Getting There

GETTING THERE

by

Gerry Boylan

Smashwords Edition

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Published on Smashwords by:

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P.O. Box 30071

Austin, Texas 78755

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Getting There

Copyright 2010 by Gerry Boylan

Cover Image: Dennis Hallinan / Hulton Archive / Getty Images

ISBN-13: 978-0-9843879-2-2

The Christmas Song Music and Lyric by Mel Torme and Robert Wells. © 1946 Sony/ATV Tunes LLC, Mel Torme Trust. © 1946 (Renewed) EDWIN H. MORRIS & COMPANY, A Division of MPL Music Publishing, Inc. and SONY/ATV MUSIC PUBLISHING LLC. All rights on behalf of SONY /ATV Tunes LLC. Administered by SONY/ATV Music Publishing, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

NURSE! By MARTIN E. MULL © 1975 CHAPPELL & CO., INC. (ASCAP) All rights reserved. Used by Permission of ALFRED PUBLISHING CO., INC.

I Remember From Patsy Moore’s lyrics to I Remember, performed by Dianne Reeves.

HAPPY TOGETHER Written by Garry Bonner and Alan Gordon. Copyright © 1966, 1967 by Alley Music Corp. and Bug Music-Trio Music Company. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of Alley Music Corporation. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

Always by Irving Berlin. © Copyright 1925 by Irving Berlin © Copyright Renewed. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by permission.

Try to Remember from THE FANTASTICKS. Words by Harvey Schmidt. Copyright © 1960 by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt. Copyright renewed by Chappell & Co. owner of publication and allied rights throughout the world. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

Ain’t No Sunshine Words and Music by Bill Withers. Copyright © 1971 INTERIOR MUSIC CORP. Copyright Renewed. All Rights Controlled and Administered by SONGSOFUNIVERSAL, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

Young author photo: Austin Andres

Current author photo: Robert Bruce Photography

Thanks to Mike Campbell for assorted quotes.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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This book is dedicated to Kathy—Kathleen McGrane Boylan. She did rescue me when I was lost and continues to do so to this day. She has been my best reader, my best friend, and my true love. Together we made a life and a family, which is how this lost soul was found.

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"I remember thinking we were worlds apart,

and then I heard your words and they spoke my heart.

I remember thinking I was too far gone,

and you reminded me that there is no such thing."

—Dianne Reeves, I Remember

Words and music by Patsy Moore

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Table of Contents

Notes on Long-Distance Hitchhiking

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Acknowledgments

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Notes on Long-Distance Hitchhiking

The hitchhiking proposition is straightforward. I’ll stand on the side of the road, stick my thumb out, and expect that while you’re driving by in a car, you’ll stop and pick me up and take me as far down the road as you’re going. Hitchhikers believe that the general nature of people is charitable and that a ride will appear. The typical driver behind the wheel sees the hitchhiker and thinks, That guy has got to be out of his freaking mind if he thinks I’m going to even look at him, let alone pick him up! Both views turn out to be correct, although the hitchhiker spends a helluva lot more time waving his thumb around to prove his point.

Hitchhikers and the people who pick them up share a few things in common. Both have an appetite for risk, more so than the regular Joe, and overall are a just a tad odd. Not surprisingly, a number of hitchhikers become salesmen and entrepreneurs. Often, they are quite successful, although more than a few end up in jail for selling drugs.

There’s a special biology to road life that’s different from that of our daily lives, creating both turmoil and fodder for stories, which are finely polished and embellished by hitchhikers for consumption by the uninitiated. Some tales are stretched too far and become outright lies. Yet other stories, while seemingly out of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! are achingly, stunningly, absurdly true.

Most of the time, road life can be uncomfortable, numbingly boring, and generally unhealthy. The hitchhiker waits and waits for someone interesting to pick him up, and for something, anything, to happen. Like a bolt of lightning, change comes—too exciting and often addictive.

