[Reprint from Gogglebox…a perzine by Jenn, a 19 year old student punkster…and best zine-writer I’ve come across. She gets her butt off the coach and GOES! I don’t think her zines are readily available at this point. They’re collages of handwritten zineage, typed and art of various sorts in thickish 5×7 format. She’s off the map somewhere presently. But says she’ll be back. You can try sending $2 to What? Dist, POB 85, Cooper Sta., NYC, NY 10276-0085.]
Lincoln, Nebraska
[We’re well into a zine’s worth of hitchiking…a trip dreamed up on the spot…to go to some hepcat wildkid music fest across the country from NYC.]
So I cop a ride to Lincoln and crash with this dude Chris who’d been at the convention. We make puffy paint patches with the names of our zines and eat popice and wander the empty night streets. I had no idea what would happen tomorrow and yesterday was way too long ago to remember but at this point I couldn’t care less cuz life was grand. In the morning Chris leaves for Olympia (his car was full) but he flows me the keys to his house just in case. I call the Riot Womyn all morning but there’s no answer so I go out and walk around Lincoln and end up finding the hip cool coffeehouse. You know the one I’m talking about, the one with two buck espresso shots and weird abstract paintings and an atmosphere that the free weekly paper describes as ”neobohemian.” The one with flyers for acoustic lesbian bands taped on the wall and stacks of local yoga newsletters by the door, the one with nutty regulars during the day who’ll talk your ear off and slightly weird (or weirdlike) kids at night drinking iced mocha outside. Every town has one and in Lincoln it’s called Shakes. So I hang out there for a while playing pinball and feeling too shy to talk to any of the other kids and then I call Riot Womyn again “Oh, hi Jennifer. Uh, well, my car’s gonna need some more work than I thought so, uh, we probably won’t leave for another three or four days.” Oh. Well are you definitely planning on going? “Uh, well yeah, sure, if my car gets fixed…” She sounds like a total flake and I can feel my heart crumbling. The festival was supposed to start in three days and if I waited around for her, it’d be over by the time we got there. We hang up and I start walking around Lincoln, not in the Go-With-the-Flow way but in the Shit-Jenn-Your-Stupid-Wandering-Has-Caught-Up-With-You-and-This-Woman-Isn’t-Going-Anywhere-and-You’re-Stuck-in-Nebraska-So-Now’s-A-Good-Time- to-Get-Depressed way. I stop in at the local Greyhound station and find out that a one way ticket to Olympia would leave me comletely broke. I feel like crying.
I go into Taco Bell and eat to make myself feel better, and I take out my little notebook to try and sort things out. I am stuck in Lincoln Nebraska, I write like seeing the statement on paper will make more sense than just thinking about it. I want to be having some sort of existential experience. No, what I really want is another burrito. After scrawling a few pages, a song comes on over the Taco Bell speakers that makes me drop my pen and feel like I’m melting. It’s this great old Motown tune by The Five Stairsteps called “Ooh Child” and at that moment it was like magic. I lean back in my plastic swivel chair and listen to him croon to me, ooh child things are gonna get easier, and I know that he’s totally right, that I was flipping out for nothing. I grab my bag and walk back to Shakes and ask a guy working there for a piece of paper and a marker and I make a sign: “NEW YORK GIRL STUCK IN LINCOLN, LOOKING FOR A HITCHIKING PARTNER TO GO WEST WITH.” I give a little description of myself, tape it up by the register and sit at a window table and it’s not too long till someone comes up to me “Hey, are you the girl from New York?” Yeah… “I have this friend Greg who I think might wanna go with you. Where you goin’ to, California?” Well yeah, eventually, but right now I gotta get to Olympia, Washington. .. Yeah? Well here ‘lemme’ give give you his number…” I write down his phone number and promise to call him later.
The Shakes daytime scene was pretty dead after that, so I go out to roam for a while. Maybe I was just psyched to hitchhike my way to Olympia or maybe just because of the blazing sun but all of a sudden Lincoln was the most beautiful place I’d ever been in my whole life. I find a video game store where you can play games for free so I try to kick these little boys’ asses at Mortal Kombat but they kick mine instead.
