Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America (31 page)

I feel so comfortable with Laura and Mike, even the dog. We pull off at Colby, Kansas, and have lunch at Montana Mike’s. God, what a town. The wind is still howling. What could life possibly be like here in the dead of winter? We sit in a booth and Mike and I order a big, fattening meal while Laura is more health conscious in her choice. I use the men’s room (no graffiti, dammit) and pass an empty video-game room. Such a Nan Goldin “art” shot. So sad, so lonely, so empty of fun. I try to imagine the bored, angry teens of this town
in
this pitiful room and shudder at the potential hormonal violence this clubhouse from hell might provoke. I insist on paying for lunch.

We keep going. God, this is such a great ride! My new family, Laura and Mike. They decide they’ll stay in a motel in Denver, too, rather than keep going to their state park, where they actually aren’t sure where they’ll be camping. Since The Corvette Kid is picking me up, it doesn’t matter to me about exit or entrance ramps, so we all can stay at the same place.

We cross into Colorado. Yay! Mountain time! I’ve made it to the West. It doesn’t look much different from Kansas for a while, though, still sparse. Scary little towns I’d probably get stuck in if I didn’t already have a ride. We even pull off and scope out the motels on the outskirts in Limon, Colorado, but they seem spookily uninviting. We don’t check in.

Nearer Denver it starts to look just like every other city does—same chain shops and motels—but we don’t care, we just need a room at the inn. We pull off and pick a place, the La Quinta Inn, 4460 Peoria Street, which is in the city limits but near the airport. We unload and Laura hides the dog in one of her bags to sneak him in. I know this is Mike and Laura’s vacation, so I tell them, “Farewell, my new friends. I’m going to let you have a romantic dinner alone.” We ask a stranger to snap our group photo on our respective cell phones and he does happily. I know my undercover travel adventure is still safe when he whispers to Laura, “Is that guy homeless?” Laura laughs and then, as we go inside, asks me, “Were we the most boring people to pick you up?” I honestly answer, “Are you kidding? You were perfect!” And they are. Absolutely, undeniably marvelous people who give me faith in the kindness of strangers
and
the gifted new Saint Christopher medal on my key ring. They rescued a dog
and
me.

REAL RIDE NUMBER EIGHTEEN

CORVETTE KID AGAIN

I check into my room and text The Corvette Kid the exact address of the hotel. He texts back that his own car has a GPS so he can easily find the location and he’ll probably sleep before he continues driving. I answer back like a stern dad, “You should.” I’ve got time on my hands: maybe I’ll do laundry, wash those dingy underpants I haven’t thrown away. I go down to the desk and ask if there’s a Laundromat in the hotel. “Yes,” the girl behind the counter says, surprising me; I didn’t know these kinds of places had washers and dryers available. I go up to where she instructed me and see it’s just one room with nothing in it but a washer and a dryer. No change machine. No soap. I race back down and she gives me both and I stomp back up, throw in my underpants and a few T-shirts, sprinkle on the soap, and put in quarters, but the machine jams. Now what? All my pitiful homeless clothes are covered with detergent. I go all the way back down and tell her, and she accompanies me back up with a paper clip. She attempts to jam the stack of quarters through but is unsuccessful, goes back downstairs while I wait, and finally returns with a credit card, which she uses like a professional lock picker, and presto, the coins drop and the machine starts working. I thank her and figure it’s safe to leave my clothes in the wash cycle even though I had already fantasized stealing somebody else’s laundry in one of the “good ride” chapters in the book. Reality is never as exciting as fiction.

Back in my room, which is okay, better lighting than Holiday Inn but not as good as Days Inn, I try to kill time but get bored and plod back up to the laundry room. This is the exact opposite of glamour. Naturally, the clothes are still sloshing around, so I just wait until they’re done. Alone. I don’t use dryers because my T-shirts will shrink, but they’ll never dry hanging in my bathroom overnight, so I toss them in with my clean underpants and hope for the best.

I wonder if The Corvette Kid pulled over to sleep. Do I pay for a separate room for him or does he just take the other bed in my room? I have no idea what he expects. If I don’t offer to pay for the room, does it look as if I’m coming on to him? Or just an innocent sleepover? Who knows, I think, as I gather my still slightly wet T-shirts and boxers and head back to my room.

