A Trip to LA

Richard Schepps, a friend in Berkeley, wanted a motorcycle. He had grown up in the Bronx and was a shy student of science, and a second-hand Triumph would be compensation for his shyness, for his sense of being provincial, and for his suspicion that he wasn’t cool. It took a while for him to save the money, and he drove the bike with a tentative, but still definite, swagger.

He backed the Triumph up to the curb in front of the North Side movie theater, and there, since the bike was sideways to the hill, and since he wasn’t as strong as he thought he was, the Triumph fell over and trapped him by one leg.

He turned and pushed the bike, but he couldn’t lift it enough to get away from it. The moviegoers were polite, or at least they tried not to embarrass him, and after Richard struggled for awhile he had to ask someone to help him lift the motorcycle.

One afternoon Richard took his girlfriend for a ride on the back of the Triumph, and they were hit by an uninsured migrant farm worker, and his hip was broken and one leg was shattered. His girlfriend had the same injuries, and both of them were in casts up to the waist. Richard had a long wound under the cast and it was draining, which had a whiff of something dead, like roadkill that had been left in the sun.

Richard was dark haired with acne scars, blue eyes, and he had a disarming frankness. One day in a German class, without thinking, I sat down next to him in that cloud of roadkill, and just as I was about to move, Richard said, “Thanks for sitting next to me. A lot of people can’t stand it.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

“Are you sure?” he said. “It’s OK if you want to move.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, although I often put my hand to my mouth.

“I appreciate it,” he said.

My apartment on Channing Way was a small place in the basement that had a shower, a bed next to the stove, and a toilet in the hall next to the storage bins. If I had wanted to, I could have fried an egg while I was in the shower, and since the ceiling was falling apart, the landlord had set up a net that caught the pieces of plaster. The bottom of an elevator shaft was just off the living room. Richard came to the apartment, on his crutches, swinging his leg and hip in a cast, in the cloud of the draining wound, and he sat in my living room where we played chess. He put his crutches on the floor like a dead scarecrow.

When we played, Richard asked how I was going to get to Los Angeles at the end of the year, and I said that I was going to hitchhike. He kept his eyes on the chessboard and said, “Can I come along?”

“Sure,” I said. “If you want to.”

“O,” he said. “I do. I really do.”

I looked up and considered what I had gotten myself into.

“What route are we going to take?” he said.

“Ninety-nine, right down over the ridge route,” I said.

“That’s great,” he said. “I don’t think my cast will get in the way.”

I wondered about the smell if I was able to get a ride.

“I need an adventure. You know, the motorcycle didn’t work out too well.”

“No,” I said. “No, I guess it didn’t.”

The end of the year was about a month away, and each time I ran into Richard, in the German class or outside, by Sather Gate, he said, “Boy, I can’t wait. Isn’t going to be too much longer, right?”

“No,” I said. “I guess not.”

“I’ll stand like this,” he said, and put out his thumb.

“Yeah,” I said.

With each passing week, I thought I would be able to find a way to say, “Look, there’s something we’ve got to talk about...” The weeks went by, and I often stood in front of him, about to speak, but always hesitant. We took examinations at the end of the year, and at Berkeley these were European style, so much so that an entire year could come down to one three-hour exercise. I found Richard in front of Sproul Hall and I looked away and said, “You know, I’d like to talk to you about something...”

“Sure, sure,” he said. “But I wanted to thank you for not leaving me in the lurch. A lot of people do that, you know?”

The plaza was filled with students, men and women with their books and a variety of mass fatigue that existed at this time of the year.

“I know,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Sure.”

“You have to have something like this happen to you,” he said, touching his cast. “To see how many friends you really have.”

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I said.

He looked at me, a sad disbelief that I would ask.

“Yes,” he said. “I really do.”

Richard showed up at my apartment on his crutches with a small athletic bag, like the ones used for team members who are going to a meet. He wore a windbreaker, jeans, a light shirt, and only one shoe. The other leg, in the cast, had a stubby, dark knob on the end, which protected the cast when he tried to put weight on it. I didn’t have a bag, and I wore jeans, a sweater, and a jacket.

