Robert Burroughs

“We had a company party last night, and I got a little drunk. My buddy didn’t want me drivin’, so he took me back to his place in Oceanside."

He was standing at the edge of the freeway on-ramp, looking like the kind of guy you'd choose out of a police line-up: dirty white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up, an 18-inch tattoo down one arm, and a cocky grin. He wore his hair short — not in a stylish crew cut, but in a greasy Texas butch. He thrust one hand out in the hitchhiker's salute, almost daring somebody to pick him up. But over the other hand he draped an old wool mackinaw, as if he were trying to hide something underneath.

Some people say that picking up hitchhikers is like petting a rattlesnake — you might get away with it, for a while.

I pushed open my truck door. “Where you headed?” I asked.

“Escondido,” he answered with a sneer. “Hop in.”

I waited long enough to make sure the cement truck in my rear-view mirror wasn’t going to slaughter us both, then I eased back onto Highway 78.

Randy Steven Kraft is on trial now in Orange County for the murder of 16 young men. Police suspect he may have murdered as many 61 young, male hitchhikers — mostly transients and Marines — after sexually molesting them.

“What’s in Escondido?”

“My truck,” he said. “We had a company party last night, and I got a little drunk. My buddy didn’t want me drivin’, so he took me back to his place in Oceanside. See, I figure it’s okay to get drunk once in a while, as long as you do it responsibly.”

As Jack Kerouac wrote in On the Road: “One of the biggest troubles hitchhiking is having to talk to innumerable people, make them feel they didn’t make a mistake picking you up."

“You hung over?”

“Not really. I slept pretty good. I will say, I’m glad I don’t have to go to work today, though.”

"I was staying in this house in El Cajon. But I couldn’t afford the rent. I had two choices: I could go downtown and live in the missions — but I’d already tried that in L.A. — or I could just wander around for a while.”

He was a good-natured fellow, gentler than he looked, even courteous. “What kind of work do you do?”

“I lay carpet. I’m just an apprentice, right now, but it seems like a pretty good business to get into. There’s a lotta people in this county, and most of ’em are walkin’ on carpet. Just last week we put in a new carpet for this guy — he was getting a Stainmaster upgrade. By the time my boss was through with him, he’d slam-dunked that guy for $5200.”

A friend who went to San Diego State hitchhiked to school every day, though he had a good car. “I just can’t stand the idea of going to bed at night without at least one interesting thing having happened during the day."

I pointed to his arm. “That’s a helluva tattoo. Navy?”

“Marines.” He said proudly, flexing the muscles over his tattoo. “Armored division. I got out in ’81, and I kinda miss it, to tell ya the truth. It’s a special kinda feeling driving a 50,000-pound tank 50 miles an hour and know you don’t have to get outta the way for nothin’. That’s what a guy needs on these freeways.” He glanced around at the chaos of steel and glass that was rushing past us. “For the life of me, I can’t understand why all these people are in such a big hurry.”

Bob tells a story of getting picked up after sunrise at a rest stop west of El Centro. The driver had a face that was bruised and bloody. “I got in a big fight in L. A. last night,” the driver said. “I think I killed a guy.” Bob was desperate for a ride, so he climbed in anyway.

I let him off at the Nordahl Road exit, not far from where the company party had been. As he was getting out of the car, I tried to get a peek at what he was hiding under the mackinaw. But whatever it was, he didn’t want me to know, and he kept it well hidden.

“Take care, now,” he said with a big, bloodshot smile. “And have a nice day.”

Some people say that picking up hitchhikers is like petting a rattlesnake — you might get away with it, for a while. Who knows, maybe someday the carpet layer will stick his carpet knife in the back of some poor bastard’s neck. But there are lots of ways to bleed people to death, and, personally, I’d trust the carpet layer before I’d trust one of these guys driving around in a BMW making deals over a cellular phone. A wolf in wolves’ clothing is less dangerous than a wolf in silk suits.

Nowadays hardly anybody will pick up a hitchhiker. There have been too many newspaper accounts of deranged hitchhikers found wearing necklaces made from the knuckle bones of their victims. Much more often, though, the hitchhikers themselves are the victims of violence. The most recent example is the grisly case of Randy Steven Kraft, who is on trial now in Orange County for the murder of 16 young men. Police suspect he may have murdered as many 61 young, male hitchhikers — mostly transients and Marines — after sexually molesting them.

About the only people who hitchhike anymore are those living on the edge — prostitutes, the homeless, and the deranged. The predators roaming our streets see these people as perfect victims, cut off from their families and friends and often living outside the law or at least beyond the bounds of normal behavior. In other words, hitchhikers are vulnerable.