It’s Saturday night in Denver! I’m going out. I go online and find out where
The Dictator
is playing. It just opened today all over America and I purposely didn’t read the reviews because I want to see this Sacha Baron Cohen movie first and make up my own mind. The girl at the desk tells me which theater is nearest. At first I think maybe I’ll hitchhike
there
, too, but then internally yell at myself, come on! You’re off work tonight! This isn’t part of your trip, take a cab! I do. It’s not far. I feel so alien in the backseat of a taxi. Am I now just a bourgeois passenger from the middle class, too dim-witted to hustle a free ride?

The theater is located in some giant outdoor shopping center filled with young people. I am shocked how many fat teenagers I see. Really fat! Four hundred pounds fat. All with giant plates of alarmingly unhealthy food piled in front of them in outdoor cafés. I’m early, as always, so I search around for a more model-friendly type of eating establishment. I settle on the Euro Café and have a Mediterranean veggie roll and a bottled water. It is screamingly average, and although I am one of the few diners, the service is abysmal. Maybe they don’t like thin people.

I go into the movie theater and am happy to see it is crowded. I take a seat on the aisle, and three presumably gay gentlemen pass me taking their seats and recognize me and I say hi back. I like the movie. It’s so odd to be doing anything besides standing beside the highway, though, so I’m a bit uneasy throughout. As I file out afterward, I run into the gay guys again and one asks me why I’m in Denver, and I tell him I’m hitchhiking my way across the country. He says, “Well, do you want a ride back to your hotel, then?” and I say, “Yes,” with great enthusiasm because technically I’m hitchhiking again, aren’t I?

I tell the guys that I am staying at La Quinta Inn nearby, and the driver says he knows where that is. On the way I discover one of my hosts owns a drive-in movie theater in Kansas. We talk about the isolation living in those tiny towns, and he fills me in on how tornadoes, some recently, had devastated many of the same places I had just driven through today.

As he pulls up to La Quinta Inn to drop me off, I am momentarily confused. This doesn’t look familiar, but what do I know? I’m in a different motel every night and they all blend together. “I hope this is the right one,” I joke as I get out, unsure. “Well, if it’s not, you can always hitchhike,” the drive-in owner wisecracks innocently. I get out. Fuck! It is the wrong one! I check my hotel-key-folder address, and sure enough, they dropped me off at a different La Quinta Inn. I go inside in complete alarm and the desk clerk calms me down. The one I’m staying in isn’t that far away, and he’ll get the guy that drives the airport-hotel courtesy van to give me a ride back. I am greatly relieved and, of course, give the nice driver a tip for his kindness.

Imagine my surprise when I play my phone messages and hear The Corvette Kid’s already here! He couldn’t possibly have slept! I’m amazed he caught up to me this quickly. “Come up to my room,” I text. “Damn! I already got a room,” he replies. Well, that settles that. He texts he’s “going to take a shower first.”

I e-mail Susan that The Corvette Kid “is here!” “A new chapter—so bizarre,” she responds, “there’s definitely something strange about his race across the country. He may be one of those Log Cabin Republicans. The adventure continues,” Susan signs off.

“Okay, now I feel better,” The Corvette Kid texts again, freshly showered. “I could drive another 2000 miles.” “Ah, youth,” I text back. “Did you eat yet?” he asks. “Yes, but I’ll go with you if you’re hungry,” I reply. “I’ll be right down,” he answers. Suddenly I think, “Suppose he’s not here at all? Suppose all these texts have been a scam? Suppose no one comes down? No one knocks on the door? He could be laughing at me all the way from Maryland!”

But no, The Corvette Kid delivers. He’s here, dressed as wholesome as ever in his khaki shorts, T-shirt, and running shoes, but I can tell he’s unsure if his “look” is cool enough for the road. It is, even if he is now driving a red Kia Sorento. I am happy to see him. We go out to look for something to eat but everything is closed this late. We drive around as if we were casing fast-food joints to rob until we finally settle for an open 7-Eleven and he buys the most unappetizing prewrapped sandwich I’ve ever seen. I can see he’s excited to be beginning the next leg of our crazy trip and so am I, but I tell him he must be exhausted. He agrees, and I add that he should sleep as late as he can tomorrow morning. Back at the hotel we split up to go to our separate rooms and I tell him, “You could have slept in the other bed without paying for your room. I’m not going to attack you—I’m too tired.” He laughs out loud and goes up toward his new accommodations.

