In the late 1970’s there was some kind of movie-of-the-week on prime-time TV about the perils of hitching rides. There were lots of scenes with parents and teachers saying don’t do it, and the main character was hitching rides to the beach and back home anyway. There’s a particularly tense scene in which some middle-aged guy in a convertible picks up the main character, looks her over, and switches the car radio to play music of her generation while giving her the “I’ve got a daughter your age” line, which creeps her out and she bolts from the car as soon as they get to the parking-lot at the beach. The movie ends with her visiting a peer in the hospital; the peer had hitched a ride and gotten raped. Everything about the show was heavy-handed and hardly believable. For whatever reason, I saw it a few different times on different stations years apart. [It might have been that the main character was played by an actress I thought was particularly cute, I dunno.] By the third or fourth replay I had learned to remember the name of the show and avoided it as pure dreck, but maybe that message had an effect on the popularity of hitch-hiking in the 1980’s.
And, for that matter, it didn’t stop me from hitching rides or giving them to strangers. The fact that I had been a cyclist since high school and had no qualms about riding my bicycle 50+ miles just for fun helped me believe I was strong enough to walk or ride anywhere I really needed to go. So I didn’t bother with hitching rides.
And a couple years after I graduated from high school I got a truck and, being the good Samaritan, stocked it with some basic tools and water. I never hesitated to stop if I saw a vehicle pulled to the side of the road or a person walking along on the highway. Random highlights:
I pulled in behind a beat-up old sedan and found a couple peering at the engine. Mind you, this was the mid-1980’s and they were dressed like late 1960’s hippies (jeans, long scraggly hair, tye-dyed shirts, lots of tattoos) The guy asked if I happened to have a spare set of vice-grips and, in fact I didn’t. So I offered to give them a ride to the nearest gas station so they could ask about a tow truck (that was when lots of gas stations still had garages and their own tow-truck) and get a ride back to their car with the mechanic. The thank me and climb into the truck with me. The truck has bucket seats, so it was uncomfortable for the woman squeezed in the middle. I think this was before seatbelts were mandatory, as well, but I’m not sure. In any case, she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. As she reached forward to grab the dash and steady herself a rat walked from her shoulder to the back of her hand. They both apologize, introduce “Frankie” and offer to pay me for the ride, which I always declined anyway. I dropped them at the nearest gas station and never saw them again.
I pulled in behind a gleaming Infinity (Nissan’s brief effort at the luxury class) and noticed a Hertz sticker on the back bumper. I got out of the car to see an Asian man in a business suit struggling with the lug nut on a rear tire. The wheel would spin as he tried to loosen the nut. I tapped him on the shoulder (startling him a bit) and motioned for him to move aside, then lowered the car until the tire was slightly compressed on the pavement again. Then I loosened the nuts, changed the wheel for the spare and properly tightened the nuts, then lowered the car and slid the jack out. Then I stood up, reached out to shake his hand, said, “Welcome to America!” and went back to my truck to drive away. I thoroughly enjoyed how the man looked completely bewildered throughout the encounter. He never said a word and I don’t even know if he understood me.
I was driving from San Diego to Las Vegas to visit a friend who lived east of The Strip. As I passed a turn-off heading out of Baker (not Bakersfield) I saw a man walking down the ramp that leads to the highway. He was dressed in jeans, cowboy boots, a cowboy hat, and a sequined vest. Even without the sequined vest, I thought it was odd for anyone to be walking onto the highway, so I stopped and waited for him at the bottom (I didn’t want to back the truck up the ramp for fear of colliding with someone with plans to accelerate up to highway speed.) I offered the guy a lift back to his car and he asked if I could just give him a ride. I let him get in and he immediately showed me his license (as if I’d be able to memorize everything) and as I got back into the flow of traffic he told me his truck was back at the gas station at the turn-off with a thrown rod. He was going to try to hitch all the way home to Wyoming. I asked about his clothes and he said he had brought them to wear in the rodeo competition which, incidentally, he hadn’t won. This was the phase of the 1980’s when gay-bashing was a fad and I told him he was lucky nobody had run him over just for wearing a sequined cowboy vest. I took him across the desert and dropped him off along the Las Vegas strip. I gave him $10 and told him to place a long-distance call to his fiancé (whom he had told me all about) rather than try to place a bet. After all, his luck didn’t seem too good with the rodeo loss and the truck damage. I’ll never know if he made it home.
I saw a Mustang Mach 1 on the side of the freeway not far from my turn-off to work (at Fashion Valley, near Hotel Circle). I laughed and thought, Ahh-ha! You’re certainly not going Mach speed now!
Then I saw the petite blonde ahead of it, walking along the freeway wearing a half-T (popular in the 1980’s) and skin-tight pants that laced-up in the back. Honestly, if I had seen some guy peering into the engine compartment, I would have figured he knew more about cars than me and could probably fix whatever problem he found with a couple paperclips or something. But it was a woman, and she was looking upset, and well…I was early for work anyway. So I pulled off the freeway in front of her and enjoyed watching her half-T in the rear-view mirror as she tried to increase her pace to a half-jog. I rolled down the passenger window and offered to drive her to a gas station or someplace where she could use a phone. I kept my eyes locked on hers while she bent over and stuck her head in through the passenger-side window space and asked, “Can you just drive me home? I’ll make a couple calls from there.”
So after the basic introductions, the natural question when I picked up a stranded driver was “Where were you heading when your car broke down?”
