Severing the lifeline connecting me to society

In the Lobby of the Hotel Del Mayo

By Raymond Carver

The girl in the lobby reading a leather-bound book.
The man in the lobby using a broom.
the boy in the lobby watering plants.
The desk clerk looking at his nails.
The woman in the lobby writing a letter.
The old man in the lobby sleeping in his chair.
The fan in the lobby revolving slowly overhead.
Another hot Sunday afternoon.

Suddenly, the girl lays her finger between the pages of her book.
The man leans on his broom and looks.
The boy stops in his tracks.
The desk clerk raises his eyes and stares.
The woman quits and wakes up.
What is it?

Someone is running up from the harbor.
Someone who has the sun behind him.
Someone who is bare-chested.
Waving his arms.

It's clear something terrible has happened.
The man is running straight for the hotel.
His lips are working themselves into a scream.

Everyone in the lobby will recall their terror.
Everyone will remember this moment for the rest of their lives.

Posted by: bluelight at 00:04 | link | comments

Hitchhiking Misadventure

NOTICE:  Some names have been changed in the following blog entry to protect crack-heads.

My plan was to hitchhike from Twin Oaks in Louisa County, Virginia to the Rainbow Gathering in Arkansas.  My girlfriend at the time was a very experienced hitchhiker who spent over a year of her life hitchhiking and had no horror stories to tell.  She was unable to come with me because of work obligations, but she gave me a few simple rules to follow while hitchhiking.  Number 1 was to always trust your intuition no matter what (and never be afraid to turn down a ride if you’re sketched out).  The second one was to never hitchhike at night (even if it means pitching a tent on the side of some highway somewhere).  And the third one was to always carry mace (although, by following the first two rules, she had never come close to having to use her mace).

So, I woke up early on Friday, June 29th, to catch a ride with Ezra into Louisa.  He was doing the usual Twin Oaks morning errends, and I had to pick up a few last minute supplies (maps, instant coffee, mace, etc.) for my hitchhiking adventure.  I couldn’t find a store in Louisa that had mace in stock, but I had a pocket-knife with me, and I figured that if worse comes to worse the threat of deadly violence would be a legitimate defense.  And, given that my girlfriend had never come close to having to use mace, I considered a life-threatening situation to be an unlikely scenario.  So I wasn’t too scared.

After we dropped off some stuff at Twin Oaks, Ezra dropped me off on the intersection of Yancyville Rd. and Shannon Hill Rd.  I set my suitcase, my guitar, and my backpack on the ground and stuck my thumb out.  I waited about fifteen minutes before I got picked up by a very friendly, laid back farmer.  He drove me to I-64 and let me out at the on-ramp.  I thanked him for the ride, got my stuff out of the car, and stuck my thumb out again.

A woman and her son who looked like they came streight from an inner-city ghetto pulled over and asked me where I was going.  I said “as far west as you can take me.”  She said she could take me as far as Charlottesville, so I got in the car.  We didn’t say a word to each other the whole ride, but instead listened to blaring hip-hop music the whole time that was playing so loud that it sounded like the speakers were going to break.  This was probably the best ride I got the whole trip.  Just laying back, closing my eyes, and letting the beats float through.  She dropped me off at a gas station in Charlottesville, where I got some peanuts and a bottle of water.  I then walked to the I-64 on-ramp, and continued hitchhiking.

A pickup truck full of tatooed, buzz-cut, loud, alpha-male teenagers pulled over and asked me where I was going.  I didn’t feel good about catching a ride with them, so instead of telling them to take me as far west as they could, I just asked them if they were going to Arkansas.  They lost interest in picking me up instantly and drove off.  After a few more minutes of waiting, I got a ride with a guy named Burt who was doing business in Virginia.  He said he was going to Louisville, Kentucky, and I jumped in, grateful to have a ride that would take me this far.

It was a long, relatively stress-free ride.  We listened to classic rock, smoked cigars, and shared stories and jokes.  He is appearently one of the top underground-wiring honchos in the country; and he had just finished installing the worlds longest underground electrical cable.  I forget how long the cable was, but he showed me pictures of it, and it was a good three feet wide.  My only irritation with this man was his misogyny, but one can’t set their standards too high when accepting car rides from strangers.

