Hitchhikers on the Road of Life
The year of the American Bicentennial I was a bit adrift. Marriage was gone to hell, jobs weren’t what I might have hoped for, the future didn’t look bright. I decided to take a Road Trip, maybe figure stuff out, maybe get myself a Plan, maybe not. I was 24 years old.
My old pickup, a rusty Army castoff, was my chariot to the Deep South, parts of which I had never been to, so I headed down through Illinois, Arkansas, Louisiana, headed, I had no doubt, for New Orleans. Around Little Rock I picked up a hitchhiker. My intention was to pick everybody with a thumb stuck out, take them where they were going, not as if it would be out of my way. The road was wide open, my nose was my GPS. And yeah, I know, kind of a hippie way of looking at things, but hey, when you think you’ve hit rock bottom, not that I really had, most directions look like Up. My hitcher was about my age, a little down on his luck too if I didn’t miss my guess.
“Where ya going?” I asked the guy who was my very first act of Good Samaritanship. “Goin to Little Rock,” he said, “to kill my no good bastard brother-in-law.” Now, I’m used to guy talk, rough around the edges, but just talk. Blowing off steam, nothing much more. But my rider wasn’t blowing off steam, at least not til he got to Little Rock where, he made it abundantly clear, even vivid, how he was going to dispatch his bastard brother-in-law.
Since I was just a sojourner on the road myself, both of us kind of lost souls, I gave him some half-assed advice that basically amounted to don’t kill the guy, bad karma, jail time, the usual pablum you yourself would give to the potential murderer riding shotgun in your pickup. I have no idea whether he killed that no good brother in law, but I had the feeling, by the time we reached Little Rock, he was reconsidering. I did what I could, right? Everything except call the Law.
My next hitchhiker was a 30 year old black guy standing next to a battered suitcase outside New Orleans. He was, he told me, just out of prison and the sheriff in his redneck Texas town told him he had 24 hours to get out … or else. He had a pretty good idea what that or else might be so he hit the road and here he was, on his way to Leesburg, Florida where some kin were. So yeah, we talked about the murder he committed, some white guy who was threatening a kid he was with supposedly, a white kid even, got 10 years, finally got out. Time for a New Start. You know, somewhere else.
He rode with me for a full day. For a murderer he seemed like an okay guy. Not knowing any other killers, I may not have been the best judge, but at least he wasn’t on his way to murder anybody like my last rider. Counts for something. When I pulled over to pick up two guys at a filling station, he grew extremely agitated. “No way, man, don’t give these guys a ride.” I asked why and he said “can’t you see they’re no good, man. They’re bad dudes, you don’t want to pick them up.” Maybe I was being harsh but I said “you killed a guy and you’re worried about these two?”
Well, in the end I drove past these bad dudes and felt a little bad that already I was violating my vow, my karmic duty. Looking back now some 40 odd years later, I think he was right. He knew people a whole lot better than me. You think maybe things can’t get much worse, you’re as big a fool as I was. I took my rehabilitated murderer all the way to Tallahassee, gave him an old sleeping bag since he wanted to wait til morning to go into town, wished him luck. He wished me the same. My luck eventually turned. I have a nagging suspicion that his maybe didn’t. I hope this time I’m wrong.
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Tags: Hitchhiking Advice, Picking up Killers