When I was nineteen, after having dropped out of high school, I did some hitchhiking with a friend of mine. We hopped a few freight trains as well.
I’m thinking of pulling a story out of this. I don’t want to write about the entire experience (Kerouac has covered this ground before), and I don’t even want to write about how the experience affected me. When I was hitchhiking I was surprised again and again at how much people, total strangers, would open up to us, and the window we’d get into their lives. There’s one incident in particular I’d like to ficionalise, which I wrote about a few months after the fact in my journal. Here’s what I wrote:
“After Judson and I walked for hours around Albert Lea Lake, finally hopping a fence and sitting near the water, after a lot of Rambo-ing through tall grasses & marshes & forests we sat sown, took a long draught of water, and Judson said to me, “Damn, water is so good. Man, we take water for granted too much.”
And I: “Na, man, we don’t take it for granted enough!”
—-
Bummed, hanging out in front of a gas station, it’s closed, it must be midnight…scrounging around the drink machines, looking for change, ‘cuz damn could I go for something to drink. It’s that joint that did it, had to be. Even though we smoked hours ago and since walked our buzz off and rested and ate fish over an open campfire. And we’ve still got 1.9 miles to go to get to a gas station, some sort of civilization. We’re still starving when we get there; so we cook some of the hot dogs Julie gave us in the microwave and use the buns and condiments they have there, the woman is really nice, and anyway I wonder if she really notices us, she’s talking to some guy that’s been in here the whole time. I’m surprises to see there is a sub shop inside the place, the woman working is making some subs, then she takes off her gloves and darts quickly over to the register to ring it up.
Now here’s the guy talking to us. Later we find his name to be John Navarro. He says that’s his ex-wife over there, working. We talk a bit and he offers to let us stay at his place. We’re over here gorging ourselves on hot dogs, we just ate fish sandwiches, we’re bums, street hoodlums with like ten bucks between the both of us, and we’re getting high and feasting like kings, and here’s this guy hanging out with his ex and he’s gonna hook us up with mattresses and pillows and all the works!!!
The broken couple get along beautifully. They seem to still have a deep connection, they talk as if they were still married.
John Navarro is a recovering alcoholic. The doc made him stop drinking, he was probably going to die before long if he didn’t. He shows us the can of the last beer he drank, two and a half weeks ago. he is due in for a wedding at one (not his). He is already late. I will never forget the look on his face when he tells me this, that there “will be a lot of drinking going on there, so it’ll be hard.” He doesn’t want to go. he needed someone to talk to. His karma, he hopes, will be with him, the gods must help him out, he helped us out. We shower. he drives us back to the highway. Good bye, John Navarro, good luck.”
This guy was one of the most memorable people I met on my trip, and I want to write a story about him.
