Naked (16 page)

I’d sooner pick up someone waving a pistol than holding a guitar. He’d lie barefoot on the side of the road with his head
propped up on his rucksack, exercising his toes and wondering why we weren’t getting any rides. “It’s a heartless cut-throat
world, so callous and so cold/I hope to get to Frisco, before I’m bald and old.”

Outside Indianapolis we were picked up by two young men in a Jeep who introduced themselves as Starsky and Hutch, names borrowed
from the brazen, coltish heroes of a popular television show. They were wired and loopy, washing down their over-the-counter
amphetamines with quarts of warm malt liquor. When asked where they were from, Starsky made a gagging gesture.

“That’s the code for ‘Delaware,’” Hutch explained.

Starsky gave the finger to the driver of an orange Gremlin. “State bird,” Hutch said. He took a swallow of his malt liquor
and belched, proclaiming it the state motto.

Noticing the tank was low, they pulled into a service station, where I offered them some gas money, hoping they might view
my thoughtful gesture as payment enough. Starsky said he had it covered, adding that he could sure use some fudge. “Not just
chocolate, but fudge. Why don’t you go on into the mart there and see do they have some.”

It’s always best for one person to remain with the car just in case the driver gets an urge to take off with your packs, so
Randolph stayed behind, squinting out at the flat, uninspired landscape and fulfilling Hutch’s request for “Free Bird.”

I bought a bag of potato chips and a block of something fudgelike and returned to the car just as Starsky was replacing the
gas cap. “Jump in, chief.” He eyed the attendant headed our way to accept payment, but just as the man reached the pump, Starsky
peeled out of the station, driving over a concrete embankment and onto the interstate.

“I’m not sure how cool this is,” Randolph said. “What about the police?”

“Police?” Starsky turned to look behind him. “Hey-ho, buddy, we can outrun the police, no fucking problemo.” He stomped on
the gas pedal and the Jeep advanced much like a plane moments before taking to the air. We passed other cars as if they were
parked, Starsky hunching forward with the clenched, determined look of a bombardier preparing to destroy a village of unsuspecting
peasants. He yelled out for Hutch to hold the wheel while he opened the packet of fudge, and the Jeep swerved into the other
lane, barely missing a tanker filled with diesel fuel. Horns blared and brakes squealed, and for the first time in my life
I thought,
This is how people die; this is exactly how it happens.
Randolph’s hat flew out the window, but even if the violent wind had taken his guitar, I doubt I would have been able to appreciate
it. This wasn’t a situation that allowed me to laugh at someone else’s misfortune. He and I were in this together. We would
either die or spend the rest of our lives on the back wards of some hospital where nurses would come regularly to massage
our comatose limbs and whisper words of encouragement. Beneath his goatee and tie-dyed T-shirt, we were whining, trembling
brothers, frantically searching for the nonexistent seat belts and grabbing onto each other for support and comfort. Starsky
and Hutch seemed to enjoy our pathetic display of fear, jiggling the steering wheel and cutting off other drivers just to
watch us cower and pray. We covered an enormous amount of ground before Starsky pulled over to relieve himself behind a billboard.
It struck me as odd that he could steal gasoline and threaten the lives of countless strangers, yet feel the need to hide
so completely while peeing. He walked far into the tall grass, and Randolph and I took the opportunity to jump out of this
death trap, our quivering hands barely able to grip our packs. “This is great,” we said. “Really, this is exactly where we
needed to go.”

Starsky zipped up his fly and exchanged places with Hutch, who drove a few hundred feet up the road before backing up to where
we stood. “And another thing,” Starsky said. “Your fudge ain’t worth shit.” He reared back and pitched it in our direction
before taking off down the interstate in a cloud of exhaust and whipped gravel. The fudge hit the billboard and bounced onto
the road, where Randolph stopped to pick it up. He brushed it off and took a few bites before saying that it tasted just fine
to him.

We reached Colorado, which was just as I had seen it pictured on calendars: cloudless blue skies and heroic mountains dotted
with magnificent firs. Just like a calendar, with no cars, people, or houses to sully the view. Randolph used the downtime
to compose a few new songs. “I’m well aware, they were from… Delaware.”

