Day Eight (Saturday, July 4, 1971)

By noon my game face was back on. My belly was full and my body felt reasonably clean. I sang “A Beautiful Morning” by the Rascals and practiced Otto’s hip-hop style of walking back to the ramp.
Between cars I clipped my fingernails and shook out my pain. Life was good no matter what. I felt sanctified, justified, atoned—whatever the terminology. I knew this was my slot in this world, my station, the role I was born to play. Its requirements were not only doable, but when conditions were right you could even flaunt it. Whose shoes would I rather be in? No one’s. I could hack it just fine as Roger Jonathan Winans.

“I yam what I yam. That’s all that I yam.” I addressed the high- flanking mountains. “I’m strong to the finish ’cause I eats me broccoli.” (I didn’t like spinach.)

Otto clapped his hands in time, snapping his fingers, trying to sing, “It don’t mean a thing / If it ain’t got no swing.”

We bid each other a good Independence Day, though after yesterday’s prolonged fiasco, I was happy not even observing it.

After ten minutes on the job, the cops came again. Luckily, it was a different set than yesterday. They wrote out an “official” warning, meaning a ticket processed like a summons, only no fine or court appearance. They, too, ordered us to hoof out of Colorado. “Don’t even consider the interstate . . . Keep strictly to the service road . . . Definitely no soliciting . . . You’re pedestrians only.”

“To think, I sat in my bedroom before the trip, wondering if I should bring identification,” I said as we dismantled.

There was no music in my soul as we took our seats in the now- familiar dining room back at the Golden Grille Canteen, eating lunch (our third meal there), grimly watching one car park and another pull out.

“We’re shot,” I said.

Otto B. George, however, sat up with conviction. “Roger, you and I got to take hitchhikin’ to a level it has never gone before. What’s stoppin’ us from gettin’ out in the parkin’ lot, and askin’ people—to their faces—if we can have a ride to Wyoming? I say we might as well do it. What do we got to lose?”
“Won’t people bite our heads off?”

“Not if we’re polite. It’s the same as thumbin’, only up close and personal. The same people who’d pass us by will tell us no, while the ones who want to help will give us a hand just like if we were standin’ on the side of the road.”

“I guess it’s come to this.” “You got the nuts, don’t you?” Otto’s latest idea, the ‘face-to-face method,’ was a remarkable success. The second person we asked, ‘Granny,’ a spry oldster wearing a jangling dress and boots, gave us a ride some forty miles north. “A Beautiful Morning” came back to my ears, clear and resounding.

Soon enough, though, I was eating out anxiety from the inside of my mouth. ‘Granny’ deposited us at the most remote of interchanges. A lonely hush swept across a forested notch, broken not by cars but the caw of hawks.

“O Otto Otherworldly. What do we do now, sir?”

He always knew what to do. He had us hike along the service road until we hit a high stretch that veered in close to the interstate below. I affixed ‘CALIF.’ to the straps of his backpack. I aligned him to keep the sign visible to traffic. I unfolded the Colorado map and put it in his hands, for show. Then, as cars went by, I waved my arms wildly as I dared.

“Play-acting is a tough business.” I fidgeted.

“So then be tough,” Otto encouraged. “Just remember those two brothers from last night.”

“True. Things can never sink that low.”

A rusty station wagon coughing exhaust glided to a stop on the shoulder. A ride or a mechanical problem? We angled down the steep incline. Two girls inside waved, “Hop aboard.” Decent! Yes, they were going north to Wyoming, where we’d be able to hook into I-80 west again and end this crazy zigzag through Colorado.

“Thank you. It feels good to be back on the offensive again.” I filled them in on the morose events of the past two days.

The girls were on a trip themselves, coming from New Mexico, where they shared an apartment. They had angular faces, baritone voices, and short, choppy hair. Let me see . . . let’s just say the boy-girl chemistry didn’t exactly work. But they were friendly, even treating Otto and me to a couple of extra ham and Swiss sandwiches they packed away.

Wyoming, U.S.A., July 4, 1971. What a pleasure to cross the state line!

