by John Waters
I look over the dirt oval track with all the junkers’ taillights facing each other and see Ratrod, a seventies Dodge Charger with its disgusting slob of a driver inside taking a big gulp of whiskey from a bottle, which I’m sure is against the rules. He glances at me and then catches Lucas’s eyes, too, and begins making mock kissing noises with his brittle, chapped lips. I avert my eyes as Lucas snorts in derision, grabs his own dick, and squeezes it in the excitement of possible revenge. “That sandbaggy asshole,” he growls, “always holding back, lurking around the side of the ring, too cowardly to strike first.” I smell gasoline fumes and am in seventh heaven.
“Will death strike tonight?” the track announcer yells over the loudspeaker system that booms out to the entire fairgrounds. As the crowd cheers and the drivers rev their engines, the countdown begins. “Ten, nine, eight, seven…” he screams. There’s nowhere to hold on to inside this car, so I just look over to Lucas with trust. He grabs his dick again and whispers over the din of fifty idling hot rods, “Wrecking cars gives me a hard-on.” I smile back, not letting him know how excited I am. “Three, two, one,” and we’re off … backward, of course! Total chaos! Some car named Grenade Banger rams into my side door, but the seat belt keeps me safe. Every time I peek up and look out, another car is about to smash into us. Lucas is biding his time, though, and every time we are hit, he growls sexually in demolition lust. “We’re tearing it up, John,” he yells over the sound of crashing metal. As he floors it in reverse, I look back and see asshole Ratrod right in our line of attack. BANG! I am amazed to see Lucas’s cock growing bigger underneath the flame-retardant material of his jumpsuit. WHAM goes another hit as we smash into another car (Gunthunt) in reverse, then back into another (Hatchet-Head) with such force that the fillings in my teeth tingle. “Dirtbags!” yells Lucas in full attack mode as he backtracks into two other cars (we’re going too fast for me to see their names) with such ferocity that both are instantly put out of business. He is in an erotic frenzy. Lucas leers at me as he revs his engine, surveying the four or five rust buckets still left running. “My dick is so hard. Wanna see it?” “Sure,” I yell in surprise over the sound of his peeling out backward and the impact of collision. The thrill of victory is pulsating in my pants, too. Encouraged, Lucas unbuttons his jumpsuit and, while zigzagging again backward, whips out (with some difficulty) an amazing cock that no gay man would ever refuse. “Beautiful,” I say as he reverse-accelerates again with a vengeance. The car he hits this time (Nitro Ned) explodes with a hiss and then bursts into flames.
“Jerk me off,” Lucas orders with beautiful, polite authority, and what else can I do but follow his orders? “Two vehicles left,” Lucas pants as he scans the pit, “so make it quick.” I take direction and don’t stop even when I feel the hostile crash of Ratrod’s vehicle into the back of our car. Lucas is so cool he doesn’t even lose his hard-on. The crowd cheers. I sneak a look over and consider a blow job, but even I know giving head in the middle of a demolition derby is risky, and besides, I don’t know Lucas that well yet. I see our enemy getting ready to strike. “Okay,” Lucas moans sexually like the gearhead gladiator he is, “let’s blast off!” He grabs my hand, spits into it, and thrusts it back on his cock with a wet splat. Could this be love? “Okay, John, we’re gonna bust a nut,” he announces, flooring the accelerator and speeding backward so suddenly that I get a whiplash, but I don’t care. By now, I’m so worked up that I feel that I actually am his car. Just as he crashes into Ratrod for the final “kill,” Lucas shoots a giant load through our nonexistent windshield into the sky with amazing projection, where it showers down beautifully like elegant fireworks. The crowd goes nuts. Lucas looks over to me in demolition tenderness and gives me the biggest, lewdest grin I’ve ever seen in my life.
That night we celebrate victory together. He lives alone. Imagine my thrill and amazement when we pull up to his trailer and I see it is the exact same model as the one Divine’s character, Babs, lived in, in Pink Flamingos, only painted silver and black. I know he never saw the movie, so I don’t bring it up. Lucas counts his winnings with me beside him on his bed in what would have been Divine’s bedroom. I refuse the cash he offers to share with me and tell him how much I appreciated such a romantic night. He blushes and then sheepishly asks, “Wanna watch some porn?” “Sure,” I say, curious to see his cinematic fantasy tastes. Fumbling under the bed, Lucas takes out a DVD with a homemade label, inserts the disc, and pushes play. But instead of regular porn, I see a compilation reel of demolition derby accidents much like the cumshot reel would be if it were normal gay smut.
