Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (7 page)

Now she stood before the mirror. She couldn't hear the bands blaring “Dixie” as the talking cigarette package kicked up its silver slippers over town on Broad Street, but she could still hear the noise of the Goodwill Industries Ball, though weeks had passed. Perhaps sound carries farther across time than across space. No matter. There was a more pressing noise: the voice of her daddy in the adjoining room. Sissy's daddy was speaking in his Carolina voice, his booze voice, the voice that sounded as if it had been strained through Daniel Boone's underwear. He was speaking about the Colonel, the elderly man in the yellow sport coat who for years had petitioned to manage Sissy's show biz career. “We'll begin with my carnival, of course,” the Colonel would purr, and then he would chart a path up the golden staircase that led all the way to Ed Sullivan. The Hankshaws were embarrassed by the Colonel's overtures. They had discouraged his interest. Recently, however, Mr. Hankshaw had had a change of mind. For two reasons: Sissy was starting to cause him trouble, and the Colonel had doubled his offer. Mr. Hankshaw was a working man, after all, and in his breast, as in the breast of working men everywhere, there beat the fatty heart of a profiteer (Could Marxist stethoscopes be so universally faulty? Do all socialist heart specialists have gum in their ears?). Sissy's daddy and mama were arguing at that moment about the contract, already signed by the Colonel, that lay like a freshly ironed pillowcase atop the TV set.

Her brothers were not home to defend her. Junior was watching the parade with the girl he was soon to marry. Jerry was in traction (no wonder the Hankshaws needed the Colonel's money) at the Medical College of Virginia. Refused enlistment into the paratroopers because of his size, Jerry had stood up in a ferris wheel seat at the Atlantic Rural Exposition—he had to do
something
—and gravity, that old scene-stealer, had once more gotten into the act.

Other things were bothering Sissy. Things as minor as her inability to locate information pertaining to the Siwash Indians, about whom she wished to write a paper in school. Things as annoying as the fact that teen-aged boys in the neighborhood had begun to follow her whenever she set out to hitchhike, burning to halts beside her, trying to coax her, as much out of malice as lust, into their vulgar Fords.

Many things had changed in Sissy Hankshaw's world, including her own physical image. Suddenly, in the seventeenth year of a life that had begun with a doctor's doubletake and a nurse's gasp, she had become lovely. A perfect compromise finally had been worked out between her predominantly angular features—high cheekbones, classically fine nose, fragile chin, peaceful blue eyes—and her decidedly round mouth—a full, pouty mouth that the Countess was later to compare to a mink's vagina at the height of the rut. Her figure had come to correspond to the average measurements of the high-fashion model: she stood five-nine in her socks, weighed 125 pounds and taped 33-24-34; one of those bony beauties of whom wags have said, “Falling downstairs, they sound like a cup of dice.”

She had given herself completely to the hitchhike because heretofore she had nothing else nor any hope of else. Ah cha cha, but now there was a choice. Or the possibility of a choice. She was pretty. And a pretty girl can always make her way in a civilized society. Perhaps she should somehow find a job, work and work and save her money—even if it took years—so that she could return to Dr. Dreyfus for that complex operation; so that she could lead a normal human female life.

Every time she said it to herself, however (there before the mirror), every time she thought “Dr. Dreyfus” or “normal life,” her thumbs talked back to her in thumbtalk: tingles, throbs and itches. Until at last she knew. Accepted what she had always sensed. She had been correct when she had howled at the dance. They were not a handicap. Rather, they were an invitation, a privilege audaciously and impolitely granted, perfumed with danger and surprise, offering her greater freedom of movement,
inviting her to live life at some “other” level
. If she dared.

Well, about the time the steam calliope was wheezing like emphysema through the lungs of Tobaccoland, Sissy decided to dare. And about the instant she decided to dare, she commenced to laugh. She was laughing with such abandon, such secret delight, she could scarcely wiggle into her panties, even though her daddy stalked in from the living room and took a long, granite look.

Her parents warned her not to go out, but their attentions were on the TV screen when she stood at the refrigerator and coaxed a package of Velveeta cheese into her coat pocket. Some olives jumped in also. An apple joined up. A half-loaf of Wonder Bread said, what the hell, it'd go along, what was there to lose. “Nothing,” said Sissy.

