The Kindness of Strangers: Penniless Across America

by McIntyre, Mike

  The man delivers lights for a manufacturer. His last stop is in Matthews, the next town east of Charlotte. He drops me on the highway outside town. I make a sign for Monroe, 13 miles farther.

  The road is clogged with rush-hour traffic. No one stops. It’s getting dark.

  A Union County sheriff’s deputy drives by. I watch him make a U-turn. A couple minutes later, he pulls up on my side of the road, blue lights flashing. He gets out of the car.

  “Are you hitchhiking?” he says.

  “Am I doing something wrong?”

  “No, I was just wondering what you were doing out here. You got any ID?”

  I reach in my shirt pocket for my sole piece of identification, my California driver’s license.

  “The extension is on the back,” I say.

  I hand him the license, pointing out the new date of expiration taped to the other side.

  “So what are you doing out here?”

  I tell him the truth, except for the penniless part.

  He takes my license with him back to the patrol car and gets on the radio. He’s in there a long time. It’s not getting any lighter.

  He finally returns.

  “You got a valid license?” he says.

  “This is valid.”

  “No, it says it expired in 1991.” He points to the expiration date on the front.

  A dumb cop. This could turn bad.

  “Like I said, the extension is on the back.”

  He scrutinizes the license.

  “Am I doing anything wrong out here?” I say.

  “No, but we get calls. People don’t like to see hitchhikers on the road.”

  “So, someone called about me?”

  “Yeah, everyone’s got a mobile phone these days, so I had to check you out.”

  I almost ask what he’d do if I called up and said I didn’t like the look of a particular car. But I hold my tongue. Besides, I know he wasn’t responding to a call. He passed me, turned around and came back.

  “So, why aren’t you driving?” he says.

  “Like I said, I’m a writer traveling across the country to research a book.”

  “I know, you told me that. But why aren’t you in a car?”

  I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve heard that the police can pick you up on vagrancy charges if you don’t have any money. That’s why I don’t tell him I’m penniless.

  I decide to go on the offensive.

  “I’m a little confused here, officer. If I’m not doing anything wrong, why are we having this conversation? It’s getting dark, and I don’t feel safe traveling after dark, and I’ve got a ways to go.”

  The cop steps back.

  “Okay, I’ll get out of your way. Good luck, Mr. McIntyre.”

  The guy leaves me on the side of the dark road, seething. I’m reminded of my dislike of cops. I was once busted for eating a sandwich I brought into a movie theater. Two sheriff’s deputies came for me during Terms of Endearment. One held his baton to my throat. “You can make this hard, or you can make this easy,” he said, just like in the movies.

  I’m still seething three hours later when I walk into the Monroe police department. I ask the officer on duty if there’s anywhere I can camp for free. I worry he’ll arrest me. But the officer couldn’t be more helpful. He says to pitch my tent in the city park, and he gives me directions.

  I’m forced to rethink my feelings toward cops. I guess they’re not all bad. After all, I did travel all the way to North Carolina before getting hassled by one.

  The rain subsides to a drizzle while I pitch my tent beneath a scrawny tree in the park. I open a can of tuna and eat it with some crumbled crackers. When the storm resumes, I sit up in my sleeping bag and wait for the water to pour through. But the tent holds.

  For a while.

  All at once, it’s as if a rain cloud bursts inside the tent. Water seeps from every fiber.

  I scramble out of bed and drag my wet things to a roof-covered cement slab. I drain my tent and crawl back into my soaked sleeping bag.

  I’m nearly to Cape Fear, but the travel gods won’t let me finish in comfort.

  CHAPTER 38

  Cape Fear is less than 200 miles away. I’m so close I can see the end. And with that knowledge comes a heightened sense of risk. I feel like a short-timer in the Army. My tour of duty is almost up, but I’m still walking point. My sole objective now is to avoid the land mines.

  I don’t know how it’s possible, but my boots actually feel wetter than they did yesterday. My toes have more wrinkles than a relief map of Appalachia. I squish back out to Route 74.

