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| http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/8213449/Hitchhiker-with-tall-tales-swindles-money-out-of-French-motorists.html |
Good afternoon! My name is Christopher Bruce, and I'm a guy who's been around the block. One or 2000 times anyway. I was born in Long Beach, California, and I guess you could say I was born a Navy brat. Well, only if you do so insistently. You see, I was sort of an unexpected child. I could easily bore you with the details (which, by the way, are juicy as heck), but that's not what this blog is about. Someday, if I get enough interest, or if I get more than one wild hair, I may just start a blog about my very unusual life. It took an a lot of interesting events to become the person I am today, believe that. It's really a wonder I haven't had one mental breakdown after another, but somehow or another, I managed to always pull myself up by my bootstraps. Sort of.
Anyway, moving right along. My parents were divorced when I was four years old, and my father and I had spent some time together from time to time, but I lived with my mother full-time. When I was eight, my mother tired of life in Los Angeles, and, since she was single (and would remain so until this day), she decided she'd rather move back to where she was from - The late great state of Iowa. Talk about culture shock. Even an eight year old boy can readily notice the absurd difference in leaving a city of 5,000,000 and moving to a town of 20. Note: You don't really know me as yet (unless you scouted out my profile, in which case, you'd be massively more enlightened), but my style of humor reeks of the likes of Bill Murray, early Tom Hanks, George Carlin and Chevy Chase. Sarcastic, dry, twisted...you get the idea. I love to make people laugh, and one of my favorite tricks is extreme exaggeration, so if you don't get something, turn it around, hold it up to a mirror, and if you can take it wrong, don't. I probably didn't mean it that way. I tend to be a bit ambiguous. If I mean it wrong, you'll know it, trust me.
Another thing you may notice is that it's a little easy to distract me, almost as easy as it is for me to distract myself. I'm slightly ADD (as many affluent and really good authors are), so shiny objects work, as well as quickly and subtly changing the subject. You can also just point upwards and stare intently in the same direction - that'll probably work too. If I do get off of the subject, never fear. After around 10 or so sentences, I'll get back to what the article was about...at some point. If the number 10 doesn't do the trick, well, it's guaranteed that at SOME point, before the article is finished, I WILL get back to it. That I promise.
So she loaded up the truck and we moved to Ida Grove (and if you sing that to the tune of the Beverly Hillbillies theme song, it works!). I won't even attempt to tell you the 524,655 things that happened in the next 8 years, but trust me when I say it was a real blast. Note #2: I've been trying to invent a way to make my words "drip" with sarcasm, so if anyone has any good notes on the subject, I'd sure appreciate them so I can move forward on this. I just can't put my finger on how to do it.
When I turned 16, I found out just where my father had gone. He had (very smartly, I'll just say that) disappeared off of the face of the earth about the time I turned 7, and somehow had come to a moral epiphany, and had finally told my mother that he was in Tacoma, Washington; I can only guess that this was to, vicariously through my mother, get that information to us, in case we wanted to make contact. When I found this out, I made it my personal mission to get there to see him. This was in 1976, and getting around the country was actually pretty simple. If you had a thumb and a duffel bag, you didn't need money. You just waltzed out to your favorite interstate or highway, and let the nice people on the road do all the work for you. Hitch-hiking was most certainly the favorite option of the lower-middle-class, as well as being a vehicle for a host of non-working Vietnam veterans. Riding the Greyhound bus ANYWHERE was the best nightmare you could experience for any price between $10-$150, and the chance of Mr. Worldly's mother taking him to see his father, whom she despised, or lending him the money for a plane ticket...well, let's just say I had a better chance of joining the Army at 16, although I had heard of certain recruiters trying that a few times, just to get their commissions and keep their quota numbers at the levels the government had mandated. So at 17, I gave it my very best go. I called my father, and told him to not be surprised if I showed up on his doorstep someday, packed....NOTHING, and just high-tailed it out to I-80.
