Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America

by John Waters

  We try to have sex during the night but Veneer had warned me. I can’t get it up and feel so frustrated when he tries to suck my dick. We try several times, and even though I’m always willing, nothing happens. That saltpeter sure is strong! Eventually, we give up and pass out unsatisfied in separate hard metal bunks. The rotting nutraloaf is never removed from our cell, and once the lights are turned off, I can hear some kind of vermin creeping around and chewing it up. I actually hear a rat puke.

  We are awakened by the flash of cell phone cameras. The jailer is leading a pack of sightseers on a “historic tour” of this “renovated and restored” onetime-abandoned single-cell jailhouse. “Here are two obvious homosexuals, ‘fudge packers,’ if you will, who invade our state every year, having illegal ‘prick-nics’ in our rest areas in flagrant violation of Kansas Statute 21-3505—criminal sodomy.” “I only gave a blow job!” yells Veneer in defiance as the tourists cover their ears in aural disgust. “Call the Maryland Film Commission,” I beg. “I was doing research for my book!” “Skull Pussy and Pillow Biter,” the jailer barks, still referring to us, “the two-headed transplants of rear entry.”

  Later in the day, we are dragged into the only other room in this tiny jailhouse, a miniature courtroom with a judge’s bench and three seats for the public. I see the lowest-rent entertainment reporter I vaguely remember from some long-ago movie-press junket. One of those hacks that kept stopping the taping and demanding you call him by his first name in your responses to his extremely unoriginal questions. God, I marvel, if he’s a reporter from Smoky Hills Public Television as he claims, his career must be in real trouble. His station is located in this almost abandoned town, Bunker Hill, Kansas. Population: 95.

  The judge enters and he looks exactly like the cross-eyed actor who plays the biggest fascist sadist in Pasolini’s movie masterpiece Salò. Veneer gasps. I gulp. “Court is now in session,” our elected official announces in a flat Midwestern accent. The other two reporters, one from the faraway Wichita Times and the other from a local flea-market classified giveaway sheet, are allowed to take photos while our TV guy videotapes. “You two ass-bandits are accused of sodomy,” the judge announces without looking at us. “Semen demons will not be tolerated anywhere in Kansas, plain and simple. How do you plead?” “Your Honor,” Veneer tries to argue as his own attorney, “I am constitutionally guaranteed the right to give oral sex—” “Overruled,” the judge yells before turning to me. “And you, homo-hack?” he rudely addresses my humble self. “Judge, I have not been allowed to contact my attorney, which is a flagrant violation of my rights.” “You’ve seen too many bad movies, cream puff,” he rules with a hint of hidden nellyism. I suddenly realize this fucker has a little “sugar” in him himself.

  But he’s not a “brother,” believe me. He gives us both two weeks of community service with the understanding that we must be out of Kansas by sunset the day our sentences end. Veneer seems relieved. But I’m not! Two weeks? That’s an eternity. I have a flight to catch from San Francisco to Provincetown for the start of the season in eight days. Two weeks in Bunker Hill, Kansas, seems like a life sentence. Our jailer drags us out of the courtroom and we are paraded in a perp walk before the pitiful little press corps. I ignore all their rude questions except two. “Yes, I have seen Black Mama, White Mama, and no, I do not identify with this movie in my current situation.”

  Next stop, the same pitiful rest stop where I was arrested. It’s much quieter, not a pervert in sight. I guess by now the word is out that this onetime jumping tearoom is now heaty. “Okay,” the jailer announces, “get out. Your job,” he says to me with a smart-ass grin, “is to pick up all the used rubbers you may find at this location. And you,” he says to Veneer, “you give out these homo-health tips.” I see Veneer blush, even though he’s black, when he reads the “Rimming and You” flyer filled with graphic descriptions of various strains of hepatitis that can be caused by indiscriminate analingus. Veneer and I look at one another in militant anger but know better than to argue. I find a stick and use it to poke through the bushes. I find a lot of used prophylactics. The semen is mostly dried up but in some it’s runny, heated by the sun on this unfortunately warm day. I pick them up with my bare hands and deposit them in a torn Rite Aid plastic bag I find stuck blowing in the wind in a low tree branch. My jailer nods his approval.