She made it out the back door during a shootout on “Gunsmoke.” Silently, she thanked Marshal Dillon for the cover, but it didn't occur to her then to lament for Miss Kitty, ever a saloonkeeper, never a cowgirl.

On a dead run, olives bouncing out of her jacket, she reached the corner where Hull Street was intersected by U.S. Route 1—in 1960 still the principal north-south interstate highway.

By the time she got her arm in the air, the light had changed and the first car, a boatish, blue Lincoln with Jersey plates, was already passing. For a second, it appeared as if she were late, as if the driver had missed her gesture. But no, some aspect of it—a glint of neon on the nail, perhaps—snagged the hem of his vision. He glanced back in time to see the entire appendage, immense, scrubbed, lubricated, zeppelinlike, looking as fresh and newborn as an egg, invoking a strange interplay between the joyful and the ominous, as it swam at eye-level past his opposite rear window.

He braked.

What else
could
he do?

“Going north?” asked Sissy for openers as the door swung toward her like a slab of candied sky. Were it any other direction she wouldn't have cared.

“You bet your raggedy white ass I am,” said the driver, grinning sardonically. He was black-skinned and beret-topped, and it was difficult to ascertain which there were the more of, saxophones in his back seat or gold teeth in his mouth. Sissy hesitated. But what the hell? In imitation of the Wonder Bread, she said to herself, “This is it; what is there to lose?” She boarded.

Actually, there was a fine style about the driver, about the tingle of treasure when he grinned, about the billow of marijuana smoke in which he sat (how different from the celebrated smokes of Richmond!); about the gardenia in his lapel and the flask by his side, about the degree to which his cameoed fingers turned up the volume on the radio, about the speed at which he made that big Lincoln rocket out of the tobacco slums, forever and forever, bearing Sissy Hankshaw up to the heights.

And Sissy Hankshaw, knees knocking with thrill and fear, and not knowing what else to do, reached into her scrawny coat and offered the black man a slice of cheese.

COWGIRL INTERLUDE (CHUCK WAGON)

Fire is the reuniting of matter with oxygen. If one bears that in mind, every blaze may be seen as a reunion, an occasion of chemical joy. To smoke a cigar is to end a long separation; to burn down a police station is to hold homecoming for billions of happy molecules.

Beside a marshy lake in an obscure sector of the Dakotas, a campfire was smiling its head off. Around it, however, there arose from a group of cowgirls several flares of discontent. Some of the girls were complaining that their stew was tasteless and bland.

“This stew is bland,” said one girl.

“It's like milk from a sick cow,” said another.

Debbie, on cook duty that day, was defensive. “But spices aren't good for you,” she said. “Spices burn the tummy and inflame the senses,” she went on, using two metaphors improperly inspired by the fire.

The dissatisfied diners scoffed, and because little Debbie looked so near to tears, Bonanza Jellybean spoke in her behalf. “It's a well-known fact,” said Jelly, “that the reason India is overpopulated is because curry powder is an aphrodisiac.”

Delores del Ruby flicked an ember out of the reunion with a sharp crack of her whip. “Bullshit,” said Delores. “There isn't but one aphrodisiac in the world.

“And that's strange stuff.”

15.

"HITCHHIKING IS NOT A SPORT.
It is not an art. It certainly isn't work, for it requires no particular ability nor does it produce anything of value. It's an adventure, I suppose, but a shallow, ignoble adventure. Hitchhiking is parasitic, no more than a reckless panhandling, as far as I can see."

Those were the words of Julian Gitche, spoken in exasperation to Sissy Hankshaw. Sissy did not bother to answer Julian's charges, and the author, who is ambivalent about the whole matter of hitchhiking, certainly is not going to answer them for her.

From Whitman to Steinbeck to Kerouac, and beyond to the restless broods of the seventies, the American road has represented choice, escape, opportunity, a way to somewhere else. However illusionary, the road was freedom, and the freest way to ride the road was hitchhiking. By the seventies, so many young Americans were on the road that hitchhiking did take on, Julian to the contrary, characteristics of sport. In the letters column of pop culture magazines such as
Rolling Stone
, hitchhikers boasted of records set for speed and distance, and whole manuals were published to advise those new to the “game.”

