SORE THUMBS
Mayer, Milton
Sore Thumbs BY MILTON MAYER Hitchhikers May Be Escaping Convicts —Official state road sign on lnterstate-40 west of Oklahoma City The desert was dusty then; U.S. 66 (buried beneath lnterstate-40...
...The occasional car was a drummer's or a produce farmer's or an emigrant family's Model T; nary a transcontinental tourist, not in July of 1925...
...A night in the desert was a night walking U.S...
...I need to give them a ride...
...With public transportation worse and increasingly expensive, motorists have been picking up hitchhikers less and less since the late 1960s, for good reasons, bad reasons, or none...
...In my shoe, too, besides my $9,1 carried a set (two sets, in two shoes) of bunioned blisters acquired walking maybe a quarter of the way from Chicago, for the hitchhiker walked manfully along and never sat...
...66 (buried beneath lnterstate-40 now) was unpaved...
...So I had pork and beans and watermelon and we drove, taking turns, all night, making the section point of San Bernardino ("San Berdoo," the railroaders and the hoboes called it) around noon and Los Angeles before supper...
...We're afraid to be secreted with a stranger, afraid of his knife or his gun...
...One day in slow traffic, with the car windows down, I passed a clean-cut young man and indicated that I was turning off, and he said, "Fuck you...
...He seemed to catch the hesitation...
...I came back...
...Fifty years later cars went too fast to enable the motorist to size up the hitchhiker...
...Hitchhikers May Be Escaping Convicts For years Ms...
...the blacktop would have been too hot on the soles of the hitchhiker's shoes...
...said the driver...
...The Hudson came up to me and stopped...
...66) seems to figure that the least he can do to repay you is to play you some chin music...
...At my age Socrates was daring death to come and get him and here am I afraid of the stranger behind me on the sidewalk, in front of me On the road...
...But I owed, and owe, them each a hitch, and how am I to repay them...
...I tell myself, me and my machismo, that I'm afraid for Ms...
...Not any more...
...I said, "Yes, sir," and he said, "You'd better have something to eat...
...There's a fellow named Boyd who does a syndicated column of well-waddaya-know items, and he had one recently that read: "A police check of hitchhikers revealed 84 out of 100 had criminal records...
...In Tennessee a while ago a car was pulled up on the no-parking shoulder of the Interstate with two young men outside it, one fooling around in the trunk, the other sitting on a dismounted tire and waving for help...
...The car came close, a heavy car (a Hudson Super-Six Sedan, as it turned out) doing a good thirty miles an hour...
...That fellow in the Hudson Super-Six who took me across pretty close to five hundred miles of desert into L. A.—how am I to repay him...
...You just stay on the road...
...But I don't...
...To help them...
...Baby Mayer and I picked up hitchhikers nearly always, and always if they appeared to be clean-cut college boys as I'd once appeared...
...He opened the door and said howdy, or, likelier, hello, and I said, "Thanks, mister," and got in...
...We told ourselves (or I told myself) that we were tired of having to keep up casual conversation...
...Baby won't let me drive—or read manuscripts or magazines...
...Why, by picking up hitchhikers...
...there's so little time to talk at home and so much to talk about...
...The driver paid for more food at the Harvey Houses in Barstow and San Berdoo, and when he said, in Los Angeles, "This is as far as I go," and I said, "Thank you very much," he said, "Thanks for helping drive," and that was all...
...We have a tape deck in the car, with tapes of His and Hers music, and sometimes we play them...
...Two or three hours later we came into Needles...
...And maybe they're on dope and maybe they don't have any good reason for being on the road instead of in school or at work...
...he said, "It's a straight road all the way...
...Only four were what lawmen called clean...
...But I don't pick them up when I'm alone, except for a kid or two from the local junior college, I tell myself that I haven't the time, that I'm going too fast to stop, that I'm not going far enough to do them any good...
...You want to drive on through with me...
...Want something to eat...
...Keep driving...
...The desert in western Arizona was dusty and hot, and the occasional car carried a couple of gallon cans of radiator water...
...I had (and have) no idea who he was, or who were the dozens of other people, many of them farmers in Fords, who gave me long and short (mostly short) rides that summer through Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico...
...Baby...
...Hesitant, and with good reason to be, I said I did...
...In this way he stood a better chance of getting a hitch, since his walking, with a slight limp, was a sign to the approaching motorist that here was a clean-cut college boy with true grit who was going to get to California or bust...
...So we sat at the lunch counter under the ceiling fan—the dining room was closed between trains—and he said, "Do you know how to drive...
...I was the hitchhiker...
...I said, "To the Coast...
...The driver was a middle-aged man alone, with his sample cases in the back seat...
...We're afraid of strange men, the way little girls are told by their mothers to be...
...I'll pay, as long as you're helping drive...
...Keep walking...
...Some of them rode with us enormous distances...
...Some of them as good as moved in on us...
...66 in 1925— "or AWOL servicemen...
...66, needed to be fed and were short of the ready...
...The evening was drawing in, somewhere around Seligman, Arizona, with nothing to be seen for miles and miles and miles of mesquite and chaparral, never a shanty, never a fence...
...The newspapers are full of high crimes committed sometimes by the hikers and sometimes by the people who pick them up...
...Stay away from strange men, in the nineteen hundred eighty-second year of the Christian era...
