Hitchhiking in America is a perpetual attempt to try to overcome people's fear
and make it a positive experience for them to pick you up. When you see the
thrilling red brake lights and rush up in the dark and tear open the car door
only to look into the barrel of a frightened driver's gun you know that it is
to your mutual advantage and security that you should be forced to show the
contents of your pockets or passport in this way.
Trust can be promoted with a
nice elaborate sign. I experiment with all kinds of slogans such as "Saving
fuel for you" and "Bible belt - and no Good Samaritan?", but sad to say the
only thing which gives people real trust is advertising that I am not American.
Trust is essential for demographic hitch-hiking. Rides with women is among
hitch-hikers regarded as a special psychic encouragement and security after all
the aggressions of so-called "rednecks" and "perverts."
But women are a
problem, too. Since American women are very open and unlike female drivers in
Europe often invite you home, they make themselves extremely vulnerable. On the
one hand it is important always to let the woman set the boundaries of the new
friendship if you have even a hope of avoiding the sexism inevitably imposed on
you as a man by a society which has never given you the choice of whether or
not to become a sexist or racist, but only of trying to counter-act the
negative acts such suffering causes.
Without an awareness of your suffering you
are bound to hurt the oppressed with your "master-vibrations." On the other
hand you cannot just - as with male drivers - float along into any situation,
as you can then easily cause hurt feelings.
Even the most competent vagabond
makes mistakes here, not least because you yourself are so vulnerable and the
immense hardships on the road often make you fall in love with types you would
never otherwise open up to. I had a striking experience of giving such
injurious signals when a driver offered me the so-called "love drug" MDA which
makes you unbelievably in love with all people. But the next ride I had was
with a stiff 80 year old woman who due to my ungovernable love couldn't help
being affected and in the course of the next hours began to behave like an
amorous teenager. So we were both left a bit crestfallen when the intoxication
disappeared.
Among the most beautiful things you experience as a vagabond are,
however, such relationships with old people whom you one way or another manage
to evade in normal life. They are the most harmonious group for the hitchhiker
as they - unlike working people - live on the same time
level as the vagabond and furthermore can give your journey its important
fourth dimension: the historical perspective. When you hear statements from
them like "What this country needs is another great depression
to bring us all together again" you experience the enormous alienation which
makes being together with the vagabond so important for these people.
But the
hyperactive ones can kill you with their psychic leaps! In Florida a 72-year
old rich man picked me up and when he heard that I photographed he made me his
private photographer. He wanted me to expose the "filthy rich" on Palm Beach
and took me to the most exclusive parties, where we wallowed in champagne,
women and multimillionaires, immediately afterward taking both me and luxurious
gifts over to the black slums in West Palm Beach or the slave camps outside the
city, and the next moment driving around to report these "criminal" conditions
to police, courts and city councils. From six in the morning to two at night he
stormed and raged over the injustices. If we were lost, he would stop anywhere
to ask directions. One night it was outside a full suburban church. He ran in,
stopped the service, presented me as a minister's son from Denmark, then
delivered a thunderous indignant sermon after which he conducted the choir.
After half an hour the congregation lay in fits of ringing laughter and he
suddenly remembered his real mission and sent church-goers to their cars to get
maps, after which a large circle lay on the church floor to find "Indian Road".
Every day he had new projects.
One day he learned from some young people about
"organic farming" and got so inspired that we got started right away on
procuring four truckloads of manure from the Everglades in order to fly it over
to his estate in the Bahamas. After a week like this I was totally defeated
from lack of sleep and proportion and had to leave. Oh, how I enjoyed the
freedom on the highway again! But the next ride was with an 82-year old woman
who was so hyper-active that she only napped while I was actually driving. If
she had not sent me up to Philadelphia a few days later to get one of her cars
and let me use her credit card to invite my poor friends from the cotton and
tobacco fields as well as passing drifters and hitch-hikers to the finest
restaurants on the way back to Florida, she might very well have worn me out
completely.
One reason I never can get tired of traveling in America is that it is the
only country I know in which you can take such psychic leaps almost daily.
Sometimes when I lived with, for instance, a poor welfare mother in a northern
ghetto, in order not to burden her food budget I would go out hitch-hiking up
north of the city where the rich people live. Often I was picked up by a
well-off businessman and when I entertained him with my travel stories I would
occasionally be invited home for dinner in his big home with central air
conditioning.
During dinner I would then tell about how the mother with three
children in the ghetto rarely could afford decent food. If I was with a
conservative family they would usually then sooner or later say that I
certainly was welcome to come and live with them, so that I didn't have to
return to those conditions. But liberal families would normally load me up with
expensive food items from the freezer and drive me all the way to the border of
the ghetto and give me money for a taxi the rest of the way. "Here comes Robin
Hood," I would laugh proudly when I came home.
Being a good vagabond, I had
learned, is certainly a matter of give and take. One doctor in Skokie gave me
eight pot roasts for a welfare mother in South Chicago and a businessman in
North Philadelphia gave me a big bag of tokens, so the son in my family in
South Phili wouldn't have to walk to
Temple University.
In the South I rarely found the same effusive compassion for the poor, but the
psychic leaps I experienced there too. One morning I was cutting firewood for
this 104 year old woman in South Carolina. She and her 77 year old daughter
usually had to cut all their firewood themselves.
Their shack resembled the medieval houses in the Open Air Museum in Copenhagen,
but it did have a well though many others do not. The daughter's husband was 97
years old and all three slept in the same bed to keep warm when the fireplace
turned cold in the morning. Their house was owned by
the white landlord (living behind the trees in the rear) whom they paid $30 a
month.
Later that day, although I had torn a big hole in my pants while cutting
wood and wasn't wearing my short wig, as I usually did on such occasions, I
managed to get into a press conference with Julie Nixon in Charleston. Nixon's
daughter, who was visiting a home for handicapped children, walked around
shaking hands with crippled children.
Afterwards the press asked her friendly
questions. I managed to spoil the entire press meeting by quite simply asking
her whether she didn't think it was hypocritical to visit these handicapped
children after Nixon had just vetoed a bill to aid the handicapped. Julie Nixon
became so embarrassed that she was unable to answer and the manager of the
institution interrupted the performance with all possible diplomatic speed. At
night when the visit was broadcast on TV my question had been censored out.
Letter to Mog, an American friend.
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