The starring road in this story is I-75, almost 1,700 miles of concrete and asphalt running through mostly uninspiring landscapes with a few notable exceptions, like the Great Smoky Mountains and Michigan’s Straits of Mackinac. I suppose my story would have been an easier tale to tell starting in Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan, and finishing in southern Florida, following the same path as I-75. But, like life, the story gets convoluted, confusing, and messy; it doesn’t follow a straight line.

It’s strange to even talk about hitchhiking today. It’s rare to see a hitchhiker anywhere, especially a cross-country ride-seeker. From the mid-1960s through the early 1970s, though, it was a frequent sight, nothing out of the ordinary. In Canada, where they encouraged hitchhiking by offering a chain of nearly intolerable youth hostels, it was like an ecosystem out of control; hitchhikers seemingly bred and birthed like gerbils until the Canadian highways were clogged with zombie-like creatures standing on the side of the road, eyes vacant, thumbs dangling by their sides.

Perhaps the present is just an evolutionary nadir of hitchhikers, and before long, they’ll appear again, like the crows that seemed wiped out by the West Nile virus. Just when you couldn’t remember their familiar cackle anymore, one smart-ass crow after another started cawing in the trees again.

Meanwhile, the story you’re about to read vaults back and forth between 1973 and 2003, and sometimes it’s jarring. Please forgive me the youthful pathos in the 1973 chapters and the wizened, chin-stroking observations of thirty years later. It was a wild ride, and I have a twisted pride that I’m still here to report it.

Here’s the truth of the matter: until I was fifteen, I lived in the pleasant suburban bubble of the late 1950s and ’60s—like a regular Beaver Cleaver. There was nothing in my life to suggest I would grow up to be an axe murderer or an astronaut. If my life had continued down that neat and tidy path, I’m guessing I would have become an insurance salesman with a bulging belly and a weekend drinking problem. But when I was fifteen, my life blew up. The next five years were anything but ordinary. Not only did life seem to have dealt me a bad hand, but I played my cards poorly.

Toward the end of this period, my life became unhinged from conventional mores, and the result was frightening and exhilarating. What would have seemed bizarre or extraordinary became almost expected. I say almost because it was clear to me even as a teenage hellion that a life teetering on the edge of control should be neither anticipated nor welcomed. Through most of this part, I was a mess. But toward the end, the astonishing and absurd meshed into a chaotic miracle. That’s the story I want to tell you.

I didn’t turn out to be an insurance salesman. But I did have a weekend drinking problem until the summer my daughter was born, and that was the end of that. And while there was always the temptation to ride the fantastic plume of the road again, the thought of sleeping under a highway bridge was a good wake-up call. I am satisfied, truly satisfied, with a wife, a daughter, friends, a job with a decent health plan, and a 401(k).

I’m a middle-aged, retired thrill seeker who likes to think he can remember the skills needed to avoid the bull’s horns, and if gored, how to survive a wound. I remember the thrill and fear of living a preposterous life, but I left the port of youth and immortality decades ago. At the heart of the story is how my soul lost its way and how good people shepherded it back home.

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Chapter 1

September 2003

The silhouette of a man, arm outstretched, thumb skyward, appeared on the shoulder of the road. I took my foot off the gas, ever so slightly, but my two passengers immediately noticed, looked up, and saw the hitchhiker.

Dad, no. There’s no room! I glanced in the rearview mirror of the van and caught my college-bound daughter rolling her eyes in futile protest.

My wife of twenty-nine years put her book down on her lap, removed her reading glasses, and smiled, revealing her diastema. Turning to our daughter, Roberta, she said, Dear, you know your dad, and—

I know, Mom, believe me, I know, Roberta interrupted. Dad’s Rules of the Road. Rule number one: always pick up a highway hitchhiker unless you think he’s a bad guy. But, Daddy, with all my stuff, where are we going to put him?

