Not that it matters a hell of a lot at ten feet … but it makes you a trifle nervous to hear that nobody in his or her right mind would dare to walk alone from the Capitol Building to a car in the parking lot without fear of later on having to crawl, naked and bleeding, to the nearest police station.
All this sounds incredible – and that was my reaction at first: ‘Come on! It can’t be that bad!’
‘You wait and see,’ they said. ‘And meanwhile, keep your doors locked.’ I immediately called Colorado and had another Doberman shipped in. If this is what’s happening in this town, I felt, the thing to do was get right on top of it … but paranoia gets very heavy when there’s no more humor in it; and it occurs to me now that maybe this is what has happened to whatever remains of the ‘liberal power structure’ in Washington. Getting beaten in Congress is one thing – even if you get beaten a lot - but when you slink out of the Senate chamber with your tail between your legs and then have to worry about getting mugged, stomped, or raped in the Capitol parking lot by a trio of renegade Black Panthers … well, it tends to bring you down a bit, and warp your Liberal Instincts.
There is no way to avoid ‘racist undertones’ here. The simple heavy truth is that Washington is mainly a Black City, and that most of the violent crime is therefore committed by blacks – not always against whites, but often enough to make the relatively wealthy white population very nervous about random social contacts with their black fellow citizens. After only ten days in this town I have noticed the Fear Syndrome clouding even my own mind: I find myself ignoring black hitchhikers, and every time I do it I wonder, ‘Why the fuck did you do that?’ And I tell myself, ‘Well, I’ll pick up the next one I see.’ And sometimes I do, but not always …
My arrival in town was not mentioned by any of the society columnists. It was shortly after dawn, as I recall, when I straggled into Washington just ahead of the rush-hour, government-worker car-pool traffic boiling up from the Maryland suburbs … humping along in the slow lane on U.S. Interstate 70S like a crippled steel piss-ant; dragging a massive orange U-haul trailer full of books and ‘important papers’ … feeling painfully slow & helpless because the Volvo was never made for this kind of work.
It’s a quick little beast and one of the best ever built for rough-road, mud & snow driving … but not even this new, six-cylinder super-Volvo is up to hauling 2000 pounds of heavy swill across the country from Woody Creek, Colorado to Washington, D.C. The odometer read 2155 when I crossed the Maryland line as the sun came up over Hagerstown … still confused after getting lost in a hamlet called Breezewood in Pennsylvania; I’d stopped there to ponder the drug question with two freaks I met on the Turnpike.
They had blown a tire east of Everett, but nobody would stop to lend them a jack. They had a spare tire – and a jack, too, for that matter – but no jack-handle; no way to crank the car up and put the spare on. They had gone out to Cleveland, from Baltimore to take advantage of the brutally depressed used-car market in the vast urban web around Detroit … and they’d picked up this ’66 Ford Fairlane for $150.
I was impressed.
‘Shit,’ they said. ‘You can pick up a goddamn new Thunderbird out there for seven-fifty. All you need is cash, man; people are desperate! There’s no work out there, man; they’re selling everything! It’s down to a dime on the dollar. Shit, I can sell any car I can get my hands on around Detroit for twice the money in Baltimore.’
I said I would talk to some people with capital and maybe get into that business, if things were as good as they said. They assured me that I could make a natural fortune if I could drum up enough cash to set up a steady shuttle between the Detroit-Toledo-Cleveland area and places like Baltimore, Philly and Washington. ‘All you need,’ they said, ‘is some dollars in front and some guys to drive the cars.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘And some jack-handles.’
‘What?’
‘Jack-handles – for scenes like these.’
They laughed. Yeah, a jack-handle or so might save a lot of trouble. They’d been waving frantically at traffic for about three hours before I came by … and in truth I only stopped because I couldn’t quite believe what I thought I’d just seen. Here I was all alone on the Pennsylvania Turnpike on a fast downhill grade -running easily, for a change – when suddenly out of the darkness in a corner of my right eye I glimpsed what appeared to be a white gorilla running towards the road.
I hit the brakes and pulled over. What the fuck was that? I had noticed a disabled car as I crested the hill, but the turnpikes & freeways are full of abandoned junkers these days … and you don’t really notice them, in your brain, until you start to zoom past one and suddenly have to swerve left to avoid killing a big furry white animal, lunging into the road on its hind legs.
A white bear? Agnew’s other son?
At this time of the morning I was bored from bad noise on the radio and half-drunk from doing off a quart of Wild Turkey between Chicago and the Altoona exit so I figured, Why Not? Check it out.
But I was moving along about seventy at the time and I forgot about the trailer … so by the time I got my whole act stopped I was five hundred yards down the Turnpike and I couldn’t back up.
But I was still curious. So I set the blinker lights flashing on the Volvo and started walking back up the road, in pitch darkness, with a big flashlight in one hand and a .357 magnum in the other. No point getting stomped & fucked over, I thought – by wild beasts or anything else. My instincts were purely humanitarian – but what about that Thing I was going back to look for? You read about these people in the Reader’s Digest: blood-crazy dope fiends who crouch beside the highway and prey on innocent travelers.
Maybe Manson, or the ghost of Charley Starkweather. You never know … and that warning works both ways. Here were these two poor freaks, broke & hopelessly stoned, shot down beside the highway for lack of nothing more than a ninety-cent jack-handle … and now, after three hours of trying to flag down a helping hand, they finally catch the attention of a drunken lunatic who rolls a good quarter-mile or so before stopping and then creeps back toward them in the darkness with a .357 magnum in his hand.
A vision like this is enough to make a man wonder about the wisdom of calling for help. For all they knew I was half-mad on PCP and eager to fill my empty Wild Turkey jug with enough fresh blood to make the last leg of the trip into Washington and apply for White House press credentials … nothing like a big hit of red corpuscles to give a man the right lift for a rush into politics.
But this time things worked out – as they usually do when you go with your instincts – and when I finally got back to the derailed junker I found these two half-frozen heads with a blowout … and the ‘white bear’ rushing into the road had been nothing more than Jerry, wrapped up in a furry white blanket from a Goodwill Store in Baltimore, finally getting so desperate that he decided to do anything necessary to make somebody stop. At least a hundred cars & trucks had zipped past, he said: ‘I know they could see me, because most of them swerved out into the passing lane – even a Cop Car; this is the first time in my goddamn life that I really wanted a cop to stop for me … shit, they’re supposed to help people, right …?’
Lester, his friend, was too twisted to even get out of the car until we started cranking it up. The Volvo jack wouldn’t work, but I had a huge screwdriver that we managed to use as a jack-handle.
When Lester finally got out he didn’t say much; but finally his head seemed to clear and he helped put the tire on. Then he looked up at me while Jerry tightened the bolts and said: ‘Say, man, you have anything to smoke?’
‘Smoke?’