“I usually only get horny when I’m racing,” Lucas whispers with lust, “but tonight I’d like to return the favor, especially for someone who has brought me such good luck.” “Okay,” I say in excitement as he eases over and unbuckles my belt. “Check out this next heat,” he says with touching sexual vulnerability as he lowers my pants. “BAM!” I cry as I watch in amazement vintage amateur 8mm film transferred to digital of three derby cars backing into each other at the exact same time and flipping over in unison. “Show me more,” I whisper as he begins stroking. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet!” he purrs back with a newfound sexual gusto. Lucas, more and more aroused, fast-forwards to another notorious demolition disaster. “Okay, John, here you go,” he moans as I see a 1975 Cadillac Coupe de Ville get broadsided in reverse by a ratty but rare 1970 Monte Carlo Chevrolet. The driver of the Caddy goes berserk, forgets all the rules of the race, and accelerates forward toward the attacker and smashes head-on into the Chevy. Both vehicles explode in flames on-screen, and in one escalating movement of Lucas’s wrist we become one; sexually united in affection, deviant excitement, and demolition lust. We fall asleep instantly.
GOOD RIDE NUMBER FOUR
OFFICER LADDIE
The next morning Lucas makes me a delicious homemade breakfast of corned beef hash with a poached egg on top before giving me a ride to the entrance ramp of Route 70 headed west. Always a sweetheart, he bashfully presents me with a belt buckle with the word W-H-I-P—L-A-S-H split into two levels of letters. Lucas can see how much I love his gift just by the way I hold it in my hands. I give him my best mustachioed sneer, jump out, and simply say, “Thank you.” Maybe being a human four-leaf clover for a crazily rugged but tenderhearted and slightly deviant demolition derby driver only comes once in a lifetime. “Give my love to the Simpsons,” he shouts good-naturedly, then peels out in his truck perfectly so the gravel shoots up all around me but not on me.
Uh-oh. Here come the cops. When the officer steps out from his vehicle, he looks mean. “What do you think you’re doing?” he snarls in an unwelcoming way. “I’m hitchhiking to San Francisco,” I explain politely, “and I know it’s illegal to do that on the interstate so I’m hoping to get a ride here on the ramp.” “ID!” he snaps without comment on my legal position. He looks at my license. “You homeless?” he demands without the slightest bit of sympathy. “No … I’m a film director,” I announce haughtily as I start to take out my Directors Guild of America card. “Freeze!” he yells as he pulls out his gun and aims it right at my head. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I say with alarm but still try to keep my cool. “I wasn’t reaching for a weapon,” I cry, “I just wanted you to look at my directorial credits.”
Suddenly another cop car comes speeding up with the light flashing. Officer Fuckhead seems relieved. This cop, also overweight but kind of goofy-looking, jumps out with a cheerier expression on his face. “Okay, Officer Bradford, what’s the problem here?” he demands. “We got a vagrant with an attitude problem,” the first cop snorts. I don’t say a word. The second cop lowers the first cop’s hand with the gun away from my head and I let out a sigh of relief. “I’ll take over here. This man is famous!” “Thank you,” I mumble, not believing my ears. “Fine with me,” grunts the first cop as he heads back to his police car, “but I never heard of him.”
“Thank you, Officer…?” I murmur in relief as the asshole cop pul
ls away, turns on his siren, and begins chasing a car that might have been doing five miles over the speed limit on this road where not one car has passed us by. “It’s Laddie,” he answers. “Where you headed?” “San Francisco,” I say optimistically. “Great town. My kind of place!” he announces with a whistle before jovially telling me, “I’ll give you a ride to Terre Haute, right before you cross into Illinois, and that way no Indiana cops will give you any shit.” I eagerly agree. As we pull off, he suddenly says with a knowing wink, “I loved you in Fargo!” Oh, no, not again! I think. Another fan who thinks I’m Steve Buscemi. “No, I always get that,” I protest. “I’m not Steve Buscemi.” “Oh, yes you are!” he yells with a startling conviction. “I’m really not,” I argue. “I love him and we’ve met many times but—” “Come on,” Officer Laddie interrupts, “let’s do lines from Con Air.” Okay, I remind myself, I said before I left I hoped people didn’t recognize me, so why not play along? “But I forget them,” I beg off. “Loved your work,” spouts Officer Laddie, suddenly doing a perfect imitation of John Malkovich in the film. “Really, I can’t remember the dialogue,” I stall, then suddenly have an idea: “I’m not really Steve Buscemi! I’m Don Knotts!”