We’ll find room, sweetheart. And remember, those road rules are for me, not you. Don’t you be picking up any hitchhikers, no matter how good or good-looking they are, I reminded her. Opportunities to offer words of advice to my daughter were disappearing as we closed the distance to dropping her off for the start of her college career. I gulped hard. Christ, this was going to be long ride if I started blubbering this early. I was going to have to pace my emotions.

I reached up and tapped the rearview mirror, positioning it to give me a better view of my daughter in the backseat. I didn’t want to miss seeing any remaining vestiges of the little girl who had dominated my life for eighteen years. I knew that college would complete the inevitable transition that had begun during her teenage years, turning me into a dad without a clue. She caught me looking in the mirror, smiled, and shook her head before looking back at her college folder. She was prepared. She was a well-organized, focused student who wasn’t naive about boys, drinking, or drugs, because her mother had been having frank discussions with her since she was twelve—conversations that made me blush.

The day of my daughter’s birth was a pole vault over my wrecked childhood. I was a dad! Every day that I was a father—a good dad—was a step further away from the unfinished slumgullion stew of my youth. After we dropped her off at college, those steps would be hers, headed away from us. Christ, I wasn’t remotely ready for this.

My name is Luke Moore. I’m fifty years old, and I’m surprised as my friends and family that I made it this far. I survived a lot of shit that was thrown at me, and even more I stepped into all by myself. But here I am today, a psychologist with a good practice focused on troubled teens, which still amuses my lifelong friends. In spite of my profession, I am the father of an unusually well-adjusted, nearly grown-up daughter, and I’m married to the woman who figured out how to pluck me out of the maelstrom. I’m stable and don’t take many risks. Really. You may think picking up a hitchhiker, especially with your wife and daughter along, is risky. Not for me. I can spot a bad apple on the side of the road a half-mile away. There are not many hitchhikers on the road today. Not like in my time. But if I see one on the side of the road, long-distance hitchhiking, and if he sells me, I can’t turn him down. It’s one of the Rules of the Road.

As we passed the young man, I looked in the rearview mirror. He had turned and put his hands together as if praying, and he mouthed, Please. Nice touch, I thought. I eased my wife’s silver Chrysler Grand Caravan onto the shoulder of the road, about a hundred feet past the shaggy-haired hitchhiker, who sprinted as best he could with a full backpack. My daughter was already clearing space in the van, pushing loose items further into the back, obscuring the view out of the van’s rear window. I pushed the button for the automatic side door opener and the door obeyed just as the winded hitchhiker appeared.

Man, thanks a lot for stopping. I’ve been out here for hours. The young man had a baseball hat on backward and five earrings rimming his left ear. I could never remember which pierced ear signaled you were gay, and if multiple earrings meant you were more earnest about being gay than if you wore just one. He eased into our van’s bench backseat, next to Roberta. Her face betrayed mild mortification at having to spend time with a complete stranger. The hitchhiker found room for his pack at his feet, leaned forward from the van’s backseat, and extended his hand to me, saying, I’m Tom Lutac, headed to Houghton to get back to school at Michigan Tech. Thanks for the ride.

I took his hand and grasped it firmly, not letting go until I told young Tom, Pleased to meet you, young man. I’m Father Danny O’Roarke, and I’m out of uniform today. And this is my sister Molly Malone and her sweet daughter Moira Malone, my niece, who is also off to college in the Upper Peninsula, at Lake Superior State. Which means we’ll be able to get you north of the bridge. I spoke in an almost convincing Irish brogue. Tom Lutac’s eyes widened a bit as he sat back into the seat.

Looking at the young hitchhiker in my rearview mirror made me grin and cringe, remembering the thrill of the road and the roar of its danger. It would be fun drawing his story out. It would make for a good yarn at the reunion I was driving to after settling our daughter in at college. The symmetry would not be lost on my childhood friends, those old Lost Souls who knew me when I looked like a 1970s version of young Tom Lutac.

