Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America

by John Waters

  All I know is that I feel a little bump in my neck, and at first I think it’s just my imagination. When I grab the rearview mirror over so I can look, I almost don’t recognize myself. I appear so exhausted and weary. And no, it’s not just my lunacy, I do have something growing and it’s no pimple. I can’t wait to tell Susan and Trish they were wrong. I knew it! Goiters are contagious. “Garbage diversity is a right!” Captain Jack continues crusading without the slightest notice of my goiter concern. The skin around his erupted neck volcano is hanging in flaps, its hole in the center gaping in expulsion, yet he’s suddenly upbeat, on a new roll, but I don’t even listen. I’m too worried about this thing right below my Adam’s apple. Maybe it’s just acne; some kind of callus caused by the sun? Even a tumor!? Please, God, anything but a goiter!

  “I’m coming, little babies,” Captain Jack shouts to the residents of the next trash can as we pull in, unscheduled, to yet another rest area. I know that we’re near Colorado Springs, and while I’m quite aware this city has a formidable conservative reputation, I did have a show there once at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center; maybe they would give me some help? But then I remember my new outgrowth—could the art mob ever accept me now? I run, but it’s hard with this fucking thing flapping on my neck. Captain Jack looks up from picking through the filthy, bee-ridden, overripe trash and holds up a large bunch of rusted, discarded wire coat hangers. “See?” he screams to me in the distance. “See how cruel people are?”

  I stick out my thumb. But who on earth is going to pick me up when I’m featuring a fresh goiter puckering on my neck for the whole world to see?

  BAD RIDE NUMBER TEN

  BRISTOL

  Bristol, that’s who. I get in and immediately regret my decision to not just jump out and run. She’s a slightly butch Grace Metalious look-alike dressed in that same red-checkered shirt the novelist wore in her Peyton Place author photo (and the same greasy ponytail to boot) and has the heat inside her van turned on full blast despite the outside temperature of seventy-five degrees. A dead dog is in the backseat, and the rest of the vehicle is loaded with cages filled with snarling canines in all states of ill health.

  She is an “animal rescuer.” The problem is, no one asked her to rescue these animals; she just felt like the “chosen one.” Bristol started her own “doggie underground” where she would kidnap animals from “kill shelters” or other “atrocity centers” such as bankrupt pet stores, puppy mills, or even homes of pet owners (reported by “other furry-friend lovers”) who supposedly didn’t spend enough time with their animals. Some had daytime jobs, which was totally unacceptable to Bristol. Even being involved in a “love relationship” with another human being was “animal cruelty” in her opinion.

  Bristol actually looks kind of like a dog herself. Not an ugly one, just a plain dog: elongated chin, large ears, and a nose that seems to be sniffing for something she will never find. As soon as she pulls off, a cat leaps from out of nowhere and bites me right on my tender goiter. “Ow!” I scream in both pain and surprise. “Don’t mind Catnip,” Bristol says with a smirk, “she’s got ringworm!” Oh, perfect! I’m trapped with an insane pet kidnapper in a car that smells like the worst cage at a zoo. And she’s got a cat who is giving off bad vibes about me to the other animals in the car. I can see Catnip mewing some lie about me to a dog and I know that sounds like paranoia, but it’s true!

  All pets hate me. “Oh, he won’t hurt you,” pet owners coo to me when they see my fear. “Heel!” I always shout to the animal, but it never seems to work. Their pets do try to bite me. Even goldfish seem hostile when they get a glimpse of my frightened face through the bowl. I don’t hate animals. I just have no desire to touch one. I’m not lonely.

  But before you call PETA, let me explain. I think all dogs should be off leashes, biting people! That’s what they want to be doing, running in packs like the wild canines I saw in Bucharest that seem so happy to attack you, snarling and yapping when you get out of a cab. Dogs don’t want to be home with their owners stuck in some sort of sick S&M relationship, sentenced to a lifetime of human caresses! How would you like to take a shit with someone following you around, waiting to pick it up with a plastic newspaper bag? Talk about humiliating! Also, I hate to tell you this, but can’t you see? Your cat hates you.

  But naturally I don’t tell Bristol any of this because I can see she is one of those maniacs who supposedly “love” animals but always seem to hate people. “Snake bite your neck?” she asks rudely. “No … I seem to have developed some kind of goiter,” I weakly try to explain.