For a brief time our brush with disaster brought us closer together. We repeated the story to drivers much like a long-married
couple, one of us finishing the other’s sentences. The experience seemed to fit neatly into Randolph’s Beatish notions, and
he spoke with growing frequency of karma and redemption. On one hot, sunny afternoon we found ourselves beside a clear, rushing
river, its bed paved with smooth stones. There were no potential rides coming our way, so we took off our clothing and swam,
looking down at our feet, where long, silvery fish exhausted themselves by heading in the wrong direction. The riverbank was
carpeted with fragrant pine needles, and rabbits skittered through the meadow. It was, for me, one of those moments when a
director might sail through the air on his cherry picker shouting, “And… perfect! Take five, guys, it’s a wrap.” While I marveled
at the beauty of it all, Randolph knowingly nodded his head, referring by page and chapter to one of the books he carried
in his bag. He seemed to have it all down, like a tourist holding his Michelin guide and nodding with recognition as the bus
approached London Bridge. My brotherly feelings faded and were finally laid to rest a few days later when, polishing off the
last of our water, he loudly belched and asked for a word that might rhyme with Utah. I didn’t sleep for days.

We were stopped at the California border and asked to hand over all our fruits and vegetables, on the off chance they might
introduce some new species of fly or weevil to the dry, beige fields surrounding the inspection point. I was never one of
those easterners attracted by the romantic pull of California. Still, though, it felt liberating to enter a part of the country
where no member of my family had ever been.

Randolph softly strummed his guitar, and I surrendered my three rotting plums as if they were my old-country surname. We crossed
the border in a peach-colored Mustang belonging to a speech therapist from Barstow, and I turned briefly in my seat before
vowing never to look back.

The San Francisco that awaited us bore no resemblance to the bohemian think tank described in Randolph’s tattered paperbacks.
The streets were crowded not with soul-searching poets but with men wearing studded vests and tight leather chaps. This was
not a Beat town but rather a beat-off town. Veronica had found us rooms at a residence hotel run by a caramel-colored man
whose curious Eastern religion involved bright orange robes, incessant chanting, and hand-cuffs. Randolph stayed for ten days,
returning home by bus shortly after a neighbor cornered him in the hallway, asking if he might be so kind as to enter his
penis in a blind taste test. Veronica and I left three months later, headed up to Oregon, where we hoped to make a killing
picking apples and pears.
Killing
accurately described the work, and once it was over we limped up the coast to Canada, back to California, and across the country,
stopping wherever we liked. It was the realization of my high-school fantasy, except that Veronica bore little resemblance
to a proboscis monkey. She was, however, the perfect traveling companion, poised and even-tempered. As a couple we received
rides from strangers who might not have stopped had we both been men. These were single women and truck drivers who claimed
they needed company yet rarely spoke a word. Sometimes people would invite us into their homes to spend the night on their
sofas. “The bathroom’s down the hall, and I’ve laid out some fresh towels. I’m trusting you not to steal the TV or hi-fi,
but help yourself to anything else, it’s all garbage anyway.” Other nights we slept in abandoned houses and open fields, under
bridges and lean-tos, and on one occasion, in the parking lot of a Las Vegas casino. We headed down to Texas with the sole
purpose of seeing an armadillo, then swept north, arriving in western North Carolina in mid-November. The next stop would
be Raleigh, and wanting to postpone the inevitable, I thought I might visit some college friends in Ohio. It was the longest
trip I’d ever taken alone, but having logged so many miles, I felt I was up to the challenge. Time had wisened me, I thought.
Without modeling myself on someone else, I had managed to transform myself into a reckless, heroic figure, far more noble
than the characters described in any of Ran-dolph’s trendy beatnik poems or novels. My college friends would view me as a
prophet, and my presence would cause them to question the value of their tame, predictable lives. “Tell us again about your
three days on the Mojave,” they’d ask. “Weren’t you frightened? Does rattlesnake really taste like chicken? What did you do
with the fangs?”

I hadn’t planned on lying, but it seemed a good move to embellish my stories, to pad and touch them up a bit. I stood by the
side of the road, thinking that I might as well have broken wild stallions or caught trout with my bare hands — the point
was that I had taken life head-on, with no regard for the consequences.