By the time we were in Charlston, West Virginia, it was getting late.  And a car accedent kept us stuck in a traffic jam for two more hours after we got there.  So, for the sake of following the no-hitchhiking-at-night-rule, I asked him to drop me off at a Motel (since there were no suitable camping locations in the immediate area).  I went in and blew $60 on a room.  The desk clerk told me to keep it a secret that he let me stay there (since you appearently need to be 21 years old to get a hotel room), and I felt an immense but silent grattitude.  I went into my room, ordered pizza, watched Forest Gump on TV, and called my friends back home.  Later on, I started reading the giddeons bible out of boredom.  I had never read the bible before, and I felt that it gave me a profound understanding of where some of the more nonsensical aspects of western culture came from (man having dominion over the earth, man having dominion over women, the supposed rightousness of totalitarianism, etc.).  In retrospect, I wish I had taken the bible with me to read further.  Later on that night, I looked at my map and discovered that I was only a third of the way to Arkansas.  I didn’t want to spend two more days hitchhiking (plus three days coming back) -- I hated constantly being in the mindset of “am I safe?” and “can I trust this person?”  --  So I decided that I would hitch back to Virginia the next day.

I woke up the next morning and walked to the on-ramp to hitchhike.  But things were different in West Virginia.  People weren’t as warm there as they are in their neighbor-to-the-east.  Instead of getting friendly rides, people honked their horns at me, gave me thumbs down, and flipped me off.  I stood on the on ramp for three fucking hours before anyone even pulled over.

Her name was Stacy, and I would spend the rest of the day with her.  She pulled over and asked me what the hell I was doing.  I told her I was hitchhiking.  With slight exasperation, she told me to get in the car.  She asked me where I was going, and I told her Virginia.  She said that she wasn’t going to Virginia, but she could take me to the next exit.  My heart sank at the idea of spending another four hours in the blazing sun with people flipping me off as they passed me by.  Stacy then started preaching to me the values of earning your way and asking me why I didn’t get a job and make some money.  Deciding not to go into the whole story about how I live on a commune etc. etc., I told her that I didn’t have an education and so it was very hard for me to get a job.  She then told me about how there was a homeless shelter in Charlston she could take me to that would set me up with an education, pay for my collage, help me get a job, etc.  I figured that my chances of hitching out of Charlston were fairly limited, and a homeless shelter was an okay place to stay since I didn’t have a lot of money.  So I asked her to take me to the homeless shelter.  She turned around and we started heading towards the shelter.  Then she told me to watch my back while I’m at the shelter, because she lived there when she first came to Charlston and she got robbed several times.  Then she asked me if I had any money, and I told her I had $200.  She told me I should take a Greyhound home, and then I realized that this was probably the best option.  So I told her to take me to the Greyhound station instead of the shelter.  She told me that she couldn’t take me there right then because she had to go to work, but I could go to work with her, if I wanted.  Having no other real option, I agreed to go to work with her.

She told me, on the way there, that her job is to take care of an elderly man.  So I assumed we would be going to a hospital or nursing home of some sort.  Instead, we went to a trailer park in the middle of nowhere.  She told me that the people in the trailer park are total crack-heads, and she told me to tell them that I was her step-brother and that my parents had kicked me out of the house and I was living with her until I could find a place to go.  I didn’t know why the lie was neccecary, but I played along with it.  I decided to sit in the car while she went into the trailer, so that I would only need to do a minimal amount of acting (a skill which I am not good at).  After a few minutes of sitting in the hot car, reading my travel guide, Stacy invited me into the trailer.  I went inside and saw the man who she was taking care of (who, for the sake of this blog entry, I will call “Bob.”)  One of Bob’s arms had been amputated, and there was a dent in the side of his head that a grapefruit could fit inside of.  He was in a wheelchair, and every couple of minutes, his legs would start violently shaking (as though he was going into a seizure), at which point he would say something like “motherfucker…  this shit’s been happening all day.”  Stacy would then have to stretch out his legs and put them back into their saddles in the wheelchair.  I learned later that the cause of this seizure-like condition was an extremely severe electrical accident which had scrambled his nervous system.

Upon entering, Bob asked me “so you’re having family troubles, huh?”  I told him that this was true, and he asked me if it was trouble with my mother or trouble with my father.  I told him I didn’t really feel like talking about it, and he said he understood.  He told me he’d been fucked up his whole life; and that his dad was a drunk and his mom was a whore.  The whole scene was very depressing.

I hung out there all afternoon.  I would occasionally go back to the car, and then Stacy would always tell me to come back.  I gave up trying this after this had happened four or five times.  At one point, we all ate bologni sandwhiches and old watermelon.  At another point, we lit Bob’s trash on fire in a steel drum (as part of Stacy’s job).  At about mid afternoon, I started to worry that the Greyhound station might be closed when we got there (since it was a Saturday and we would likey get there after 5:00).  But there wasn’t anything I could do about it, so I just hoped for the best.    Towards the end of Stacy’s work shift, she asked me if I could play the guitar I brought with me.  I told her I could, and she asked me if I was any good at it.  I told her a lot of people thought I was, and she told me to bring it in and play it.  She told me it would be my payment for her helping me out.  So I went out to the car and got my guitar and brought it into the trailer.

