Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America

by John Waters

  It’s suddenly dark. Cars fly by and the drivers don’t even look over to consider picking me up. I’m not even back on Interstate 70 yet and I’m completely exhausted. Some of the scabs from my earlier injuries have now stuck painfully to the fabric of my jeans, and every movement prevents their fragile healing. The moon’s not even out! It’s already come to my worst nightmare; I have to sleep out in the open. With no clean clothes for tomorrow. No phone. Like a bum.

  I climb down a slope into a sorry little cluster of trees. Scenic it’s not. I’m lucky enough to discover a discarded take-out bag filled with the spoiled leftovers from a Chinese dinner. I realize I’m starving! I haven’t eaten all day. I dig into the carton of soggy white rice and rip open the only plastic packet of soy sauce left and mix them together. Someone’s picked a few red-hot Szechuan peppers out of their kung pao chicken and I gobble them down and try to ignore the burning in my throat. I blot my tongue with a stale fortune cookie and pretend I’m full.

  It’s suddenly freezing but I try to make do. I curl up in a ball and crumple up the carryout trash and use it as a pillow. Just as I’m about to doze off, I realize I have to take a shit. God, how I hate the human body. I so resent that I have to defecate daily. I didn’t even get to think up this disgusting little act and now I have no choice. Just do it, I tell myself, praying there’s enough foliage around to use as toilet paper. It’s hard to shit outside. You have to remove both your jeans and your underpants. I begin. Suddenly I hear a rustling nearby and then an ungodly animal noise. I grope to find leaves but I can’t, so in a panic I use a flattened rice container as toilet paper. Before I can be sure I’m clean, something lunges at me and I can feel sharp teeth biting into my ass. I scream, but of course there’s no one around to hear me. I grab at the creature and still with no pants on roll around, battling for my life. For a split second, I see the face of a raccoon, and it’s got some kind of hideous yellowish foam around its mouth. Adrenaline pumps through my system. I grab the wild animal and with both hands begin to strangle it. The raccoon struggles back, biting my hands, spewing rabid saliva all over my face, but once I get it by the throat and start squeezing, I can feel that victory could be mine. I choke even harder and finally the diseased creature lets out a terrible-sounding death rattle before going limp in my bloody hands. I struggle to put on my pants and run up to the highway and begin waving my hands to oncoming traffic much as Marilyn Burns did at the end of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

  BAD RIDE NUMBER FOUR

  PAULA

  Finally my luck must be changing, because though it’s the middle of the night, a car stops. I limp to the passenger side and look in, praying for a friendly face. I don’t get one. I see a harsh-looking woman behind the wheel, wearing an expression of great hostility. “Get in,” she says in a flat, emotionless tone. I look in the backseat and see one of the most frightening drag queens on earth—one that couldn’t “pass” as a woman even to Stevie Wonder or the late Ray Charles. She has a large bouffant hairdo, stenciled eyebrows, and a face full of wrinkles. Her looks could stop a train. “I’m her mother,” she says in a man’s voice, not even trying to assume any kind of femininity. I shudder. “We’re going to Indianapolis,” the woman in the front barks in an impatient tone. I hesitate. “And we’re in a hurry,” adds the horror in back, looking as mean as can be. I look out at the road in the darkness and don’t see a headlight anywhere in the distance in either direction. What the hell? I’m street-smart; I can talk my way out of anything.

  I get in and put on my seat belt. For the first time I see the woman in front smile, but it’s the smile of a snake. “I’m Paula,” she says with a new glare of malice, “and that is my mother.” “Nice to meet you,” says the obvious man, holding out a long, veiny hand with chipped nails painted an especially hideous shade of purple to match the lipstick that has been applied with great care. “I see you got a cut there,” Paula announces with little sympathy. “Yes, I had a very bad ride and then I was attacked by a wild animal,” I try to explain. Both Paula and her “mother” break into hysterical laughter. Oh, great, a new set of loonies. I look straight ahead and we drive. Every once in a while Mom starts cackling and Paula loses it and joins in. “What’s so funny?” I ask, unable to hide my discomfort.