  It’s still raining.

  My first ride is a redheaded fellow originally from southern Indiana. He asks where I slept last night. I tell him the Monroe city park.

  “You were in a dangerous place,” he laughs. “Right by the train tracks there, bodies turn up dead there all the time.”

  Maybe the Monroe cops aren’t so nice, after all.

  A trucker from Alabama stops for me. Truckers drive forever. Maybe this one is going all the way to Wilmington. But it’s the shortest ride of the trip. The trucker carries me six miles to Wadesboro.

  A husband and wife who recently moved here from Oklahoma pick me up. The woman does all the talking. She just had surgery and her jaw is wired shut, but she can’t keep quiet. She wipes drool from the corners of her mouth as she talks. They’re Mormons, she says. She mentions this several times. I don’t bite. I’m too wet and cold to talk religion.

  They drop me at a gas station in Rockingham, east of the Pee Dee River.

  The gas station is in the middle of the town, not a good place to catch a ride. I should walk to the outskirts of Rockingham, but it’s pouring. I stand beneath the eaves of the gas station’s minimart, holding a sign for Wilmington. I’m sure I look pathetic.

  Today is Friday. I want to finish at Cape Fear tomorrow. The post office in Wilmington closes at noon on Saturday. If I don’t get there in time, I’ll have to wait until Monday to pick up the ATM card Anne sent me. The prospect of officially ending the journey and remaining penniless for two extra days is a nightmare.

  I must press on.

  The problem is not the rain so much as my pack. It now feels like a 70-pound tumor on my back. If it didn’t belong to my brother, I’d ditch it.

  I do the next best thing. I jettison most of the pack’s contents. I’m like a damaged airplane dumping fuel to fly just far enough to reach the runway. The only items I keep are my clothes, sleeping bag and an energy bar.

  I now feel light enough to run, and I do. I run straight through Rockingham in the rain.

  A guy pulls over. He’s only going 25 miles, to Laurinburg. He offers to drive me five miles farther, to Maxton. There’s a truck stop there, he says. But when he drops me off, there’s only one trucker ready to roll out, and he’s headed west.

  The worst news is that Route 74 has turned into a freeway. It’s illegal to hitchhike. Most people driving 70 miles an hour aren’t inclined to stop anyway.

  I stay dry beneath an overpass. But it’s so dark, motorists can’t see my sign until they’re right up on me.

  My only chance at a ride is to stand out in the rain. The passing 18-wheelers spray me with water and blow my umbrella inside out. My jeans cling to my shivering legs.

  At last a trucker pulls over. He locks his brakes and skids along the grass shoulder.

  The trucker is a jolly fat man who was once robbed at knifepoint by a hitchhiker.

  “But I hate to see a man stand out in the rain,” he says. “People don’t have no heart anymore.”

  He’s from South Carolina. He says folks in North Carolina aren’t friendly. I don’t know if that’s true, but the kind strangers I’ve met in this state have all been from someplace else.

  A good friend of mine says America is hard on the edges and soft in the middle. He may be right. None of this journey has been a cakewalk. But the country was more accommodating in the states between
California and North Carolina.

  The trucker warns me about pneumonia. When he stops outside Lumberton to turn south on Interstate 95, he recommends a cheap motel I should go to if no one stops right away.

  “You have money for a motel if you get stuck out here?” he asks.

  Even now, at the end, I am weak. The image of a hot shower and a dry bed flashes in my head. I can’t be tempted by the trucker’s response to the truth.

  “Yes,” I lie.

  A black man picks me up at the freeway on-ramp.

  “I was in the Air Force twenty-two years,” he says before I get in the car. “I ain’t afraid of nothing.”

  He’s only going 33 miles to Whiteville, but I know I’m safe for yet another ride.

  The man emigrated from Jamaica when he was 12. At 16, he hitchhiked from Los Angeles to New York. He kept a diary of the trip.

