... in response to Yo, Bruce, posted by burbuja2 on Jan 7, 2004The year was 1974. I was going to college at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. I hated school but didn’t know what else to do with my life and I had a full-ride scholarship so it seemed to be the smart thing to do. But I hated it and my grades were terrible. I was in this fraternity and this guy in my fraternity said I should see some of the world and get a little perspective. He said he had hitchhiked all over the country and it was a cool thing to do. (In retrospect, I don’t know how such a cool guy was in a fraternity, but at the time I was 20 years old and didn’t know squat so it wasn’t something I asked or considered).
Finally a few weeks after his talk with me I got put on academic probation and just dropped out of college. (It wasn’t for lack of smarts on my part, because years later I would return to college and graduate with a 3.5 GPA in engineering and math, I just wasn’t interested at the time). I worked for about a month or so while still living in the fraternity, but I got fed up with that too, and finally decided to jump on the advice the guy had given me. I bought a backpack and sleeping bag, gave my car to another one of my fraternity brothers for safe keeping (yeah right, real safe, he drove it all over the place, but I was a stupid kid so what can you expect) and hit the road heading down to Interstate 80 and then west.
My rides were rather uneventful going west until I hit Colorado. Somehow I got picked up by a bunch of guys smoking a lot of weed in a van. I was too tight-assed at the time to try grass (finally did try it a couple times years later but never liked it), but I didn’t want to appear the party-pooper so instead I got drunk off Bacardi rum. Colorado was a blur. Somewhere after this I turned south and headed south for Phoenix, Arizona.
On the way one of stops let me off just at dusk in the middle of nowhere Nevada. I walked to the nearest underpass where the Interstate passed over a small two-lane road. I climbed under the bridge and got all the way up in the girders. I had a small light and a sleeping bag and food and water. I slept there in the middle of nowhere under the highway and it is one of the most memorial nights of my life. Don’t know exactly why, but it is.
Next day I continued on and eventually I made it to the suburbs of Phoenix, but didn’t have anywhere to stay. Prior to that I had either slept with my ride or in a roadside park, or under the highway, but I didn’t know where to stay in Phoenix, but the people that dropped me off told me that they thought there was a Shiloh youth hostile I could stay at somewhere in Phoenix.
I am now in suburban Phoenix and hitching there is different for me. No big rigs going by, nobody on long trips willing to share a lift. But I put my thumb out and eventually this Chevy Impala stops. In the front seat are two guys crunched together and in the back seat two girls similarly crunched together. I know what is going on, but I figure “hey I have never actually had any experience with gay people, so what the heck”. I put my backpack in the trunk and get in the front seat and the car takes off. Immediately the guy next to me puts his hand on my thigh and says “How’s it going?”. Well this totally freaks me and I think “enough of this new experience”. I yell “LET ME OUT!”. The guy says “Hey man, we’re not gonna mess with you”. Louder I yell “LET ME OUT!!!”. Now I am a pretty big guy, even when I was 20, so they actually pull over the car and let me get out. But when I say “I want my stuff!”, the guy says “What stuff?”. Well I start getting real loud and looking like I am gonna get medieval and the driver gets out of the car and gets my backpack out of the trunk. I am surprised that I was actually able to get my stuff back without more difficulty than this, but after circling the block once and driving by me, the car takes off and never troubles me again. I don’t know why they circled the block, maybe it was to see my “colita Aloha” that my wife is always talking about (colita is Spanish for butt and Aloha is shorthand my wife uses referring to Hawaiian hula dancers, but this is another story, LOL).
Anyway I somehow get to the Shiloh youth hostile and spend the night. The director of the hostile, a young guy maybe 25 or 30 took a liking to me and convinced me to stay a couple days. I stayed a couple days and he was constantly trying to convert me to Christianity and even took me to see Billy Graham at some football stadium but finally I had enough of that and split. Then I went to the university in Tempe and found some guy from my hometown in the student listings and called him up and the guy and I actually spent a day together. Finally I hit the road again.
This time, shortly after I left Phoenix, I got picked up by this Navy Seal guy returning to his base in San Diego. He had been on furlough for a few weeks and had put on about 15 pounds, so he didn’t look so tough to me, but his stories were pretty scary sounding so I can only imagine what he might have looked like when he was in shape. I stayed with him for a couple days, even staying at his apartment in San Diego, but he finally started getting tired of me hanging around. He wanted to jaunt off with his Seal buddies and I was dead weight to him, so I took off. Frankly in retrospect, I can’t figure out why he even invited me to stay at his apartment even for a day since he didn’t know me from Adam, but hey, I was a fresh faced Iowa farm boy so maybe I looked trustworthy, I don’t know.
So I leave San Diego and head north, up through L.A., seeing the first glimpse of Disneyland in my life as my ride went by on I-5 (you can see the top of the Matahorn from the freeway) but we didn’t stop. Years later I would live in L.A. for a couple years and finally make it to Disneyland, but not this trip. I continued north through L.A. and just before Bakersfield my ride ended and for hours I couldn’t get another one.