  “I guess I’m the one that should be asking that, aren’t I?” Paula suddenly snaps with a new combativeness. “Hallelujah!” adds Mom. “What do you mean?” I stammer. “We know who you are, asshole,” Paula snarls. “Yeah, Mr. Shock Value,” snarls her supposed mother, mentioning the name of my first book. “How did you know I’d be here?” I wonder out loud. “One of your shithead fans has been tweeting his butt off about you hitchhiking and how he spent quality time with you.” “Facebook, too,” pipes in the hag in the back. “You think other people’s nightmares are funny, don’t you?!” Paula growls accusingly. “Huh?” I ask, completely confused, but then add nervously, “No, I don’t. I think I’ve tried to have compassion for both the crime victim and the criminal,” I sputter, wondering which of the cases I’ve written about has so offended them. “It wasn’t my fault,” growls the cross-dressing man in the back, whose hostile face is made even more grotesque by the elaborate and out-of-fashion hairdo he’s wearing. “I was addicted to speed,” adds this monstrous mother, “and my children were just trying to help!” “Yet you think it’s fucking funny,” spits out Paula with a vengeance. “I went to jail and you had a party!” “A party? What party?” I panic, thinking how this deadly duo must have me mixed up with somebody else. “That little bitch thought she was better than us!” hisses Paula. “When her own parents ran off with the carnival and dumped her with me!” adds the skinny battle-ax. “It was for her own goddamn good!” hisses Paula with a sadistic smile. “That’s right,” adds the gaunt drag monstrosity no politically correct pronoun would ever adequately describe, “to teach her a lesson!”

  Suddenly these words hit me like a ton of bricks and I turn around in my seat. “Gertrude Baniszewski?” I scream in terror. The Indianapolis single mother who, with the help of her children and their neighborhood friends, tortured and finally murdered Sylvia Likens, a foster child they had taken in? “That’s her,” snaps Paula, “and I’m her daughter!” Oh God, Gertie’s child, all grown up but still scary—the one that escaped from prison twice but still only served two years for her part in the grisly torture slaying. “But Gertie is dead,” I cry, knowing the infamous Indianapolis killer died from lung cancer in 1990, having being paroled after serving fourteen years of a life sentence and then living quietly in Iowa under the name Nadine Van Fossan. “Do I look dead?” Gertie Jr. yells with a vengeance, and I see her coming at me with some sort of wire she wraps around my neck. Paula starts chanting evilly, “To teach her a lesson. To teach her a lesson,” in obvious tribute to her mother’s pitiful legal defense against the charges of this terrible crime, and as I fight, I feel a rag go over my nose with some sort of awful chemical smell. The last thing I remember hearing is both of these freaks chanting a new, terrifying premeditated cry of revenge: “To teach him a lesson! To teach him a lesson!”

