I had just about decided that maybe things would go better if I responded (there weren’t too many more excuses I could make after being caught looking — three times), when suddenly he was back around on his side, and up into the cab. He yanked the door closed, turned the ignition, and pulled out onto the highway again. When I glanced at him, I saw that his jeans fly was open, as if he’d forgotten to zip it up. But after about two minutes, he just put his hand inside. “Man, this thing and me have had some good times together. I could use some good times now — what is it, seven-thirty? I don’t know, but I always get horny in the goddamn morning. I can go all goddamn night and not think about it, but come the morning, and there it is, just standin’ up and rarin’ to go.” Boldly, he pulled his cock out of his pants, looked at it, then at me. “What about you?”
There wasn’t much to it. It had real tight foreskin — and he was no more of a nail-biter than Bob was.
“I don’t know,” I said and tried to look uncomfortable. “I don’t think so.”
“Well, I sure could use a little fun.” For a moment, he even looked sheepish. “And there ain’t enough to it where it would hurt you none.”
When I didn’t say anything, he said in a harsher tone: “You know, if you don’t wanna do nothin’, I can set you down on the road right here and you can go get yourself another ride. It don’t make no never-mind to me. Is that what you want?”
I was tired; and I wasn’t sure what I wanted. “No. …”
“Okay,” he said. He drove on another minute. “You can touch it, if you want. Go on. It ain’t gonna hurt you.”
So I did. It was small and hard under my hand. We drove like that for another couple of minutes. Finally he said: “Look, I’m a little tired now. I’m gonna pull over …” which he started to do — “and go in the back of the truck and take me a rest.” On the shoulder, once more, he put on the brakes. “You can come back there with me, if you want.” In his serious inflection, it didn’t sound like an invitation so much as a warning.
We jogged, stopping, again; again he opened the door on his side, swung his legs around, and jumped down — with his little prick still jutting out of his pants, from the way it looked.
I sat in the cab ten, twenty, thirty seconds; maybe I was just being silly. Since I did find him sexy, why was I putting him and me through all this? Still, I felt like I was being bullied into something I thought I’d said I didn’t want to do — even though … well, I did want to. Finally I got out my side, leaving my guitar case leaning against the seat, and walked around to the back of the truck. Through the canvas flaps — one was pulled a little to the side — I could see where he’d spread a blanket on the ribbed van floor. He was lying on it, on his back, his pants open, massaging himself.
Morning traffic was going by fairly regularly.
I climbed in. “You know,” I actually said, “I’ve never done this before,” because I was exhausted and because I didn’t want him to think I was just a cocksucker and because it was the first time I was wholly on my own, outside New York City, in a sexual situation that for all my experience was, finally, new enough to make me retreat behind the language barrier composed of this banal lie millions of millions of women and men have spoken in such situations — to put some gap between this and all that had just been so much of my life.
“Huh?” He lifted his head and glanced at me. “Oh. Yeah.” He put his head back on the blanket.
The sex, as they say, was brief and impersonal. I didn’t come. He did. Yet the reality of it somehow brought me back to myself a bit. At one point, in his excitement, he’d reached down and grabbed my head. And I’d enjoyed it. This coyness I was affecting was, I realized, silly. When it was over, I even chuckled. “Well, that wasn’t so bad.”
“Yeah,” he said again.
We both lay on the blanket now. I was hoping he might stay there and let us sleep for an hour or so.
But in less than a minute, he sat up suddenly. “Okey doke. Let’s get goin’. Time to get back on the road.”
I followed him over the tailgate, jumped down, went to the cab, and climbed back in.
As we drove on, he said: “I’m gonna do you a favor, boy. You ain’t never gonna get to Texas if you follow the route you was talkin’ about. I done hitchhiked all over these States, and you can’t get no rides on that road — part of that road you were going on ain’t even been built yet!” (So that was what the dotted section Bob and I had wondered at, back at the bus terminal, had meant.) “Besides, it don’t go direct. You turn off here up ahead about fifteen miles, onto — ” he gave the number of another interstate — “and that’ll take you right on down through Mississippi and into Louisiana; then you go straight on and into Corpus.” Aransas Pass was just a few more miles outside Corpus Christi. “And you’ll be there.” He shook his head. “I don’t know where the hell you thought you was goin’, but if you’re goin’ to Texas, you better go like I said. If you do, you’ll be there in half the time. Goin’ the way you was, you liable to be on the road a couple of goddamn weeks!”
I wasn’t sure what to say. The way I’d been headed was one I’d picked out with Bob on the map — which Bob had claimed was one he’d hitched before. But as I looked at the map folded back in my lap, what this guy said seemed to make sense, too. … But even before I was sure what I’d best do, he pulled to a stop, pointed down a turnoff where I could see another highway, and shooed me out of his cab. “Now take the right road, and you’ll get there!”
Then his truck rattled and grumbled away in the morning haze, his canvas back flaps shaking and swinging. I stood with my guitar case in one hand, my map in the other, and a lot on my mind.
What about Bob, on the other road?
But maybe, I figured, till I got to Aransas Pass, it was pointless to worry. Another thing I decided (I squatted on the shoulder now, to stick my map, along with my notebook, back inside my case), was that if this was the sexual landscape I’d entered, and encounters were going to happen that frequently, no matter how tired I was I’d better shrug off this new-found virginity I’d been developing. (Maybe he hadn’t been doing me a favor so much as getting rid of a kid who was going to be coy about putting out. I knew he had a couple of hundred miles to go along my original route; and he wouldn’t have been that bad to travel with. …) I walked a few feet down the feed-on ramp, and held out my thumb.
The ride pattern for cross-country hitchhiking has always been pretty much the same: three, five, seven rides of three, five, twelve miles before you catch a good one of forty, sixty, ninety miles. Sometimes you even get two good ones in a row — then you start all over.
There were no other sexual propositions till seven rides and three hundred miles later: it was another Chrysler, and as I ran up to the open door, for a moment I wondered if I’d find Bob inside. But this one was dark blue. It was driven by a thin balding guy in his late thirties with glasses, who wore pale blue slacks and an open collar that flapped around his neck. He said he was a salesman, but whatever he sold (boats? houses? private airplanes?) was too big to fit in his car. About ten minutes along into the trip he started in on the anecdotes about his own hitchhiking days: “… I was back up in the sleeper, see — we were somewhere in South Carolina and it was about nine o’clock at night, an’ I was just beat — but the next thing I knew he’d stopped for some other hitchhiker. Well, we weren’t moving at all. So I looked out the sleeper curtain, and I’m damned if that truckdriver hadn’t picked up this nigger kid and had his pants down around his knees and was suckin’ on his dick — a piece of meat on that nigger, too! Well, I’m watchin’ from the sleeper, and don’t you know it’s gettin’ me all hot and horny? So — ” he glanced over at me. “You look like you could have some colored blood in you, too, huh?”