...carrying, besides, $9 in my burning shoe and an Ingersoll timepiece with the tiny faces (cut from the group photographs in the Englewood High School yearbook) of Greta Esk, Roselle Moses, Marjorie Gibson, Carolyn Teetzel, and Marcella Einarson pasted on the dial at 12, 3, 6, and 9 and (this was Marjorie) at the pivot on the center of the face...
...He asked me where I was going...
...I'm not...
...In a VW microbus we picked up seven or eight of them at once in Ostrava, in Moravia, and took them to Prague...
...The roadside uniform of what seemed to be the whole generation of middle-class young whites—jeans, boots, guitar, sometimes a dog, sometimes even a cat—has long since lost guilty enchantment for the elderly...
...But the end result of that little item, like the road sign on 1-40, is to frighten more people away from the stranger, especially the young stranger (or the old stranger who has the look on the road of an old con...
...The whole Mojave desert Milton Mayer is The Progressive's roving editor...
...But a couple of hours after the hot sun goes down in the desert and the light goes from gold to pink to red 1o purple to night, the desert gets cold, cold at night in 1925, and the cold-blooded snakes move around in the dark...
...And many is the time, on the long hauls, when we want to talk a little, or a lot...
...He pulled up in front of the Harvey House at the station—it was that, along the Santa Fe trail, or the Chinaman's, and the Chinaman had no ceiling fan...
...In the midst of the random hostility that overspreads the land the care of the stranger waxes cold...
...None of those people who gave me a lift over all those years ever said much, if anything, to me...
...A few years ago I had to get from Modesto to Monterey, California, across the state, and there was no handy transport, and I hitchhiked again, this time a clean-cut old college professor, and a hundred or a thousand cars went whizzing by me and a Chicano farmer picked me up in an old truck...
...the desert supported snakes (on what...
...So by and by we quit picking up hitchhikers, especially on long trips when we'd be in danger of being stuck with one all the way from, say, Seligman into, say, L.A...
...So I speed away from the drummer who picked me up in the Super-Six, from the farmer in the Tin Lizzie going out of Rolla, Missouri, who didn't even ask me where I was going and who moved his wife and kids into a pile to make room for the clean-cut young fellow with the briefcase...
...I don't believe Brother Boyd (or his police check, which comes to the same thing...
...would be fenced away from 1-40 fifty years or so later, the whole desert owned by somebody...
...The adventurer went slower, but he kept walking...
...He said nothing, and I said nothing...
...The hikers aren't, most of them, that clean-cut any more, and they sit with a tired thumb aloft...
...He said, "Come on in...
...The sorrows that were poisoning my life had become unbearable and I had run away from home to bum to California and ship out to China and never come back...
...It was just getting dark...
...And then, far behind him, the miragelike murmur of a motor car, audible in the high desert long before its dust was visible...
...So I pass in my car, ashamed and making the usually false gesture to indicate that the car is full or we're turning off soon...
...One of them rode with us from Linz, in Austria, to Athens, and two weeks later from Athens to Switzerland...
...and the snakes came slithering out in the belated cool of the evening...
...your grateful rider (less sensitive than I was that afternoon on U.S...
...I was the intrepid hitchhiker, age fifteen, striking out for freedom, carrying my poor persecuted belongings in a briefcase on which I'd pasted a University of Chicago paper pennant so that passing motorists would take me for a clean-cut college boy (I was neither...
...I pass them by in my need...
...Or moving on, looking for work...
...But it isn't because we don't enjoy the chin music that we quit taking them...
...So our clean-cut young adventurer went venturing on, with his blistered bunions burning...
...Oh, we gave a lot of people a lot of rides—but not as many as we'd got...
...I'm afraid of the stranger within the gate—him whom my religion told me to receive...
...Years later, too, when I hitchhiked from Chicago to Alabama to see my girl, I never learned the identity of my benefactors...
...I lied and said, "No, thanks, but I'll wait for you...
...We passed them by, and a little later another car was pulled off on the shoulder, its hood up, and a man and a woman standing outside it, and we passed them by too, and a minute later we passed a car backing up with two big men in it to help the stranded couple...
...It's because we're afraid of them...
...The sun, man, that sun, going down without taking the heat away with it, and a long way to walk to Seligman and nothing there when you got there, and nothing for another seventy-five miles after that but Kingman, and then the muddy Colorado, low in its banks, and California and then Needles, the Santa Fe section point, and nothing for 150 miles beyond Needles, nothing at all but the Santa Fe's single track (which was the only reason there was any Seligman, Kingman, Needles) and the beautiful adobe Fred Harvey House oases at the town stations, where the passengers lolled and bought Navajo jewelry and blankets and kachina dolls from the Indians while the locomotive was coaled and watered and the crew changed...
...Twelve others were juvenile runaways"—like me on U.S...
...The slower you walked (but kept walking), the better an opportunity the approaching motorist has to size you up...
...It's dark and it's cold at night in 1982...
...And a good thing...
...I prefer to look out the window—Ms...
...In 1925 hitchhikers were not as tired as they are now...
...so fast that even if the motorist thought of stopping he'd be so far ahead of the hitchhiker by the time he could stop that he'd give up the impulse to...
...And then, five years or so back, we just stopped doing it...
...Some of them, like me on U.S...
Vol. 46 • August 1982 • No. 8