  I awake in a basement room. Oh God, the basement! The name of that amazing book by Kate Millett that was subtitled Meditations on a Human Sacrifice. The same room in the house where Gertie, her kids, and the neighborhood delinquents did their dirty deed in 1965. I’m tied to a table. As my field of vision comes into focus, I see Paula coming at me, holding a chipped dinner plate. “Want some crackers?” she growls, offering me some crushed-up Ritz crumbs. When I shake my head no, she goes into a mini-tirade. “See,” she grunts, “that’s what we offered Sylvia but she wouldn’t eat either, and we were the children who were hungry!” “Taking in other people’s ironing,” I hear the faux Gertie mumble before seeing her out of the corner of my eye. “That’s what I had to do to get money to feed that brat!” she seethes. “I had asthma, too!” Before I can answer, she burns me with a lit cigarette. I howl in pain. “Think it’s funny now?” spits out Paul
a. “No,” I yell, fearful of what’s next. “Maybe I’ll get a portrait painted of you!” Gertie snarls with an overwrought vengeance as she burns me again right where I’m already scraped. “I didn’t mean it,” I argue, knowing what she is referring to—the hideous oil painting I had done of Gertie’s mug shot and later published in Shock Value. “Yes, you meant it!” seethes Paula as she approaches and pours scalding water on me just as they did to Sylvia. “Maybe we should bake a cake?” Paula sniggers as I scream in agony and remember the smart-ass refreshment I served at a book party I threw to privately celebrate Millett’s shocking volume. The cake I had made by a bakery in Provincetown with the terrible words in frosting on top that Gertie and gang carved into their victim’s chest: I A-M A P-R-O-S-T-I-T-U-T-E A-N-D P-R-O-U-D O-F I-T. On the page, a sentence. On a chest, the most terrible novel ever written. “Let’s put on your birthday message,” growls the Gertie clone as she comes toward me with some sort of homemade tattoo gun made from a video gaming console with a large-size paper-clip needle attached. Paula rips open my shirt. “Please,” I beg, “I was young. I didn’t realize your circumstances. You were poor. You’ve served your time. It’s all over now.” “It’s not over until Gertie has been avenged,” this Halloween drag version of Indianapolis’s scariest killer mother wails in my face as she brings the tattoo needle down on my skin. “I A-M…,” Paula begins spelling out their new terrible hate message, and I feel the agonizing pain of the unsafe ink pounding into my skin with a vengeance. “A-N A-S-S-H-O-L-E,” Gertie cackles with glee at her updated skin carving. Should I be thankful that the word asshole has fewer letters than prostitute? Through my screams at my punishment it’s hard to feel grateful for anything. “… A-N-D P-R-O-U-D…,” whispers Paula on cue as Gertie inks away with practiced sadism before completing the message they both are dying to see and say out loud: “O-F I-T.” Gertie hesitates, straightens her wig, and goes a step further than the original. “To teach him a lesson,” she mutters victoriously as she adds an exclamation point on my chest to this horrifying, infamous true-crime declaration. Paula lets out some kind of war cry.

  The pain is forcing me in and out of consciousness, and suddenly I realize they are taking me somewhere. I half walk, half stumble up the stairs with my two captors hurrying me along, paying no attention to my cries of alarm at the increased pain and the liquid oozing out of my freak tattoo. I smell of burned skin. At least I make it out of the basement alive, something Sylvia Likens never did. It’s light out. Christ, I’ve been imprisoned overnight! They throw me in the back of the car and, without a word of where we are headed, peel out. “Torture” by the Everly Brothers comes on some oldies station they are listening to, and they shriek in harmony to the lyrics of emotional despair but screech in laughter every time they get to the “Baby, you’re torturing me” chorus. Gertie really looks bad now, her five o’clock shadow bursting through the Pan-Cake makeup like poison oak. I can see that somehow she looks a little like Paula. Could it be her brother?! Oh God, spare me that!

  I have no idea where we are but I see signs that we are entering Indianapolis. Finally we pull up to a scruffy lot in a random suburban neighborhood. I see a street sign reading “E. New York Street” and my blood runs cold. That was the street Gertie’s house was on! I see a number: 3852. Oh my God, I remember now that the murder house has been torn down, but this abandoned, trash-filled piece of earth must have been 3850, the crime scene itself. Gertie II gets out, opens the back door, and pulls me out without the slightest concern over my injuries and throws me down in the dirt. Paula snarls a parting message in my ear: “Maybe you’ll realize now that we’re a real family,” and gives me a swift kick in the leg before they both get back in their car and drive off, mission accomplished.

  I lie there, happy to be alive at least. Suddenly I see other people milling about, a few taking photographs of this empty lot. At first I don’t believe it, but, yes, these shutterbugs are true-crime buffs. I see somebody else dressed as Gertie, but this time it’s the “young Gertie” and I can tell she’s really a girl. Another is dressed like poor Sylvia, with those hideous words scratched above her midsection in obviously fake blood. The ingenue Gertie and the imitation Sylvia pose together for the other true-crime groupies. I vow to burn my Gertie portrait if I ever get out of this trip alive. I struggle to my feet. Gertie #3 sees me and yells out in hyperexcitement and disbelief, “John Waters!” I limp away as fast as I can.

