I nodded. “I’m Negro.”
“Oh. Well, you know, I didn’t mean anything by callin’ him a nigger. Negro. This Negro boy. Well, anyway, there he is, suckin’ this Negro kid off in the front seat, and there I am, peekin’ out of the sleeper curtain, pullin’ on my own peter somethin’ fierce — waitin’ for him to finish with the colored boy. Didn’t come — ’cause I wanted that cocksucker to get to work on me.” He rubbed his crotch, laughed, and looked at me. “Know what I mean? And he does, too. Well, I tell you, I like my pussy. But ever since that night, I’ll be honest with you — ” again he rubbed between his legs — “I sure like to get my …”
But I fell asleep amidst his ramblings.
A couple of times, while I drowsed in the humming car and afternoon clouds as tan as saltwater taffy stretched across the windshield between streaks of gold, he reached around the guitar case between us, and I felt him grope me.
That was all.
And I was too tired to respond.
For many years a strangely vivid memory would return to me: in some medium sized city, I was coming down wide steps into an ancient lobby, holding the iron rail. The whole hall — perhaps it was a YMCA — was painted an enameled turquoise. There was maroon linoleum on the floor. From where I stood on the steps, I could see the wooden pigeonholes for mail behind the registration desk. On the counter were a black telephone and a tarnished call bell, of the sort whose top button you hit with your palm. Across the tiled foyer, the elevator stood at the first floor with only a gate over the door. Inside, I knew (for I had already ridden in it up to my room), it had a large rheostat and hand lever. A black man in dark green, threadbare livery was both bellboy and operator. At the doorway, the light spilled out on the night street (I remembered it from when I came in) through two narrow stained glass windows.
I had no idea of the year, the situation, or any context for the memory — certainly no picture of the room I’d rented. Or of who had brought me there or how I had chosen the place.
I still don’t know the city.
Indeed, the memory’s unfixed status made me several times wonder if it wasn’t a dream.
During those same years, however, if you asked me whether I had stayed in a hotel during any of my hitchhiking trip to Texas, I would have said “No”—just as I would have said, “My father died in 1958 when I was seventeen. …” But the actual transcription of this section has fixed that loose and floating image to this trip — doubtless to the second night of it, too.
There was no sudden and revelatory addition linking it by material and logic to something else from the same time. This awareness came, rather, as a growing conviction, a retrieval of memories I’d occasionally had about it, a solidifying certainty that, once in place, it is impossible for me to deny as any sudden and climactic knowledge would have been. There is no way to confirm such a shift in the status of a memory. But yesterday I would have said I did not know where this memory trace comes from. Today, I am equally sure I do.
At this point, I can reconstruct at least this much context: the night in the bus depot with Bob had left me pretty tired — as had the actual hitchhiking, and I’d finally decided to spend six or seven dollars of my money on a room for the night. In true hustler fashion, when he hitchhiked, Bob had told me, he never stayed in hotels or motels unless someone else put him up. I was feeling guilty about my decision and had resolved not to mention it to him.
He was on an entirely different road.
Probably I never did. But by cutting it out of my own repertoire of things to say about the trip, I began to cut it loose from language and history, so that a year later it was an unanchored fragment: and I had taken a small, self-protective lie of omission and forgotten it was not the truth. Only bits of the visual image remained on the surface, to float and drift (wasn’t it from my later Europe trip? or from some subsequent stopover at an early science fiction convention?) till I’d actually forgotten where it belonged.
Such gains in local knowledge of the stations of our lives are among the prizes a self-narration such as this can win. (And doesn’t that narration lose us as many such fragment sensations and images forever …?) But there are other memories that, for me, have always been part of the journey:
For three hours I sat in the sun at the highway edge with a hot field of grain aroar with crickets around me, while all of six cars drove by. On the ground, cross-legged, beside my guitar, I wrote out a few journal pages in my notebook. I reread two Sturgeon stories — but not, yet, “A Way of Thinking.” Then I took my shirt off, sat on the case, and strummed and plucked for maybe fifteen minutes.
But it was too hot.
Squinting, squatting, I put the guitar away, stood up, and stuck out my thumb again.
The seventh car veered over to the road’s edge and opened its door.
For another hour (though I don’t know whether that hour was before or after my wait in the sun) I looked out some truck or car window at the passing road bank, matted with gray and green grasses, scrub and pine fringing its top. The ground had seared in the heat, with great scabs showing through every few yards of brick red Georgia earth.
Near midnight, between a beach and a highway, I walked through the outskirts of Biloxi, Mississippi, stepping over branches scattered by a hurricane from the week before, the yellow neon from the carnival rides that comprised this section of town swinging above me, around me, lighting the sand, the macadam, my outstretched thumb, while cars drove past in the dark.
And at three-thirty in the morning, the driver of the small pickup reached over, shook me awake by the shoulder, and said, “Here you go, fella.”
“Oh … yeah.” I blinked. “Thanks.” Reaching down, I got my case and climbed out into the deserted suburban night, at some intersection in Shreveport, Louisiana.
“You walk right down that way, ’bout three, four blocks. Like I said — ” in his cap, the fat man leaned over to tell me through the half-open window — “you’ll be at the highway again.”
Then, the single moving vehicle on the street, his truck pulled away while his red rear lights diminished in the black.
Looking up at the wires crossing on the night, with the traffic light (turning now from green to red) hanging from the middle, I stood, centered in the silent street, the heavy part of my guitar case on the asphalt, the neck balanced under my hand. Dark houses stood on my left, on my right. I could taste the mucus that filmed my mouth. My face felt like some metallic plate instead of bone and flesh and muscle. Gathered in a crease of my neck during the last hour of head-hanging sleep, sweat dried in the dark.
What, I wondered, am I going to do at three-thirty in the morning in Shreveport —?
Then it began to rain — gently, insistently, the drops a-tick and a-glitter on the blacktop under the intersection lights, in the leaves on the corner trees, peppering my face, my arms, my glasses.
At three-thirty.
In Shreveport.
I lifted my guitar case and started down the street I’d been pointed along. It was the poorest of the four joining at the crossroads — there, indeed, the houses had been rather elegant.
Ahead, I could see the highway under a phone pole lamp. The rain flickered beneath the tin shade’s edge. During the five minutes I walked toward it, no car went by.