3/6/23
Newsletter 267
The Crack of Dawn
The first time I hitchhiked from Detroit to L.A. was in the summer of 1975 when I was sixteen years old. I was supposed to go with Ivan Raimi, and Ivan and I had been planning this trip for a month. On the morning we were going to leave, Ivan showed up at my parents’ house and bashfully explained he wasn’t going. His parents didn’t like the idea and had bribed him with a trip to Israel, which he took. I recall taking it in stride and wishing Ivan a good trip to Israel, but I was still going.
My mother reticently dropped me off at the entrance to I-75 south. I marched down the freeway ramp in my Vibram-soled hiking boots. I had my new backpack with literally everything I believed that I needed to survive in the wilderness: a sleeping bag, a rolled-up foam ground mat, a tent, a butane stove, a snakebite kit, flour, rice, olive oil, salt, pepper, the selected poems of Robert W. Service, and many other things.
Positioning myself at the bottom of the ramp, I stuck out my thumb. Legitimately, hitchhiking on the freeway was illegal. However, if you were at the end of a ramp they mostly let you get away with it. My first ride, I shit you not, was from a Michigan State Policeman. The cop couldn’t have been friendlier, asked all about my trip, admitted that he would never have the guts to do that, then dropped me off near the Ohio state line.
[As a note: I didn’t start keeping my journal until later that fall of 1975, so this is entirely from memory].
Then an eighteen wheel truck picked me up. In 1975 when tattoos were a rarity, this white, 40-year-old driver had F-U-C-K tattooed on the knuckles of one hand and S-U-C-K on the other. I asked, “How far are you going?” He said, “Chicago.” I asked, “Is that where you’re dropping off your load?” He looked at me with a completely psychotic glare and said, “What’s it to you?” I said, “Nothing,” and we didn’t exchange another word for the next couple of hours, all the way to Chicago.
It was a perfectly warm, sunny, summer day. I stood at the end of a ramp in Joliet, Illinois, directly beneath a sign that said, “Prison area: do not pick up hitchhikers.” My allergies had been acting up for a few weeks and I had a stuffed nose. Luckily, I had brought a bottle of Afrin nose spray. It says on the bottle “Do not use for more than three days,” and I had been using it several times a day for a couple of weeks. So, I shpritzed my nose and goddamn if a tidal wave of blood didn’t come cascading out. It poured down my beard, all over the front of my army jacket, and it wasn’t letting up.
Totting my heavy backpack, I jogged up the ramp and there was a Wendy’s. By the time I got inside I was totally covered in blood. When the patrons saw me, everybody rose to their feet and began to scream. I raised my blood-soaked hands and said, “It’s just a nose bleed. I’m fine. I just need napkins.” The employees brought me piles of napkins and a big cup of ice, and my nose stopped bleeding.
I was then picked up by a yellow VW bug driven by a chubby, middle-aged white guy in a suit and tie named Virgil, who worked for the IRS. He was going to Iowa City to stay with his three kids who were all in college there and lived in a house together. It was getting toward evening and Virgil asked, “Would you like to stay the night?” Incredibly grateful, I said yes. At his kids’ house, I had a nice spaghetti dinner with Virgil and his studious-looking, bright, funny, son and daughter. After dinner we were all sitting in the living room talking when the door opened and in came Virgil’s third kid, his younger daughter, Amy, and she was stunningly, drop-dead gorgeous. She looked Native American, with long straight black hair, big dark eyes, and statuesque. She was wearing a loose-fitting, low-cut white top, tight jeans, sneakers, and had perfect posture. She was carrying a pile of school books and laughing. Virgil and the other two kids, all pasty white people, were somehow her family. We were introduced, and she took absolutely no note of me.
Virgil and his bright, upbeat family laughed and joked for possibly an hour and I did my best not to stare at his lovely, Native American princess daughter. When it was time to retire, I was shown to a bed in the unfinished basement that was a little creepy, but so wonderfully kind. This was the end of my first day of hitchhiking across the country, and it had been amazing. Sitting there in the dark, I decided that if indeed there really was a God, he had to send Amy down to the basement and make love to me. I hoped and I wished and I prayed . . .
The next morning I found Virgil in the kitchen with coffee, and all three kids had already left. Virgil drove me another twenty-five or thirty miles that morning. I questioned him about Amy. He confessed to me that she was not getting nearly as good of grades as the other two, and showed me their report cards.
He dropped me off somewhere in Illinois and I continued hitchhiking west.
I’ve made it to the crack of dawn, and with any luck I’ll make it to the crack of dusk.