I Am So Popular: Hitchin' a Ride
The other night, I drove past a young woman walking in the dark up my street, a busy thoroughfare in the ‘hood. I sized her up—maybe seventeen, probably less than a hundred pounds. I didn’t get three blocks before I circled back around, pulled up near her, rolled down my window, and mustered what I hope would be a no-really-I-am-a-safe-person-to-talk-to tone.
Are you going far? I asked. She told me her destination, a couple of miles away, which would involve her walking along Airport Boulevard. If you feel safe letting me give you a ride, I could do that, I said.
She thanked me, said she’d just finished a hard night at work, and hopped in. I noticed she didn’t put on her seatbelt, something I am always getting on Warren to do. But despite fears I had that we would get rear-ended and my attempt at a good deed would instead find her going through the windshield, I did not ask her to buckle up. Maybe, I thought, she wants to be able to jump out in case she decides I’m a creep.
I’ve been giving rides to strangers for as long as I can remember, going directly against my own ongoing insistence to my son that we must always be safe, and we mustn’t pick up unknowns. I wrote about another instance of this not long ago, about getting hustled by a seeing blind man who told me, upon getting in my car, that he was not there to hustle me, a dead giveaway that that is exactly what he was up to.
If I wind up suddenly dead one day, there are a couple of stalkers and at least one vitriolic ex that would comprise a “usual suspects” list. But I suppose it’s also possible that I might wind up shanked by some random somebody I stopped to help in a torrential downpour, because I noted they were carrying fifteen bags of groceries or a little baby, or had just missed a bus. I know, I know, it’s stupid. Maybe we can blame it on all the Jesus stuff I had foisted upon me as a kid, the importance of giving your sweater to the cold, your money to the poor, your food to the hungry and so on.
(Recently, in a moment of no-good-deed-goes-unpunished, I offered a dollar out the window to a homeless man since he had a dog with him, and homeless dogs break my heart. My car was moving slightly forward, the guy was also moving, and as he grabbed the money and said, “God bless you, brother!” he also managed to push my arm back with enough force to send brutal shooting pain through my bursitis-riddled shoulder, which felt ripped out of its socket.)
I didn’t ask many questions of this young lady passenger, since I don’t believe in making riders sing for their supper via responding to rat-a-tat inquiries. I did what I could to try to convey to her that I was not going to hurt her, which is to say I made a dramatic gesture of phoning Warren and announcing to him I’d be home very soon. My between the lines message was that I wasn’t going to waste any time killing this kid and dumping her body, I had places to be and somebody waiting for me.
But her untimely demise at the hands of some brute is the very thing I worried about when I saw her walking down my street. I didn’t tell her we’d had a couple of brutal rapes around here in the past months. Or that nearby Hyde Park had had the same. Or that my son had come upon a brutal attack in Clarksville not so long ago. (Aside: yes, he called the cops. No they didn’t catch the guy, which I know because when I called to ask about the incident, the cop I spoke to chortled out something about how it was just a drunken lovers’ spat, as if the woman my son saw bleeding on the ground, who’d disappeared before the cops arrived, deserved to be beaten as the price of a night on the town.)
I did gently remind my rider that, you know, sometimes people like to hassle young women walking alone. Since she had mentioned having a hard night at work, I did venture to ask if she worked at the neighborhood café. She snorted a wistful no and told me actually she worked at a strip club. I wondered about her reluctance to mention this—was she worried I’d judge her? Try to give her some speech on morality?
I remembered another young woman I picked up once. We were exiting the Hyde Park post office, the skies had just opened up, and she was obviously car-less and dismayed. I sensed she needed a lift to campus, and I was right. We rode in silence as far as Toy Joy, at which point she blurted out, in her broken English, some speech about Jesus being her lord and savior and did I yet know his holiness. I fought the urge to push her out of the car as I responded with a terse no. Just like I don’t have the right to pry into strangers’ lives even if they are in my passenger seat, nor do they have the right to proselytize.
Again, I wanted to say something to let the young stripper know it was cool, I wasn’t going to lay a trip on her about her choice of employment. I whipped my mental Rolodex of topics around and thankfully came up with a good one. You know, I said, I just read this great book by Diablo Cody. Did you see the movie Juno? She wrote that. She also wrote this book, Candy Girl, about her year as a stripper. It’s really great. She’s not judgmental or anything. It’s just funny.
That was true. And I was glad when the young woman perked up and said she’d look into getting a copy of it. (When I saw her again the other day apparently walking to work, I kicked myself for not carrying a copy in the car to hand to her. But then that would seem creepy, wouldn’t it?)
Last year around this time, Warren and I were in Hawaii and one of our hikes took about four hours longer than expected and we got lost (or, as he put it, took the long way). By the time we found the actual road again, it was late and we were tired, and we stuck out our thumbs to the occasional passing car hoping for a lift to ours, and I tried not to get irked at people for whizzing by us, as if we might be axe-murderers disguised as wiped out hikers on a barely traveled back road. It was their prerogative not to pick us up, I knew, but didn’t all those rides I’d offered over the years—taking the young hippies to the meth clinic, running the harried grad student to UT when the bus didn’t wait for her, harassing the umbrella-less British guy into a lift during a thunderstorm—net me some kind of good karma?
We did eventually get a ride, for which we were thankful. It was uneventful, a few pleasantries swapped about the difficulties of hitchhiking in America vs. other countries. And then we were back at our car, wishing our driver a good life, knowing that we’d never meet again.
Not so the young dancer. I’ve seen her twice now and I’m sure I’ll see her again. I am easily old enough to be her mother. And actually being a mother to a teenager—one who, after the fact, admitted to me a scary night he’d spent in Amsterdam and another night, sleeping on the streets of Paris in the cold during a coming-of-age trip he took a couple of years ago—fills me with an urge to involve myself. To come up with a clever way to convincingly convey to this girl that she doesn’t need to immerse herself any further in the titty bar culture. To give her bags of healthy food and stacks of interesting books.
Not my place, I know. So I will just drive by her from now on, silently wishing her the best, secretly hoping some magical door springs open for her, one which she can walk through, onto a better path.
Spike Gillespie wants everyone to be safe and happy. She blogs at www.spikeg.com and www.knitbuzz.blogspot.com. She also is the Head Mistress for the Dick Monologues. Next show May 13th—don’t wait, email spike@spikeg.com for reservations.