“Let’s go,” he said.

The first thing was to get out of town, since it is far easier to be picked up on a highway than on a city street. We took the bus to a likely spot, and I put out my thumb. The idea was to go east for a while until we came to Highway 99, which in those days was the basic north-south road. No one picked us up, and the shadows began to lengthen in that golden California spring afternoon. Just before dark, we got a ride that left us on 99 at Rippon, where we were left at a construction site. Earth-moving machines, dump trucks, culverts, and piles of rebar were left on some newly bulldozed land. The best thing to do, I thought, was to get to the side of the construction lot, to lie down, and to wait for morning, maybe to sleep if we were lucky. Cars went by with those large, yellow balls of light from the headlamps.

“No one is going to pick us up at night,” I said.

Richard looked at me.

“I don’t like this,” he said.

“We’ll sleep over there, behind a bulldozer,” I said.

Richard stretched out, one leg a little off the ground, since the cast had been arranged with the knee bent at a slight angle. He began to get cold.

“If we sleep,” said Richard. “In the morning someone could come to work and park on us. I think we have to worry about that.”

“It will be all right,” I said.

“How do you know?” he said.

The draining wound was strong after dark, a sweaty, rotting flesh stink, and it swept over me as I faced the sky, where the stars had a purple glint. The earth-moving machines looked like water buffaloes against the occasional light of a car.

“I’ll keep watch,” said Richard.

The burrs from the wild grass around us, at the side of the lot, got into my sweater and into our socks. Richard scratched where he felt the burrs, and he didn’t listen when I said that would only make it worse. He asked what time it was every hour or so and then he slept in the gray-blue light of dawn. In the morning we looked like figures emerging from the dirt and the ground fog. Richard’s teeth chattered and I stood and hugged myself.

“Let’s go over to the road,” I said. “You sit there and I will try to get a ride. I’m not sure seeing you with crutches is a good idea.”

“Maybe they will feel sorry for us,” he said.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. Just sit here.”

The cars went by and in the early morning people were too worried about getting to work to stop. After nine o’clock or so the traffic diminished, and for a while there were no cars at all. An occasional truck went by with a rumble from the exhaust I felt in my chest as the driver shifted down. A cloud of black smoke lifted from the exhaust pipe that had a little lid.

Richard sat in the dust at the side of the road. It took awhile but a boxy Chevrolet stopped about twenty yards away, and when it pulled over it left a cloud of dust with gold sparkles in the morning sun.

“Good,” I said. “Let’s go.”

Richard jumped up, tried to use his crutches and fell with a crack as his cast broke between his thigh and waist. He sat down and looked at me.

“My cast,” he said.

I put my hand on his jeans and felt a ridge where the cast had split.

“What are we going to do?” he said.

“Does it hurt?” I said.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Not yet.”

Two men were in the car, both of them in their early thirties, and each of them had an ex-con look, which came from their pale skin as though they had just done time. I thought, San Quentin. They had acne scars and both were wearing clothes that looked to me to be the kind of thing a prison gave you when they let you go. Both of them kept their eyes on me, their glances steady, cold and curious the way a lizard glances at a fly.

“I need a favor,” I said.

“Yeah,” said the driver. “Like what?”

“My friend broke his cast, and I need you to back up so I can get him in the car.”

The driver looked at his passenger and then turned to Richard, and then back to me with that reptilian glance.

“Can you drive?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“We’re tired,” he said. “We’re going to need someone to drive.”

I thought maybe these two weren’t just released but had broken out of San Quentin. They looked at each other, and then the passenger said, “All right. Let me get in the back. Then you can back up.”

The passenger got out of the car, opened the rear door, and then, with a movement that looked as though he was in some pain, he got into the backseat. The driver backed up and stopped where Richard looked like a casualty at the side of the road.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Get him in,” he said.

There were two ways to put Richard in the car, leg first, torso last, or the other way, with his upper body first. This, upper body first, was the easiest, since Richard could then drag himself across the seat, although this meant that Richard would have to lean against the passenger in the back.

