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Pickup on Route 66
by Joseph B. Atkins
Art by Jorge Mascarenhas

Everything came to a dead stop in Oklahoma. For four hours we waited under a July sun with no luck.

"I think we been dropped off in hell," I told my buddy Mickey as we made our pact to take the first ride in either direction. So Mickey crossed the median to the eastbound side of I-40, and I stayed put. The first car to stop would determine whether it was still on to San Francisco or back to North Carolina.

It was 1969 and we were in the godforsaken country west of Oklahoma City between El Reno and Clinton, a point where I-40 stretches east and west along a straight line that disappears into the sky in front of you and in back of you. Stuck at the crossroads where the last ride had left us, we were so sick and tired of the highway, the sun, and Oklahoma that we were ready to say to hell with California.

We'd been mostly lucky up to that point, catching one ride after the other through the Smoky Mountains and Tennessee. Of course, we got the usual harassment about our long hair. "All the boys back where you come from look like girls?" said a pompadoured gas monkey with a wink to his buddies at one mountain crossroad. It was scarier in Arkansas, where we got frisked and our backpacks autopsied by a pockmarked sheriff and his deputies. "You ladies know what we was looking for, don't you?" he said just before they drove off, leaving everything strewn along the roadside.

Mickey was a bone-thin high-school dropout, shade tree mechanic, and chain-smoking reformed thief. I'd known him since the eighth grade. We parted ways when I went off to college, then reconnected when I flunked out. He'd just finished a year in prison for borrowing a 1962 Corvette without asking. We both needed a change of scenery, an adventure, so why not San Francisco? I'd read Dharma Bums, wanted to go to the City Lights Bookstore, meet Jack Kerouac. Mickey had no idea who Jack Kerouac was, but city lights sounded good. At least until we got to Oklahoma.

Then came Lefty, just as the sun was sliding down the western sky.

He was driving a new Ford pickup, shiny and black, like his cowboy hat. Pulling the truck over to the shoulder, he leaned out the window and shouted, "You boys look like you could use a ride." I raced ahead, threw my backpack into the bed, and waved Mickey over. Mickey walked across the empty road, unloaded his pack, and climbed into the air-conditioned cab next to me. As Lefty spun out onto I-40, he said he'd get us as far as Albuquerque, but he preferred Route 66 to the new highway and he took the next exit to the Mother Road.

I gave my stone-faced buddy a slit-eyed grin that read: "Got it made now, man." What I didn't know was that this was our ride to hell, and Lefty was the chauffeur...

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