  Veneer is having a much tougher time. Since most of the drivers who are stopping have to use the bathroom for legitimate purposes, they become enraged when they politely take Veneer’s flyer and read the scandalous message. Some don’t even know what “rimming” means and ask him innocently. Other men do know and are infuriated to think that they have been identified as engaging in such. One guy actually punches Veneer in the mouth. My jailer runs over to try to break it up and I see my chance for freedom. An effeminate, bewigged older gentleman has just driven up. Back in Baltimore, we call this type a nellbox, but never to their faces. I guess he hasn’t heard of the police crackdown yet. Before he can even get out to cruise, I approach him, still pretending to look for rubbers, and whisper stealthily, “Help me. I’m being held prisoner by homophobic authorities.” The nellbox looks at me, over at the growing brawl with the jailer and Veneer, and then back to my crotch. “Get in, girl,” he whispers in his most exaggerated old-school-queen vernacular. I leap in and immediately lie on the floor. He slowly drives away.

  BAD RIDE NUMBER EIGHT

  BLOSSOM

  “Gay to my hole, Miss Thing,” he whispers out of the corner of his mouth as he drives right by my jailer and poor Veneer without their even noticing I’m gone yet. “I beg your pardon?” I answer, for once perplexed at the meaning of his gay slang. “I’m Blossom,” this big galoot of a queen answers, not bothering to translate, “and don’t you forget it, girl!”

  Oh God. Is it wrong to be gay but still have “gay shame,” as it’s humorously called by hip fags in the U.K.? Embarrassed at the old-school poofs who exaggerate the stereotype and give the new queer generation a gayly incorrect name? It’s a tough call. I remember when Divine first saw Richard Simmons and confessed that he felt homophobic. I can identify here. Suddenly Blossom reaches into the backseat and grabs a bakery box, which he hands over to me. “Have some pie, butt plug,” he offers with a deranged look in his eyes. “Okay,” I mutter, once again hungry after days of irregular meals. My tattoo is hurting. Every time I move I can feel the scabs stretch and break, and you can see pus leaking through my shirt in the front. “You pop your cork?” Blossom asks me with sudden lechery when he notices. “No,” I explain in horror, “I have an infection.” “Well, let’s stop and get some medicine,” Blossom clucks like a hovering mother, suddenly pulling off Route 70 and heading south on Route 281, wherever that may lead. “Hey, I need to stay on Route 70,” I cry, but he doesn’t slow down.

  “I gotta be careful,” Blossom whispers even though it’s only me in the car to hear. “Why?” I ask, almost afraid he’ll confide the truth. “Can I tell you a secret, girlfriend?” he asks, and ignoring his gay familiarity, I answer warily, “Maybe you better not.” “I’m on a mission, Mary,” he continues, disregarding my advice. “These straight fuckers need a payback.” “Who?” I ask, having no idea of what he’s talking about. “Breeders!” he snorts back. “Oh, come on, some straight people are fine. These days, you can’t tell a person’s character by his or her sexuality,” I argue, not caring if he agrees or not. “Oh, yes, you fucking can!” Blossom suddenly snarls with unassimilated gay fanaticism. “Somebody’s gotta pay!” he threatens as he swerves off the road to enter a Rexall drugstore parking lot.

  Blossom pulls into a handicapped parking space and slams on the brakes in a decidedly ungirlish way. “I’m mentally handicapped because of heteros,” he shouts for the world to hear, even though it’s only me in the car. He opens the back door, gets out a can of spray paint, and writes SPAGHETTI IS STRAIGHT UNTIL YOU GET IT HEATED UP! on the next car. At first I don’t understand, but when he takes a hammer out fr
om under the front seat and smashes the windshield of another car and snarls, “Make heterosexual divorce illegal,” I begin to understand the severity of his twisted militancy. I hate separatism, but I’m too freaked-out at this point to debate sexual politics.

  Besides, I feel dizzy. “Come on,” Blossom says, dragging me out of the car and toward the drugstore, “you’re coming with me.” “I don’t feel well,” I try to explain, hoping to stall him, but telling the truth. What’s the matter with me? I feel light-headed, nauseous, not myself. “That’s because straight pig-fuckers are around,” Blossom rants, suddenly back to his hetero-bashing. “I feel like puking, too, every time I think of them dancing the Electric Slide.”