Traffic was clear just outside of Pinconning, as I accelerated quickly onto northbound I-75. It was an autumn Michigan day, dry and clear, the unfiltered sun warming us through the windshield. In the side-view mirror I could see my reflection, the sunlight highlighting the creases of age and the fading scars on my face. I wore the old wounds like a retired bullfighter. I felt, more than heard, the cosmic hum, an incantation from the past. It was faint, but I would pay attention if it grew louder. At fifty years old, I was on the downside of immortal.

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Chapter 2

March 1973

I stood on the interstate highway like a matador. One foot touched the solid white line that separated the highway from the road’s shoulder, and my arm and thumb stretched outward with a purpose, challenging the cars as they flew past. I was standing forty miles outside of Knoxville on the southbound shoulder of I-75. It was past midnight; the traffic was thinning and the night air coming off of the Great Smokies was cooling quickly. I had covered this ground twice before, hitchhiking from my home base in Royal Oak, Michigan, a northern suburb of Detroit, to Florida. My cross-country treks began two days after I barely managed to graduate from St. Mary’s High School in l971. Two years later, I was a veteran long-distance hitchhiker, with over 100,000 miles logged from my home base in Michigan, reaching Santa Fe, Los Angeles, Seattle, Calgary, and other scattered points in North America.

My parents had been dead for five years. My mother was truly dead, gone and buried. My dad’s heart was still beating, but to me he was a ghost, put far away in what I imagined—what I hoped—was a Count of Monte Cristo-like dungeon. He didn’t exist to me, except in my nightmarish version of purgatory. But don’t we all endure a dose of this kind of melodrama in our lives? And isn’t it a perfectly logical response to hit the road with twenty bucks and see how far it will take you? I thought I was a very well-adjusted whack job, thank you very much—maybe just half a bubble off center. At least that’s what I tried to convince myself when I stood on the side of the road, hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away from a home that didn’t exist anymore, as the rain increased and the odds of getting picked up dwindled.

I always stood close to the road. Drivers had to see my face or they wouldn’t pick me up. (Road deviants and predators were the exceptions to this rule.) The regular folks who pulled over for me and my fellow road warriors needed to make a connection. Although the cars were sometimes only inches from my thumb, it rarely occurred to me to be afraid. I knew it increased the danger, but as I saw it, the improved odds of snagging a ride overrode the risk. I had thought the process of hitchhiking through, and after thousands of brain-numbing hours on the road, I generally knew what worked and why.

Cross-country hitchhiking was about traveling from one place to another, not about taking the scenic route; it was primarily free transportation. That’s why the interstate highway system was effective for hitchhikers. It was four lanes of direct routes with cars wheeling from one destination to another with a purpose. Interstates were the CliffsNotes of travel.

The best place to stand was just past where the merging entrance lane met the main freeway. That allowed the drivers entering the freeway to see me early on, and if they were going to pick me up, to stop in front of or just after me, before they reached full speed. Traffic volume was paramount to hitchhiking success, and a major highway like I-75 carried thousands of cars, not the trickle found on most two-lane highways.

I had learned to never take a ride that dropped me off in the middle of a city; there was no place for cars to pull over. City police were suspicious, unaccommodating, and numerous, and they weren’t there to protect a hitchhiker from the kooks, weirdos, and rednecks hurling poorly reasoned epithets or beer cans. Turning down a ride was always a last resort, but usually a smart decision. This was a lesson learned after walking seven miles to get out of downtown Atlanta after being threatened by Fulton County’s finest. After that debacle, I would either wait for a ride that took me past the city or hitchhike on the interstate ring roads that circle around medium-to-large cities, bypassing the cities’ centers.

I figured I had ten seconds or less to make the driver of a car racing on the interstate look at me and then acknowledge that I was a fellow human being. Nearly all drivers tried their best to look away. They changed the radio station, glanced into the rearview mirror, or simply stared straight ahead—anything to avoid eye contact and acknowledge I was a person standing on the highway, begging them to stop and be a Good Samaritan. The basic human appeal of aiding someone was easily overridden by the images of a hitchhiker robbing and maiming a driver, or worse.