Oddly enough, Sissy was almost indifferent to this cultural phenomenon. To approach her for practical advice on the subject of hitchhiking would have been virtually futile. For example, she could not have told you, as did Ben Lobo and Sara Links in their booklet
Side of the Road: A Hitchhikers Guide to the United States
, that Montana laws strictly forbid hitchhiking in the vicinity of mental institutions. And it is difficult to say how she might have reacted to this piece of advice in
Hitchhikers Handbook
by Tom Grimm: “Don't use your thumb to hitchhike. Use a sign instead.”

And at
this
Grimm observation, “I doubt whether most girls could safely hitchhike long distances alone,” Sissy would have had to laugh.

Because by that day in the New York clinic when Dr. Goldman administered to her the “talk serum,” many years after the black musician's Lincoln had transported her away from home and family, Sissy could say:

“Please don't think me immodest, but I'm really the best. When my hands are in shape and my timing is right, I'm the best there is, ever was or ever will be.

“When I was younger, before this layoff that has nearly finished me, I hitchhiked one hundred and twenty-seven hours without stopping, without food or sleep, crossed the continent twice in six days, cooled my thumbs in both oceans and caught rides after midnight on unlighted highways, such was my skill, persuasion, rhythm. I set records and immediately cracked them; went farther, faster than any hitchhiker before or since. As I developed, however, I grew more concerned with subtleties and nuances of style. Time in terms of m.p.h. no longer interested me. I began to hitchhike in something akin to geological time: slow, ancient, vast. Daylight, I would sleep in ditches and under bushes, crawling out in the afternoon like the first fish crawling from the sea, stopping car after car and often as not refusing their lift, or riding only a mile and starting over again. I removed the freeway from its temporal context. Overpasses, clover-leafs, exit ramps took on the personality of Mayan ruins for me. Without destination, without cessation, my run was often silent and empty; there were no increments, no arbitrary graduations reducing time to functional units. I abstracted and purified. Then I began to juxtapose slow, extended runs with short, furiously fast ones—until I could compose melodies, concerti, entire symphonies of hitch. When poor Jack Kerouac heard about this, he got drunk for a week. I added dimensions to hitchhiking that others could not even understand. In the Age of the Automobile—and nothing has shaped our culture like the motor car—there have been many great drivers but only one great passenger. I have hitched and hiked over every state and half the nations, through blizzards and under rainbows, in deserts and in cities, backward and sideways, upstairs, downstairs and in my lady's chamber. There is no road that did not expect me. Fields of daisies bowed and gas pumps gurgled when I passed by. Every moo cow dipped toward me her full udder. With me, something different and deep, in bright focus and pointing the way, arrived in the practice of hitchhiking. I am the spirit and the heart of hitchhiking, I am its cortex and its medulla, I am its foundation and its culmination, I am the jewel in its lotus. And when I am really moving, stopping car after car after car, moving so freely, so clearly, so delicately that even the sex maniacs and the cops can only blink and let me pass, then I embody the rhythms of the universe, I feel what it is like to
be
the universe, I am in a state of grace.

“You may claim that I've an unfair advantage, but no more so than Nijinsky, whose reputation as history's most incomparable dancer is untainted by the fact that his feet were abnormal, having the bone structure of bird feet. Nature built Nijinsky to dance, me to direct traffic. And speaking of birds, they say birds are stupid, but I once taught a parakeet to hitchhike. Couldn't speak a word, but he was a hitchhiking fool. I let him get rides for us all across the West, and then he indicated that he wanted to set out on his own. I let him go and the very first car he stopped was carrying two Siamese cats. Tsk tsk. Maybe birds are stupid at that.”

16.

THE SO-CALLED TALK SERUM
is essentially racemic methedrine with a pinch of Sodium Pentothal. It is not to be confused with the controversial “truth serum,” which is wholly Sodium Pentothal. Indeed, according to Dr. Goldman, the talk serum may cause a subject to exaggerate. Clearly, he believed Sissy Hankshaw guilty of overstatement while under the influence of the injection.

The author frankly doesn't know. The author isn't altogether certain that there is any such thing as exaggeration. Our brains permit us to utilize such a wee fraction of their resources that, in a sense, everything we experience is a reduction.