Going Under In Wendover

 

I’ll ask you to picture me as a black dot in the desert, a period crawling across a straight line drawn on a vast white page, sweating literally and metaphorically, regretting everything, at Ground Zero in midsummer 1984. I’ll ask you to picture this: the highway patrol on Route 80 outside of Wendover, Nevada had directed me to walk a mile of desert landscape, back to Utah, in the blazing sun of noon – but to get you there, to help you understand how I could have been such an idiot as to be in that position I have to convey what I’d misunderstood about the difference between hitchhiking in New England and hitchhiking across the deserts and mountains of the West. To do the tale justice I need to rewind, to a back road near Chatham, New York, a few weeks earlier, to a ride hitched from a hippie named Melvin in an orange Volkswagen Bug.

It was the summer after freshman year. My friend Eliot and I had each taken “leaves of absence” – Eliot’s from the University of Chicago, mine from Bennington. After shrugging off college we’d run aground at Eliot’s family home in upstate New York. There we contracted with Eliot’s mom to prep and paint the exterior of their large house in exchange for room and board, and in our desultory way were following through – though the paint we applied would soon flake away like psoriasis, due to unfortunate shortcuts in our notion of prep. Each day, after sleeping in until Eliot’s mother was out of the house, we got stoned, stacked the player with vinyl – James Brown, The Minutemen, and Little Feat were in heavy rotation – ascended the scaffolding, killed hornets in the eaves, and fantasized escape.

I’d left a girlfriend behind in Vermont, and one June day, horny, sick of fumes, out of dope, I defected from the paint job and hitchhiked to Bennington to see her. That one-hour drive could usually be hitched in three – the reliable ratio for jaunts between the small towns that dot the New England map. You stuck out your thumb and strung together ten or fifteen short hops – bored salesman in pickups, kindly dads, daydreaming, harmless gays and, most of all, students from Hampshire or Bard in Toyota Corollas, who could be counted on to get you high during your ten minutes in their car. Hitchhiking was low-impact, low-commitment – you made small talk and put a couple of towns behind you.

Melvin was thirtyish, bearded, intense. He stopped his Bug for me somewhere just out of Chatham, and within a few miles I was, yes, stoned, and letting him fish for my story. I laid it out: girlfriend, paintjob, cabin fever. Eliot and I hoped to jaunt out West to visit his crazy uncle in Berkeley, I explained, but we needed a car.

“Well, I need to get this VW back to Colorado,” he said, and explained something about driving back with a girlfriend. It was too easy. By the end of the ride we’d struck a deal, exchanged phone numbers and Eliot’s address. A week later, at an appointed hour, he dropped the Bug at Eliot’s and vanished.

I want to say: We drove that car as far as we could, abandoned it out west, and we did -- amid a thousand jokes about how the hollow surfaces were likely packed with a million dollars in cocaine, we drove it precisely as far as Golden, Colorado, where we found a giant “M” carved into a mountain and a pizzeria with a whole stuffed moose spread around the four walls – head, hide, and hooves. It was further west than I’d been and it was where Melvin lived and it was where Eliot and I realized we hadn’t considered how to cross the last third of this great land, hadn’t even broached the subject.

We fooled around for three days in Colorado, at one point going to the Denver airport to try to cadge a lift on a mail plane, a useless notion we’d picked up who-knows-where. Then we found a ride board at the University in Boulder and scored Eliot a ride to Berkeley in a two-seater convertible driven by a reputedly beautiful girl – I never did lay eyes on her. That was the sole ride offered and so I volunteered to hitchhike to Berkeley, which I’d been daring myself to do for days. I knew how to hitchhike, right?

This was an error ofscale. Route Eighty between Cheyenne, Wyoming and San Francisco is a vast wasteland of desert and mountain dotted with a minimum of battened-down outposts selling gas, food, and gambling. Reno and Salt Lake City are the only hubs for a thousand miles; the rest is Elko and Little America, names you’d know only if you’d stopped there to repair a tire or wolf a hoagie. Hitchhiking in this relatively Martian zone, where anyone who stops has per se volunteered to spend forty-five minutes to two hours with you – unless they mean to leave you somewhere between towns, and let’s not think about that, please – is a rather different proposition from hitchhiking in New England.

In fact it stands in relation somewhat as facing a major-league pitcher does to swatting at a wiffleball, or as making love does to jerking off. I describe this with good-humored equilibrium now. But when the insight came over me, which it did roughly fifty miles out of Cheyenne, between the ride with the Christian who’d warned me extensively about accepting rides from the lawless wildcat oilmen in Western Wyoming, and the next ride – for which I waited an hour – in a pickup truck full of what were unmistakably lawless wildcat oilmen, with rifles and open beers in the cab, well, when that insight first came over me it was something akin to receiving a diagnosis of fatal illness.

