WHISPERS THROUGH AMERICA

The kid woke up. His nose was bleeding. First time in his life, his nose had bled. It felt like it must have some symbolic meaning, but the meaning was that he’d walked halfway across the city last night in the January cold, and he’d never done anything like that before in his life either. He’d arrived at his hotel room feeling half dead, and glad to be alive. His feet were blistered to hell and back, his shoulders marked with stabbing pain and deep black bruises where the straps of his heavy backpack had cut into him. He had nowhere left to go but vaguely west. He was officially homeless. And he was happy.

It was freedom, on a grander scale than he had ever imagined. His entire life, a blank slate which he could use to write a new and wonderful story. Any sordid memory of childhood failures, or a lack of friends, or a guilty conscience, or all his religious troubles, that could be chopped up and thrown in the garbage. Everything that had come before was merely fuel in the fire. He was looking ahead now, keeping his momentum forward. 

The raw survival instinct was coming to life inside of him. There was nothing behind him that he clung to. Not to family, not to friends, not to missed opportunities or sweet nostalgia. He could not complete this mission if he held any part of himself back. The sacrifice would have to be complete and final. He would have to be willing to throw away even his own life, if he wished to go through with this. The words of Jesus continued to echo in his head. The only thing he feared was that the symbolic suicide, the sacrifice, would not be final – that he would be too cowardly to take things all the way. How would he know when he had truly reached rock bottom? How would he know when his old self had been fully cleansed and left behind him? All he had were questions, and the burning drive to find answers. 

What shocked him the most was that lack of fear. The moment of hesitation before acting, that’s all he needed to worry about. Everything else could be regarded with perfect tranquility. The moment he made up his mind to go somewhere, or to do something, he suddenly felt in control of things. The craziest outcomes became possible; the kid could play chicken with the universe and win. Hesitation became the enemy. Action became everything. 

The first thing he’d done when he walked out the door that morning was grab a piece of cardboard and scrawl a crude rendition of the words: WEST – ST LOUIS in stark black sharpie. 

It was the beginning of 2022. He still dressed like a revolutionary in featureless black, and his head was just beginning to grow out again from a fresh shave. He kept his surgical mask pulled down under his chin, ready to tug up over his nose anytime he had to be put in public. The warm, musty smell inside the mask had become an odd comfort of sorts, after two years of lockdown protocols. But there was no comfort that would ever be enough for the sheer brazen humiliation of hitchhiking. 

He felt naked in that odd way that assaults every public speaker. How could he possibly justify his behavior if he was questioned, even by some random concerned onlooker, let alone the police? The kid had the vague idea that it was easy for some people to simply flag down any odd car and go for a crazy ride with like-minded hippies. He wondered how it must feel to have that kind of confidence. But there was nothing for it but to go out and do it. 

He hesitated, but not for long. After chugging an iced coffee and visualizing his success while browsing “hitchwiki” to pretend to brush up on the fundamentals, he began standing awkwardly at the corner of gas station parking lots. It was the most awkward thing he had ever done in his life. 

He held his sign out and his thumb up. Drivers zoomed past. He eyed them furtively, trying not to bother uninterested parties, but not to blend into the background, wither. He wondered how much enthusiasm would make him seem crazy, and how much just standing there would make him seem wooden and depressed. 

He followed all the hitchhiking advice he’d gotten on the internet. Have a sign to let drivers know where you’re headed. Be vague about your destination in case you need to bail early. Stick around gas stations and other places where drivers are able to slow down, pull over, and take a minute to consider if they want to commit to giving you a ride. And smile. 

The problem was, the kid felt about as natural with a smile on his face as the Terminator when John Connor was trying to teach him how to be human. His rugged black clothing was against the advice for novice hitchhikers, too. It’s wiser to dress in bright colors; the last thing a hitchhiker wants to do is blend in. But then again, the kid was simply winging it. He could not afford to let perfectionism get in the way. 

So he went through the motions and forced himself to keep at it. He could imagine no other option. 

Despite his maddening anxiety, he was showing the first sign of the bold commitment that would carry him through the rest of his mission. And he had this going for him: that he looked like a kid. If he looked a little sad, a bit down-and-out, it just earned him sympathy. People tend to assume the worst of the homeless. After all, who in their right mind would have chosen this life? 

After the better part of a torturous hour, the kid tried a different strategy, walking up to the line of cars stopped at a red light. Sign up, thumb up. In less than five minutes, an SUV rolled down a window. 

“Hey you! Going to St. Louis?” 

The kid trotted up. “Yes,” he said, “Yeah. I am.” 

“Well go on and get in, then.” 

The old woman, Mickey, sat in the back. Her son was driving and her daughter sat up front, too. They were incredulous at Mickey’s willingness to pick up a hitchhiker, but they did as they were told. Mickey got bits and pieces of a life story from the kid who was trying to leave that all behind. She was kind, and disarmingly mischievous in the way that only the elderly can really be. 

