in spite of the heat.
Fortunately the previous driver did return and, except to stop to conceal his fruit before we reached the California inspection station, our trip to Blythe was uneventful.
* * *
THE LAST OF the light revealed that Blythe was green. The air in Blythe was clammy. The waters of the Colorado are sprinkled liberally into the air around Blythe, creating a cloying coolness like that produced by evaporative coolers. The driver, oblivious to the risk of being rear-ended, let us off on the exit ramp. I had seen signs that said Blythe had three exits. The driver had asked which exit I wanted and I said I wanted out at the last. So far as I knew the driver had complied with this request.
The evidence was that some hitchhikers had been at this ramp for many days. There were many clumps of rusting cans; the labels I could read bore the generic markings of surplus commodities. The third day we were at the ramp a woman of advanced middle age, who had passed us many times, stopped and gave me a large sack. A handout is not a bridal shower and I usually did not examine what I was given in the donor’s presence, for I meant to create the impression that I was grateful for whatever I got.
By then I was hungry, for I had only pocket change left. When the woman was gone I looked into the sack. It contained three boxes of dog treats, a small bag of dry dog food, and two cans of dog food. Lizbeth, of course, had not missed a meal on this trip, and I still had ten pounds of her food in my bag.
It is too easy to despair of a spot after a short time and to waste time and energy seeking another spot that proves no better. But the fourth night we were in Blythe I was convinced we were at the eastern ramp in Blythe and that we would have to walk through town to reach the last ramp.
We walked what seemed a very long way that night. Blythe appeared to be the nearest town to a military base. We passed many clubs and restaurants. At one of these, some ladies who were leaving stopped to give us a bag of chicken. At last I found highway markers; the strip we walked along was the interstate’s business route. After midnight we reached the third Blythe exit. Like many Western towns, Blythe has not considered the needs of pedestrians very well and several times Lizbeth and I were in the street, a situation made worse by the drunken young people cruising about in their Jeeps.
The entrance ramp did not seem promising when we reached it. It was short and rose steeply. Drivers hit the accelerator when they turned onto the ramp and floored it until they were far into the desert.
All that, I thought, would wait until morning.
Along the ramp was about five yards of round rocks bordered by oleanders. I thought we would hide in the oleanders to camp. But in the oleanders the ground fell off steeply and I sought a level spot in vain. I spent a few hours dozing and sliding down the rocks, but Lizbeth found a ledge her size over my head and had a restful nap.
I am not sure I slept at all. In any event I was up before dawn. When there was light enough that we could be seen, I stuck my thumb out. We got a ride almost immediately in a rusted van. It had captain’s chairs and cutout windows, but the interior was thoroughly trashed. There were many other passengers but only one who knew any English. The ride lasted until we reached a rest stop in the middle of the desert. Then the one who spoke English explained I would have to pay money. I gathered these were new arrivals or otherwise they would have known not every white man has money. I had only three or four quarters, which I meant to use to make phone calls once I arrived in L.A.
At least there was water at the rest stop—so I consoled myself as I led Lizbeth to the highway. Water, and certainly no cop to object to my hitchhiking on the highway. In fact, the spot seemed so desolate that people would think twice before passing us by.
The sand was so fine that it blew along the ground, infiltrating my bags and my shoes. Cacti were everywhere. It is a wonder anything survives in such a place, but all that does has stickers or stingers.
We had another ride soon.
Two men occupied the front seat and three of us and the dog were squeezed into the back. I learned that all of us in the back were hitchhikers. One of the other hitchhikers was a very old man and the other was very drunk. I never did know if the front-seat passenger had been a hitchhiker too, but he and the driver were now partners and they planned to take Hollywood by storm.
When we ran low on gas, the driver pulled into a little desert town and conned a church out of a tank of gas. His story was, I think, that his mother was ill and he was rushing to her side. Who the rest of us were supposed to be I am not sure. Of course the deacon knew it was all lies, but I imagine a tank of gas seemed a small price to pay to have the lot of us peacefully on our way.