  Blossom suddenly changes the subject, all business. “Okay, once we get inside, we’re just two trouser-bandits out shopping.” My head starts spinning in some kind of weird vertigo and I reach out to hold on to him for support. “If we get busted,” he continues, ignoring my frailties, “you don’t know me, Girlene, and I don’t know you.” Suddenly the horizon spins and I fall to my knees. My scabs, just beginning to heal, rip apart. Blossom pulls me back up to my feet with surprising strength.

  We both see security guards rushing to investigate Blossom’s now-reported vandalism. When he gives me a wink, I realize that was Blossom’s point in the first place. We enter the store. Blossom knows the layout. He heads right to the bottled-water department, grabs a large bottle of Evian, looks around to see if he’s being observed, unscrews the cap, takes a gulp so there’s room, and pours into the bottle some Clorox bleach from a hidden container he pulls from his pocket. “Straight throat!” he mutters, and even if I have no idea what he means, I know it’s not good. The whole place is spinning again and I begin to collapse, but Blossom catches me just in time.

  I can barely make it back to the car. Blossom, now in high spirits, is mumbling hate-crime threats and giggling insanely as he sees my deteriorating condition and lets me lie down in the backseat. I feel really bad. He takes pity on me and feeds me another piece of pie. Just as the first bite goes down my throat, a lightbulb goes off in my brain. This freak is poisoning me, too, only this time it’s on purpose. I spit it out. “Why? Blossom, why?” I beg. “I’m a gay guy, too!” “Because you’re a traitor,” he hisses as he jabs on the CD player and “Strychnine” by the Sonics comes on. I usually love this kind of music, but the lyrics “I like the taste of straight strychnine” are suddenly not funny. “You’re a bisexual sympathizer, an assimilated faggot,” Blossom continues. “Worse yet—you’re not an outlaw anymore!”

  I vaguely remember stopping at two more convenience stores. He went in alone while I lay helpless in the backseat. First it was a Hy-Vee drugstore where he replaced milk of magnesia with ipecac (“so they can feel as sick as I do when I see straight guys sitting in a movie theater together with one empty seat between them so their legs don’t accidentally touch”). My memory is foggy on the last one, but I think it was some place named Cheapo Depot, right over the Oklahoma border, where he injected citrus fruit with rat poison (“If leather bars are vanishing, so must straight people”). I finally lose consciousness.

  It’s early morning when I wake up. I’m in some sort of “adult” hotel with Blossom. Pay-per-view bareback gay porn is playing on the TV. He’s completely nude with an erection, and his legs are up and wrapped around his head. His asshole is so overused it resembles a baboon’s. Blossom. Now I know where he got his name. He’s tied a noose around his neck and strung it tight over the faux rafter overhead all ready to be sprung. He’s obviously an autoerotic-asphyxiation enthusiast. Stroking his enlarged cock, he has been waiting for me to wake up and focus on this full horror show. “Gay to my hole, Miss Thing,” he announces for the second time today, and this time I think I know what he means. He snaps the cord and the rope flips him around to his feet and hoists him off the ground. He chokes in ecstasy. Maybe he reaches an orgasm. I’m not sure. I run.

  BAD RIDE NUMBER NINE

  CAPTAIN JACK

  It’s fucking boiling outside already and, natch, without my bag, I don’t have my sunblock or my baseball hat. And Beaver, Oklahoma, is not exactly a hotbed of shopping choices. I stand in the rising sun for a long time. No cars come by. I feel old with my infected tattoo, my achy legs, and a general fatigue from the anxiety of cross-country hitchhiking that has gone so wrong.

  The sun gets hotter and I can feel my bald spot burning. I find an old piece of cardboard by the side of the road and I hold it over my head, but every time I reach my arms up, my tattoo scabs seem to rip and pull apart. I’m thirsty. Jesus, I see some sort of bird overhead. I hope it’s not a buzzard anticipating more bad luck for me. I’m not roadkill, I am a man.

  “Captain Jack” is, beyond a doubt, the most disgusting-looking driver who has picked me up so far, but after several hours of waiting with bleeding sunburn blisters you’ll get in any car, believe me. He is of indeterminate age, maybe even younger than me, but the years have not been kind. Grizzled worse than Gabby Hayes, and smelling stronger than the comic-strip character B.O. Plenty, Captain Jack also is a goiter sufferer. He has a huge, hideous one on his neck. I have always feared catching a goiter from a stranger and have voiced such concerns to my assistants in the past, but they just hooted and hollered, “That is medically impossible.” I’m not so sure. At first I think the clinging, pungently damp, and horrendous stench in his car is his breath, but then I realize it is goiter odor. Every time he speaks, his repulsive growth rises, falls, and quivers in thyroid-hormone starvation.