Why people assume that the victims themselves are dangerous is difficult to understand, unless you assume that the reason most drivers refuse to pick up hitchhikers is that they don’t want to contaminate their comfortable circumstances by coming into contact with the unfortunate. We consider hitchhikers dangerous because we fear that poverty, mental illness, and desperation are communicable diseases.

It’s in that first moment of eye contact that I decide whether or not I’ll stop for a hitchhiker. If he’s wearing sunglasses, I’ll usually pass him by. But even though this kid was wearing sunglasses, I decided the moment I saw his big smile that I’d give him a ride.

He was standing at the Tavern Road on-ramp, in Alpine. He was a big, overweight, dark-haired kid, wearing red sweat pants, blue sweater, and moccasins. “I can take you as far as Jacumba,” I said.

It was obvious by the look on his face, he didn’t have the slightest idea where Jacumba was, but he climbed in anyway.

There’s a kind of unspoken agreement between a hitchhiker and his ride. Since the hitchhiker can’t afford to pay for the service he’s receiving, he’s obligated to provide entertainment. As Jack Kerouac wrote in On the Road: “One of the biggest troubles hitchhiking is having to talk to innumerable people, make them feel they didn’t make a mistake picking you up, even entertain them almost, all of which is a great strain....” Some hitchhikers will play the harmonica or guitar, but storytelling is by far the cheapest, easiest, and most common. The exchange usually begins, as it did in this case, by the driver asking, “Where you headed?“

“Well, I’m headed that way,” the kid said, pointing east. “I guess you could say I’m just gonna see where my luck takes me.”

I nodded to encourage him to go on with his tale.

“What it is,” he said, “was I was staying in this house in El Cajon, living on money I’d saved up. But I couldn’t afford the rent, so, the way I saw it, I had two choices: I could go downtown and live in the missions — but I’d already tried that in L.A., and I didn’t like it much — or I could just wander around for a while.” Getting a job wasn’t an alternative the kid was ready to consider, and after listening to him, I began to see why. His thoughts were scattered, and his story soon became incoherent.

The kid explained how he’d grown up a Navy brat and that moving around a lot felt natural to him. “One thing I’ve noticed,” he said, “is that whenever I travel, I lose weight. I could stand to lose about 20 pounds right now.”

“The hitchhiker’s diet, huh?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s called scrounge up whatever you can.”

Behind the kid’s big smile and sunglasses, I could sense paranoia. “Don’t you ever worry about what could happen to you hitchhiking around?” I asked.

“Well, you read about murders and stuff in the paper all the time. I figure people are mostly honest. Just the same, though,

I never pick up hitchhikers myself. It’s just too weird.”

“Well, I hope you don’t get stuck hitching out there in the desert. It’s still pretty cold at night. You got a good sleeping bag?” “Not really,” he said. “I was pretty cold last night. I slept right there where you picked me up. But I only had one blanket, so this morning I hitched back to El Cajon for two more blankets and a sheet.”

After having spent a night on the ground, he was concerned about the rocky landscape we were passing through. “I guess the only way to describe this country is ‘hills on top of hills,’ ” he groaned. “You’d have to go in with a bulldozer just to get a place flat enough to sleep.”

I handed him a bag of tortilla chips, and he wolfed down his breakfast in a hurry. Then he talked on and on. Now and then, I managed to make a little sense out of what he said. “I took a class at Mesa College once, and I really learned a lot.”

“Yeah? What was the class?”

“I guess you could say it was geography, or biology. Something like that. It was all about nature.”

The closer we got to Jacumba, the more strange he became. After a mile or so of silence, he turned to me and asked, his voice filled with curiosity, “Can you feel the heaviness?”

“Maybe,” I said. “What’s it feel like?” “Well, sometimes I can feel my eyeballs bulge out of their sockets and kind of roll back into my head. Maybe it’s the gravity. Or maybe it’s all these hills.”

“Could be.”

I let him out at the Shell station at the Jacumba exit. “Good luck.”

He nodded, then opened his door and pointed east. “It’s kind of amazing how this road just keeps going on and on, isn’t it?” He acted like he really wanted my opinion. “It is amazing,” I said.

