I did a lot of hitchhiking in college, thanks to Jack Kerouac convincing me that being On the Road was a romantic adventure. Kerouac ended up a drunk and hanging out in Gunther's Tap Room, Northport, Long Island, not far from where I grew up. I never got around to buying him a beer.
A college buddy and I made it to Big Sur one year. After a summer in California with the Navy near LA, we hitchhiked up Route 1 and got stuck in Santa Barbara where scores of other hitchhikers were trying to score a ride. We drew ourselves a phony sign with [destination] Boston on it and a guy in a VW van stopped for us right away. You guys going to Boston. No, we're from Boston. We're headed for Big Sur. The guy replied, sorry, we're going to San Francisco. We'll drop you off in Salinas. Ok, thanks. [Where's Salinas].
Salinas is forty miles from Big Sur, a little north of Monterey. It's surrounded by miles and miles of vegetable fields. It was dark and late when we got there so we found a motel to sleep for the night. We were on the road, but not on the road enough to sleep with the lettuce or real hobos and migrant farm workers. One of us even had a credit card.
In the morning, my friend, who could strike up a conversation with a refrigerator, comes back to the motel room and announces he has found someone from Holy Cross College, like us, and he's taking us to Big Sur. Luck of the Irish!
Our host had a lovely family. They pitched us a tent and we stayed with them on the chapel grounds. Big Sur was beautiful. Big trees, big cliffs, big ocean. Not a hippie girl a la Kerouac and Neal Cassady in sight. But we ate well and at the end of the weekend our hosts took us home to Monterey, fed us again, washed our clothes, took us to the famous Monterey Bay Aquarium and then put us on the bus for San Francisco and our ultimate destination in the Canadian west.
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Most of the time, though, I travelled alone on shorter trips. One night on a trip from Holy Cross back home to Long Island, I got picked up by the head basketball coach, Jack Donohue, a minor celebrity who'd coached Lou Alcindor (aka Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) in high school. He said he could take me as far as New Haven, where he was spending the night with a friend's family. Then he launched into a fatherly diatribe about what a bad idea it was to be hitchhiking, especially at night. I allowed that I was unafraid. I was experiencing an adventure. He was blunt: "You don't have to shoot yourself in the head with a .45 pistol to discover it's a bad idea."
He dropped me off on the New England Thruway outside New Haven. I waited a while for a ride and then three black guys pulled over. I hesitated, but then thought: I'm not going to let them think I won't ride with them. All the trouble is between the old people. "What a Wonderful World."
We weren't back on the road two minutes when the guy next to me in the backseat says: "I am Dr. Death and I am going to operate on you." This was pretty disturbing, but I pegged them for some college guys on the way to NYC from Brown or Yale. Dr. Death would not let up, though. Open up your bag. Give me your money. Says I, If I had any money would I be hitchhiking. In fact I had some money, but if I gave it to Dr. Death, I wouldn't have train fare out of New York City, where hitchhiking was impossible. Dr. Death is thinking he's having fun with a soft white suburban kid. I'm thinking if the car gets off the thruway or if he shows a knife I'm going to break his neck before the guys in the front seat can do anything. I wasn't as tough as I thought I was, but I'd been in street fights before and survived being on the wrong end of knife before. I was determined to go down fighting. After about 20 minutes of this, the driver, who's wearing a Joe College tweed jacket, tells Dr. Death to stop bothering me. There's nothing but silence for the rest of the ride. They drop me off at the Throgs Neck Bridge and drive off into the darkness without saying a word.