I do not remember where the old man got out. Near La Puente, the drunk came to life and demanded to be let out. His English was poor, but I gathered he meant to get out several hundred miles earlier—or he had not meant to travel at all. Apparently he had no idea where he was and did not remember getting into the car. He was let out at the first exit after he awoke. He was furious. But there was nothing to be done for it and we still could not discover where it was he wanted to be.
When we reached L.A., the driver assured me he would drop me off in the heart of Hollywood. But first we were going to whiz by Long Beach. I do not know why I did not insist on being let out, but I was very tired and the prospect of not having far to walk was very tempting.
Once we were in Long Beach I began to understand the driver and the passenger had no plan. We went first to a modest neighborhood where the driver went into a house, ostensibly to solicit lodging from some acquaintance. I thought his true object was to conclude a drug deal. Whatever his mission, he returned disappointed. Then we went to the Queen Mary.
I know not the point of this side trip. But I was to stay with the car in a restaurant parking lot, somehow to prevent its being towed if that seemed likely, while the two of them went to view the Queen Mary and the Spruce Goose. I had mentioned wanting to throw Lizbeth in the Pacific Ocean as I had promised her the previous year when we were stranded in the desert and they suggested I do that. But the Pacific here was a little brackish inlet and not the blue surf I had seen in Santa Monica. When they returned they still had not developed a plan. Between them they mentioned almost every place in California I had ever heard of as a possible destination and none was accepted or finally rejected. I was relieved that the car did seem to be returning to Los Angeles.
They were no nearer a decision when the driver pulled off the freeway and told me to get out. He seemed to be perfectly arbitrary in this. We had been much closer to Hollywood many times. I was let out east of downtown.
The sun was low and red in the haze. Lacking landmarks, I used it to judge west. Lizbeth and I set out on the streets of L.A. This was by far the most difficult part of our journey.
We had been let out in a Latin neighborhood—so I call it for I did not discover whether these were Chicanos or more recent arrivals. We walked west, and before the sky was dead black—for there are no stars in the sky over Los Angeles, or at most Sirius and Venus—we had walked through a warehouse area, a bit of some Chinatown if not the Chinatown, downtown L.A., and a neighborhood of nice older ho
mes, duplexes, and apartments in some hills.
I supposed from the hills that I had overcompensated for the season and vectored us to the north of our destination. I began looking for ways of descending the hills. I found many cliffs at the ends of culs-de-sac and at last I found a narrow, steep stair. The stair ended at Sunset Boulevard in Silverlake. This I thought was a neat piece of dead reckoning for we had not been much, if any, out of our way. But I could hardly be smug; we had so much farther to go. Fortunately the portable toilets for the L.A. marathon were still on the streets. The streets seemed unusually quiet. We walked and rested, walked and rested. I would think we had walked miles only to discover the street numbers had advanced by only a few hundred.
As we crossed the Hollywood Freeway on Santa Monica Boulevard, I realized the address I had been given was within a few blocks.
I had been here before.
When I found the address it was a little door between storefronts. I rang the bell and Carl came down to let me in.
All the rest is in a fog of fatigue. Carl fed me and let me shower. He led me through what seemed at the time a maze to a small room where he said I might sleep. He offered me a futon, for the room was quite bare. But I said that could wait until morning.
The window looked onto Santa Monica Boulevard. The service station where I had waited for Roy to rescue us, as we were leaving town the year before, was right across the street.
Pondering this irony, with Lizbeth at my feet, I fell asleep.
* * *
WE WERE THEN off the streets for about four months. I called the voter registrar the first thing Monday morning. One of the things that bothers me most about being homeless is being disfranchised. Even Third World countries have somehow mastered the technology required to permit all adults to vote. Tinhorn oligarchies do not fear the poor, but the United States does. I had always registered and voted when I had an address.