The percentage of people who ignored their mothers’ advice not to talk to strangers or to pick up hitchhikers was miniscule. Those people were nearly always men—usually single, divorced, or in a troubled relationship; salesmen; or old men in hats. Their need to pour out their stories over a long stretch of road to a total stranger, a captive for hours, overcame fear or their mothers’ admonishments.

My analytical view of hitchhiking odds grew out of the boredom and loneliness of hundreds of hours standing on asphalt or cement in conditions usually too cold, hot, or wet. Here’s how it added it up: only one car in thousands would stop for a hitchhiker. About 30 percent of interstate drivers were women, and women very rarely picked up hitchhikers. This limited the natural selection to the 70 percent of drivers that were men. Of these men, only about half would even look at a hitchhiker. A healthy percentage of the remaining candidates detested anyone outside their normal day-to-day experience. They looked directly at me and my hitchhiking contemporaries with self-righteous head shaking, or with eyes shooting darts of death and smoke coming out of their ears. They were appalled by our assumed countercultural, amoral lifestyle.

Mainstream society was largely left out of the hitchhiking equation. The eligible driver who would consider picking me up was the proverbial needle in the haystack, only moving at seventy miles per hour. In spite of the poor odds, cross-country hitchhiking worked because of the risk-taking slice of the driving population and other at-the-margin folks. These included hippies in VW vans, drunks, and anyone who had hitchhiked in their lives, including grizzled Dust Bowlers who talked of hobo camps and encounters with less-than-healthy women, and of how they had lost the teeth that left large gaps in their smiles.

While hitchhiking was a waiting game, a little planning increased the odds of getting a ride. No matter how long I had been on the road, I made an effort to keep my appearance presentable.

I pushed my not-quite-hippy-length blond hair behind my ears. I didn’t wear hats because they implied I was hiding something. Many people felt the same way about beards, but since I felt mine had finally grown in nicely I was too vain to give that up; I did keep my whiskers trimmed and neat. In summer, my T-shirt was always tucked into my jeans, and I stood up straight and smiled. I completed the pose by keeping my arm out, bent slightly at the elbow. I was a paragon of uprightness. All right, that’s a stretch, but I knew that it was crucial not to appear threatening. At twenty years old, I was a wiry guy, just under five feet eleven inches tall and weighing in at 150 pounds—when my pockets were loaded with change. I didn’t look menacing. It was more the opposite reaction. When I smiled, I was told by more than one driver that pulled over that I looked like a grandson, or the boy next door; maybe a little mixed up, but still polite to his family and neighbors. This was an important edge in trying to sell the reluctant chauffeur. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I used to practice a shy, unassuming, and appealing smile using the small pocket mirror I kept in my knapsack. Yep, when traffic disappeared, I would pull out my little mirror and try on a jaunty smile or two for mass consumption, and then add bedroom eyes in case a couple of chicks would drive by and find me irresistible. None ever did, but that didn’t stop my inane practice sessions.

My only defense for the variety of offbeat activities I engaged in while on the side of the road was boredom. The truth was that I was jaded and, in some ways, a weird dude. I wasn’t sure if all that time on the road by myself gave me way too much time to think, allowing eccentricities to slip into my psyche, or if I was just wired differently. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think I was loopy-eyed strange. Around my friends I could be a guy’s guy and swear, spit, grunt, and vulgarize with the best of them. Alone, it was a different story.

As a hitchhiker, I was implacable in my technique, although I did silently curse every thousandth or so car that passed by. But I was always selling.

Hey, lady, look this way. That’s it. I’m harmless—just need to get on down the road. Okay, not you, but what about you, buddy, in the nice Corvette? Probably not. Never been picked up by a Corvette, but this old Bonneville, with you, old-timer, you’re a likely suspect. C’mon, make it happen, I sang out.

Over time, I developed good instincts, singling out the older model car in the slow lane, spotting the profile of a man with a hat, or the Camaro with the elbows of two young pot smokers sticking out the windows, or the slightly weaving, slow-moving car at night with a driver trying to avoid a DUI.