I opened the door, helped Richard up, and got him into the backseat. He leaned against the man who was there, Richard’s clothes filled with burrs from the grass.

“What stinks?” said the man in the back.

The man in the front moved over to the passenger side and said to me, “You drive.”

I pulled onto the road and headed south.

“We are getting off at Fresno,” the man said. “So you just go straight down 99 and turn off there. Right?”

“OK,” I said.

He put his head on the front seat, next to my leg and went to sleep.

The car ran all right although it didn’t have much compression and the brakes were soft, and the steering was spongy. I drove south, but as I went, I turned the rearview mirror so I could see Richard’s face. He stared straight ahead, obviously frightened and uncomfortable too, not quite on the verge of tears, but close. I thought I had gotten him into this, and, if nothing else, it seemed that I had to get him out of it. There were pins in his leg, from the hip to the knee, and I had no idea what happened to them if the cast had broken. Did the pins pull out of the bone, and did that wound open, too? I sat in the dusty air of the car, the man next to me with his head on the seat by my leg.

I could drive to Fresno and ask these two if we could go to a hospital, or I could do something else. I could drive through to Los Angeles, go to a hospital, get Richard out, and tell these two that they were in Fresno. Fresno is about a hundred and fifty miles from Los Angeles. The men looked like they were sound asleep, and the question was, Would they stay that way until Los Angeles?

Richard shrugged in the rearview mirror, as though he was telling me this is not the way he had hoped this would be. Would I help? I kept driving. The oncoming road had the long, fluid aspect of being in a silky chute of some kind, but leading to some place that left me uneasy. I kept thinking, no, stop at Fresno, and then I glanced at the guy on his side next to me with the acne scars that had the texture of the moon. I drove carefully, since I didn’t want to be stopped by the police.

I kept the car at a constant sixty-five miles an hour. Plenty of gas to get to Los Angeles, since they must have filled it up before they found us. The steady hum of the engine had about it all the inertia of trouble approaching. Well, I thought, as the exit for Fresno appeared in that hyper-green highway sign, Why not try for Los Angeles?

I kept going south, the Fresno sign approaching the car, and as it did, as it was just passing overhead, the man on the seat woke up and glanced at the sign as it passed over the car. He sat up and looked at me with a kind of anger that is so frank, so certain that there is no bluff in it, all threat.

“I want you to stop this fucking car right now, and then you are going to back up and get the fuck off. Right now.”

Richard sat up a little, blinking when he heard this voice. He didn’t know what I had been trying to do, although he knew something was wrong. I was in the fast lane, and when I looked in the rearview mirror, it didn’t seem that there was anyone right behind me. The man looked at me.

“Well? What are you doing?” he said.

I shifted into reverse, looked over my shoulder, and drove back to the exit at twenty miles an hour. Then I stopped, and turned off the highway.

“What the fuck were you thinking?” the man said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You better be,” he said.

“What’s going on?” said Richard.

“Yeah,” said the man in the backseat. “What the fuck?”

“I don’t know,” said the man in the front seat.

“It still stinks,” said the man in the back.

“What were you going to do?” said the man in the front seat. “Drive us someplace we didn’t want to go?”

The trucks rumbled on 99 as I drove away.

“Look,” I said. “I need to get to a hospital.”

“No kidding,” the man said.

“Can I drive to a hospital in Fresno?”

“You hear that?” said the man next to me to the one in the backseat. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It sure stinks.”

“I’m sorry,” said Richard.

“Shut the fuck up,” said the man in the front seat. He turned to me. “I should just push you out and your messed up friend. You know that?”

“Yes,” I said. “I just wanted a hospital.”

The man shook his head.

“Find a fucking hospital. Be quick about it.”

There weren’t many people on the street, and closer to Fresno the landscape was all clutter, gas stations, small shopping centers, auto parts stores, agriculture supply houses with people in parking lots around the stores. In one of these I asked a woman for directions, and she gave me complicated ones, four or five turns, but at least it was enough to start, and when I was lost, I asked someone else. The hospital appeared like a factory that had three stories and a sign for Emergencies.