For 20 or 30 years after World War II, hitchhiking was on the way to becoming a part of American mythology. The vision quest of every young man (and a few young women) included hitching around the country with a duffel bag and a harmonica, testing his fate while collecting tales of strange characters and bizarre circumstances. It was probably Kerouac’s On the Road that started the hitchhiking fad in the ’50s. “The greatest ride in my life was about to come up,” he wrote, “a truck, with a flatboard at the back, with about six or seven boys sprawled out on it, and the drivers, two young blond formers from Minnesota, were picking up every single soul they found on that road — the most smiling, cheerful couple of handsome bumpkins you could ever wish to see....”

As a writer, Kerouac played his lonesome-traveler role for all it was worth; but the truth was, Kerouac loathed hitchhiking himself and would do almost anything to avoid it — even buy a bus ticket, even walk. As Ann Charters says in her biography of Kerouac, “After On the Road appeared, Jack’s rucksack vanished into the back rooms of his mother’s house.... But in the minds of his readers he was forever linked with the ‘rucksack revolution’ he described in his novels.” The lust for free traveling adventure had been part of the American mentality long before Kerouac, though. Walt Whitman wrote about it in “Song of the Open Road”:

• Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
• Healthy, free, the world before me,
• The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
• Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good fortune,
• Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
• Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,
• Strong and content I travel the open road.

For a while during the late ’60s, anyplace you found three guys and a six-pack of beer, there were hitchhiking stories being told. A friend who went to San Diego State hitchhiked to school every day, even though he had a perfectly good car. When asked why, he explained, “I just can’t stand the idea of going to bed at night without at least one interesting thing having happened during the day. And more often than not, hitchhiking provides that one thing.”

Another friend tells of hitching through Arizona when a man in a convertible Cadillac and smoking a big cigar pulled up and offered him a ride. When my friend looked inside the car, he saw the man was naked. My friend considered the circumstances, then politely turned down the ride.

Bob Burroughs, a San Diegan who has kept detailed notes on his 20 years of hitchhiking adventures, tells a story about a drunk in a flat-bed truck who picked him up outside Mendota, Illinois. After they’d gone several miles, the driver stopped and asked him if he would get out and see if the truck’s brake lights were working. As soon as Bob got out, the driver took off. Bob hopped on the back of the truck, and, after several blocks, the driver looked back to see Bob smiling at him through the rear window. Later, after he’d stopped and waved for Bob to get back inside, the driver said, “I was just trying to teach you a lesson.”

Bob tells another story of getting picked up just after sunrise at a rest stop west of El Centro. The driver had a face that was bruised and bloody. “I got in a big fight in L. A. last night,” the driver said. “I think I killed a guy.” Bob was desperate for a ride, so he climbed in anyway. The driver was on his way to Yuma, where he had a brother who was a cop. He was hoping his brother would give him advice on what to do.

The smartest hitchhiker I ever heard about was a guy who hitched across the country carrying his belongings in a gas can with the bottom cut out. Drivers who will never pick up a hitchhiker will stop for a fellow motorist out of gas. Of course, some of the drivers were angry when they learned they’d been tricked, but the fellow said most of them gave him a ride anyway because they admired his ingenuity.

Every hitchhiker has a story of his favorite ride — the longest, the strangest, the prettiest driver. But as any hitchhiker will tell you, for every lucky ride there are a half-dozen nights spent sleeping in the bushes because nobody would stop for you. There are the men alone in vans asking if you wouldn’t like to crawl in back and take a little nap with them. There are the drunks who careen down the highway like a boat on a rough sea. There are the policemen who harass you, the hours spent standing in the rain, the long walks to the next good on-ramp, and the hundreds and hundreds of cold, blank stares. Somehow, though, the notion of the great hitchhiking adventure lives on.

Standing on the La Costa Avenue on-ramp were three big, rugged, sunburned girls with hiking boots and backpacks. I’d passed that ramp 100 times and never seen anything like them before.

“How far you going?” the biggest one, a Viking blond, asked after I pulled over.

“Oceanside,” I said.

“Oh, yeah. I’ve been there. That’s the place where everybody in town wears military boots.”

She motioned for her friends to come. They all heaved their packs into the bed of the truck, and two of the girls climbed in back with their gear. The big Viking, though, scrutinized me carefully, then climbed in the cab. If worse came to worst, she figured she could handle me.

It was obvious she was no North County girl. She wore no makeup, no sunglasses, and wasn’t burdened with that look of jaded boredom. She wore a long skirt and had her hair braided in back. The rich smell of female hormones filled the cab.

“We’ve been down to Mulege,” she said. “Now we’re headed back.”

“Back where?”

“Vancouver. We made it to Mexico in five days.”

“Don’t see many women hitchhiking anymore,” I said.