I worked them all, willing the strangers to pull over. My final hook, when traffic was light, was to keep eye contact and smile at every car. Even if the driver didn’t look over, I would turn and catch them looking in the rearview mirror. Drivers couldn’t help themselves. They wanted to catch a glimpse of the hitchhiker, much the same as people who didn’t want to gape at a crippled person couldn’t stop themselves from taking a sidelong glance. My technique was to turn, drop my arms to my sides, open my hands, and let my face say to the driver, I’m really okay. You’ll really be glad you helped me.

It didn’t often result in a ride, but it bolstered my belief that I had some control over the generally powerless proposition of hitchhiking. I was certain my years on the road had fine-tuned my skills of persuasion. I believed that I could will direction in my life and, if not necessarily control my fate, at least smooth the rough edges. I gave my theorem credence because, after two years on and off the road, I had managed to avoid any serious harm, in spite of many close calls. This was my proof that a combination of willpower and proper planning would result in me finding a good place in the world.

This, of course, was delusional, considering I was poor, alone, and without any apparent prospects. In spite of the obvious, I was indefatigable in my belief that I would find money when needed. And success. And, in time, love. Why wouldn’t things work out? Delusion and indefatigability were a potent combination.

And that’s how I found myself in Tennessee, hitchhiking way too late at night and feeling the chill of the springtime mountain air. A spark of road doubt had just begun to slip into my mind. Road doubt, a.k.a. the road willies, occurred when common sense started to overcome youthful immortality and half-baked I can control the universe theories. It had to be pushed deep into the recesses of a hitchhiker’s mind, especially this hitchhiker. Once a little road doubt wormed its way into my head, it started to bore deeper, and before I knew it, I would be back in the suburbs wearing a funny little hat, flipping burgers at Bertha’s Hamburger Depot. When road doubt visited, I concentrated harder on willing my short-term destiny to include getting picked up by a nympho blonde schoolteacher, who was cruising the highway looking for an unassuming, bedroom-eyed stud-meister like myself to satisfy her unrelenting need for sex. Though fantasies were fairly effective in warding off road doubt, the nympho blonde schoolteacher never did pick me up. I guess that’s why they’re called fantasies.

After all the reflection and strategy, hitchhiking was a gamble. You stood out there on the edge of the road and took a chance. That’s what I was doing on that damp night in the Middle South.

I had been dropped off about forty-five minutes prior by Lonesome Lefty Pawlicki, the most lonesome Polack you’ll ever meet, he had said when he picked me up near Conway, Kentucky. Lonesome Lefty was a typical driver in the sense that he didn’t have a lot to lose and had a few stories to tell. I had trained myself to listen to drivers, even while dozing off. My head would bob up and down, moving with the motion of the car, and I would have just enough concentration to hear if the driver’s inflection signaled a question. Then I would then murmur an assent or uh-uh and reengage in the conversation for a while.

Many of the drivers were indeed lonely, and their stories were often wholly fabricated, or a retelling of an incident that would have turned out better if fate had been kinder. Eventually, their true, sad stories came out, along with the reasons they were alone and facing life with a smile that needed dental work. They were hungry for companionship, conversation, and attention from any quarter, including hitchhikers.

Lonesome Lefty was a child left behind. Born to a fifteen-year-old mother in a rural shack above the Great Saltpetre Cave near Conway, he grew up fatherless. His mother sold cigarettes, candy, and gas at Stuckey’s without the prospect of upward mobility. School didn’t take for Lonesome Lefty. He dropped out after the sixth grade, and after a series of low-paying jobs, he eventually worked his way up to a well-drilling crew. His right hand was crushed on the job in 1959. Lonesome Lefty told me his dismal tale, which I listened to with a respectful but jaundiced ear. I heard a lot of stories on the blacktop that defied even my jaded view of the world.