“Pull in there,” said the man in the front seat. “Make it snappy.”

The hospital had a drive-through that passed the emergency entrance, and I stopped there, got out of the car, and went inside. A nurse looked at the burrs in my clothes and the dirt on my face and then rolled out a wheelchair. We got back to the car, opened the door to get Richard out, and as we slid him into the chair, the two men had pulled out a Brownie camera.

“Hold it,” said the man who had been in the front seat. “Hold it.”

Then he took a picture of me, Richard, and the nurse.

“Some vacation,” said the man from the backseat.

“Yeah,” said the man from the front seat. “I want to remember.”

“This?” said the man from the backseat. “We should have fucked these two up.”

The man from the front seat took another picture. Then the two of them got in the car, gave us one furious and yet oddly reptilian glance, and drove away. The nurse rolled Richard into the emergency room, where she helped him onto a table.

She turned to me and said, “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

She was in her forties and her nurse’s uniform was crisp and clean and she wore shoes with pink soles. She turned to me with a furious expression. Then she put her hand to her mouth and tried not to gag.

“I’ll get the doctor,” she said.

“I didn’t think I’d end up here,” said Richard.

“No,” I said. “Me neither.”

A doctor arrived, a man with a mild, quiet aspect, at once calm and obviously concerned. He wasn’t wearing a white coat, but a gray suit with a vest, a tie, and an achingly white shirt. He said to Richard, “We are going to have to get these jeans off. You don’t want us to cut them, do you?”

Richard shook his head.

The doctor pulled the pants down to expose the cast, which was stained where the wound had leaked. The stain looked like water damage on a plaster ceiling. The doctor held the cast and said, “Does it hurt?”

“No,” said Richard.

He nodded, then left the room and came back with a bowl of plaster of Paris and some rolls of gauze. The nurse came in, too, and she tried to hold the cast while the doctor soaked the gauze in the plaster.

“I can’t do it,” said the nurse. She gagged and put her hand to her mouth. “I can’t stand the smell.”

The doctor turned to me and said, “What about you? Can you hold it?”

I nodded and held up the cast.

The nurse left the room and the doctor wrapped the cast with plaster gauze, which smelled like a new room with sheet rock that had been taped and sealed with compound. We worked in the air of that draining wound, which seemed to be worse with the break. The doctor wrapped up the last piece of bandage and said, “That should do it. Let’s let it set.” He looked at me. “You can wait in the next room.”

I sat on a chair in another examination room where I took off a sweater that was filled with burrs. The nurse came in and scowled, and said, “You should be ashamed. Ashamed.”

I looked down. My clothes were covered with dust.

“What did you think you were doing?” she said.

“I was trying to get to Los Angeles,” I said.

“Why didn’t you fly?” she said.

I tried to dust my pants off.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said.

“What’s wrong with me?” I said. “You think I have all the money in the world? Is that it?”

She went on looking at me.

“I haven’t got that much money,” I said. “I’m trying to stay in school. That’s all.”

We stood opposite each other, and then she picked up my sweater and began to pick out the burrs.

“You want something to eat?” she said. “I can get you a sandwich.”

“Thank you,” I said.

She went on picking the burrs out of the sweater and then brought a bologna sandwich and some Jell-O along with a small container of milk and the same for Richard. The cast dried and the doctor came in and said, “Here’s twenty dollars. That’s enough for two bus tickets to L.A. I’ll drive you to the Greyhound station.”

He drove us to the station, Richard stretched out across the backseat of his five-year-old Buick, and when we got out in front of that institutional bus station, he said, “Don’t mind the nurse. She gets that way. Good luck.”

Richard and I sat by ourselves in the back of the bus since other passengers got on, approached the empty seats near us and then turned away.

“Is that enough adventure for you?” I said.

“I don’t know,” said Richard. “I guess. Well, yeah, that’s enough.”