  Suddenly, as if cued by Lucifer himself, the dogs in their cages all begin to bark. And Bristol swerves to miss something in the road. I look back and see a mangy dog eating the roadkill of a fox that has obviously been flattened by a speeding vehicle. Her dogs inside the car start wailing in pack mentality. Bristol pulls over, jumps from the car, and grabs some sort of animal tranquilizer gun from the trunk. God knows what else she’s got in there because I stay inside the car, but her dogs wail in agonized excitement at the possible pet drama.

  I watch Bristol in amazement as she coaxes the insane-looking animal away from his maggot-infested lunch by barking and growling herself in some sort of faux dog communication. Suddenly Bristol fires the dart from the gun like a seasoned veterinarian. The rabid dog flips over and goes limp immediately. The other dogs in the car let out growls of approval and Bristol barks back in dog celebration.

  She drags the unconscious dog over and much to my shock throws it in the front seat with me. I can see the stringy shreds of putrefied fox meat still caught in the beast’s teeth. “Oh my God,” I hear Bristol cry out, suddenly speaking in English, “the poor creature hasn’t been neutered!” Well, at least she’s not pro-life, I think in the only optimistic moment of the ride. “We’ll fix that!” she announces with sudden purpose. To my utmost horror, I see her grab a box cutter from the glove compartment, flip over the mutt’s limp body, and slit the skin by the testicles. I look away in horror. “Watch this!” she orders. “Or you can walk to San Francisco.” I sheepishly turn my eyes back. “One day you may have to do this yourself,” she sternly warns like some kind of veterinarian leader. I doubt that, I want to scream, but then look ahead to the empty highway and keep my mouth shut. Like a skilled surgeon working on the battlefield, she ligates the testicles, and closes up the incision surgically with a pitiful stapler and a tube of Super Glue.

  I guess the operation is a success, because Bristol pulls away and all her dogs start barking, almost in song, like that horrible version of “Jingle Bells” recorded by the Singing Dogs. I can’t tell what the new dog song is, but Bristol starts barking along with them, too, so I just sit there. Musically alone. With my scabs itching, my sunburn peeling, my tattoo oozing, and my goiter throbbing.

  Then I see that fucking cat again, eyeing me as it pukes up furballs or something on the floor. Bristol doesn’t seem to notice. It looks as if she suddenly has digestive problems of her own. Bristol starts gagging. The cat is retching, and what comes out looks worse than fur. I turn to Bristol in alarm, but she signals me with her hands that she’s okay. But she’s not. She keeps driving and at the same time starts frantically gesturing for me to get something from under my seat. She can’t talk because she’s retching and heaving, so I frantically reach under and find a glass bottle of milk. Bristol starts shaking her head in affirmation and I take off the bottle cap and hand it to her. But instead of chugging it down, she holds it just outside her mouth and opens wide. Nothing happens at first, but then I think I see something white dart out of her mouth and then go right back in. The dogs go berserk in the cages. The cat starts hissing and making ungodly noises. Suddenly I see the white head of a tapeworm poke out from her mouth again, drawn by the bait of the milk. Bristol grabs the head of the tapeworm as quick as lightning and starts pulling it out of her throat through her mouth. The cat’s back goes up in a hump and it pukes its own whole load of tapeworms. But Bristol
doesn’t give up. She keeps pulling the tapeworm up from the bowels of her gullet, gagging and choking, heaving and spewing phlegm until finally the tail is disgorged. I watch in complete horror. Bristol, suddenly calm, heaves the carcass of the now-dead tapeworm out the window. The dogs quiet down. I kick off some regurgitated worm remains from my boots. My good boots that I paid a pretty penny for!

  We pull into Bristol’s “forever home,” her animal sanctuary surrounded by chain-link fencing, outside Grand Junction, Colorado. It’s night. She offers me a place to stay, and what can I say? I have no money or credit cards or phone; this will have to do. I see thousands of dogs everywhere. A new circle of hell.

  Her car comes to a stop and the outside canines go wild to see their leader, jumping up on the hood of her car, licking the windshield, jumping up to the side windows, snarling at me in jealousy. I am terrified but see that the cat is completely nonchalant. When Bristol steps out of the car, all the dogs immediately go silent but begin slurping her everywhere on her body with slavish adoration. Some lick her on the lips, others actually lap her shoes. It’s truly sickening.