I played a lot of old-timey country/bluegrass/folk songs (Wagon Wheel, Don’t Think Twice, Angel From Montgomery, House of the Rising Sun, etc.), and the rednecks went apeshit.  They loved it.  They told me I was going in the wrong direction, and that I should be heading to Nashville instead of Virginia.  One of them gave me a whole list of old country singers I’d never heard of, and asked me if I could play any of their stuff (and he seemed slightly taken aback that I couldn’t play any of it, and even more taken aback that I’d never even heard of any of it).  Bob told him to back off because the music was from before my time.  The residents of this trailer park liked my playing so much, that they told me that I could stay there if I didn’t find anywhere else to sleep.  I was not exited about the idea of sleeping in a trailer park with a bunch of crack-heads, but it was a better place to sleep than a homeless shelter where I would get robbed.

Finally, around 5:30 PM, we left the trailer park.  Stacy then told me that she had to run a bunch of errends before she could take me to the Greyhound station (which included getting a new fuse for her car stereo, going to AAA to pay her car insurance and buying cat food and cat litter for her cats).  We did all of that, and when we got to the station, it was, indeed, closed.  It would open again at 11:00 PM, but Stacy said that she would be asleep by that point.  She said that the soonest she could take me to the station was Monday.  I was not terrebly exited about having to stay in a trailer park full of crackheads for two days, but it seemed like the only option I had.  Stacy said she would hang out with me for the rest of the day, though.  So we went to her house to drop off the cat food and cat litter.  Afterwards, we decided to go to Taco Bell with her brother, Kyle.

I should mention now that Kyle has an extremely abrasive personality.  When he wasn’t around, Stacy told me a story about him to illustrate just how much of an asshole he is.  She said, “let me give you the definition of a douchbag.  Our cousin was in a schoolbus accident a year ago and had half of her fucking body ripped off, and do you know what this little motherfucker said?  He said ‘well bad things happen to bad people.’”

So, anyway, we go to taco bell, and Kyle gives the person taking our order at the drivethrough a long, pissed off diatribe about how they fucked up his order last time and put sour cream on the wrong thing.  Then, they gave him free food as an apology.  I found out after we left the parking lot that he made up the story about them fucking up his order just so that he could get free food, and that he does this every time he goes out to eat.  Then, we went to the auto shop again to get a belt for Stacy’s engine.  I sat outside the store, neuroticly smoking a cigar, trying to cope with Kyles presence.

When we got back to Stacy’s house, I asked her if she could just drop me off at the Greyhound station so that I could wait by myself for it to open.  She told me that she could, but that the station was just across the street from the Charlston crack district, and that people get shot there all the time.  She then told me that she could wait at the station with me, if I wanted, and I gratefully accepted her offer.  I knew at that point that I would get home.

We ate at Subway before we went to the station.  While we were eating, she told me all kinds of fucked up things about Charlston.  She said that about 40% of the population was dying from some kind of cancer.  She said that there was a power plant every ten miles, it was a huge coal mining city, and that the water was practically poison.  She also told me that Charlston is the meth capital of the world, and that there was once a little girl who opened a trash bag outside of her house out of curiosity and had her entire face burned off because the trash bag was filled with chemicals used to make crystal meth.  Even if Stacy’s stories were exaggerated, they made me very glad that I was about to take the bus home.  She told me about her drug days and how she used to be addicted to heroin and how she used to watch Pink Floyd’s The Wall on acid.  I asked her what it was like being on heroin, and she told me it was the most wonderful thing she had ever felt.  She told me she didn’t do any drugs any more, and I lied and told her I didn’t either.

We got to the station at around 10:30, and hung out in our car for awhile.  Some other people showed up and started hanging out outside of the station, waiting for their bus.  Figuring we were safe in the company of fellow travellers, me and Stacy got out of the car, took my bags out, and hung out.  I played my guitar on the sidewalk for awhile.  I met one woman there who was from my home state (Ohio).  She was travelling back there to live with her parents.

When the station opened, I said goodbye to Stacy, went into the lobby, bought my ticket to Richmond, played some arcade games, waited around, tried to call home, and got on the bus at 12:30 AM.  The bus would arrive in Richmond at 8:30 AM, so I would have to try my best to sleep on the bus.  Everyone else was tired and trying to sleep.  As the bus took off and we were all trying to sleep, the bus driver picked up his microphone and made some announcements.