  BAD RIDE NUMBER FIVE

  EUGENE

  Great. I’m stuck inside city limits, the worst place to hitchhike. My cuts are sore and the new tattoo is going to get infected, I can tell. I should go to the police, but then what? There’d be big-time publicity and I could never continue the trip and there goes the whole deal. And besides, maybe I did deserve a little bit of punishment for that cake, but certainly not this! I look down at my chest and see that the yellow fluid oozing out has turned brown and the letters, especially the A and H of ASSHOLE, are starting to swell. I should go to the hospital, but then again, how do I explain this hideous epitaph scrawled on my chest? “Oh, this? I was just drunk!” I’m sure there are great plastic surgeons once I arrive safely in San Francisco who can help with laser-surgery tattoo removal, if I can just get there in one piece.

  But nobody picks me up. I keep walking anyway because a few “Basement” buffs are still following me. I pose for cell phone pictures with a couple of them and that seems to do the trick. All except for one persistent African-American Gertie impostor (a man? a woman?) who won’t leave me alone and wants to “come along.” I try to explain that no one will stop to pick me up hitchhiking with a Gertie look-alike, but she’s persistent. Finally, I show her my chest, and while she thinks it’s fake, she’s still impressed. An exclusive shot of “Gertie” and me and my horrible new tattoo seems to satisfy her. She retreats happily, adding the photo from her cell phone to her Basement Are Us blog.

  Just when I think I’m going to pass out, a car stops for me. I’m in luck, I think to myself once I get in the car and painfully put on my seat belt. “Eugene,” as he introduces himself, looks like a hippie; he’ll be gentle. No funny stuff with this guy. He explains he’s going to St. Louis but will let me off at a rest area outside the city on I-70 so I’ll have a better chance to get a ride farther west. He explains that he’s a vegan and offers me something to eat. I am starved out of my mind. I don’t have any food issues—I can eat anything. At least I thought I could. Eugene offers me a raw turnip, which, I guess, is better than nothing. He rants against the evils of any animal products and then continues on against “the criminality of force-feeding hospital patients and prisoners nonvegetarian meals.” I agree—what else can I do?—and ask him for another turnip. “Hungry little muvva?” he asks good-naturedly, tossing me one. I notice he is eating what look to be hedge clippings, and when I ask him what he’s having, he tells me they are exactly that. “There’s free food everywhere!” he brags. “Just eat leaves … grass … the spirits give you nourishment—it’s right before your eyes!” Before I follow up he takes out a baggie and sprinkles some kind of brown seasoning over his hedge salad. “What’s that?” I ask, ever the foodie. “Dirt,” he replies as if I’d just asked the dumbest question in the world. “You mean, like earth?” I ask, confused. “Well, yes … I call it land … sod … it’s all delicious.” I hold out my half-eaten raw turnip and he sprinkles a little of the “vegan spice” on it. No matter what he calls this seasoning, it still tastes like dirt to me, and this crust of the earth gets caught in my throat and I gag. “Here,” he says, holding out a bottle of what I thought was lemonade. I take a big swig and spit it out immediately. The liquid tastes salty, spoiled, disgusting. “What the hell is that?” I demand in between dry-heaving. “Urine,” he says matter-of-factly, “nothing better for you than drinking your own wee-wee.” “But that’s not my wee-wee,” I sputter. “You’re correct,” he answers with pride, “it’s mine.” I retch. “I’m healthier than you,” he says, shrugging with
out concern, “you should be thanking my bladder, not complaining.”

  I can’t believe I just drank this hippie freak’s piss. I continue to gag as he drives along, looking at me in food pity. “You poor thing,” he tsks-tsks, “it’s all those animal parts stuck in your veins that are making you sick. Bristle. You know what that is?” “No,” I admit weakly. “That’s stiff animal hair left over on pork product.” Gag. “Don’t be puking in my car,” he warns, “and if you do, I would expect you to eat it back up. Consuming one’s own vomit is a way to train your digestive system to reject animal-derived substances.” “Please,” I beg, “do you have anything a little less radical to eat?” He thinks a minute. “Sure, you like tofu?” “Yes!” I yell, practically salivating for something I’ve at least enjoyed in my culinary past. “Here you go,” he offers, taking out a bowl made out of a recycled tin can, “it’s raw. The way tofu should be eaten.” I scarf it down.