See me: hair growing back from a buzz, Elvis Costello nerd glasses, plaid shorts, Chuck Taylors, discernibly Jewish features, and with preparations for the notion of desert consisting of the Meat Puppets tee-shirt I wore. Had I even considered where I might spend the nights? Nope. Mothers, quake for your sons – I was not a stupid boy. I showed no particular signs. I did my homework and got into college and then one day stepped out onto Route 80 in August without any sunscreen.

Though in writing this account I haven’t located the notebook I kept, listing each ride, I remember. I remember a ride with a Chinese shopkeeper inexplicably delivering a vanload of soda ninety miles through Nevada, and I remember a ride in a rig with a trucker who had a sleeping baby on the bedroll in back and wanted me to sit and make sure the baby didn’t roll off, and I remember a ride with a daredevil salesman, a professional speeder with radar and a CB radio who advanced me a hundred miles in under an hour. I’d remember more if I found the notebook but the story I want to tell is Wendover, on the Utah-Nevada border, and to tell it I don’t need a notebook because, well, because I just don’t.

The ride that got me out of Utah – I thought – was with a guy who booked rock acts at one of the two large casinos in Wendover, Nevada, just over the Utah border. The town was a speck in the Great Salt Desert, its only excuse for existing being that it was the easternmost place to gamble on Route 80. He picked me up at four on a Friday for the two-hour ride into Wendover. We listened to Neil Young’s Everybody’s Rockin’ and I soaked in his air conditioning and stared out the window at the marvelous, impossible salt flats, where lovers had trod off the highway to spell out their names in rocks which shone like black eyes against the white. The booker – who’d told me he’d been Three Dog Night’s road manager in his glory days – was friendly enough, but after measuring my naiveté he mentioned casually that every room in the two Casinos in town was likely to be booked, then gently drew a line in the salt: after he dropped me off on the highway outside of Wendover I was not to look him up and ask him for any favors. He’d see the last of me on Route 80 – no hard feelings.

I shrugged off his weirdly prescient ultimatum – I said I meant to keep moving tonight, push past Wendover, towards Reno. The sky was just beginning to glow when he deposited me on the offramp outside of town, a miles or so into Nevada. Oh, how I would come to loathe that spot! I waited an hour at least, hungry and exhausted, gazing at the twinkle of Wendover across the highway, and at the expanse of waste that surrounded it and me. There’s nothing to stretch time like sticking your thumb out as darkness gathers in the desert, and that spot, on a Friday night when every car was packed with weekending Mormoms, was the next thing to a hitchhiker’s worst nightmare.

The nightmare itself strolled along at around seven: a drifter with a walking stick and Charles Manson eyes. He appraised me with one hungry glance.

“Tough spot for a ride, huh?”

Impossible, I thought, with you standing anywhere in sight. “Yeah,” I agreed.

“Well, if you can’t get a lift and you want to crash, I’ve got little camp...” He pointed past the highway, over a barren, scrubby hill.

“I’m moving on.” Now more than ever.

“Well, if you can’t...”

“I’d probably just go get a room in town –” I stopped myself, but not before I’d painted a bullseye on my forehead.

“Right... okay.”

His posture said: I can take this kid.

“In fact,” I said. “I think I’ll just go in now.” And, feeling the drifter watch my back, I walked the semicircle of ramp, into Wendover.

There isn’t a town in America without a cheap motel, right? I found no cheap motel. Wendover was two things: a pair of glossy, booked-up Casinos full of clean-cut couples and Mormon families, and a sprawl of shanties and trailers which housed the suspicious, hard-bitten croupiers and security guards and maids who serviced the Casinos. I walked towards the neon, my skin prickling with fear, now comprehending the booker’s condition, knowing that if he hadn’t given it I would absolutely be on his doorstep.

Instead I went into the Stateline Casino. You’ve seen pictures of the neon of a giant cowboy with a rising gun-arm: that’s it. As predicted, they’d been booked full for this weekend for days. The woman at reception stared at me, with my sunburn and napsack and stink, like I was a flea in her carpet.

I asked if there was a deadline for cancellations.

“Eight o’clock. Sometimes a room or two opens up. No guarantees.”