Finally this ratty looking car stops and it has the young guy, chock full of energy, but real sleazy looking, and this woman who looked 60 dressed real revealing with tons of makeup. Turns out he was a pimp and she was his whorehouse madam. This was way beyond my realm of experience at the time and I was terrified, but I had picked up a traveling companion shortly before that (a fellow hitchhiker) and he seemed like a decent guy, so between him being there with me and my deciding to be open to new things on this trip, I managed to get in the car. Immediately the young guy says I-5 is a crappy place to get rides, so we should take Highway 99 instead. Okay, we say, and off we head.
The pimp drives about 90 mph down two-lane Highway 99 (least it was back in 1974), all the while carrying on non-stop dialog with the madam while my buddy and I look on from the backseat somewhat in terror. “F*** you” he cries! “Promises, promises” is her response. On and on the risqué dialog continues while he roars down the highway but finally, 90 minutes of gut wrenching angst later, they let us safely out.
I thread my way up Highway 99 to Fresno where my buddy splits for a different direction and I can’t get a ride. Finally I a guy picks me up and is heading to San Francisco. He even agrees to detour to Berkeley for me. So I end up in Berkeley and immediately look for a chapter of my Fraternity at the university there. I find it and show up at the door. I tell them who I am, a fellow brother from Iowa, and give the secret handshake and they let me in. I really wonder about that secret handshake thing now. My fraternity was pretty much a major F*** Up with nobody really knowing what was going on; eventually they even got their chapter license lifted. So this handshake I learned during initiation was probably a bunch of hooey, but the guy at the fraternity in Berkeley let me in. I figure he had no idea about secret handshakes and was too perplexed to decide if I was for real, so he just let me in. Anyway everyone greeted me and even invited me to a party. But I got horribly drunk, made a huge pass at one of the fraternity brother’s girlfriends, and then puked in the bathroom back in the fraternity house. They probably now have a sign barring all people from Iowa in that Berkeley chapter of the fraternity after my behavior, but I was oblivious to my poor behavior at the time and the next day I packed up and hit the road again.
Well I really considered going north to Oregon at this point but after a couple hours of no rides going north and a couple offering to go east, I decided I would go east instead. So up I-80 I head again, this time going east. I finally wind up in Salt Lake City after a couple days and decide to splurge and get a hotel. The guy in the hotel who checked me in even volunteered to drive me to get a pizza. They didn’t have delivery back then I guess.
Then I venture into Wyoming. Generally speaking I would ride with someone for one or two hours, a few for a couple days and occasionally I would see some person or car more than once during the course of my travel. In Wyoming that happened when I saw two girls in a Volkswagen Beetle pass me by. I remember thinking at the time I saw them the first time, where would they put me even if they did stop, but hitchhiking is like direct marketing, you don’t want to fail to make the pitch (or in my case, put the thumb out) to everyone because you never know who will be the one to stop.
So it was that the second time I saw the Volkswagen with the women, it stopped for me. They even remembered seeing me. They managed to cram everything into one corner of the backseat including my backpack and off we went. They were from the Midwest, but had been living in Eugene, Oregon and were now traveling back home for some reason. For two days all they did was rave about Eugene, Oregon. Sounded like paradise to me and I was sorry I had headed east instead of north. The first night with the women, we decided to get a hotel room. We split the cost and settled into the room and I am thinking “Oh, my God, am I gonna get laid?”. This was huge to me because at 20 years old I was still a virgin. In fact I really hadn’t got much more than to second base and wasn’t even sure if French kissing might be bad. I was a real sexual neophyte. So here I have two, young, attractive, slightly older women and I think maybe pay dirt is ahead. We settle down to sleep (separately) and they turn off the lights. I lay there wondering when this fantasy is going to start. Finally I haltingly say “so you guys wanna do something?”. “NO!” I hear in duet, and that ended that.
But despite my lack of scoring with the women and remaining the big V, they were good company, and they continued to talk about Eugene, Oregon. I decided, I had to see that place, but I was getting pretty tired of hitchhiking and decided to head home.
A couple days later I stumble into Ames, Iowa and breathlessly look for all my friends to share my adventure. But other than hearing tales of how my car could go 90 from the guy I lent it to, nobody was particularly interesting in talking to me because it was close to finals and everyone else was still a student. So I hung around for about a week and I said enough was enough. I packed what meager belongings in a small U-Haul trailer and strapped it to the rear of my ’68 Cougar (400 cubic inches of engine baby) and headed for Oregon.
I ended up living in Eugene, Oregon for 10 years and even ran into one of the women who gave me the ride in Wyoming, though I never did get laid by her. I finally did get my sexual experience and lost the big V, but that is another story.
My hitchhiking adventure lasted 15 days.
