21 June 2007
I don’t think Bill set out to find a girlfriend, let alone a dog, but he didn’t get much choice. I latched on to him like a limpet, but, though he was a bit nonplussed, he didn’t seem to mind.
When he decided to go back to Maryland, there wasn’t really much question but that I would go with him. So we scoured the notice boards of the Berkeley campus to find somebody with a car that was going back East that wanted to find passengers prepared to help pay for gas, until we found someone going to Pittsburg which we thought was close enough. The only hitch was that we had no money.
Now Bill was a shoplifter not a bank robber, so there was nothing to be done except work for it. And there wasn’t a lot of casual work around that could be accomplished in the few days we had before our ride was leaving. But then someone told us that all we needed to do was turn up on a particular street corner at five in the morning the following day.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. What kind of moron turns up at five in the morning to an address like “street corner” without knowing what the gig is? Well, we were those kind of morons.
When we turned up with the dog there were a few desperate looking hippies and half a dozen Mexican laborers there, smoking cigarettes, speaking Spanish and looking like they did this all the time. This was reassuring. It meant they had come back from wherever it was they’d been taken.
After a while a battered Chevy drove up pulling a U-Haul trailer. A pretty well-dressed guy in an open shirt and slacks got out and I wondered how all of us were going to fit in that Chevy. I needn’t have worried. The guy opened up the back of the trailer, shoved us all in, including the dog, and drove off to God knows where.
Of course eventually God shared this information with us and we got out an hour or so later in the middle of some scrubland. The guy had been commissioned by the Forestry Department to gather seeds for a reforestation project. We were given some burlap sacks and shown how to grab the thin branches with our left hand, put the branch between the fingers of the right hand and pull up, stripping the seeds off it and into our hands. We were given gloves to protect our hands and told that we would be paid by the pound of seeds we gathered.
We quickly discovered that this was going to be a lot harder than we thought. Although the seasoned laborers seemed to be pretty adept at the job and didn’t wear gloves, I watched as my feeble gloved hand pulled through branch after branch yielding only tiny handfuls of seeds. Doing the calculations quickly in my head (actually it wasn’t difficult) I swiftly surmised that the twelve hour day I was facing would not yield many pounds of seeds.
It was summer and a very hot day and, while my dog Methedrine lounged dreamily in the sunshine, panting but apparently happy, I was absolutely sweltering. One of the laborers suggested I strip the branches without the gloves as I would get more seeds more quickly that way. I tried it and he was right. My hands remained scratched, sore and stained with resin for several weeks afterwards.
A second car drove up. A late model Lincoln Continental and another smartly dressed man got out with a stunningly beautiful but bored looking young woman in sunglasses. The man went a ways to talk to the man who brought us while the bored woman, totally unselfconsciously stripped off to the bikini she had under her clothes, laid out a mat on the roof of the car and started to sunbathe! I noticed that the laborers didn’t stare at her and her gorgeous body as I thought they would, but studiously looked anywhere else, stealing glances at the bosses. And I wondered if the bosses had taken exception to their staring on previous occasions?
At the end of the day I proudly brought my sack to the weigh station. The seasoned laborers laid their haul of twelve, thirteen and a half and even fourteen pounds. Mine weighed in at less than three and Bill’s was scarcely more than that. I ended a twelve hour day with about ten dollars in my pocket. After two days of this we thought we had enough money to make a decent contribution to the gas for our journey. And anyway, even if we didn’t, Fuck it; there was no way we were going back there!
We first met our cross-country travelling companions in the early morning of the day we set out. Frank was the owner of the car and he was travelling with his friend Benny. They were in their thirties and had an unshaven, dishevelled appearance. Frank, who rarely spoke, had a thick crop of black hair and a muscular body. Benny, who didn’t talk much more than his friend, was wiry, with thin lips and even thinner hair. They looked like the kind of guys you cold cast in a gangster movie. Also in our strange little party was a kid with long frizzy blond hair who quoted from Mao Tse Tung’s Little Red Book and babbled prolifically about politics in a way that convinced me that he’d never read a whole book all the way through. Any book. I can’t recall his name because Bill and I just called him (not to his face) The Maoist Communist Fuck-Up. And then there was the strange but oddly vulnerable Darren who arrived with no luggage and only wearing a light jacket, who stared at his hands a lot and laughed at inappropriate moments. Benny wasn’t at all happy we’d brought a dog with us, but he asked us to show him the money and, having seen it, led us to the car. It was an ageing and very battered old Buick with an old-fashioned bench seat in front that didn’t look like it was going to get us to the state line, let alone to Pittsburg.