“Good evening,” he said.  “You are on board a bus.  A bus which is going to Jacksonville Florada.  Fortunately, we are going to be making some stops along the way, since not all of you want to go to Jacksonville Florada.  Or, maybe you do, I don’t know.  The good news is, according to your tickets, you are all on the right bus.  The bad news is, you’ve already been on a bus, and you already know all the rules and regulations you need to follow when on board a bus.  But you’re going to have to hear them again.  And again, and again, and again, and again…  First off: no smoking on board the bus.  That includes all tabbaco products, all cigarettes, all cigars, all pipes, and all funny weeds.  Second of all: no alcoholic beverages on board the bus.  Yup, that’s right.  Uncle Sam doesn’t want you or me to have any open containers on board this bus.  So as long as we both follow this rule, neither of us should get into any trouble.  Then there’s the entire laundry list of banned and illicit substances.  Rather than go through that whole list, let me just say that, for the duration of this bus ride, we just say ‘no.’  Now, I am not the brightest person in the world and, you guessed it: that’s why I’m a bus driver.  So I would probably be the last person you would want to ask about fares or scheduling or any of that kind of thing…  One last thing.  My employer has asked me to say “thanks for riding Greyhound.”  Which makes sense, since they do want to keep that money rolling in.  And, seeing as I can’t really make a living driving an empty bus, and pay my credit card bills, my land lord, my taxes, and I guess my car insurance…  I too would like to THANK YOU FOR RIDING GREYHOUND…”  At this point, the bus was filled with a tired, scattered applause.  The driver then said, “well, gosh, I can’t believe ya’ll are still awake after all of that.  But thanks, I appreciate it.”

I slept a little on the way to Roanoke (which was where I transferred to the bus which was going to Richmond).  On the second bus, I sat next to an insane, cute, puerto rican ghetto chick named Ya Ya who let me snuggle with her almost the whole night, which turned what would have been a long, grueling bus ride into a very pleasant experience.  I probably got about three hours of sleep total, that night.  But, in spite of tiredness, I was ecstatic when I arrived in Richmond.

I had heard from my girlfriend that a few people from Acorn (the commune down the road from Twin Oaks) were going into Richmond, that day, to help with Food Not Bombs.  So I got a taxi from the bus station and asked the driver to take me to a park downtown (I did not know exactly which park Food Not Bombs would be happening at).

My taxi driver was by far the most abrasive driver I got during my hitchhiking experience.  He spent the whole ride bitching about how some other taxi driver had taken someone to another town and how it was bad business because it’s a long drive.  I couldn’t have cared less.  In addition, he took me to the club district, downtown, and he told me that he thought I had told him I wanted to go to a bar.  I suspect he just wanted to drive me around to make the meter go up.  I told him that I wanted to go to a park, NOT a bar.  So he dropped me off at a huge, beautiful park, downtown.

I got out, payed him the $20 taxi fare, and started asking people if this was the park where Food Not Bombs would be happening at.  I found out that it wasn’t, I and called my girlfriend.  I told her that I was in Richmond and I was headed to the park where Food Not Bombs would be happening at.  She told me that the people from Acorn actually decided not to go to Food Not Bombs, this week, but she would try to find someone to pick me up.

I managed to get a ride to the Food Not Bombs park by asking people if they could give me a ride.  When I got there, I realized that the park also served the purpose of being somewhat of a homeless camp (truly an ideal location for a Food Not Bombs chapter).  Interestingly enough -- because I was slightly unwashed and was carrying a backpack, a tent, and a sleeping bag -- the homeless people there thought I was one of them.  And I was welcomed by a guy named Bill.  He asked me if I just got into town, and I told him I had.  He told me that people were going to be serving us free food, later on.  He told me everything I would need to know if I wanted to stay at the homeless camp.  He told me how it closed at night so people there tended to sleep there during the day.  He told me to stay away from the middle of the park where people tended to cluster since there were a lot of shady characters who hang out there.  He told me who I could trust, who I couldn't trust, and how “different people trust different people” there.  I played along and tried to blend in.  I had some tea and a peanut butter sandwhich, at one point; both of which were handed out by some evangelical christians who were trying to convert people by feeding them.  They wouldn’t give me food unless I also took one of their evangelical phamplets.

I lounged around the homeless camp for while.  I laid out my sleeping bag, read a little, took a short nap, and turned my head when I heard a car horn honking.  Cardin from Twin Oaks was on the street to my left, waiting to pick me up.  I threw my stuff in the car, threw myself in, and cruised back to Twin Oaks with a story to tell.

Posted by: bluelight at 04:13 | link | comments (1)