Our headaches with the Colorado police were over. My inertia felt corrected as I pointed my bags westbound in the vast dustblown terrain. The different topography stuck out right away. Everything was XXLarge. The kingsized mountains were blankets of dense brown earthskin; the sky covered the ends of the horizon like a geometric dome. Big sky country. Everything was super-sized, and I was small. There wasn’t a structure in sight. Remove the cloverleaf and this could be 10,000 B.C. It was always at times like these—as I stood in awe of my surroundings, that I contrasted it with my dull family. My father, the workaholic carpenter; disconnected from every single one of my interests. My piano-lesson mother, who didn’t really like music, who only yelled at me. My allies were my fifteen year-old brother, Willis, and two younger sisters, Sally and Nancy. That’s the bunch. For the holiday Dad would’ve set up his miniature grill on the driveway, cooking burgers and dogs. An invitation from neighbors to see fireworks would be turned down as “too social.” Whoops, I was wrong—it was two hours later at this instant. Eastern time. Mom would already have her pajamas on, settling on the couch for a night of TV. Dad would be back in his room doing paperwork for the day tomorrow. My sibs—all disappeared in their rooms.

Otto and I took a gulp of water each from the canteen and hiked right down to the I-80 pavement. Traffic was paper thin. Sakes alive—on the main artery between New York and San Francisco—there was enough time to do twenty situps in the traffic lane proper!

“It’s like we’re on the set of a Western movie.”

“We’re actors without a script, working our way through. But that’s the way we like it. We make it up as we go along. I’m happy as a canary, Otto.”

He accepted the idea that I stole Steal This Book. Much of the time while I hitched he sat on his pack and skimmed through the pages, calling my attention whenever he spotted something.

A kid named Jeff picked us up after a beastly wait of one hundred fifty-five minutes. Lo and behold, he was wearing a New York Yankees cap like me. Amazing! Out of all the places to come across a hometown fan, here was one. A job transfer for Jeff’s father brought his family out here a couple of years earlier, from New York State, and Jeff never lost his affinity for the Bronx Bombers.

“It’s whatever team you rooted for when you’re a kid,” he said. “I can’t say it’s because of winning, because they haven’t won the pennant in seven years.”

“What was the score yesterday? Who pitched?”

His favorite player was Jake Gibbs, a catcher whom he thought was better than last year’s Rookie of the Year, Thurman Munson. He hated my two favorite players from the recent past, Roger Maris and Joe Pepitone.

Jeff could take a little teasing, too. At the onset of the ride he regretfully said, “I’m only going to the next town.” That turned out to be Laramie, fifty miles distant.

“Your lift to the next town is the longest on record.”

We arrived in Laramie, Wyoming, as the sun was going down, though there was still lots of swirling heat. I observed a scruffy row of one-story, low-income houses when a car shrieked to a halt a hundred yards in front of us, a green sedan.

“Keep back, Roger.”

A door opened. Either a fruitcake guy or a paunchy girl fell out of the back seat—pushed almost. The car squealed across the median illegally and zoomed past us going the other way. Three or four roughnecks inside hooted it up.

The abandoned passenger came poking our way, long-faced and crying. Two pencil bumps on her teeshirt identified her as a girl. She had glasses and no shoes. Neither did she have gear. She was small and weak. “Are y-you g-going west?”

“Yes . . . ” I answered, but thinking it best to practice Otto’s method to withhold our hand until we found out more information, said nothing more. This girl was devastated. Her whole face looked sore from crying.

“Hey, you all right?”

She nodded, though it was clear she was not. She repeated, “You are g-going west?”

“Yeah.”

She swallowed. “Can I hitch with you then? I want someone to hitch with. I want to get to San Francisco.”

“San Francisco?” Chills ran up my spine. “That’s where we’re going.”

“Hold it, Roger. We’re tryin’ to get out of this town before we do anything else. That’s what we’re tryin’ to do.”

“Oh, may I please hitch with you? I don’t want to go any farther by myself. Please. I’m scared.” She wiped a tear from under her glasses and put a dirty hand on her belly. Damn. On top of everything else, she was pregnant.

She was scared, mangled, disillusioned, and malnourished. Her clothes were threadbare and she needed a good scrubbing. Little sparkles embedded in the cheap plastic of her eyeglasses made her condition all the more ironic.

“We’d better take her on, Roger. We got an emergency here.”

“Yeah. It has to be. Let’s work it out.”

Despite all the questions shooting through my head, I knew there’d be benefits. She was female. Just to include her in our lineup would boost our chances for a ride. But could she hold her own until San Francisco?

“We’re missin’ rides just by standin’ here,” Otto said. “You’re goin’ the same way we’re goin’, so we might as well start.”

“Oh thank you.” She brightened a notch.

“What’s your name?”

“Starla.”

“I’m Roger and this is Otto.”

Three thumbs went out in a diagonal. Otto stood on the outside edge of the grass. I hugged the traffic lane. Starla worked the middle of the shoulder. While we waited she blurted out her story.