Now, this was actually fairly naive of me to do. Not only was this was a time when a few hundred children of varying ages had disappeared off of the face of the earth, never to be seen again, but I was a hitch-hiking tenderfoot. I didn't even know anyone who had actually done it to get pointers from. By the way, I actually almost was a "Johnny Gosh" myself (in case you're not familiar with the name? Google it!), when I decided to work at the fair one year. That's another story, another time. The Big Man upstairs however seemed to have other plans for me, although I'm still trying to figure out what those plans were. It must have been pretty important, however, because I'm still here...amazingly enough. I wasn't any Mel Gibson, but I was a handsome kid, and highly desired, unfortunately, by more than just the fairer sex. Again, these are stories I have no space to relate. Get me too far off track and this blog could break a few length records.
It was 80 degrees, and hot, humid and sunny when I left Des Moines, and I spent no more than 10-15 minutes on the road before rides presented themselves, so I progressed very quickly to the very boring state of Nebraska...which I was sure would NEVER end! I then made it across that to the wilds of Wyoming. By now I had become elevated a great deal above sea level, and the temperature that night had dipped to near 40. I had brought no coat. It never occurred to me that the weather would actually change. In August? No way! Freezing, I continued on. Somehow, later on, while I slept peacefully in the passenger's seat in a car that belonged to a man I didn't originally see as someone I would want to travel that far with, I made it to the ice age that was the opposite side of the state, only to be greeted by 2 ft. of freshly fallen snow and frigid temperatures, suited only to Eskimos and polar bears.
Needless to say, I haunted the truck stop I ended up at, and took also to knocking on the window of every semi I could find, in order to find a ride to Washington. After what seemed like a million semis and a week or so, I knocked on the truck window of a real winner named Cameron. He wasn't going my way either...but related to me that, if things got desperate, I could go the other direction with him, in essence, offering me a ride back from whence I had come.
As much as I abhorred the idea of defeat and running back to Des Moines with my freezing cold coat-less tail tucked between my legs, I finally assented, and got in to head back East. As we drove and talked, I noticed that, on occasion, he would lift his fist to his mouth and breath in. I had no idea what he was doing, but he did it an awful lot. When I took a better look at him, he was rather unkempt, glassy-eyed, and tended to slur his words. I finally screwed up enough courage to ask him what he was doing, and, without even blinking, he spat it out. He was a spray paint "huffer", hooked on Toluene, an ingredient found in spray paint cans. He sprayed it onto a cloth, then, as we drove, (and for all the other minutes he existed, I discovered later) breathed it in whenever he could handle it. Now I was pretty much in fear of my safety...but I continued to converse with him as normally as I could muster...here I had a ride that was going all the way back to where I had come from, so I gave him a chance to see if he had enough wits along to get the job done, where the end of the story came to its ending with me making it home in one piece.
Surprisingly enough, he was more than lucid enough to drive in a straight line. I had no idea at all about the dangers of spray paint sniffing, heck, I hadn't even met anyone who had ever done it before. I decided I would stick with this ride, if for no other reason than the fact that it was a sure thing, and the only ride I'd need to find on my return journey home.
I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but Cameron, who was from Grand Rapids Michigan, somehow managed to convince me to go all the way to Michigan, where he promised me I would have a place to live and a job in no time. As I mentioned before, I had no desire whatsoever to re-appear in Des Moines again, in a time span that couldn't have exceeded a week's time, only to present a story of unpreparedness and failure in my bragged about mission. We stopped at a truck stop, on my urging, to call my father collect to tell him I wasn't going to make it just yet, and why. We arrived in Grand Rapids soon thereafter.
We'll just skip right on over the events that followed that year, as well as the immediate years that followed. This is because my days as a hitch-hiker had ended...at least at that time they had. I had no further desire to put my life on the line until I had a better shot at growing up a little (although "growing up" as most people like to define it, didn't really happen for me until I was in my later 20's). Let's run ahead then, to my next inspired hitch-hiking attempt, which, by the way, lasted a heck of a lot longer than I ever expected it to.