  “Someone will read it,” he says.

  We splash through the driving rain, windshield wipers slapping, the defroster losing its battle with the fog on the window.

  As the man talks, I get this eerie feeling that I know him. I don’t recall his face, nor do the details of his life sound familiar. It’s more a sensation of his presence, the way a blind person can tell when someone else is in the room. I can’t explain, but it seems as if this man has been shadowing me all along, like some guardian angel. And now our parallel paths have converged for one brief ride. I feel like we’re floating, and I wipe the fog from the window to check and make sure the car is still on the ground.

  “Have we met before?” I say.

  The man turns to me and smiles.

  “Could be.”

  No one is going far. I’ll have to nickel and dime my way to Wilmington.

  A junior college administrator drives me 18 miles to Bolton. Like the others today, he’s originally from somewhere else: Germany. A box of bottles rattles in the back of his car. The guy must be going to a party. But he says the bottles contain vinegar. He’s coming from the college TV station, where he taped a special.

  “I’ve watched all the cooking shows, and I’ve never seen one on vinegar,” he says.

  The last person to pick me up today is from North Carolina. A Tar Heel at last. She drives like Junior Johnson.

  “Fasten your safety belt and don’t be scared,” she says. “I’m late for work.”

  She has her sports coupe up to 90 in nothing flat. She weaves in and out of traffic. We come up on cars like they’re parked.

  I grip the armrest, my knuckles turning white.

  “I’m Angela,” she says, “And you are?”

  “Petrified,” I say.

  “Relax, I’m late for work every day.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “I deliver pizza for Dominoes.”

  “Boy, no wonder you guys can get it there in thirty minutes or less.”

  The closer we get to Wilmington, the more intersections we cross. Vehicles pull slowly onto the highway. Angela almost drives up the backs of several cars. She doesn’t seem to know how to use the brake pedal. If the fast lane is blocked, she swerves into the slow lane. It’s all a blur of pavement and metal.

  I was worried I wouldn’t make it to Wilmington today. Now I’m afraid I won’t make it there alive.

  But we soon cross the bridge over the Cape Fear River, and Angela stops the car in downtown Wilmington.

  I step out, grateful to be standing still. Patches of blue poke through the clouds. Now that I don’t need a ride, it’s stopped raining.

  Cape Fear is 12 miles farther. After I drop by the post office in the morning, I’ll head out to the coast and make it official.

  Only one more night.

  CHAPTER 39

  Wilmington is the biggest city I’ve had to spend the night in since Billings, Montana. I can’t count on the kindness of strangers. No shelters are listed in the Yellow Pages, so I get the address of the YMCA. Maybe they’ll let me sleep there.

  The Y is 27 blocks away. I start hoofing it. Naturally, it begins to rain. My umbrella snags on branches as I walk in the dark. I make it 23 blocks before the sidewalk runs out. The shoulder of the busy boulevard is flooded. I walk back downtown.

  I find the police station inside a brick building near the riverfront. The officer at the desk gives me directions to the Salvation Army. But when I get there, every bunk is taken. The receptionist calls Wilmington’s other shelter. It’s full, too. She tells me the police will let me sit in the station.

  “I’m back,” I tell the officer when I return. “The shelters are full. All right if I sit in here until daylight?”

  The room glares with fluorescent lights and the chairs are wooden. But at least it’s safe and dry.

  “I can’t let you stay here,” the cop says. “It’s against policy.”

  “Oh, shoot, the lady at the Salvation Army said you let people sit in here.”

  “It’s up to the sergeant on duty. The sergeant’s policy tonight is no.”

  I gaze over the cop’s shoulder at the sergeant, a stern-looking black woman hunched over paperwork inside a glass office. From the way she grips the pencil, I know her policy is ironclad.

  I ask the officer if there’s an open public building in town where I can stay out of the rain.

  The cop leans over the counter and whispers, so his sergeant can’t hear. He says there’s a closet in the lobby of this building. I can stay there.