Thinking my obvious pulling of his leg will end this charade, I’m astonished when it doesn’t. He believes me! “You know Andy Griffith!?” he asks in wide-eyed wonder as we speed along I-70 West, obviously not knowing that both of these actors are dead. What the hell? He’s giving me a long ride; why not go along with it? “I sure do!” I say with Knottist nervous pride.
“You like poppers?” Officer Laddie suddenly asks with a mischievous grin. “Well … sometimes,” I stammer, shocked again by the unpredictable behavior of the overweight Indiana police officer. “Me, too! Not for sex, though,” he explains as he reaches under his seat and pulls out a bottle of Liquid Gold. “Wow, I haven’t seen that brand for a while,” I admit. “I got ’em all—collector’s items,” he brags like a true connoisseur. “Jolt! Ram! Blue Boy! Even foreign ones like France 5 or English Jungle!” he shouts, fumbling in the glove compartment to pull out different brands. I stare back in awed appreciation. He snickers. “What I really like poppers for,” he whispers conspiratorially, “is driving!”
“Here, Don Knotts,” he offers, handing me a bottle of Rush. “Call me Barney, please,” I answer, keeping up the charade. “Hold the top while I get a good snort?” Officer Laddie asks in proper popper etiquette. I unscrew the cap and hand him back the opened bottle and pinch his one nostril and then the other as he takes a big whiff in each and drives with one hand. He hands the bottle back to me and I pretend to take a bigger sniff than I really do as Officer Laddie turns bright red in popper dizziness and turns on the radio. “The Giggler” by Pat and the Wildcats comes on—that great obscure, astonishing garage-rock instrumental with the maniacally cheerful chuckling vocal added for novelty appeal. Amazing. I thought I was the only one who knew that 45 rpm, but I guess I was wrong. Officer Laddie lets out a howl of laughter and shouts to the world, “Aunt Bee, look at us now! POPPERMANIA!” He turns on the siren full blast and accelerates. I’m popper high, too, so I don’t care. Under the influence, he still seems to be driving safely to me.
Officer Laddie begins mock-disco-dancing in his seat and waves to passengers in other cars, who oddly enough seem delighted, give him the thumbs-up, and start mock-dancing right back at him. I start laughing uncontrollably when I look out into the countryside zipping by my window and see cows looking up at the sudden noise of our siren. “Cows don’t get high,” I blurt out stupidly to Officer Laddie as the muscles in our bodies relax and our heart rates increase and the blood pounds through our veins in hilarity and chemical excitement. “They sure don’t,” screams Officer Laddie over the music before we both break into uncontrollable laughter in our joint amyl nitrite bond of lunacy.
As the popper high quickly vanishes, Officer Laddie pulls over on the side of the highway and we look out to an incredible vista, a scenic overlook of majestic America. He reaches into the backseat and grabs a box of donuts. “Hungry?” he offers, taking a coconut-topped Texas-style one for himself. Realizing it’s almost lunchtime and I can’t demand healthy food on the road, I eagerly grab a chocolate-frosted cruller. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” he says, and I assume he means the donut. “Yes,” I agree, but then I see way in the distance a moving mass of dark clouds and suddenly realize he means the storm. “Is that a tornado?” I ask with sudden alarm. “It sure is,” he says, smiling; “maybe we can get a show!” Since I’m not from this part of the country, I’m not sure how scared I should feel. “Are we safe?” I ask as I hear the faint wailing of the tornado-warning siren in the distance and see the now clearly formed tornado funnel zigzagging across the landscape. “Nobody’s ever really safe except in Mayberry, are they?” he asks with a grin. “But Don Knotts is deceased,” I argue, “and so is Andy Griffith,” figuring now is not the time for games. “Nonsense,” Office Laddie responds, “I saw both of them on TV just this morning.”
When the tornado suddenly switches course and seems headed straight for us, I panic, but Officer Laddie just yells out, “Dorothy!” in tribute to Auntie Em’s great line in The Wizard of Oz without ever considering the possibility I might not know the reference. With an abruptness that takes my breath away, the dark funnel turns white when the clouds part for a second and the sunlight peeks back in, lighting up the tornado and forcing a rainbow to appear at the same time the twister is churning through the farmland, miraculously missing houses yet gobbling up nature itself with a ravenous appetite. “See?” Officer Laddie yells over the roar of the tornado. “We’re over the rainbow on both sides of Oz!” Awestruck at the incredibly magnificent once-in-a-lifetime view of a tornado and a rainbow, I hold on to Officer Laddie as branches and limbs from trees become missiles hurled toward us. We duck each one just in time as the tornado veers slightly to the left and just misses sucking us up inside.