On that fateful day in May at the Atwaters’ farm, we were put-tin’ in a well at the son’s house in the back eighty. Goddamned Leo Murphy was always forgettin’ to tie down the well rods on truck number two. Everyone knew Leo was an accident waitin’ to happen, and that day, the accident happened to me. A stack of those rods rolled off the truck, clatterin’ all over me. One sorta speared me, is what I understand, on this hand here. He held out his mangled, frozen hand for me to view. I got some pretty good knocks on the head, and when I woke up I was in the county hospital. That was it for me in the well-drillin’ field. There ain’t no one-handed well drillers. That job was the best money I ever made.

This part of the story was likely close to the truth, but the tales he told me of righteous drinking, beautiful women aching for him, and chauffeuring Jerry Lee Lewis were open to serious questioning. I had introduced myself as Bill Brown when I settled into the front seat of Lonesome Lefty’s ’66 Bel Air. Bill Brown was one of my many pseudonyms. I grew tired of telling my own story and found solace and challenge in making up new personas as I traveled. Lonesome Lefty finished his ramble and turned to me. So what did you say your name was, friend?

Bill, Bill Brown, but my friends call me One Ball Bill, I said, straight-faced.

Say again, friend, did you say One Ball? What’s that for?

Well, Mr. Pawlicki—

No, call me Lonesome, friend, Lonesome Lefty interrupted.

Well, Lonesome, it’s a long story. But if you’re interested, I’ll tell you my tale of woe that left me with just one nut.

Yes sir, One Ball, I would like to hear that story, if’n you don’t mind telling it.

I had already told a rendition of the saga of One Ball Bill to another unsuspecting driver on this trip, but Lonesome Lefty was the perfect audience, gasping and making eyes as I told the wholly fabricated tale. I smugly concluded the story with the line, My best friend called out to the rest of the team, ‘Make room for One Ball Billy,’ and the name just stuck.

This was my talent. I prided myself on my command of language and my ability to stretch and bend any story into a tale that barely resembled the truth. My vocabulary came from doing crossword puzzles with Mom from the age of eight. I never worked on them by myself, only with Mom; it was our thing. The storytelling talent came from Dad. I was proud of the skill, but not the source.

Lonesome Lefty Pawlicki was astonished at my story. Friend, that’s the damnedest thing I ever heard, he said. He looked at his crushed hand, resting on the steering wheel, in a different light.

The remainder of the ride was in that easy zone in which two individuals with nearly nothing in common had spilled their guts about their lives; there was nothing much sacred left to be embarrassed about. We rode on and swapped anecdotes about ourselves and our hopes. Lonesome Lefty was looking forward to Kentucky; he had a caretaker job in a small apartment complex. One Ball Bill was rolling to Atlanta to meet with an admissions counselor at the prestigious Emory University. Both of us were lying.

At the end of the four-hour ride, it was past midnight, and Lonesome Lefty left me off at the top of the exit ramp. We exchanged a left-handed handshake with a pair of direct looks and sincere good luck’s.

I stepped out of the car, shouldered my bag, and walked down the entrance ramp. Traffic was thin, and a misty rain watered the road and my denim jacket. I pulled my collar up and moved my arms and hands to attract attention. Rain is not a friend to hitchhikers.

Subtle techniques didn’t work when a hitchhiker was getting soaked. While rain might evoke some initial pity, very few drivers wanted a sopping wet beggar in their car. Adding a hat or the hood of my poncho made me look wet and ominous. Rain was also the friend of road predators. They knew a drenched hitchhiker with diminishing prospects for a ride was more likely to ignore his instincts and make a poor decision about whether or not to accept a ride. A seasoned hitchhiker develops a sixth sense about the bad ride and can read a driver whose intentions might include more than just moving down the road.

