"Riding The Hellhound"

Stuff a gym bag with unwashed underwear, socks and a sweatshirt. Skin-pinch the rubber band off the greenbacks you've saved working for Burns International as a mall security guard, or humping Big Macs for Micky D. Leave a note behind for mom or your significant other or the landlord you're in arrears to, explaining that you've been called by Life to deliver this great thing inside your heart to the human race, and you're going far to give it away. Then head on down to Greyhound where for about 99 dead presidents you can ride the Dog to anywhere in the United States. A sack full of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and exactly twelve 500 millegram capsules of Siberian Ginsing will last you three thousand miles with no trouble at all. Meditation helps too. Just one thing though: leave the dope and the guns behind, O.K.? Because of a Nevada town called Winnemucka. Which rhymes with "Muthafucka." In Winnemukka, the Dog drivers got this little scam rigged: what they do is to pull up to this clapboard casino called . . . I can't remember the dump's name, but believe me you'll know it when you see it . . . and as the driver lights up a Chesterfield from a pack tucked into his rolled shirt sleeve he calls out in this sneaky voice "It's not a rest stop. I'm just jumping off here for a minute to take me a wiz. Back in two shakes of an ass" and puff! He's gone! You're sitting there with that cactus glare in your sun-shocked eyes when all of a sudden, son-of-a bitch, these leathery jock types in country western plaid and jeans board with badges out and announce in Dennis Weaver ranch hand drawls: "We're the Nevada State Narcotics Police. Will you please have some I.D.ready and we'll be looking through your bags too" and out the window is -- Holy Cow! -- mirrored sunglasses under a Highway Patrol Stetson and he's choking on a short leash this breathless cold black nose of whining sinew and ripping paws as it conducts an insane tail-wagging hunt through the disgorged contents of the bus' luggage carriage. Well, this is not good, not good at all. Even if you're guiltless, not transporting anything more illegal then Ginseng, how can this be a good thing? Old sins of the past rise up in your eyes to betray you, but you'd best look absolutely innocent or else they'll have you out there on that anvil of a blacktop, unpacking and explaining and posturing to save face and you don't want the whole goddamned bus to see your skidmarks, now, do you, held up in a cops fist for all to see, against the sun-raped backdrop of the ugliest town this side of Reno. They always find something too. Go right for the Black kids first. Once it was a brother, couldn't have been more than 19, had boarded in Sacramento. Sat there cool as Ice T as the bus rolled out into the night but like the rest of us looking kinda ragged by the time we hit Winnemuthafucka. Then the cops got on, politely asked him to step outside and pulled his bags from the luggage compartment, and the dog went nuts whining and wagging while the kid stood there frozen with regret. One of the State troopers lifted out and displayed on the burning tar a 9 millemeter automatic sidearm, a bag of what looked like coke, some pipes, some grass . . . lifted out each item like it was a holy thing, some saints relic, and lovingly displayed it on the road as two of the plainclothes ever so politely stepped up, pulled the brother's hands behind and cuffed him and ever so lovingly pushed him down to the hot tar. Whether or not it burned his ass they sure as hell didn't care, just stay put or else. You're ours now, baby. And once it was this young couple of hippie grunge kids couldn't have been more than, say, nineteen, twenty, him with long hair and a headband and her in this long sixties Judy Collins dress and just one subtle tattoo of a bluebird on her leg. Sitting there heads on each others shoulders, sweet as Kurt and Courtney, but that don't fool the Nevada State Narcotics folks, oh, no, who are not sentimental, and they drawled: "Will you please step down" and the kids first went corpse white, then chalky gray as a penitentiary latrine wall. In no time the Highway Patrol Stetson was doing his roadside archeology, lifting out a 44 Magnum, oh yeah! And then a kind of pillowcase sewn shut that he ripped open at the seam and held up for the others to see. Pot burst out like mattress stuffing. They grinned at the kids and one of them stepped up first to the boy and still smiling put his hands behind and cuffed him while the girl watched, face screwed up in tears. And now it was her turn and she collapsed, hysterical, suspended from his hands by her twisted arms like Joan of Arc. Smuggling a gun and dope across state lines is as bad as bad news gets but doing it in one of the most inhospitable states in the Union is catastrophic and in the meanwhile the bus driver called out with unrestrained pride: "O.K. then, boys, see ya the next trip" and them responding like Andy and Barney of some demonic Mayberry "So long, Will! Got us a nice catch, wouldn't you say?" and Will chuckling as he slams shut the hydraulic door and spins that big silver Americruiser around the corner and pulls up into the parking lot of the casino which, he explains, belongs to a friend of his and we're told that we're gonna get here the best meal of our life for next to nothing and the sad truth of it is, he's right. It's a place where the gamblers eat. All you can chow down for two bucks, and before I became a vegetarian Buddhist I'd have fried chicken, mashed potatoes, clam chowder, string beans, salad, garlic bread, the wickedest peach cobbler this side of the Snake River, chocolate pudding, coffee, coca cola and a mint-flavored toothpick. Sat around there with the other passengers and numbing out with food the pain of losing two of our own, of being deceived by that bus driver, of acquiescing in our own humiliation, since every one of us had to produce our I.D. and endure suspicious questions and watch our bags searched and sometimes stood up and got patted down and trying to explain to those gun-toting goobers the difference between Siberian and Korean Ginseng and there wasn't a goddamned thing we could do about it but stuff our cake-holes with grub and nod gratefully with pouched cheeks and shake our heads dismally when someone mentioned that the Black guy or the hippies or whoever it happened to be was probably going away for a hella long time, yes, a hella long time. And the hole they were going to rot in wouldn't be fit for any kind of dog. Except maybe the kind they rode in on. -Alan Kaufman

[Back]