I was 21, and was feeling my oats with a vengeance. I had just finished a dance with Uncle Sam and the U.S. Army, and it was time to roam free and see the U.S. This time I had a fresh duffel bag that I really didn't see me ever having a use for outside of the service. I packed it to the brim with my clothes, and jammed in a slew of personals to boot. The menagerie of things I packed, of course, also included 2 coats of varying thickness this round...there was no way that I was going to get caught in the middle of a strange area in 2 feet of snow and sub-degree penguin-friendly temps again without a coat, I'll tell you. I once again called my father, who, not surprisingly, more or less brushed my information lightly off of his shoulder, with a bit of a verbal "flick" that, not unlike a dog-whistle sound, was so obviously only for me to hear. He lightly chuckled and said "OK, well, just call me when you arrive, and I'll come and get you."
And so off I trekked, again in the very direction that once had cowed me to the point where I seriously doubted I would ever do such a thing again. Once again, I have kind of a hard time imagining myself a true hitch-hiker, as real road-weary-type hitch-hikers can brag many a mile of hardcore walking in between destinations. In the time I spent on the road, I only experienced one time that I ever spent more than 30 minutes out on the road, and I never spent any of that time walking. Granted, it didn't take me long to discover that, when you came to the edge of a big city anywhere, that you would be condemned, usually, to walk from one end of it to the other. People in big cities just tend to NOT pick people up. Most drivers are just going to work, coming home from work, or are out running short errands. I quickly learned to just shuck the thumb in favor of turning my back on traffic and commit myself to getting some needed exercise. Of course, people who saw me walking a lot of times picked me up regardless, knowing full well what I was striving to accomplish. I once spent an entire hour trying to get a ride in Needles, CA, but this was due to the fact that California and Kansas, at that time, were the only two states who had made being directly on the interstate illegal. Like it is in almost every state these days, you could only solicit a ride on the on-ramp. This really makes a lot of sense anyway, since people on the freeway were doing 50-80 mph, and people entering the freeway were just getting started, usually going a whole lot slower, and more likely to pull over and pick you up. The problem was, there was only about a tenth of the traffic available, since people obviously used every on-ramp in the city to get on it. The police didn't usually didn't "ticket" you, but they sure warned you strongly enough, then drove by a couple of times to show they intended to enforce those warnings. They threatened arrest and jail time if they caught you doing it, that was inspiration to stay off of it a-plenty.
I made it easily enough to the border of Wyoming, and then I paused for thought. I was broke, hungry, and badly needed a real shower (a good portion of your time spent using your thumb tends to involve a lot of "stand-up showers", where you use a restroom sink to clean the outside of yourself the best you can and hope to come across a reasonable method of doing the real thing later). Sure, there had been an offer or two of a "free dinner", and "you want something to drink?", so I wasn't dying by any means, but if I was going to make it all the way with any hope of having a few bucks on me when I got there, I might have to actually do a little work. Remember, this is 1982 and there were literally about 50% more jobs in the U.S. then there was people to work them. My best and easiest job, I figured, would be to get a job in a restaurant, where I knew they wouldn't even pause for breath, but would thrust an application at me and say "can you start NOW??" These of course were also the days where no one really cared who you were or what you might have done in your past as well. I-9's hadn't even been invented yet, and IDs were considered a formality, not a necessity. Your social security card definitely didn't matter whatsoever to anyone. An owner or manager would have laughed heartily at a suggestion from anyone suggesting that they do any kind of a personality or background check, that's for sure, and waiting two to three weeks for the job to call you was pretty much rare to non-existent. If there was a help wanted sign in the window, you could bet on the fact that, if you presented yourself fairly well at your 5 second interview (which usually consisted of the questions "What's your name, where are you from, have you ever done this before?", then the statement "you're hired!", then finally "Can you start right away?") that you were about to be employed.
After spending about 3 hours in the wonderful budding burg of Pine Bluff, Wyoming (actually it was about 3 weeks, but I like to think it was only 3 hours. I try my best to forget that little hole and every person in it), I then continued on to the almost forgotten task I had set out to do. On the border of Tacoma, WA, I called my father, and promptly floored him. He mumbled a bit, then said he was on the way to pick me up. What happened next I refuse to relate on the grounds that it might be a bit graphic, mixed with a cup and a half of morally offensive, so I will pass on that story, with no regrets.
To finally reach the end of this rather long blog post, I have concluded that there is no chance this post will ever survive to it's inevitable resting place without a "Part II".
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