The rain turned from a spatter into a steady light rain. I sighed and pulled out my bright yellow, ninety-nine-cent K-Mart parka to wear over my denim jacket. As I slipped the parka on, I saw a large car, a Ford Galaxie, approaching me fast. I noticed the inside dome light was on, illuminating a young woman who was touching a cigarette to the bright orange coil of the car’s lighter. As the car shot by, the driver looked up and over toward me as she puffed life into the cigarette, a smile in her eyes suggesting she might consider stopping. I had an instant of hope. I thought I could reel her in. But her eyes riveted back to the road. I turned to watch, hoping to catch her glancing in the rearview mirror, but instead saw a pair of headlights bouncing crazily across the median that separated the two-way traffic. The Galaxie’s brake lights brightened, telling me the woman saw the danger. The oncoming lights were attached to a battered pickup truck lurching at high speed and fixed like a torpedo on the woman’s car. The Galaxie swerved right. Too late.

The crash happened less than a hundred feet from me. Images flickered rapidly at me as if backlit by a strobe light. The pickup’s front bumper hit the Galaxie almost straight on. The vehicles exploded into each other, accompanied by an excruciating scream of metal and glass. The pickup pushed the hood and engine of the Galaxie up, up, until the car flipped on its side, slid across the gravel shoulder, and came to rest on the grass just off the highway’s shoulder. I was close enough that shards of glass bounced off me like rock candy.

I stood frozen, oddly curious about the noise caused by the accident. A television show I saw as kid, featuring natural and man-made disasters, flashed through my mind. No one who survived the various scenarios could accurately describe the sounds.

It sounded like a train.

I don’t know, it was like a needle scratching across a record.

They had no point of reference. Neither had I, until my family’s home burned to the ground. The screeching, hissing noises of that fire and this accident were my version of Dante’s Inferno—the sounds of the gates to the anteroom of hell opening in welcome.

My shoulders shook involuntarily and jarred me from memory to the present. The events leading up to the accident had played out in stunning fast-forward. I couldn’t think in a straight line. The sounds and sights of the crash scene didn’t synchronize. I picked a few pieces of glass out of the creases of my parka, heard the engine of the dying car hiss with steam, and watched pieces of airborne metal settle on the highway. I blinked my eyes hard, trying hard to snap out of my shock and ran toward the vehicles as the traffic came up fast on the carnage, stopping sharply behind me. The cars’ headlamps illuminated the twisted truck lying in the middle of the road. The lights shone into a cab filled with steam and smoke. The driver’s body had pushed through the windshield and lay in an impossible position on the crinkled metal that used to be the hood. Drivers left their cars and moved toward both destroyed vehicles, catching up to me as I looked inside the truck for other bodies. A lean, mustached man with a filterless Camel clinging to his lips reached the body on the hood The cigarette dropped from his mouth and he wailed, Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God! He reached out and held the broken body’s wrist, looking for a pulse that wasn’t there. I sprinted over to the overturned Galaxie, but the woman wasn’t in the car. Stumbling away from the car and down into the tall grass off the highway shoulder, I looked for something I didn’t want to find. Hearing a groan—not a good sign—I waded through the grass toward the fence that separated the highway right-of-way from a cornfield.

I almost stepped on her. She was lying on her back, her face untouched, only a sheen of rainwater covering her skin and short dark hair. I dropped to my knees and saw that her arms and legs were bloody. She moaned lowly, and I put one hand on her forehead and supported the back of her head with the other. Her eyes fluttered open and looked at me quizzically.

What... where am I? she stammered quietly.

This was more than I had bargained for when I hit the road looking for a chance to get away from both the humdrum of the suburbs and my own sad-sack past. I choked back the bile and vomit that were moving up my throat. Here I was with an accident victim in my arms, looking to me for help. I wanted to run as fast as I could in the other direction. I had to find a way out of this shit, but there wasn’t one.

You’ve been in a car accident. You’ve been thrown out of the car. I’m Luke. I’m going to help you. I was shivering as I looked down, and in spite of the blood and rain and circumstances, I thought, Wait a minute, this girl looks familiar. No way. Who is she?

She tried a smile, lips trembling, and said, Thanks, you’re an angel.

I positioned myself cross-legged and