In the sudden calm and eerie silence following the storm, I can’t think of anything to say but “I’m really John Waters. I made the first Hairspray movie.” Officer Laddie looks at me with sudden recognition. “Oh my God. Of course you are,” he says with happiness, “and you’re not going to believe this, but I’m playing Edna in our church group’s production of Hairspray.” Good God, I think, the miracle of Hairspray never ends. “Come on,” he begs, grabbing both of my hands with enthusiasm, “let’s do ‘Timeless’ together. You know the words!” And even though I have to think for a moment, he’s right, I do, even though I didn’t write them for the Broadway musical version; Scott Wittman and Marc Shaiman did. “Styles keep a-changin’, the world’s rearrangin’,” I croon as Wilbur. “Fads keep a-fadin’, Castro’s invadin’,” warbles Officer Laddie back, playing Edna with the perfect lack of condescension. “You’re timeless to me,” we sing together while cars whiz by, honking their horns in applause as we shuffle along the side of the highway in perfect vaudevillian happiness with the ravaged, torn-up countryside behind us making the perfect backdrop for our shared musical madness.
GOOD RIDE NUMBER FIVE
YETTA
Officer Laddie has to get back to work, so we do our curtain calls to the applause of honking horns from oncoming traffic and then, like everybody else in showbiz, go our separate ways. I’ll always remember this lovely man and what a help he was on my cross-country trip; however, I have no time for elaborate goodbyes, it’s time to get another ride.
But I’m in the middle of nowhere—the border between Indiana and Illinois. I see poking up the road, at a ridiculously slow speed, a beat-up station wagon whose driver is putting on signal lights to turn onto Route 70W, so I excitedly stick out my thumb. I see what appears to be, from my quick glimpse, a very old lady behind the wheel. She pulls over on the entrance ramp and I’m not sure if it’s because she wants to give me a lift or her car has died. I run up to the door and peek inside. “Hi,” says the overweight lady with snow-white hair pulled up in some kind of goofy
Pebbles Flintstone topknot. She is wearing a floral muumuu getup, jeweled plastic slip-on sandals with black seamed hose that have seen better days. Her face, although deeply wrinkled, is somehow familiar, but that seems impossible. I hop in and notice that even though she wears no makeup except for a touch of red lipstick that seemed applied by a blind person, she is featuring false eyelashes—the kind you buy in a joke store.
“Loco Moto,” that great honky-tonk hillbilly instrumental by Cornbread and Jerry, with the organ mimicking an approaching train whistle, is playing on the radio, which I think must be another good sign. “I’m only going to Hermann, Missouri,” she says with a chatty voice that also rings a bell. “Thanks for the lift,” I say as she pulls out at a ridiculously slow speed and merges into the interstate without showing any concern at the drivers who slam on their brakes behind her in the slow lane and then lean on their horn before angrily speeding around her. “Green tree. Pretty lady. Car. Car. Truck,” she recites, naming out loud almost everything she sees. “Don’t mind me, I’m a gabberbox,” she chuckles. “A gabberbox?” I ask, confused at her term. “You know, hon, I talk a lot,” she explains before breaking into a laugh that is eerily familiar. “Oh, you mean a chatterbox,” I say, and she just continues laughing, but then pops a giant cough drop in her mouth, one with a strong cherry odor. “I talk mental,” she announces with pride. “Are you from Baltimore?” I ask, hearing her use of the working-class white expression hon, which is still heard in certain blue-collar neighborhoods in Baltimore. “No, no,” she answers without any apparent geographical pride, “I’m from San Francisco, California.” The off-kilter lilt to her voice is familiar and I rack my brain: Who does she remind me of? “Do you miss the Bay Area?” I ask, wondering if she could have even read my San Francisco sign from the distance of her moving car. I try not to stare at this batty old broad but somehow I know this woman. “No, I’m real happy in Hermann, Missouri! I’ve got a secondhand convenience store called Yetta’s.” “You mean overstocked items?” I ask politely, trying to imagine what on earth a secondhand convenience store could be. “No, goofy,” she says in a nasal, singsong voice like some kind of dotty comedienne, “it’s just used products, like a thrift store. I get outdated prescription drugs, half-used deodorant sticks, recalled over-the-counter cold medicine … they still work! Sometimes it’s a bunch of bullshit when they say there’s some sort of health scare. I try ’em first, and if I’m okay, so are my customers!” “Is that legal!?” I blurt, imagining a store straight out of one of my old movies. “I don’t know, John,” she giggles, “but the local police are nice. They buy stuff, too!”