“I gotta get home.” she told me, “I’m late for work.”
“Oh.” I shrugged. I was obvious from my uniform that I worked at the movie theater; I had a company patch on my black tuxedo vest. “What work do you do?”
“I’m a dancer.”
“Oh, that’s cool! My sister did a lot of dance. I always got dragged to her jazz and tap recitals at Balboa Park and the Del Mar fair. Where do you make a living as a dancer?”
“The Body Shoppe.”
Jesus Christ! What kind of Penthouse Letter have I fallen into?!
“Umm…so how far…uh…how-uhh…”
“My apartment is on H street.”
This was back in the days when I used to rove around Downtown San Diego on my nights off, looking to pick fights. My usual stomping ground was C Street and the low-numbered avenues around the time the city was trying to carve out a Gaslamp District but before C became a trolley line. I hadn’t been farther south than G, but, “Well, H-Street can’t be all that far and I was going to be early at work anyway.”
“You are so kind!”
H street, for those who don’t know, is another 30 to 40 minutes south on Interstate 5, in Chula Vista. I didn’t know that until I had already agreed to drive her home.
I drove her to her apartment and she spent the whole time complaining about her ex-boyfriend, whose car was broken down on the highway. She invited me upstairs and into her apartment and had me wait in the living-room/kitchen while she headed to the bedroom. In mere minutes, she came out carrying a couple hangers with costumes on them and clutching some bills in her fist. She extended her fist and said, “Can I give you this for the gas?”
As usual, I declined.
She draped the hangers over a chair and asked, “What can I possibly give you for being so kind?”
It was clear there was no limit to what I could request, but all I could think was, She’s a stripper! I’m a teenager! This should be a Penthouse Letters situation! I know this is a horrible stereotype, but how many men have come before me…uhh, with her? I do NOT want to catch VD from this chick!
So I told her she could give me a hug. She did so, with plenty of gratuitous grinding. The half-T didn’t leave anything to the imagination.
I was already blushing as I headed toward the door, so my face couldn’t have gotten more red as she asked, “Are you gay?”
“No.” I told her honestly as I opened the door too leave, “It’s just that you’ve made me a half-hour late already and my boss happens to be my brother. If I did what I want to do he’d have no choice but to fire me.”
I was driving north on I15, heading for a friend’s D&D game in Scripps ranch. As I passed the Carroll Canyon on-ramp, I saw a guy slamming the hood on an old Chevy and turning around to start walking along the highway. I pulled to the side a couple dozen yards ahead of him and he calmly walked up to the car. As I rolled down the passenger-side window, I saw a Latino who looked like he was still in high school. He peered into the truck and said, “You know you shouldn’t pick up strangers on the freeway.”
“Yeah,” I grinned and pointed back to the car* he was leaving behind, “and you know you shouldn’t have bought a No Va.”
The kid grinned as he opened the door and climbed in, “I do now!”
After buckling himself in, the kid introduced himself and showed me his license (like I could study it while driving down the freeway) and said his apartment was just off Mira Mesa Boulevard (a couple ramps down the road). I introduced myself and asked what happened to his car.
While Pedro was explaining the car problem, he casually reached down and pulled a 4-inch 9mm pistol out of his sock. It was pretty, with a shiny chromed slide and fake ivory grips. He looked down at it for a while and rubbed the grips but didn’t point it in my direction. I refrained from turning my head, recalled Larry Niven’s “The Deadlier Weapon” from reading his Convergent Series in high school, and slowly eased my foot down on the accelerator pedal. After a moment, Pedro looked over to me and said, “Relax. I’m a cop. I was over at Miramar# qualifying this as a back-up piece.”
“And did you qualify?” I asked.
“Well, it shoots fine,” Pedro told me, “but there’s more paperwork to complete. Hey, you don’t seem nervous at all.”
“Well it’s not the first time I’ve seen a gun.” I shrugged. As he nodded in acceptance of that explanation I added, “Besides, before you could get that fully pointed at me, the edge of my hand would be through your windpipe.”
“Oh!” Pedro’s eyes widened but he didn’t try to move away from me. Instead he countered, “But then you’d be killing a cop.”
“In self defense.” I argued weakly, then noted, “Besides, at ninety-five miles an hour, you wouldn’t survive the roll-over after I jerk away from the blast.”
Pedro turned his head from looking at me to peering at the speedometer. We were actually doing about 97 mph and still accelerating. He started shoving the pistol back in his sock while saying, “Well like I said, I’m a cop. You’ve got nothing to be nervous about. And my exit is coming up.”
“I’m not nervous.” I assured him as I flipped on my blinker and checked over my right shoulder to make sure the lane was clear. I certainly didn’t want my passenger citing me for an unsafe lane-change. I started fading over to the exit lane and asked, “So what department are you in?”
While I drove along Mira Mesa Boulevard, we chatted about his job and the challenges and opportunities for Latinos in Southern California law enforcement. I dropped him off at the entrance to his apartment complex and he made a point of showing me his license and badge again. We acted like I had never seen his pistol and, until now, there was never a reason to think of the incident as unusual.
–G!
*Chevrolet’s mistake is legendary in communications and advertising studies. The Chevy Nova was successful enough in the USA but the company couldn’t understand why sales were practically non-existent in Mexico. Then someone pointed out “No Va” means “Doesn’t Go!” and nobody is stupid enough to buy a car with such a name.
#Miramar is a community college which is noted in San Diego county as one of the key schools for law enforcement training.