  I relock the doors but Bristol opens them back up with her key-ring remote and tells me, “It’s fine.” Since she is now covered in dog slobber, which she makes no move to clean up, I’m not sure what “fine” is. I slowly get out of the vehicle, and thank God, the dogs don’t attack, they just watch me with the same cold rage the birds had for Tippi Hedren at the end of that Hitchcock movie.

  Bristol releases her dogs from the cages in the car and they are immediately welcomed by other snarling packs of frightening mongrels. I am especially unnerved to see the unconscious, now neutered dog begin to come to and then with a rabid ferocity leap right past me to join his fellow curs in pack rule. Bristol smiles in animal lunacy. The infected cat jumps out of the front seat, and Bristol takes a dead mouse out of her purse and flips it in the air directly to the puss’s mouth. I thought a cat wouldn’t eat an already dead mouse, but I guess I was wrong.

  My hostess asks me if I’m hungry and I stupidly say yes. You’d think by now I’d realize that she eats the same food scraps her animals do and expects me to do the same. I’m so hungry, I eat them. When it’s time for beddy-bye, she walks me out back and points to a doghouse. It’s a human-size one, so I don’t complain. Just as I’m about to close my eyes in exhaustion, the overhead clouds part and a full moon shines through. Thousands of dogs howl. I’m not exactly sure, but I think I hear Bristol join in.

  BAD RIDE NUMBER ELEVEN

  HOGWASH

  I get up early. Out of the doghouse for real. Luckily, I still remember which direction is west. Please, dear God, get me out of Colorado. My goiter has actually subsided a little. Real scabs have formed on all my injuries. The certain tightness of nature’s healing invites picking, but I know better. Even my tattoo has stopped oozing, so can I take that as some sort of good sign?

  I guess not. I stand there at an entrance ramp to Route 70 West, my aorta of misery, for hours. Knowing better, but at a loss for a better plan, I walk down to the highway and give it a try, but alas, it’s worse. Cars do come by, but by now I’m looking really rough. Nobody even glances toward me, much less slows down to consider picking me up. I walk for a mile or two and then a miracle. I see a partially crushed, run-over felt-tip marker by the side of the road. Again, I pray. Please, God, let it work. I unscrew the cap and test it on my hand. Thank the Lord above! It’s not dried out. I scan the area for anything to make a sign out of but see nothing. I continue walking and glimpse part of a cardboard box that has blown from somewhere caught in a storm-drainage ditch. Maybe heaven itself? I scramble over the brush and grab the potential hitchhike sign like the lifeboat it may be. In desperation, I write out in big, bold letters HELP! I MADE HAIRSPRAY! On the flip side, over the logo of some generic paper-towel label, I am even more shameless and scrawl I’M JOHN WATERS. It doesn’t work.

  Hours more go by. Out of boredom I walk more. Still no dice. Cars. Trucks. Vans. They all ignore me and my sign. Finally, a motorcycle stops. My one rule: Never get on a motorcycle while hitchhiking. This guy wears the colors of the Sundowners, a biker club I am unfamiliar with. But God knows, he looks like the real thing. Almost like the Hells Angels. Which makes me feel warm and fuzzy because I’m a real sucker for these guys. Well, not literally, because they’re all old now. I know you’re never supposed to say the words Hells Angels out loud unless you are one of them and I try to respect this outsider law. I agree with Quentin Crisp, who called Hells Angels “naturally superior beings.” They are. I genuflect to their infamy. I’ve met some of the Maryland Angels in Baltimore and once took two of them to the Ottobar, a great punk-rock club in town. You should have seen the faces of the tattooed new-wavers and their goth girlfriends when I strolled in with these bikers in full colors. Later that same night I was taken to the Hells Angels clubhouse by them, which is, of course, beyond impressive. Lots of couches. Axes lining the wall. “For what?” I stupidly asked. “In case, John,” the Angel answered; “just in case.” I see.

  This biker who has stopped is named Hogwash, but he’s actually better-looking than his name. “Get on, bro,” he says with a growl, and instantly that nasty butch fifties instrumental “Cross-Ties,” by Dale Hawkins, plays in my head as his musical cue, but before I can enjoy this new imagined score, he snorts, “John Waters, what the hell are you doing out here hitchhiking?” I am so relieved. I try to thank him politely but explain I feel unsafe and too inexperienced to ride on the back of this monster Harley, especially with a member of an outlaw biker gang to whom I’ve never had the pleasure of being introduced. “When a Sundowner asks a man to mount his hog, only a fool turns him down,” he snarls in a steely voice, “unless he wants to go down. And I don’t mean head,” he explains, suddenly all business, “I mean dead!”