I got an interminable ride with a window salesman who spent six hours saying, “You just take and take, don’t you? Out there
with your thumb in the air — not a care in the world, just grabbing whatever you can get. Yes, sir, you take and take until
you’re ready to burst. But what about giving? Did you ever think of that? Of course not — you’re too busy taking, Mr. Handout,
Mr. Gimmee, Gimmee, Gimmee. Me, I’m what you call a ‘taxpayer.’ Tax, it’s a… tariff that working people have to pay so that
someone like yourself can enjoy a life of leisure. I give and I give until I’ve got nothing left! Nothing! Then I turn around
and give some more. I give and I give to all of Uncle Sam’s little takers, every last one of you, but what’s in it for me?
I’ve been thinking that maybe it’s time I get a little something in return. Yes, indeed, maybe it’s about time we try that
shoe on the other foot for a change. You, my young friend, are going to wash my car, inside and out.
And
you’re going to pay for it!”

He exited the interstate and headed for a car wash, the roof of which supported three artificial seals buffing a limousine
with their motorized fins. The man stood beside the bumper supervising me as I shampooed and waxed his car.

“That’s right, put a little muscle into it! Next I want you to empty those ashtrays and vacuum the interior, top to bottom.
Come on, speedy, let’s get cracking.”

I had no problem with the work, but his coaching style was driving me out of my mind.

“How does it feel to be giving for a change? Not much fun, is it? Hurry up now and buff those hubcaps, I want to see them
shine. Buff, boy, buff!”

I’m buffing, I’m buffing. Give it a rest already,
I thought. Every headlight represented his bald, gleaming skull, and I worked the rag as if it were a sheet of sandpaper.
I polished everything from the antenna to the license plate before he handed me my pack and drove away, tooting his horn as
he merged into the afternoon traffic. I got a ride back to the interstate and then another that landed me twenty miles beyond
Charleston, West Virginia. The sun was low and I hoped I might catch a long ride before it got dark, something that would
maybe carry me through to the state of Ohio. It was cold outside and my hands were chapped from washing that lunatic’s car,
the skin rough but my fingernails shining with wax.

I waited twenty minutes before someone slowed and stopped twenty yards down the road. It was a pickup truck advertising an
air-conditioning-and-refrigeration company. Often someone, some wise guy, would stop in the distance only to drive off laughing
after you’d exhausted yourself running to meet him. In response, I had developed a casual trot.

The man’s shirt introduced him as T. W. His fingers were soiled with grease, and the cab of the truck was littered with candy
wrappers and soda cans. I asked him what T. W. stood for, and he told me it stood for T. W. His last name, he said, started
with an
a,
“So when you put it all together, it has a nice ring to it.” He had an open, childlike face, the features set into a continuous
expression of wonder. It was as if he’d spent the last ten years in a coma and woken up to find everything new and sensational.
I told him I was a medical student completing my residency, just a few more months and I’d be graduating at the top of my
class.

“Really? Be a doctor and operate? On people? You must be some kind of smart to be a doctor. Operate on brains, you say?”

I’d said I’d been doing it for years and that it wasn’t nearly as hard as it looked. It might seem odd for a twenty-year-old
brain surgeon to be begging rides from strangers, so I told him I was hitchhiking to satisfy a bet I’d made with one of my
classmates. “Fifty dollars says I can make it from Duke University to Kent State in time for tomorrow’s frontal-lobe conference,”
I said. “It’s not that I need the money or anything, this is just something we doctors do to blow off steam.”

“Well, I’ll see to it that you win that bet,” T. W. said. He explained that he’d cut out of work early and would be more than
happy to drive me to Ohio, seeing as he was a night owl and hadn’t spent time with a doctor since his foot had been crushed
by an air-conditioner a few years back. “Look at me,” he crowed, “riding with a brain doctor!” We could get started just as
soon as he dropped some documents off with a friend. He left the interstate and drove onto a series of highways and winding
country roads before arriving at a tavern. It was a squat cinder-block building lit with beer advertisements and a neon sign
that announced the existence of a pool table. He invited me to join him, but I was underage and had not yet developed a thirst
for alcohol. “You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll just sit here and study for next week’s lobotomy.”