Get lost! screamed her look. But she didn’t know I was measuring her look against the wolfish eyes of the drifter out on the highway, a contest she couldn’t win. I camped there in the lobby, shamelessly listening for clues, watching her watch me. A young couple asked and got the same reply, and when I saw they were hanging around I went and stood righteously at the desk, establishing precedence. It was a quarter to eight.

I’d turned it into a line, so the couple lined up behind me. I overheard their whispered conversation. Somehow I was transparent to everyone here:

She: “If there’s only one room we could let him spend the night in our car.”

Yes, yes, yes! I thought. I had about a ninety dollars left, and the cheapest rooms were seventy.

He: (long, evaluative pause) “I don’t think so.”

Now I hoped there was only one room. They deserved it. In fact I think they got a room. I only remember my flood of relief as I handed over my sweat-soaked cash in exchange for a key. I’d meant to put this contemptible town far behind me, but now coughing up my nest egg for a night inside the castle walls was a triumph. Up in the room I cranked the air, showered for the first time in two days, and donned my good shirt. On the bedspread was a complementary roll of quarters, meant to ensure that road-weary voyagers to Reno drop at least a bit of boodle here instead. I figured I’d spend it on dinner, and went downstairs.

In this long, shameful narrative you’ll permit me one boast: I’ve only gambled once in my entire life and I’m in the black. I took that ten-dollar roll of quarters to a slot machine and turned it into fifteen dollars. Then I quit, bought myself a shrimp salad with my winnings, and went upstairs and watched a movie on cable: Farrah Fawcett-Majors and Charles Grodin in Sunburn. And the next morning I checked out of the Stateline and walked back to my spot on the offramp, headed West.

That’s when it got silly. I stood there in the sun from nine to noon that morning. I counted cars, promised God I’d never hitchhike, and counted cars again. One hundred more, I decided. The hundred passed and I had no alternative but to clear the score and start again. Three times that morning I was cruised by the Highway Patrol, but I didn’t think much of it. I’d been searched and questioned once in Wyoming and survived. Anyway, I was still worried the drifter would show – the cops were my friends.

Sometime shortly after noon, when I’d begun to wonder if I was doomed to be in Wendover forever, they pulled over for a talk. Did I know hitchhiking was illegal in Nevada?

No, I told them, I didn’t. “I’m just trying to get out of your town, sir, I’ll be gone as soon as I can.” This approach had worked in Wyoming, but it didn’t work here.

It’s illegal, they explained. You can hitch in Utah, but not here.

I just came from Utah, I explained. I’m headed West.

Too bad, they explained. Utah was a mile that-a-away – East – and I ought to walk back there, with my thumb down, please, so I wouldn’t be in violation of the law.

But I’ll only be going back this way, I pleaded.

Whatever you’ll do, you won’t be committing a crime in Nevada.

So it was that I that I became a speck on a page, a token moved in an absurd symbolic action across a cartographic line in real space – so it was that I trudged under slow-crawling police escort along the shoulder in midday sun through a stretch of desert until reaching a road sign which read “Welcome to Utah!”

Follow: westbound, Wendover was the first stop on that road in hours. Follow: every car would stop for at least gas and a piss. Follow: I could stand there forever and die. No one would pick up two minutes before pulling in for a rest stop. I’d already been failing for hours standing on the right side of this hellhole. So, the instant the cops abandoned me on the Utah side of that line, I turned around and walked back in.

I didn’t pause at the spot I’d worn on the on-ramp, the drifter spot, the counting spot, the death spot. I slogged past it, went into town as far as the nearest gas station. Humbled beyond humble, I was ready to beg, to make a personal appeal to drivers as they stood filling their tanks. Up close I’d persuade someone, anyone, to get me a mile or two West and break the jinx. I approached the attendant, to make him understand I was harmless, to convey my plight and get him on my side.

The attendant was an ancient, shuffling black guy, the first black face I’d seen in days. In a film he would have been played by Scatman Crothers, circa The Shining. In a film it would be too much, I know, too easy, but this was true: he listened to my story and he laughed and he spoke in an patois so thick I could barely make it out.

“You want to wait for me to get off, I’ll get you down the road a piece,” he said, pretty much.

“I’ll wait.”

“You can sit back there.”

I sat, I waited, and when the time came I climbed into the attendant’s battered Reliant. I shared space with his dog – which the attendant explained he’d rescued from the road and taken in, probably just so I’d understand he was truly an angel and I was truly a stray, a whelpling, a pup – and got out of Wendover before I went under. Or at least before going under for a third and final and famously fatal time.

Eliot still doesn’t believe me, and neither, I trust, do you.

Rolling Stone, 2000