Day Twenty-Five (Wednesday, July 21, 1971)

Once my eyes opened, I was up. “The Trip” was back on. No more lingering.

My body made good progress in the battle zone. White was seeping slowly into my sclera, a positive sign. When my eye was open, the eyelid no longer drooped. The black skin started to recede. I could touch the ugly areas and not feel too sharp a pain. My mouth looked halfway normal. A thick scab formed over the cut. I dabbed my face with soap and water. Overall, I felt fine. I made a possessions round up. Diary. Wallet. Traveler’s cheques. Watch. Yankee cap. Winter jacket.

Sunglasses were still a must.

Betty brought us to the entrance ramp of the 99 freeway just outside Visalia, saying, “My lord, if you didn’t seem so anxious to leave, I’d show you the drug store where I work three days a week as a pharmacist’s assistant.” We sat in the car about ten minutes. She asked again and again if we had adequate money, all our clothes, toothbrushes, maps, and so on.

Otto and I looked at each other with renewed faith under the molten sun. Traffic was back, swishing. How I liked that auto sound—it was the hitchhiker’s lullaby, in the same category as gurgling streams and rustling leaves. Our troubles as a team had flared up again but were currently dormant. Otto’s mateship was dependable. His head was screwed on right. I liked him being around. As long as we had that, we had stability. Otto wasn’t going to change over a little blip. Neither was I. As we laughed about our desolate location, I still savored his companionship. He was good in the trenches. Kept my head stimulated. He knew we were at our best working as a pair.

“So this phase two?” he asked.

“You got it. Travel By Thumb, under new and improved management. A total makeover, featuring exciting and unseen moments from your favorite hitchhiking characters, Roger and Otto. The best is yet to come, ladies and gentlemen. Stay tuned.”

A ride came quickly. But it was only for two exits south, to an even worse ‘on’ ramp, smack in the middle of farm country. It had to be 105 degrees, with neither cloud nor tree in sight. Just flat, arid farmland. Hay wagons, tractors, and equipment trucks comprised the majority of vehicles puttering past. None of the farmers had the slightest inclination of helping out. I entertained Otto by singing “Hot Fun in the Summertime” by Sly and the Family Stone. We drank freely from the canteen.

I was shocked to see a mileage sign: Los Angeles 195. Just to Bakersfield was 89. I pulled out my map and whistled. San Francisco and Los Angeles were a whopping 420 miles apart. New York and Philadelphia, I knew, were 90. Those were the proportions I was used to.

Otto studied a cop buzzing past on a motorcycle. “Now I know why they call the California Highway Patrol ‘CHIP’s. Have you noticed? They go by every fifteen minutes.”

“You can set your watch to it.”

After two hours of deepening our suntans, shouting at farmers, and singing dozens of songs, he and I had no choice but to tempt the CHIPs. It was a new Otto Overture. He suggested inching down the ramp as close as we dared, to a spot legally arguable if we were “on” or “off” the freeway proper.

“Keep your eyes open and your knees loose. I don’t wanna to start the second half kickoff with a ticket.”

Ten minutes into the gambit, a cream-colored Buick Electra angled across the lanes. We said hello to a guy with a frumpy permanent wave and a tape deck playing Monterey Pop Festival Live. He was a hairdresser named Gerard. We called him, ‘Gerard zee Hairdresser.’

He was tall and European. A scarf was tied around his neck. His pants were pinkish; but his hands were too rough to be gay. His conversation was decidedly hetero.

“Fellows, I spare you shop talk about zee curling irons and shampoo and wigs. Those are zee tools of my trade. Instead, we enjoy talk of womens’ beautiful behinds, no? You like Sophia Loren and Brigitte Bardot, no? Gina Lollobrigida, no? Catherine Deneuve, no?”

“Yes yes yes yes,” Otto nodded.

“We like babes in all flavors, sizes, and shapes. Sophia and Gina and all of them.” I licked my lips in the heat.

Gerard fancied himself as “zee fastest safe driver on zee roadway.” He got close to a 100 m.p.h. several times by staying only in the right hand lane, a feat worth remembering.

“People are so busy passing. They leave zee slow lane open. That is my secret.” He powered southbound through heat and hot air. “When you stay to zee right, you stay invisible. Especially when you deal with zee CHIPs. That is zee object of zee game, no?”

Gerard knew the 99 freeway like the back of a scalp. He maintained a safe distance behind other cars, always used his blinkers, and stayed patient. He buried uninitiated fools in his rearview mirror. He pointed out possible police lookouts, “corners I zee them hiding.” Sure enough, at one spot a cop was lodged behind a clump of mulberry trees.

“This is fun, no?” He cruised at ninety steering with his fingers that had seven or eight rings. “Never give zee CHIPs a reason to stop you. Drive an American car with nothing fancy. Keep your papers up to date. I love when some fellow rolls out ahead of me. I follow close behind in zee slow lane. I do not challenge, do not get mad. But I laugh when he gets a ticket—not me.”

Miles clicked by. Traffic got heavier. The grooved, concrete lanes got stained and oily. Gerard flew past Bakersfield, and I was snapping my fingers to the beat of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band on his tape deck. He suddenly signaled and exited north. He let us off at Mettler, a town so small that my Shell map didn’t even list it in the legend.