  Captain Jack claims to be a recycler but he sure ain’t “green.” He’s a hoarder of unrecyclable plastic. The entire interior of his car is filled with dirty deli trays, old #4 prepared-food containers, filthy plastic cups, and moldy take-out containers. This is the first car I have ever been in where I notice roaches. Captain Jack doesn’t talk much, but God, he stops his vehicle a lot! At every rest area, manned or unmanned, he pulls over, roots through the trash, and “rescues plastic orphans,” as he calls the “unwanted inorganic children” of our garbage. I could run and try to get another ride, but he’s going all the way to Colorado Springs, a good distance, and he is at least a safe driver. Besides, the families in Oklahoma don’t look friendly. Not one person has recognized me. But by now, without my eyebrow pencil or little scissors, who could? My pencil-thin mustache is in piss-poor shape. You can’t see it now unless you’re up close, and the odor zone of infection of my tattoo keeps any potential mustache viewer safely at a distance.

  Captain Jack has little “friends” in his car, too. It takes me a while to notice “Janice,” whom he introduces as “his wife,” who’s made out of plastic rings from carryout six-packs and some coat-hanger wire twisted together in some kind of torso with a head fashioned out of an empty paint can with a wig on top made from food-stained paper napkins. He has “children,” too. “Myrtle,” a baby girl sculpted entirely out of food scraps, who he confides “has disabilities” and rests in a discarded and burned kitchen pot some poor fired short-order cook forgot and left on a burning stove. His “son Arnold” could be considered “outsider art” by some, I imagine. He’s lovingly formed out of broken beer bottles with an ugly little face painted on with spilled kitchen messes from soiled paper towels.

  “It’s not right the State of Oklahoma rejects these unwanted little recyclables,” he begins ranting before asking me with true bewilderment, “Why should a tin can feel superior to a take-out container? Junk mail is okay to be picked up, while plastic wrap is rejected? How could that not be called discrimination?” “Well,” I try to reason, “those are inanimate objects, they’re not human, so their feelings can’t really be hurt.” “That’s what you think!” he suddenly rages. “I’m tired of aluminum cans feeling uppity around Styrofoam cups, they’re all equal!” “Waste and recycling,” I argue, “are gray areas still being worked out by environmentalists. In California, many of these items you have in your car are recyclable—it just costs more to do so.” T
hat really sets him off. “States’ rights? Is that what you’re arguing?” he debates with an unhinged passion. “Why does Oklahoma get off the hook? Why should a salad-bar container be trash in this state and a valuable citizen in California?” he screams, his goiter going up and down with each rant. “It is a federal case! Spray aerosol cans are fucking better than dirty tinfoil?” he yells, banging the steering wheel on every other word. “How could that be? Somebody’s got to stick up for take-out containers. Plastic-bottle supremacists will not be tolerated!” I watch with growing alarm as his goiter turns deep red, then purple, and finally almost black.

  Suddenly his goiter explodes. Not only am I covered in a thin coat of pus but so is he. Oh my God! I pray I haven’t caught goiter germs! “See,” Captain Jack shouts in agony to me, “see what recycling discrimination can do to a man!?” Much to my relief, Captain Jack continues driving safely despite the fact that the steering wheel is also covered with slime from his exploded growth.

  In a panic, I turn on the radio without asking permission and am relieved to hear that incredibly beautiful, melancholic “Lonesome Drifter” by Jericho Brown playing. But Captain Jack scowls at the lyric—“Ain’t got no loved ones”—because he believes otherwise. “I’m sorry, Janice,” he sobs to his recycled “wife,” flicking off the radio in contempt. “I’ve tried to be a garbage integrationist,” he explains to his spouse, “but society fights me every step of the way.” “Change takes time,” I soothe him, but he doesn’t even hear me; he’s in another world by now—a recycled state of mind. “Arnold? Myrtle?” he blubbers, completely ignoring my human presence, “I have never refused refuse, have I?” They don’t answer as far as I can tell, but he seems unfazed. “I don’t waste waste, do I?” he continues to plead to his pitiful little family of garbage talismans, and somehow he seems solaced by their silence.