  It sounds like a crazy idea, and I wonder if the cop is kidding, but I thank him and go looking for tonight’s lodgings.

  I find the closet next to the automatic door that opens to the street. It stands across the lobby from the restrooms. It’s about the width of a coffin, but not as long. The space is made smaller by the presence of a single sofa cushion, a two-by-four board, and a music stand.

  After I remove my pack, there’s barely enough room to curl up on the floor. I take off my shoes and socks and lay on top of my wet sleeping bag. My hip is bruised from sleeping on the cement slab last night in the park. I wish I hadn’t thrown away my foam pad.

  The closet door is warped and keeps popping open. Light from the lobby filters through the crack. I toss and turn, trying to find a comfortable position. My feet press against the door, and my head rests on the base of the music stand.

  I finally doze off.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been asleep when I hear the building’s automatic door swing open. I listen for the footsteps to turn toward the police station, away from my hideout, but they get louder. Still groggy, I bolt upright.

  The closet door is open an inch. A human shadow dances on the closet wall. It gets bigger. I place my feet against the door and try to lock my knees, but I’m too late. Whoever is on the other side barges in.

  I spring up, reeling with panic. The intruder lights a cigarette lighter. There’s suddenly an angry black man in my face, attacking me with 80-proof breath.

  “What the fuck are you doing in here???!!!” he shouts.

  I stumble back into the music stand.

  “Who are you?” I say. “Who are you?”

  He backs out of the closet without another word. He’s unshaven, and the cuffs of his baggy pants are frayed from dragging on the street. He teeters across the lobby and drops in the doorway of the men’s room. He lays his head on the greasy athletic bag he carries with him.

  I shut the closet door and stand in the dark. I try to wedge the two-by-four against the door, but it won’t hold. I place the cushion between my feet and the door, as if that’s going to keep anybody out. I sit up on my sleeping bag. I worry about what’s happening on the other side of the door. I don’t make a sound. I’m afraid to even shift. I don’t want to remind the guy I’m in here. When I hear him snoring, I lie back down.

  The building’s automatic door rumbles open a while later.

  Suddenly, someone leans on the closet door.

  “Hey!” I shout, trying to sound tough.

  “Oh, excuse me,” says a man on the other si
de.

  He sits down in the lobby, not far from the man sleeping in the bathroom doorway. He spreads out some newspaper and lies down.

  The new man mutters something I can’t hear, waking the first guy.

  “There’s a white guy in there,” the first guy says.

  The new man is talkative, but he’s hard to understand. I pick up snippets, wondering if any of it pertains to me: “Night of the living dead…Lies in disguise…Revelation, chapter nine…Lies in disguise…”

  The new man rambles on, growing loud and belligerent. If he keeps it up, the cops will hear him and come kick us out in the rain.

  Sure enough, the police station doors off the lobby open at around one in the morning. I hear the authoritative click of heels start across the floor.

  “You can’t sleep here!” a woman barks at the new man.

  It must be the sergeant.

  “Let me see the chief,” the new man grumbles.

  “I’m in charge here tonight,” the sergeant says. “You gotta sleep somewhere else. People come in here and see you, they get scared. Not everyone who comes here is a criminal. There are some people who come here for legitimate reasons.”

  “Can’t I just sit here, to avoid the elements?”

  “How did you avoid the elements last night?”

  “I slept in a friend’s car at his apartment building.”

  “Well, I suggest you do the same tonight.”

  “He ain’t there.”

  “My heart goes out to you, but you can’t stay here.”

  The first guy enters the conversation. “We get treated better by white people!” he shouts.

  “Who is that talking behind that corner?” the sergeant snaps.

  I hear the first guy roll from the bathroom doorway into the sergeant’s view.

  He starts in about injustice, but the woman cuts him off.

  “Who keeps the bathroom open for you?” she says. “You get on out of here. I don’t want to see you here again. You come back here when there’s white folks working.”