It had gone so much better than the kid had dared to expect. Hitchhiking was not only easy, but fun. Then again, his next try was a bust. Mickey and her kids dropped him off at a truck stop just outside town, wishing him the best of luck. 

St. Louis is a gritty place. The downtown is nice if you’re there in the daytime. The river is a wide brown mess of opaque muddy water, and the outskirts are ghettoes and abandoned warehouses from industries that have all seen better days. It was grey and biting cold outside. The kid had thought his trick of holding a sign and a thumb near a gas station would do him right. After all, it worked just fine last time. Why not again? 

He had to fight the shame; that was the worst part. He had never considered hitchhiking to be begging; it wasn’t putting anybody out of anything. It was simply a spontaneous rideshare. Ideally, the driver gets something out of it, too. Usually there’s stories and conspiracy theories, sometimes confessions too. Often there’s gas money or a coffee involved, even just as a formality.

But hitchhiking simply wasn’t done anymore. Nobody did much of anything out in public anymore. The world was just recovering from the paranoia of the virus, and hitchhiking hadn’t been a phenomenon since the sixties. The boy knew people still did it, and he had just managed to do it himself. The spark had been lit. He was sure he could do it again. 

He walked back and forth across the parking lot, sheepishly eyeing the trucks and cars that pulled out, trying not to look too sad or desperate. How does one have fun when he has nothing else left? He felt that he was looking forward to something, but he had no idea to what. 

Eventually he just started walking again. It had been hours, but the sun was still in the sky and the kid had nothing better to do. If he couldn’t catch a ride west today, then at least he could get a little further. 

He walked as far as he felt comfortable doing before nightfall. That part of St. Louis was terrifying. Broken windows, abandoned shops, overgrown yards. It was not a place he blended into, and he could feel it. A prostitute staggered towards him and slurred an offer to make him feel good. The kid’s hackles were up, and although he had been eyeing alleys and bushes where he might sleep, he was rapidly deciding that it just wasn’t worth it. Woods and bushes were good for sleeping in, not alleys in major urban areas. The kid had to admit that tonight wasn’t turning out like he’d imagined. Swallowing his pride, he booked a hotel for the night and walked back into the center of downtown. 

When he got there, it was an unspeakable relief. All he had to do was check in and enjoy his own private room for the night. He’d spent so many weekends traveling with his family as a kid. Hotels felt just like home. The efficiency of the small room appealed to his monklike sensibilities. The safety of it immediately relaxed him. It was a guilty pleasure, but it was a much-needed solace before the next day plunged him ever further into the unknown. The loss of two hundreds dollars stung deep, but he reminded himself that he wasn’t exactly going to be eating out of dumpsters anytime soon. He had about four grand saved up the bank. It would last him a good long while, he figured, and when it inevitably ran out, it would just add to the experience. Roughing it would never feel quite real if he always had plenty of money anyway. It wouldn’t be “going the whole way.” It wouldn’t be the same thing as truly hitting bottom, striking up against true grit. 

He had expected to be terrified of the morning, but the kid found himself oddly calm. He didn’t know enough about the world to be as afraid as he should have been. It brought him great satisfaction to tear up pieces of duct tape to wrap around the stinging blisters on his feet. The pain meant he was doing something right. The suffering was making him a better man, or so he told himself. He was getting closer to his goal. He was breaking himself in; bloodying his own nose, catching himself by the scruff and dragging himself along into a life of rigorous action. 

He ate the hotel breakfast gratefully, took a coffee with him and struck out for the highway again, backpack cinched tight, high up on his shoulders. His second hitchhike was unsolicited. It irritated the kid that he apparently already looked obviously homeless; he’d tried to avoid that as much as possible. Was it the way he carried himself? Was his face betraying his depression? Or did anybody with a large backpack walking through a big city simply get profiled as homeless? In hindsight, stepping into that car was one of the most questionable and dangerous decisions he ever made. The man had simply pulled over and offered to drive him anywhere he wanted to go within town, with little explanation as to why. But then there was that sympathy thing again. The kid was starting to figure out how many ordinary people out there had either bleeding hearts or strict moral principles, or both. The kid was just trying to get to a different interstate exit, where he had hoped to find better luck catching a ride. What the man gave him was three hundred dollars and an insistence that he use it to get a bus out of town. 

It was the first of many acts of unbelievable kindness that the kid would experience. It never happened when he expected it, and it never took the form you expected, but it always seemed to show up at just the right moment. The kid didn’t know much yet, but he knew enough to keep his pride shoved deep down where it belonged, so he accepted the man’s generosity. The man drove him to the Greyhound station. The kid got a bus out of town.