“We figure it’s safe to hitch with three of us together, but we still turn down a lot of rides,” she said. “No strange guys, no drunks — they’re just too much trouble. In L.A. we got picked up by a guy on speed. Ricochet Rick. He talked a mile a minute. Got a $250 speeding ticket while we were riding with him.”

“Maybe that was one ride you should’ve turned down?”

“Yeah, it was. Usually we try to go by the vibes. Women are our favorite ride, and we’ve had a lot of them. They always wanna hear all about our trip.”

“How’d you like San Diego?”

“Sure are a lot of expensive cars. And it looked real clean. But we liked Mexico more.”

Her friends in back had dozed off, their faces to the sun. They’d spent the night beside the road and hadn’t gotten much sleep.

“In Oregon we had to wait for a ride for four hours in a rainstorm. That was pretty awful. Other than that, though, we’ve been lucky.... Hitching in Mexico was the easiest, and the people there are the nicest. They talk and talk, even though they know we don’t speak Spanish.”

“You hitchhike a lot?”

“Last Christmas I hitched from Vancouver to Ontario in five days. I made a sign that said ‘Home by Xmas,’ and I decorated it with holly. I never waited for a ride long enough to get cold.”

When I pulled off on Mission Avenue, the Viking got out and woke up her friends. As I waited at the red light, rather than head for the on-ramp, they picked up their packs and trudged merrily up the street. Last I saw, they were heading into a Burger King.

San Diegans like to believe that everybody in the country would give anything to live here if only they could be so fortunate. That impression is reinforced by our rising home prices and by the endless flow of U-Haul trailers flowing into our county. What we don’t always see is the steady stream of people trying to escape from San Diego. And when the California dream has turned into a nightmare, often the only way out is hitchhiking.

At the Lake Jennings exit on I-8, I spotted a neatly dressed man in his mid-30s. He had a gaunt, bearded face and carried all his belongings in two plastic grocery bags. He was about the saddest-looking fellow I’d seen in a while.

“I’m going to Alpine,” I said. “Where you headed?”

He chose his words very carefully. “Oh, I don’t know. I’m just kinda drifting around, I guess.”

“Well, climb in,” I said.

Though it was obvious he’d spent the night sleeping alongside the road, he was neatly groomed, and his clothes were clean. He even smelled of soap. “Coming from San Diego?”

“Ah, I was staying in El Cajon. I went there thinking I might look for work. Too many people for me, though.”

“What kind of work do you do?”

“I’m a painter. Mostly I paint houses, but I could paint a car if I had to.”

“You like that kind of work?”

“Oh,” he said sadly, “everything’s getting so damn technical. It’s like varnish. There used to be two kinds of varnish — spar varnish, for outdoors, and then an indoor varnish. That wasn’t good enough, so they had to make polyurethane to replace them both. Now they got an indoor polyurethane and an outdoor polyurethane.” After a moment he added wearily, “There’s so much you gotta know just to be a painter nowadays.”

He explained that he didn’t much care for hitchhiking, but he couldn’t afford a car. “For three or four hundred dollars, you can’t get much of a car anymore. Next time I get some money together, I think I’ll look at motorcycles.”

I asked him if he was hungry, and he admitted that he was. I offered him a sandwich, but he refused it at first, saying proudly, “That’s your lunch, I can’t take that.”

When I made it clear I wanted him to have the sandwich, he took it and finished it in about four bites. He startled me for a moment because I realized, if I were that hungry, no store window, no burglar alarm, and no gun would keep me from food.

“How far you figure you’ll get today?”

I asked, after he’d finished eating.

“I’d kinda like to make it all the way to Tucson,” he said. “There’s a big motel there in the middle of town — La Quinta, it’s called. Some people call it ‘La Kweenta,’ but that’s not right. Anyway, me and another guy painted that. I’d kinda like to see it again.”

When I dropped him off, he thanked me, then thanked me again. When I drove off he smiled and waved until I was out of sight.

For people who are supposedly down on their luck, without even the money for a bus ride, it’s surprising how many hitchhikers are full of hope. Maybe that’s because, after months of stagnation and despondency, they’re finally doing something to change their luck. Or maybe it’s reassuring for them to see that at least somebody out there cares enough to give them a ride. The underlying premise of hitchhiking, after all, is that people will help other people in need — that people are good. Maybe only a desperate person would believe that. But while some desperate people might take a high-powered rifle, climb to the top of a water tower, and begin killing everything that moves, the hitchhiker sticks out his thumb and asks for help. Hitchhikers are optimistic, which is the same as saying they still have hope.

