Waters - Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America

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TO MY SISTERS, KATHY AND TRISH,

AND IN MEMORY OF MY BROTHER, STEVE

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE: GOING MY WAY?

I havent felt this excited or scared for a long time. Maybe ever. I just signed a book deal resulting from the shortest pitch ever. I, John Waters, will hitchhike alone from the front of my Baltimore house to my co-op apartment in San Francisco and see what happens. Simple, huh?

Am I fucking nuts? Brigid Berlin, Andy Warhols most dangerous and glamorous sixties superstar, recently said to me, How can I be bad at seventy? Shes got a point. I mean, yes, Im between pictures, as they say in Hollywood, but long ago I realized, as a so-called cult-film director, not only did I need a Plan B that was just as important to me as moviemaking, I needed a Plan C, D, and E. But Plan H, for hitchhike? Im sixty-six years old, for chrissake.

Why would a man who has worked so hard his whole life to reach the level of comfort you have, put yourself in such an un comfortable position? Marianne Boesky, my New York art dealer, asked me when I told her of my undercover travel adventure, as the publishers were calling my new book in trade announcements. A onetime actor in my early films who had a recent homeless past was even more alarmed when I hinted that I might do a hitchhiking book. Youll never get a ride, he warned, telling me he had tried hitchhiking himself out of necessity in Florida last year. No one picks up hitchhikers these days, he griped with disgust. No one!

Even successful hipsters seemed shocked when I confided my plans. Nice knowing you, a California photographer buddy muttered with a laugh over dinner when he realized he wouldnt see me again until after my hobo-homo journey was scheduled to be completed. God, I wondered grandiosely, would I be like JFK on those recently released secret White House tapes, where he was heard planning his first day back from Dallas before anyone knew hed be assassinated, commenting on what a tough day that would be. If he only knew.

What am I trying to prove here? I mean, Im not bored. An ex-convict woman I recently met claimed her criminal past was not a result of a bad childhood but just because she wanted an adventure. I do, too. Kicks. But hasnt writing and directing fifteen movies and penning six books made me feel complete? My career dreams already came true years ago and what I do now is all gravy. Shouldnt I be retiring rather than sticking out my thumb? Retiring to what, though? Insanity?

Will I be safe? I know serial killers routinely pick up hitchhikers and murder them, but arent the victims, unfortunately, usually young female hookers? Yeah, yeah, I know about Herb Baumeister, the I-70 Strangler, who choked at least sixteen gay men to death, but he picked them up in gay bars, not on exit ramps of truck stops. Yet I must admit even truckers I know are fairly nuts. One of them must have raised a few of my neighbors eyebrows when he came over to visit and parked his eighteen-wheeler right on the small, quiet residential street in front of my house, taking up half the block. Hes funny and sexy and straight but a real freak and likes to horrify me with his stories from the road. How he travels, high on speed, picking up teenage runaways and screwing them in the back of the truck or driving full speed ahead in the night, carrying a bag of someone elses clean urine prepared for any random drug tests as he masturbates into a sock. He laughs when he admits sometimes illegally dumping huge loads of gravel in the middle of an unsuspecting suburbanites lawn if he knows hes overloaded and a weigh station is coming up that will be open. Suppose someone like this guy picks me up?

Can I really give up the rigid scheduling Im so used to in real life? Me? The ultimate control freak who plans, weeks ahead, the day I can irresponsibly eat candy? Sure, Ive got all my interstate routes planned out for the trip and I think I know how many truck stops there are and how far apart they are, but so what? Will I really get out of the car if my ride strays from my route but is still headed west? I keep thinking beggars can be choosers, but I have to open my mind to the possibility I may be wrong.

WE ARE ALL BUMS, a radical left-wing poster boasted on the wall of my bedroom in my parents house in the sixties. I remember the rage this particular slogan caused in my father. A bum. The worst thing you could be in his book. Now that he is, sadly, gone, can I finally become one? A vagabond? A freeloader? Is it possible to be a vagrant when you own three homes and rent another place in Provincetown for the summer? Will this book end up as a new spin on that now dated but incredibly influential 1961 nonfiction book Black Like Me , where the white author, John Howard Griffin, hitched and rode buses through the South disguised as a black man to see how it feels to be discriminated against?

I am afraid just the way the Black Like Me man was. But of different things. Like bad drivers. Im amazed every person driving their car isnt killed every day. Riding along at high speeds in lanes just a few feet from each other. Texting, talking on the phone behind the wheel. Or just plain driving while stupid! Nobody is really a safe driver. I worry my own involuntary backseat driving will cause problems for anyone who picks me up. Will cries of Slow down! or slamming imaginary brakes from the passenger side cause bad will with my host drivers? Im never in the front seat of a car if Im not behind the wheel except when I take taxis in Australia, because I read the drivers there think youre snooty if you get in the back. Where I live in Baltimore, if you got in the front of the cab, theyd think you were robbing them and probably shoot you.

Ive had a good history with hitchhiking. Its hard to imagine today, but in the early sixties my parents expected me to hitchhike home every day from high school. All the kids did. The roads were filled with preppy teenage boys, lacrosse sticks over their shoulders and their thumbs out. Im sure just as many serial killers were behind the wheel then as now, but you never heard about them. Nobody warned us of the dangers of hitchhiking. Evil definitely did not seem to be lurking.

Of course perverts were out there, and I hitchhiked every day with a hard-on hoping one would pick me up and give me a blow job. Many did. On this trip, I guess Ill still technically be horny while hitchhiking, but I may be carrying a Viagra in my pocket instead of an erection. Is all hitchhiking gay? Arent truck stops and Levis-clad tough-guy hitchhikers staples of porn movies? My planned route is I-70 West, and if Im lucky enough to get a ride going that way, Ill be able to find out if there really is such a place as the Kansas City Trucking Companyor was that just the title of a fictitious garage in that classic gay film directed by Joe Gage? I saw the real El Paso Wrecking Corp. on my drive from El Paso to Marfa, Texas, and almost drove off the road remembering this sequel. If there really is such a place, maybe I can get dropped off there and make friends.

I drove all five cross-country interstate routes in the United States when I was a young man and loved it. We used to get drive-away cars, where the owner gave you the keys and you paid the gas and delivered the car to an address on the opposite coast. I even remember singing America the Beautiful stoned on hashish with my fellow travelers (David Lochary, Steve Butow, and David Hartman) as we drove toward a beautiful sunset in Minneapolis. Looking back, Im amazed anyone trusted any of us considering how we looked at the time, but even though we violated the rules by taking other passengers (and drugs), we always did deliver the car in one piece. But come to think about it, we didnt ever pick up a hitchhiker then , and that was in the heyday of the hippie years. And in 2012, I expect someone to stop?