“I’m nine months pregnant . . . due any day now . . . Sometimes I get cramps real bad . . . I’m on my way to find my husband . . . He’s in California with another girl . . . He doesn’t love me, but I kept telling him when I had my baby, I wanted him to be near . . . The baby’s kicking awful today . . . He left when I wouldn’t get an abortion . . . ”

“Where you from?”

“Kansas.”

“How old?”

“Sixteen.”

“Who were those cowboys?”

“Those men?” Fright rushed back to her voice. “They picked me up outside Cheyenne. They took the money I had for the bus. They, they . . .” She started sobbing. “They said u-unless I took off all my clothes, they were g-going to b-bounce my stomach like a b-basketball. T-they gave me three hits of mescaline. They, they made me ride the w-whole way without any clothes.”

“They wanted to kill your baby? Those sons of bitches. That’s murder!”

“Easy, Roger.”

Starla staggered out of the diagonal and bent over in the grass with her hand draped across her stomach.

“You gonna be all right thumbin’ like this?” Otto asked.

She eventually straightened herself up, came back to the diagonal, and extended her thumb. “I’ll try.”
“Don’t worry with us,” Otto said.

“That’s right. You’ve joined forces with a couple of professional hitchhikers. We don’t go for sloth.”

A cream-colored Impala, hauling a medium-sized camper, lumbered to a halt as it passed. I scooped up my bags and ran.

A hairy, meaty arm rested on the window ledge. Inside was a lone, middle-aged fellow with a red balding head, bulbous nose, and a forced smile on his face. “Happy July Fourth. My name’s Bill.”

“Are you offering us a ride?”

“I guess I am.” Otto, and then Starla, appeared from behind the camper.

“You have room for three?”

“I think so. Here.” He opened the door with a grunt. “Let me open my trailer so you can throw your things inside.” He walked around the hood, revealing a hefty frame and a stomach like a kettle. No babies inside this guy’s belly. Just fat, carbohydrates, and cholesterol.

Bill stepped back while unlocking the camper door and called to Starla, “Don’t you got anything with you?” Starla looked downward and shook her head.

“How far west you going?” I asked.

Bill’s perplexed expression turned toward me. “Oh, I’m going to good ways west. You don’t have to worry about that. You’ve got a ride clear across Wyoming.”

Otto and I posted Starla in the front, which was only right. There was plenty of room wherever you sat. The interior was foamy and comfortable, though it wasn’t quite as plush or new-smelling as Archie the Drunk’s cruisemobile.

“I see all three of you are going to California,” Bill said, after we got going. He directed his comment to Starla, but she wasn’t looking. She slumped her head against the window. Bill’s eyes focused on me through the rearview mirror.

“Yes. San Francisco. We appreciate your stopping. We didn’t know if we were going to get a ride back there. It’s so desolate.”

“Oh, that’s all right. I don’t have anything to do tonight anyway, except drive. I’m from California myself. Have you ever heard of Santa Monica? It’s one of those neighboring towns to L.A. You don’t know where one stops and the next one begins. All the towns run into each other. We just call it the L.A. area. A few movie stars live in Santa Monica.”

Bill stole another glance at Starla, but her head was melted into the window mechanism and I didn’t think anyone was going to snap her out of her trance. She had all that mescaline swimming in her brain anyway.

When Bill discovered the three of us had linked up only a short time before, you could see ardor flaming up through his face. He began to gaze at Starla reverently in the dark, grip and twist the steering wheel, and pat down the long strands of his sandy-colored hair, trying to cover his bald spot as best he could. He plugged a Frank Sinatra eight-track into his tape deck. The first three songs matched Bill’s situation exactly: “Strangers in the Night,” “All or Nothing At All,” and “Yes Sir That’s My Baby.”

“Well, I can get you across Wyoming, and maybe ever farther that that,” Bill said after a long lapse. “I don’t know quite where I’m going myself yet. I got four more days of my vacation to use up.”

It was now completely dark. We rolled up and down tremendous- sized mountains. Bill’s bulky unit had a hard time tugging and jerking its way up some of the inclines. Sometimes it felt like we were swerving. The illuminated white lines painted over fresh asphalt guided us through total blackness. Headlights coming the other way were, at best, occasional. Bill kept on his high beams. I poked at my pinching underpants, picked my cuticles, and flexed my fingers. Bill yakked away, mostly about money and misery—runaway inflation, how his car only got five miles to the gallon, his poor credit rating, and about California’s ever-increasing property taxes which were eating him alive.