I’m actually glad we have separate rooms. When was the last time I shared a motel room and wasn’t sleeping with the person? Almost never. I decide that I’m going to just go as far as Reno with him, then get out for other rides and give him the keys to my apartment in San Francisco and tell him to drive there and wait for me. He’s safe. I can tell.

Even though we are supposed to be sleeping late, I wake up at 5:30 a.m. I’m so relieved I don’t have to go outside and beg a ride. I see online on the
Deadline Hollywood
website news alert that Donna Summer has died. It’s hard to care about celebrity news from a motel that doesn’t even carry
USA Today
. I feel lazy just lolling around the motel room, waiting for The Corvette Kid to wake up. I take a bath and then panic when I realize I am out of La Mer cream! If ever I needed this pricey moisturizer, it’s now. I look in the mirror and see I have “hitchhiker face.” Almost none of these motels ever offer complimentary body lotions. This one does, thank God, and I pocket it. Reduced to swiping cheap toiletries, all in the name of literature.

It’s 10:00 a.m. and The Corvette Kid is ready to go. He’s freshly scrubbed, looks rested, and seems even more willing to take on his new role as my on-the-road sidekick. I fill up the tank and we’re off. As soon as we get out of Denver, the landscape changes. The Rockies are suddenly so scary and beautiful. The Corvette Kid laughs and admits he thought the Rockies were just one mountain we’d go over. We go through ski resorts with amazing vistas, and as excited as I am to see this kind of scenery again after forty years, it is even more fun to see it through The Corvette Kid’s eyes—especially when he’s missing in action from his parents’ home.

We stop at a rest area and ask other tourists to take our picture. I get recognized and sign autographs. If I had been hitching, I bet it would have been easier to get picked up in Colorado than elsewhere. I like this state. We keep going, laughing, comparing stories about his life in a small town and mine as a filth elder. I immediately feel guilty for imagining anything gay about The Corvette Kid. He’s just a curious guy and somehow we’re suddenly in a book together. Could life be any better than this?

We pull off in Grand Junction, Colorado, and make the mistake of having lunch in Applebee’s. It’s Sunday at one-thirty in the afternoon and the eatery is packed with families and elderly people after church. The food is horrible and I tell The Kid that this gets the prize as the worst chain restaurant I’ve eaten in on the trip so far. I visit the men’s room and am shocked to see it’s filthy. Middle America never looked so unappealing. We drive off and pass a middle-aged male hitchhiker, the first one I’ve seen this trip. We don’t pick him up. I know, I know.

As soon as we drive across the Utah border, there is nothing. Beautiful nothing. Suddenly, the
CHECK ENGINE
light comes on. If we break down here, we are incredibly screwed. It is hot as hell. No one is around. I have never even seen a cop. We just pretend that it’s not on. Gas stations are few and very far between; as in, there aren’t any. The Kid’s tank is getting low. Now
that
warning light comes on, too. Check engine
and
no gas. I picture the vultures circling overhead. The Kid suddenly points happily to a sign announcing a gas station coming up. We pull over with great relief to a Shell station in Thompson Springs, Utah. Gas is $4.14 a gallon! It was $3.19 in Kansas, but I guess they’ve got you by the balls here. There’s not another one within hundreds of miles, so what are you gonna do, not pay? The Kid opens the hood to check the engine just as his vehicle has ordered him to do, but I can tell he’s no gearhead. “The oil seems okay,” he says, perplexed. Don’t ask me! I don’t even know how to open the hood of my car! We pull out and the
CHECK ENGINE
light is still on. We try not to talk about it.

Route 70 West ends in about an hour, but Trish and I had mapped out with AAA the more direct route to 80 West by cutting up north on Route 191 to 6. This turnoff is about ten minutes ahead, but looking out the window and at my AAA TripTik and the
Rand McNally Road Atlas
, I realize these roads are almost entirely through the desert. What the hell, let’s take a chance.

We turn off on 191 and it’s just two lanes, one in each direction, where if you have to pass a car, you risk a head-on collision. The fucking
CHECK ENGINE
light is still on. It’s so bleak that we both are energized by the extreme landscape. We see little baby dust tornadoes, just hoping to become lethal ones. They may call this soil “desert” in these parts, but I thought a desert was sand. This is dirt.