The land remained flat, yellow, worked over, in need of a good rain. Blue sky fused into chalky white at the horizon. Reflector cups and small, star-shaped flowers in the median offered up the sole color
(pink) across sun-choked fields. Smog blanketed the atmosphere in a grainy haze.

Our previous wait was two hours. That seemed to be the new standard. This wait grew into two hours, twenty minutes.

A hairy guy gulping down a full can of V-8 juice stopped in his El Camino. He welcomed us aboard by saying in an unusually deep voice, “It’s a beautiful day, my brothers.” He was short and bulky with long arms and big hands.

“You probably seen me on TV or in the movies and never known it, my brothers. I’m a stunt actor. I do four or five productions a year. Sometimes the only thing I do is tumble down a set of stairs, though I’ve taken a horse’s foot to the mouth and landed a parachute in a tree.”

“Pleased to meet a Hollywood star!” I said it mostly to make him feel good. He was one of the homeliest men I’d ever seen, with a thoroughly broken nose and scarred forehead.

“My specialty is westerns, but I’ve been on Ironside for a few seasons now. I’ve been on Wagon Train, Lancer, Here Comes the Brides . . . movies, I’ve been in Little Big Man and The Boatniks. Some assignments are more lucrative than others, my brothers.”

“Did you hang out with Dustin Hoffman on Little Big Man?”

“He’s the biggest studio name I’ve worked with, but to answer your question, no. Not enough. Nice guy, though. Loves to party when he’s in the mood.”

“All your bills get paid no problem, I bet.”

“Stunt work pays good money as an avocation. But my vocation is to pick up every hitchhiker I see on the highway. That’s who I am, my brothers. Do you know who you are? I come from the land of the free and I help others be free, too. This is my labor. My way to serve. I do it in gratitude from years standing among the masses with my thumb out like yourselves. Hitchhiking is artwork formed out of movement. Do you sense that in your souls?”

Meanwhile, the 99 freeway merged with Interstate 5. Gloriously high mountains rose across a vast, desolate plain. We chugged up one of the mountains at a forty-five degree angle.

“Let it come to you, my brothers. Let it come inside your soul.” The engine rallied.

Overtaking the summit opened into a new universe. A moist glen with intermittent lowlands beckoned. First came dappled forest, then random houses carved out of hillsides sprawled across mountains, dotting the landscape with creamy-orange rooftops and Spanish- style architecture. Soon came glut: older, smaller houses; commercial buildings and stores; industrial distribution centers; office complexes; parking lots; people noise clamor hubbub rancor. It crammed together, pressing mind and eye. Objects swirled around in a color-drenched kaleidoscope. A moody song on the FM, “A Case of You,” by Joni Mitchell, filled the waves.

The freeway got packed. The stunt man was doing eighty-five. Anything less was too slow. Further, further we thrust. It was almost sexual. There was a throb to it. I was here, in it deeply. One life, one glob, one giant throbbing lifevein.

Just as I started hoping the stunt man would show us around the set of his latest movie, he said, “My brothers, welcome to the L.A. basin, land of fallen angels. The next exit, I regret, is mine.” The most recent mileage marker said Los Angeles 36.

Otto and I refueled our jets at Honey Dew’s Cactus Flower Restaurant, a lively taproom with plenty of customers. I felt exuberant coming out, though I wasn’t sure about getting a quick ride. The ‘on’ ramp was horrifically busy at the beginning of afternoon rush hour. There was nowhere to stand—the ramp itself was long, curving, and treacherous.

“We lost our momentum by havin’ a sitdown meal instead of just goin’ to that hot dog truck like I wanted, Roger.”

“I was hoping your frown was my imagination.”

“This is the pits. There ain’t no artwork standin’ in this mess.”

A guy in front of a giant truck yelled, “Hey buddies! How’d you like to help us unload this furniture?”

Allied Furniture, Missouri plates. The guy said, “It’s down the road a stretch. I’ll give you both twenty dollars if you’re interested. We just got to town and want to get this stuff off tonight.”

“I could use capital refurbishment,” Otto decided.

He and I boarded the truck. We said hello to the boss, ‘Jocko’; his partner Antonio, and Antonio’s son, Jose. The five of us rode to an unincorporated village, Lancaster, which was nothing but one new housing development on top of another. The dry scrub land made for such a vapid environment that you wondered where they found water for all these newcomers.

The work Otto and I agreed to was tough. The truck was chock full. I grabbed at least six Cokes from the cooler to help me get through the sweat and stink. My bad eye didn’t affect my lifting; I took care not to touch or bump into anything. Otto worked “as a way to get exercise.” It was a ranch house built mostly on all one level.

By the time we slacked off, it was dark. My strength was sapped. We didn’t finish. The quantity of furniture was tremendous. Jocko treated everyone to take-out food from Burger King before departing with Antonio and Jose for a motel. Otto and I took showers inside the new house. He and I camped in the living room amidst unpacked cabinets and chairs stacked atop one another, with the owner’s son in- law sleeping down the hall.

“Quite an unexpected turn of events. But I sanction it.” I settled into the soft, carpeted floor.

“As long as Jocko antes up with the gold, it was a smart turn. If you’re not inside makin’ money, then you’re outside spendin’ it.”