I walked down the tile flooring beside the banister with its thin spokes, turned, and knocked on Bob’s and Joanne’s door.
There was no answer.
Sunlight through the window at the hall’s end lay a coppery trapezoid over the gray and maroon tile floor and put a grid of thin shadows on the stairwell’s yellow wall — which dulled to gray even as I waited, when some clouds pulled across the sky.
I put the guitar case down and knocked again.
Forty seconds later, I heard the lock turn. Joanne opened the door a crack, holding together a housedress that doubled as a robe. Her black hair was messy. She looked very sleepy.
“Bob ready?” I asked.
“He ain’t awake yet,” she said.
“Okay,” I grinned. “I’ll come back later.”
She nodded hurriedly, then closed the door.
I went back to my apartment.
“What’s the matter?” Marilyn asked. She still sat with a half cup of coffee.
“Himself doesn’t seem to be up yet.”
“Oh.” So we sat around, talking some more, every once in a while going through the stillnesses that punctuate a parting conversation — when the parting, scheduled at one time, is now delayed longer and longer.
Bob’s eventual arrival — grinning and yawning — around eight-thirty is much less clear in memory, and the actual leave-taking (from Marilyn, from Joanne) a blank.
From here on, I’m going to try an experiment. Up till now, little in this account has been truly exhaustive, but just to see what happens, I’m going to try to include every memory I have of the hitchhiking trip. As experiments go, I doubt it begins very well, because the first leg of it is particularly dim. All I am really sure of is that Bob took nothing except the jeans he was wearing, the shirt and shoes he had on, and his denim jacket.
I know we walked across town together, me carrying my guitar case. Somewhere outside the PATH train entrance on Sixth Avenue, Bob or I looked up and commented that the overcast had thickened. It was probably going to rain.
I had a little more than fifty dollars. Bob had a little less.
On the PATH train we rode over to Journal Square. Sometime later, we wandered out to some road, and I recall standing on an arch of highway, with Bob, under a light drizzle, looking over a grim, industrial landscape, while cars whizzed and rattled behind us. The road’s shoulder wasn’t wide enough to let them stop, even if they wanted to. Probably because of the rain, we ended up taking a bus as far as Washington.
I sat, looking out the window, or looking down at our two denimed legs, Bob’s and mine, now touching, now half an inch apart, now touching again.
Standing outside the Washington depot that night, looking at the sexual traffic, gay and straight, moving around us through green and red neon from a bar across the street, Bob nudged me: “We could probably make some money around here.”
“Go ahead if you want.” I pulled the case up against my side. “I’m going in and sit down.”
After wandering around a little more, though, we stayed there on the benches, drowsing against one another’s shoulders, pretty much all night. Toward sunrise, I got into a conversation with some guy who said he’d give us a ride out to the highway. He wore glasses, a rumpled gray suit, and he accompanied the ride with a lecture on how hard it was for two guys to hitch together. Few people would chance taking a pair of men. We’d do better to split up.
It made sense.
I’d taken a roadmap from a basket on the counter at the bus station. (Bob said he didn’t need one. “You just keep south till you’re about to hit Florida. Then you turn right and go west.”)
But now we mapped out a general route, down the east coast and across to Texas. Twenty minutes later, out on the sunny morning highway, Bob said: “Okay, I’m gonna go up about a hundred yards. You stick your thumb out here. We’ll see what happens.” He sprinted up the road, now and again putting out his hand when a car passed.
He’d only gotten about thirty yards on when a green Chrysler pulled over in front of him. Its roadside door swung open.
Bob grinned back at me, gave me a thumbs up, ran on and ducked in. The door closed. The Chrysler pulled out into the traffic … and was gone.
I was alone on the road, some hundreds of miles away from my home and of thousand more from anywhere I wanted to go.
I turned to the road, took a deep breath, and stuck out my thumb.
All my narrative instincts tell me that, if the ride I got about six minutes later were my third, or my fifth, the tale would flow much smoother. But that would violate the nature of the experiment I’m attempting here. And, however awkwardly it fits into the tale, it really was the first ride I got, once Bob left.
It was a very long six minutes later (I was ready for it to be an hour or two …), when an old blue truck with canvas roped down over the sides of its van pulled up ahead of me. The cab door swung out. I ran up the shoulder, pushed my guitar case in, then pulled myself up. A hand gripped my arm to steady me — “There you go. Close the door. Where’re you headin’?”
“South,” I said. “Texas, finally. But I’ll go as far as you’re driving.”
In his late twenties or early thirties, wearing a blue short-sleeved checked shirt pretty much open over a bald chest, the driver was kind of serious-looking. “I’m goin’ pretty far. Let’s see how it goes.”
I closed the door. As he started up, the smile he gave me took a moment to come out, then left very fast. He looked back out the windshield and hauled on the wheel. “You got enough room there?”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
We began to bounce on down the road, my guitar case shaking against my shin.
After three minutes talking about routes, roads, and rides, though, he switched gears on the truck and the conversation in the same ten seconds, veering off into an obscene account of how horny he was and had been on the trip, with much groping of his crotch.
Probably because he looked so sober, or maybe just because I wasn’t expecting it, it took me another minute to realize this was a come-on. The odd thing was that I thought the guy was pretty attractive, and in any other situation would have been happy to have sex with him. Bob had alerted me that sex was rampant on the road. But I hadn’t been ready for it to intrude on my first ride. Also, I’d only gotten maybe two hours’ sleep in the Washington bus depot. But the guy was coming on pretty strong. “Man, I tell you, I like my pussy. I got an ol’ lady waitin’ for me in Tennessee and we’re as good as married. But I’ll be up front with you — ” He hefted his crotch again — “I sure like to get my dick sucked, too. You like gettin’ sucked off?”
“I don’t know.” For some reason I decided to say: “I never did anything like that.”
“I used to have one ol’ cocksucker,” he went on, “worked with a goddamned circus — used to travel all up and down the east coast. Didn’t have no teeth — but that just made it better. Know what I mean? And, I’ll tell you, that man sucked dick like he wanted you to come back. I come back, too. We was real good friends, actually. I followed that goddamned circus around for three years.” He looked over. “Christ, I gotta take myself a wicked piss.” As he pulled the truck over, he released the clutch and moved his worn boot to stamp the break pedal; we both jogged forward, then back. “What about you?”
“Um,” I said. “No.”
“See you in a second.” He opened the door on his side, dropped down to walk around the front of the cab to my side, where, presumably, he took his leak. He stayed there a good two and a half minutes. The three times I glanced down into the right hand mirror, he was looking directly up at me, while he stood there, fingering himself, waiting for me.