What kind a moron heads off on a three thousand mile journey under these conditions? Well, I think I’ve already answered that. So we set off on Highway 80 and the car behaved itself and we didn’t start to run out of money until we got to….well, Nevada actually. So when we passed a hitchhiker just outside of Rock Springs, Wyoming on his way to New York, we screeched to a halt and offered him a ride all the way to Pittsburgh if he would help pay for gas. He agreed. We weren’t the only morons in the world.
We scrunched up to be able to fit four in the back (plus the dog!) and carried on into the night.
His name was Paul and he was Canadian; and the first thing I noticed about him was that he was astonishing normal. Frank and Benny drove non-stop in shifts, four hours each, snatching sleep in-between. The Maoist Communist Fuck-Up babbled constantly as if he was on speed which, for all I know, he might have been. Darren stared straight ahead, laughed for no reason and, every fifty miles or so would say, “Can we stop at the next gas station?” because he needed to pee. After four hundred miles, Frank, who had hardly spoke a word during the journey, finally snapped.
“Does it have to be a gas station? What about a restaurant? Can we stop at a restaurant? What about the side of the road?” But Darren didn’t want to stop anywhere but a gas station and was certainly not prepared to use the side of the road. And so we drove on, stopping at a lot of gas stations and, when we hit a city we would stop at a grocery store where Bill would shoplift whatever we needed. My heart was in my mouth then, because I just didn’t know what would happen if he was arrested.
By the time we hit Omaha early one morning, the money had finally run out. We were going no further until we got some. We got directions to the nearest Manpower agency, but it was only Benny who was offered work: half a day at a warehouse on minimum wage. There was only one thing left to do, Frank reasoned, sell blood. So we drove down to Omaha’s Skid Row, where there is always a blood bank ready to spring, vampire like, on the local winos who are happy to exchange one type of fluid for another.
Although we all were prepared to shed our blood in the cause of getting to Pittsburg, the bank refused to take blood from the Maoist Communist Fuck-Up because he was too young, and Bill and I because we didn’t weigh enough. So Frank and Paul were taken through to have their blood taken, (by this time Paul must have been wondering why he hadn’t just carried on sticking his thumb out on Highway 80 back at Rock Springs) while Bill, the Maoist Communist Fuck-up and I sat in the battered Buick waiting for them.
After a while a parking cop came over to tell us that we were illegally parked and had to move the car or it would be towed away. This put us into a serious dilemma because one driver was out working in a warehouse and the other was inside selling his blood. So Frank gave the keys to Bill and told us to move it somewhere else. Easier said than done.
The car was parked on a hill for a start, its nose pointed down to a busy intersection. The three of us talked about who should move the car. The Maoist Communist Fuck-Up didn’t know how to drive, so that left him out. Bill didn’t have a licence, so that left him out. And I had never driven a stick shift before, so that left me out. But somebody had to move the car.
Bill finally decided that it would be him and got into the driver’s seat confidently, shifted gears manfully and pulled out into traffic, immediately clipped the side of a pick-up truck. He panicked, turning the corner and trying to head off.
“You have to stop, Bill!” I cried, “There are witnesses!”
He stopped a couple of hundred yards down the road, grabbed my arm and confidently and manfully said, “Tell them you were driving!”
I walked back to the intersection where the pick-up truck driver was inspecting the (mercifully light) damage to his vehicle.
“I’m really sorry!” I said, “My foot slipped on the clutch.” Having never used a clutch I had no idea what I meant. The man laughed.
“This truck is an old wreck anyway. Don’t worry about it.”
But it was not going to be as simple as that. Because by this time a police car was on the scene and a very tall (well, everyone is very tall to me as I am very short) officer said, “Okay sweetheart, who was driving?”
I told him I was driving, but at this point a public spirited citizen ran up and said, “No she wasn’t! There was a boy! A boy was driving! I saw him!” The officer looked at me a bit more menacingly than I thought necessary.
“Alright, sweetheart,” (I really wished he wouldn’t call me that), “Where’s your boyfriend?” When I continued to insist that I was driving, they put me in their back of the police car and said they were they were taking me in. I’m being arrested, I thought! I’m never going to see Bill again! You’d think I’d have other worries, but I was seventeen and in love.
So when the police car pulled up to the old Buick and I saw Bill and the Maoist Communist Fuck-Up leaning against it, then straightening up fearfully at its approach, my heart broke. The policemen got out of the car, leaving me in the back. There were no handles on the inside of the back but, inexplicably, the window was open and I crawled out to join them. The officers were remarkably unconcerned that I had escaped.