When Starla woke and sat up following a gas station stop, Bill extended her all courtesies: Was she too hot? Too cold? Need aspirin? Something to drink? Hungry? Otto and I weren’t asked this stuff, but it was okay. I didn’t think Bill had a clue that his prospective dream girl was on the brink of giving birth. Her shirt was loose and covered it well. I felt sorry the guy had to squeeze his pleasure in life from a penniless, mixed up, pregnant waif. Otto and I had a couple of laughs about this at another gas station stop down the road about an hour later.

“I’ve got my own floor waxing business,” Bill revealed during one of the periods when Starla was awake. “I wax a lot of the stars’ floors in Bel Air, Malibu, Beverly Hills. You’ve heard of Bob Crane, haven’t you? From Hogan’s Heroes? I’ve done his floor. How about Ann Southern? She plays a part on My Mother The Car. I do her floor, on contract, once a month.”

Starla stared at him curiously.

“Yeah, but I think I’d get out of that business all the same if I could think of something else to do. You get tired of doing the same thing after twenty-two years. I always wind up doing more than just waxing
floors. A lady over in North Hollywood had me bringing in her grocery bags the other week.”

More sadly, he said, “My wife could never accept me as a floor waxer. We got divorced two years ago. She was a beautiful lady, and I tried to provide for her the best I could, but she didn’t want me waxing no floors. She wanted me to be a movie star. I take my vacations by myself now.”

The Frank Sinatra eight-track had a malfunction. After three songs, you’d hear tape hiss. Then ka-chink, ka-chink, and the same three songs started again. “Strangers in the Night” played over and over.

Everyone got out of the car at the next gas station stop to get a breath of fresh air. The Milky Way was creamy and twinkling. The temperature dropped into the “cold” zone. Starla wandered off by herself after Bill bought her chocolate donuts and a Yoo-Hoo.

Otto and I leaned against the camper, talking and yawning. “You know, Roger, our best chance to get a longer ride is when it comes time to sleep if we coax Starla into the camper with Bill, alone.”

“You mean defer to the bench seats of the car? I’d do that in an instant. The camper sleeps only two anyway.”

“If Starla butters up Bill a little bit, who knows. Maybe we got a ride all the way to San Francisco under our noses.”

Bill came blundering past, a man welled up in failure. Almost by intuition, he said, “I’d be glad to put you boys in the back so you could get some sleep, but you’re not allowed to stay inside a moving trailer, not in this state. Every state has a different law. Don’t worry, I’m getting tired myself. I’m thinking about stopping at the next rest area, eating some dinner, and getting some sleep. I suppose you boys are hungry.

It was during this last driving spell, after Otto fell asleep and I dropped into a half-nodding twilight zone, when Bill delivered to Starla a quiet, private soliloquy.

“You know, a man gets lonely traveling around by himself . . . The mountains and the rivers mean nothing when you have no one to share them with . . . Living alone at my age is not meant to be . . . What I need is a traveling mate . . . Someone like you, Starla . . . Can you see yourself as my traveling mate?”

The reply came soft and trembling: “I d-don’t think s-so.”

“Strangers in the Night” came on for about the seventh time.

“Here’s the rest area,” boys,” was the next thing Bill said. “I guess we’ll call it a night here.”

From the kitchenette in Bill’s camper, Otto and I each ate two hot dogs—drenched in mustard and speared with a fork—over a dented pot, and drank acidy cola, the cheapest brand on the market. Starla didn’t want anything. She was back in the car with her head smeared against the window. She hadn’t said ten words the whole ride.

“Is there anything wrong with Starla that you guys know about? She’s bound to get awful cold without a jacket or anything if she stays in that car.” Bill wiped his mouth with a paper towel. “I’d sure like to do something for her, but I don’t know what to do.”

“She’s had a hard day, that’s all,” Otto said. I kept clamped. If Bill couldn’t see for himself that Starla was dangerously pregnant, I wasn’t going to break the news.

Bill roused Starla, but she refused to move. Even pleas like, “You’ll feel much better in your own bed,” and “I promise no one will bother you,” went unheeded. Finally he gave up. He pushed her a spare blanket through the window.

Otto quickly opened the back door of the car, climbing onto the rear bench seat, behind Starla. “I’ll sacrifice in the Impala.” That meant I got stuck with lonesome Bill in the musty, squeaky trailer. It irked me to spend the night with a dumpy, middle-aged guy! He snored like a lion. Otto’d better not try and claim that he slept with another girl! No way. It was null and void. No matter what he said, he was leading in our girls contest only 2-1.