By Jay Thiemyer, Contributing Writer
Night before last I got a ride and a floor with a nice down sleeping bag for cover from two Furman students. We rode in their old Firebird and listened to Velvet Underground ooze so unctious and smooth out of the doors as we drove through the pines, drank and shmoozed and smoked. Slept like a baby in an extra bed, finally. I was overdue for the comfort and sank into it.
They woke me around ten and took me back out to the Interstate. I should mention that this kindness was not rare. I never really took seriously the fear spread by newspapers about hitchhiking. It always struck me as about as intelligent as the paranoia-inducing, J. Edgar Hoover-driven flick “Reefer Madness.”
Literally that obtuse and separate from the simple enjoyment of being on the highway or the by-ways, come what may, with the folks, the characters, so unanticipated, so easy to get along with.
Unlike the badged fuckers on the Atlanta streets getting down on the poor man and thinking they were righteous behind the crosses they wore around their necks. They didn't even know what righteous was about. And all they had to do was get out on the road to get some. To be righteous with the rest. To simply let go and let be and listen to what the people out there travelling endlessly, that river of people, all those voices and heads had so much to suggest about what was really going on in the world, what actually mattered. Regardless of what was said, how profound or forgettable, we were like Job's comforters for each other. Isn't that pretty much what it is?
The frat lads from Furman gave me a big blue umbrella with Gitano written on it in bold white letters. “You might need it, it's tornado season.” They left me on the side of the interstate, a curiosity; I felt like a puppet in a roadshow, a carny on the loose in the land.
I had a six-pack from them and went up to sit in a hedge of ligustrum by I-95. The hedge overlooked the road and I drank it like a hedgehog. Smug in the simple momentary release and warmth of the beer, not appreciating how the energy I'd gained from the perfect night's sleep was being wasted.
The tonnage on the highway didn't mind. They just passed me by as I watched them and imagined getting out, ideally slightly buzzed as in olden days, to stand and wait for one to stop as I ruminated, Rumens Ludens, my thoughts free to find themselves. For me, standing on the side of the road somewhat blitzed, was a kind of meditation, when my thoughts were indeed free to sort themselves out, all distractions including the ride I was waiting for, were pushed away by the booze. A little standing meditation with my thumb out, eyeing the river of traffic, like leaves on a stream.
That's how it used to be when the poison worked. Like curare, it works in small doses, ya know. Get your heart right.
But in these days of which I am writing, I would waste my time enjoying sitting in a ligustrum hedge, absorbed in the buzz of a nearby lawn-mower, wishing I were standing soon to progress on the trafficky stream, lost in thoughts I didn't even have the energy to record in my notebook anymore. It was advanced 'not caring'. I did not care.
Nursing myself awake, I stood up. Stood out on the shoulder but nobody stopped. Went up Amityville Road, then turned past a Mennonite Church, I believe it was, onto Valhalla St. I remember the juxtaposition of those two road names. Lexington, NC.
Up ahead was a Kmart with a big parking lot for bumming change. Got a six-pack of Pearl on-sale for $1.29.
I suspect I thought that enough beer would wash me into the stream of movement to my destination, that fate would transport me, incomprehensible, as in olden days, the wonderful days of youthful immunity, when for reasons I couldn't recall, I simply got where I was headed. Blind Faith was in the air.