The policemen had asked to search the car, even though they didn’t have a search warrant and the Maoist Communist Fuck-Up permitted this, which I thought was astonishing since we had absolutely no idea what might be in that car! The Maoist Communist Fuck-Up then thought it was very funny to take all the stuff out that he had in his backpack one by one saying, “One smelly sock! One stinky pair of Y-fronts! One sweaty T-shirt!” The officers frowned, knowing our little travelling companion was being sarcastic. Bill and I quietly decided that, if we got out of this, we’d kill him.
As they continued to search the car, Frank and Paul emerged from the blood bank, knowing nothing of what had been going on. When he saw the police car Frank raised his hands as if surrendering, which I thought was a bit of an overreaction.
By this time, of course, the driver of the pick-up which, if you recall, was how this whole episode started, said he didn’t think it was worth the trouble of claiming for the damage to his truck since it was so battered anyway. And he’d gone off!
Frank watched nervously as his licence and registration were examined and the car continued to be searched. The officer seemed to get bored with the whole thing, particularly with the Maoist Communist Fuck-Up’s commentary, and turned to Frank.
“You guys got anything?” he asked.
“No! Nothing!” Bill interjected quickly. The officer looked at his watch.
“You guys got thirty minutes to get out of this state!”
Fortunately the state line was only a few miles away and it took us just nanoseconds to embrace his offer of mercy and jump into the car. We squealed round to Manpower to pick Benny up and headed towards Des Moines. It was then that I realised with horror that I’d left my purse in the back of that police car! And it had my ID and all my money in it!
We did a swift U-turn and cruised the area when, with great fortuitousness, we saw the patrol car that had nearly arrested us. It was going the other way, but it had stopped at a stoplight, and Bill leapt out of the car and ran manically down the street to catch it. Just before the light changed, he managed to throw himself at the driver’s window and said breathlessly, “I’m sorry! My girlfriend! She left her purse in the back of the car! I’m sorry!”
The officer looked at him up and down.
“Haven’t you had enough trouble for one day?” He opened the door and let Bill take my purse off the back seat, then looked at his watch again. We entered Des Moines and the state of Iowa seven minutes later. At least I hope we did.
As we headed off across Iowa, Frank and Benny seemed visibly relieved, and it was not surprising. They were, Frank told us, both wanted for armed robbery in the state of Colorado.
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I don’t think Bill set out to find a girlfriend, let alone a dog, but he didn’t get much choice. I latched on to him like a limpet, but, though he was a bit nonplussed, he didn’t seem to mind.
When he decided to go back to Maryland, there wasn’t really much question but that I would go with him. So we scoured the notice boards of the Berkeley campus to find somebody with a car that was going back East that wanted to find passengers prepared to help pay for gas, until we found someone going to Pittsburg which we thought was close enough. The only hitch was that we had no money.
Now Bill was a shoplifter not a bank robber, so there was nothing to be done except work for it. And there wasn’t a lot of casual work around that could be accomplished in the few days we had before our ride was leaving. But then someone told us that all we needed to do was turn up on a particular street corner at five in the morning the following day.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. What kind of moron turns up at five in the morning to an address like “street corner” without knowing what the gig is? Well, we were those kind of morons.
When we turned up with the dog there were a few desperate looking hippies and half a dozen Mexican laborers there, smoking cigarettes, speaking Spanish and looking like they did this all the time. This was reassuring. It meant they had come back from wherever it was they’d been taken.
After a while a battered Chevy drove up pulling a U-Haul trailer. A pretty well-dressed guy in an open shirt and slacks got out and I wondered how all of us were going to fit in that Chevy. I needn’t have worried. The guy opened up the back of the trailer, shoved us all in, including the dog, and drove off to God knows where.
Of course eventually God shared this information with us and we got out an hour or so later in the middle of some scrubland. The guy had been commissioned by the Forestry Department to gather seeds for a reforestation project. We were given some burlap sacks and shown how to grab the thin branches with our left hand, put the branch between the fingers of the right hand and pull up, stripping the seeds off it and into our hands. We were given gloves to protect our hands and told that we would be paid by the pound of seeds we gathered.
We quickly discovered that this was going to be a lot harder than we thought. Although the seasoned laborers seemed to be pretty adept at the job and didn’t wear gloves, I watched as my feeble gloved hand pulled through branch after branch yielding only tiny handfuls of seeds. Doing the calculations quickly in my head (actually it wasn’t difficult) I swiftly surmised that the twelve hour day I was facing would not yield many pounds of seeds.