Encinitas is the kind of town that doesn’t see many black faces, so when I saw the black man standing at the Encinitas Boulevard exit with an army-green duffel bag, I figured he had to be the loneliest guy in town. I took the next exit and followed the frontage road back.

“I’m going to Oceanside,” I said.

“Good.” He tossed his duffel bag in back. “A ride outta there should get me through Camp Pendleton.”

His front teeth were gone. He was a bit shabby. I figured him to be about 40. “Where you coming from?” I asked.

He smiled proudly. “Believe it or not, I come all the way from Richmond, Virginia, in ten days. I woulda made it in eight, but I spent two days in Yuma ’cause nobody would give me a ride.”

For having spent ten days on the road, he was remarkably cheerful. “First time in California?” I asked.

He immediately recognized my question as the cue to begin his story. “What it was,” he said, “is I went through a really bad divorce. All she left me with was a guitar, and I hadda leave that in Virginia. You know how it is, everybody’s got an opinion on whether you’re right or she’s right. Everybody’s got their advice. I figured I just had to get outta town. Try to change my luck. I never been to California before, so that’s where I headed. Hell, I feel like I’m starting all over.”

“You passed right through San Diego. You didn’t care for it?”

“I liked San Diego. But I heard if you go there without a lot of money in your pocket, it can be really hard. I only got 50 bucks.... L.A.’s a big town. I figure that’s my best chance. I used to know a guy who lived in Venice. Who knows, maybe I’ll run into him.”

“What kind of work do you do?”

“I’m a musician. I play rock guitar. But I can do a lotta other things, too — cook, hang sheet rock. I’ll do whatever I have to do. I’m only 26. All I’m lookin’ for is a chance to start over.”

If we lived in a perfect world, hitchhiking would be the answer to our transportation problems. No car would travel the freeways without a passenger in every seat, and no traveler would go without a ride. Just a few years ago, the government of Canada was promoting hitchhiking as a way for young people to see their country. Drivers were persuaded to believe it was their social responsibility to pick up hitchhikers, and every small town had a free hostel where hitchhikers could stay.

But in a perfect world, city parks wouldn’t become campgrounds for the homeless, public rest rooms would be as clean and safe as our own bathrooms, and buses would always run on time.

At first I didn’t take him for a hitchhiker, even though he was standing at the on-ramp at Via de la Valle. He had a preoccupied look on his face, as if being without transportation was only a momentary inconvenience, and he couldn’t allow that to untrack his thoughts. Sure enough, though, the moment I turned onto the ramp, he stuck out his thumb.

He was a little red-bearded rodent of a guy, with thick glasses, yellow teeth, and a greasy Padres cap, and he had a newspaper tucked under one arm. He didn’t even bother to glance over at me while he took the passenger seat. I might as well have been a bus driver. “Cigar bother you?” he asked, using his tongue to twiddle the burned-out stub between his lips. “Not if you don’t light it,” I said.

He just shrugged. “You can let me out at Oceanside Boulevard, if you’re goin’ that far.” He took the newspaper from under his arm, opened it to the sports section, and began reading.

I didn’t say anything, and after a moment or two, the hitchhiker felt the urge for conversation. “You follow baseball?” “Some,” I said.

“Whatta you figure the Padres’ chances are this year?”

“They’re lookin’ pretty good, I guess. They picked up Clark and Hurst.”

He grunted sarcastically. “Yeah, that’s about what everybody says.” Then, after a weighty pause, he proceeded to set me straight. “What the hell did Bruce Hurst ever do? Eric Show’s got a better ERA, yet nobody outside of San Diego — except maybe a few people in the John Birch Society — ever even heard of him! Besides, the only reason Hurst left Boston was because he got embarrassed over a little talk about a man and his mistress. 1 mean, is the guy a pitcher or a prude?” Without taking his face out of the paper, he worked his way through every player on the team, highlighting their strengths, but paying particular attention to their weaknesses. He concluded with John Kruk. “For a fat white boy, the guy’s got talent, no doubt about. His problem is, he’s girl crazy. Instead of settling for some coal miner’s daughter, which is what he needs, he chases after all these North County women. And lemme tell ya, they’ll end your career faster than bad knees.”

The hitchhiker didn’t even notice when I pulled onto the Oceanside Boulevard offramp. When we came to a stop, he finally quit talking long enough to pull his face out of the paper. As he got out of the truck, rather than thank me for the ride, he said, “You really oughta follow baseball more. It’s one of the only things a guy can make any sense out of anymore.”

As I drove away, I looked in my rear-view mirror. He was lighting his cigar.