  Gulp. I notice Hogwash isn’t wearing a helmet and I certainly don’t see an extra one for me. “Okay,” I say meekly, “but please go slowly,” I beg as I straddle the seat and wrap both arms around him tightly. “Ooh, that feels good,” he taunts me in a mock little-girl’s voice before gunning the engine and peeling out, leaving rubber for quite a distance down the highway.

  I am immediately terrified. I see the speedometer climb to fifty, sixty, seventy, almost eighty miles an hour. I yell for him to slow down but he answers by doing a full wheelie. I scream like a pussy. The wind is ripping through my thin hair and flattens my goiter painfully against my Adam’s apple. My tattoo pops open and I can feel leakage spreading across my T-shirt. Sonny Barger I am definitely not.

  “Please! Please! Please! Let me off!” I beg into the void. But instead this imbecile goes into a “circle wheelie” right in the middle of the fast lane as the cars’ and trucks’ drivers lean on their horns and swerve away in the nick of time. I know I am going to die.

  Suddenly he is putting his legs over the handlebars! “No, don’t,” I scream. “A high chair,” he shouts like a banshee on crack. With that, the front of the motorcycle lifts off the ground from speed yet he still keeps his legs dangling over the front. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” he howls just as we go beyond a “twelve o’clock wheelie,” where the bike has gone past balancing straight up and tips over backward in the air. I am thrown off midspin and land hard on the hood of a car before bouncing off and being thrown into the hedgelike highway landscaping. Hogwash is killed instantly as his bike revolves 360 degrees twice before smashing to the asphalt and bursting into flames. A giant tractor-trailer skids out of control to miss the whole mess and crushes Hogwash’s burning corpse. I crawl back to the highway feeling no pain yet, in complete shock. All I can think is, I guess this makes me an official member of the Sundowner biker gang.

  BAD RIDE NUMBER TWELVE

  WARREN AND TARANTULA

  Somehow, I’m alive. I’m sure at least one bone is broken somewhere in my body, but before I can even fully begin to feel any pain, a car pulls over. I’m not even hitchhiking yet! The guy looks okay, norm
al enough. A baby in the front seat is crying. I notice that it isn’t strapped in a car seat in the back the way it should be for both safety and legal reasons.

  “You okay?” he asks with what I think is genuine concern. “I don’t know,” I truthfully answer. “Get in, I’ll take you to the hospital,” he offers. “Maybe I shouldn’t move,” I argue, “maybe I should just wait for the ambulance to arrive?” The infant starts screaming hysterically with a lung power I thought not possible. “Hold the baby,” the driver suddenly commands me. “Huh?” I mumble in confusion, in no shape to hold anything, much less a shrieking tyke. “Help me,” he begs in a sudden emotional plea. I’m so confused and injured I don’t know what I’m doing and get in the vehicle.

  As soon as I close the door, he peels out and the baby falls on the floor. I can’t believe my eyes. It goes ballistic. “Pick him up!” he yells, and I’m so stunned I freeze. “Shut up, Tarantula!” he screams like a maniac. “Tarantula?!” I say out loud in disbelief. “That’s the baby’s name?” “That’s what I call him now!” he shouts. “I have to! His fucking mother is a custody cunt! I gotta be careful!”

  Oh God, what have I got myself into now? Nobody could have luck this bad! I reach down and pick up the baby and realize that my left shoulder must be broken. Tarantula bites me. I drop him in shock and naively recoil before realizing I’d bite me, too, if I were in the same situation. “Hey, look, mister,” I begin to lecture before he cuts me off with “Warren! No use lying about my name when she’s got an all-points bulletin out on me. But the kid? I gotta protect this little fucker.”

  “Little fucker?” Jesus, I reach down again and pick up the little boy, who hardly reacts as if he’s being comforted. He howls like a banshee. Warren suddenly pulls a broken-off car aerial out from under the seat and waves it menacingly. “You want another whipping?” he shouts like a madman, just like Dawn Davenport in Female Trouble. “Don’t you hit this child!” I scream in horror, holding the crazed infant close to my damaged chest. “Stay out of it,” Warren threatens me. “You don’t know what I’ve been through. Look!” he yells in a frenzy, pointing up to an AMBER Alert electronic billboard overlooking Route I-70 West. I see the description of his car and the words CHILD ABDUCTION in flashing letters. Jesus Christ, what the fuck do I do?