It was summer and a very hot day and, while my dog Methedrine lounged dreamily in the sunshine, panting but apparently happy, I was absolutely sweltering. One of the laborers suggested I strip the branches without the gloves as I would get more seeds more quickly that way. I tried it and he was right. My hands remained scratched, sore and stained with resin for several weeks afterwards.
A second car drove up. A late model Lincoln Continental and another smartly dressed man got out with a stunningly beautiful but bored looking young woman in sunglasses. The man went a ways to talk to the man who brought us while the bored woman, totally unselfconsciously stripped off to the bikini she had under her clothes, laid out a mat on the roof of the car and started to sunbathe! I noticed that the laborers didn’t stare at her and her gorgeous body as I thought they would, but studiously looked anywhere else, stealing glances at the bosses. And I wondered if the bosses had taken exception to their staring on previous occasions?
At the end of the day I proudly brought my sack to the weigh station. The seasoned laborers laid their haul of twelve, thirteen and a half and even fourteen pounds. Mine weighed in at less than three and Bill’s was scarcely more than that. I ended a twelve hour day with about ten dollars in my pocket. After two days of this we thought we had enough money to make a decent contribution to the gas for our journey. And anyway, even if we didn’t, Fuck it; there was no way we were going back there!
We first met our cross-country travelling companions in the early morning of the day we set out. Frank was the owner of the car and he was travelling with his friend Benny. They were in their thirties and had an unshaven, dishevelled appearance. Frank, who rarely spoke, had a thick crop of black hair and a muscular body. Benny, who didn’t talk much more than his friend, was wiry, with thin lips and even thinner hair. They looked like the kind of guys you cold cast in a gangster movie. Also in our strange little party was a kid with long frizzy blond hair who quoted from Mao Tse Tung’s Little Red Book and babbled prolifically about politics in a way that convinced me that he’d never read a whole book all the way through. Any book. I can’t recall his name because Bill and I just called him (not to his face) The Maoist Communist Fuck-Up. And then there was the strange but oddly vulnerable Darren who arrived with no luggage and only wearing a light jacket, who stared at his hands a lot and laughed at inappropriate moments. Benny wasn’t at all happy we’d brought a dog with us, but he asked us to show him the money and, having seen it, led us to the car. It was an ageing and very battered old Buick with an old-fashioned bench seat in front that didn’t look like it was going to get us to the state line, let alone to Pittsburg.
What kind a moron heads off on a three thousand mile journey under these conditions? Well, I think I’ve already answered that. So we set off on Highway 80 and the car behaved itself and we didn’t start to run out of money until we got to….well, Nevada actually. So when we passed a hitchhiker just outside of Rock Springs, Wyoming on his way to New York, we screeched to a halt and offered him a ride all the way to Pittsburgh if he would help pay for gas. He agreed. We weren’t the only morons in the world.
We scrunched up to be able to fit four in the back (plus the dog!) and carried on into the night.
His name was Paul and he was Canadian; and the first thing I noticed about him was that he was astonishing normal. Frank and Benny drove non-stop in shifts, four hours each, snatching sleep in-between. The Maoist Communist Fuck-Up babbled constantly as if he was on speed which, for all I know, he might have been. Darren stared straight ahead, laughed for no reason and, every fifty miles or so would say, “Can we stop at the next gas station?” because he needed to pee. After four hundred miles, Frank, who had hardly spoke a word during the journey, finally snapped.
“Does it have to be a gas station? What about a restaurant? Can we stop at a restaurant? What about the side of the road?” But Darren didn’t want to stop anywhere but a gas station and was certainly not prepared to use the side of the road. And so we drove on, stopping at a lot of gas stations and, when we hit a city we would stop at a grocery store where Bill would shoplift whatever we needed. My heart was in my mouth then, because I just didn’t know what would happen if he was arrested.
By the time we hit Omaha early one morning, the money had finally run out. We were going no further until we got some. We got directions to the nearest Manpower agency, but it was only Benny who was offered work: half a day at a warehouse on minimum wage. There was only one thing left to do, Frank reasoned, sell blood. So we drove down to Omaha’s Skid Row, where there is always a blood bank ready to spring, vampire like, on the local winos who are happy to exchange one type of fluid for another.
Although we all were prepared to shed our blood in the cause of getting to Pittsburg, the bank refused to take blood from the Maoist Communist Fuck-Up because he was too young, and Bill and I because we didn’t weigh enough. So Frank and Paul were taken through to have their blood taken, (by this time Paul must have been wondering why he hadn’t just carried on sticking his thumb out on Highway 80 back at Rock Springs) while Bill, the Maoist Communist Fuck-up and I sat in the battered Buick waiting for them.
After a while a parking cop came over to tell us that we were illegally parked and had to move the car or it would be towed away. This put us into a serious dilemma because one driver was out working in a warehouse and the other was inside selling his blood. So Frank gave the keys to Bill and told us to move it somewhere else. Easier said than done.
The car was parked on a hill for a start, its nose pointed down to a busy intersection. The three of us talked about who should move the car. The Maoist Communist Fuck-Up didn’t know how to drive, so that left him out. Bill didn’t have a licence, so that left him out. And I had never driven a stick shift before, so that left me out. But somebody had to move the car.
Bill finally decided that it would be him and got into the driver’s seat confidently, shifted gears manfully and pulled out into traffic, immediately clipped the side of a pick-up truck. He panicked, turning the corner and trying to head off.
“You have to stop, Bill!” I cried, “There are witnesses!”
He stopped a couple of hundred yards down the road, grabbed my arm and confidently and manfully said, “Tell them you were driving!”
I walked back to the intersection where the pick-up truck driver was inspecting the (mercifully light) damage to his vehicle.
“I’m really sorry!” I said, “My foot slipped on the clutch.” Having never used a clutch I had no idea what I meant. The man laughed.
“This truck is an old wreck anyway. Don’t worry about it.”
But it was not going to be as simple as that. Because by this time a police car was on the scene and a very tall (well, everyone is very tall to me as I am very short) officer said, “Okay sweetheart, who was driving?”
I told him I was driving, but at this point a public spirited citizen ran up and said, “No she wasn’t! There was a boy! A boy was driving! I saw him!” The officer looked at me a bit more menacingly than I thought necessary.
“Alright, sweetheart,” (I really wished he wouldn’t call me that), “Where’s your boyfriend?” When I continued to insist that I was driving, they put me in their back of the police car and said they were they were taking me in. I’m being arrested, I thought! I’m never going to see Bill again! You’d think I’d have other worries, but I was seventeen and in love.
So when the police car pulled up to the old Buick and I saw Bill and the Maoist Communist Fuck-Up leaning against it, then straightening up fearfully at its approach, my heart broke. The policemen got out of the car, leaving me in the back. There were no handles on the inside of the back but, inexplicably, the window was open and I crawled out to join them. The officers were remarkably unconcerned that I had escaped.
The policemen had asked to search the car, even though they didn’t have a search warrant and the Maoist Communist Fuck-Up permitted this, which I thought was astonishing since we had absolutely no idea what might be in that car! The Maoist Communist Fuck-Up then thought it was very funny to take all the stuff out that he had in his backpack one by one saying, “One smelly sock! One stinky pair of Y-fronts! One sweaty T-shirt!” The officers frowned, knowing our little travelling companion was being sarcastic. Bill and I quietly decided that, if we got out of this, we’d kill him.
As they continued to search the car, Frank and Paul emerged from the blood bank, knowing nothing of what had been going on. When he saw the police car Frank raised his hands as if surrendering, which I thought was a bit of an overreaction.
By this time, of course, the driver of the pick-up which, if you recall, was how this whole episode started, said he didn’t think it was worth the trouble of claiming for the damage to his truck since it was so battered anyway. And he’d gone off!
Frank watched nervously as his licence and registration were examined and the car continued to be searched. The officer seemed to get bored with the whole thing, particularly with the Maoist Communist Fuck-Up’s commentary, and turned to Frank.
“You guys got anything?” he asked.
“No! Nothing!” Bill interjected quickly. The officer looked at his watch.
“You guys got thirty minutes to get out of this state!”
Fortunately the state line was only a few miles away and it took us just nanoseconds to embrace his offer of mercy and jump into the car. We squealed round to Manpower to pick Benny up and headed towards Des Moines. It was then that I realised with horror that I’d left my purse in the back of that police car! And it had my ID and all my money in it!
We did a swift U-turn and cruised the area when, with great fortuitousness, we saw the patrol car that had nearly arrested us. It was going the other way, but it had stopped at a stoplight, and Bill leapt out of the car and ran manically down the street to catch it. Just before the light changed, he managed to throw himself at the driver’s window and said breathlessly, “I’m sorry! My girlfriend! She left her purse in the back of the car! I’m sorry!”
The officer looked at him up and down.
“Haven’t you had enough trouble for one day?” He opened the door and let Bill take my purse off the back seat, then looked at his watch again. We entered Des Moines and the state of Iowa seven minutes later. At least I hope we did.
As we headed off across Iowa, Frank and Benny seemed visibly relieved, and it was not surprising. They were, Frank told us, both wanted for armed robbery in the state of Colorado.
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