That’s okay, it was fun. Then I found Thriftstore Row and go straight down the line from Good will to the Salvation Army. picking up a little something from each one. I scored a pair of old school blue Nikes to replace my Payless canvas pieces of shit and a copy of Alice in Wonderland and a tacky little wall hanging to leave for Chris. But the last stop on Thriftstore Row was the jackpot. No amount of gushing description could possibly do justice to my euphoria in this place. I’m walking up to the shoe racks and suddenly I see them. Glowing like little angels between a pair of Kangaroos and some mauve opentoe pumps are the most divine rollerskates you’ve ever seen and I’m in love at first sight. They’re royal blue Adidas (yellow stripes) with trucks and wheels bolted to the bottom. I put them on like glass slippers, slow and delicate, praying that they’ll fit…yesss! and start skating around the store, up and down each aisle, weaving through rows of torn couches and outgrown baby clothes and stained tuxedos. I give the checkout lady five bucks and skate into the street. Exploding down the sidewalk I realize that these are superpower rollerskates that will help me to fight the forces of evil and fear and annoying boys who talk about themselves too much.
So I skate back to Shakes and give Greg a call. He seems real nice over the phone and says that he definitely wants to go. “I’ll meet you in an hour to talk, okay?” Yeah, great. Shakes is hopping by now but I still feel a little shy <jenn, you have on adidas rollerskates for god’s sake, there simply is no excuse for timidness when you’re wearing these things.> 0kay, okay…gulp. Everyone’s looking at me a little weird anyway, so I go for it and meet the whole Lincoln crew and yes, they are all way fucken rad as expected. This one guy asked me if I found someone to hitch hike with and I tell him about Greg. “Oh, have you met him yet?” No but he’s coming here pretty soon. Why, do you know him? “Yeah, yeah we all know him. He’s a little bit, uh, strange. He used to drop acid like everyday in high school.” But he’s not so into drugs anymore right? “Nah, not really. But his head’s still pretty fucked. You’ll see when you meet him.”
I sit outside on a bench waiting for the berserk Greg to arrive. My head is buried in Alice in Wonderland and just as Lincoln starts to fade out and the curious white rabbit fades in, an even more curious creature stands in front of me. “Hi. Are you Jenn?” I took up at the kind of face that real writers would describe as chiseled but I would describe as game show hostish. His eyeballs are swimming in their sockets. Yeah, you’re Greg right? Right?” He sits down and we talk about this trip…er, I tell him about this trip. Well, I really want us to get to Olympia in three days and after that we can get a ride down to San Francisco… Greg sorta nods in agreement. I feel like I could say that we’re gonna swim to Japan and he would bring along a Speedo and goggles. I mean, he was perfectly pleasant and he laughed at all my jokes on cue and he spoke in complete sentences, but there was still something about him that seemed a little, well, a little retarded. He reminded me of Rocky from the Rocky Horror Picture Show except without the gold lame underpants (or at least none that I knew of) but I got a good vibe from him and felt that he’d make a fun (and obedient) travel partner. He needed one more day to get his shit together and then we could leave. Okay then, it’s set. I took off to go skateboard with a buncha kids, and let me just say that happiness is skating in a parking lot at night in the middle of Nebraska with a crew of kids you just met, knowing that you have a place to sleep and someone to hitchhike outta town with in two days. And being told by the girl who lets you borrow her skateboard that the National Museum of Roller Skating just happens to be located a mile from the house you’re crashing at. Fuck yeah!
In the morning I walked around naked in Chris’s house and ate two bowls of his cereal and read his poetry books and felt wonderful. I looked up the number for the museum and called to see if it was open. “Yes dear, we’re open until five today.” Oh cool, is it okay if I wear my rollerskates inside the museum? “Um, well, I suppose you can…” Fantastic! I get dressed and put my superpower skates on and get started on the mile shot to the museum. I was rolling along, waving at people in passing cars and feeling very amused by myself for rollerskating to the National Museum of Roller Skating in the middle of Nebraska. Then I noticed that my feet were throbbing with pain. And that I’d only gone three blocks in like ten minutes, and that the wheels were straining to turn, and that I wasn’t skating to the museum but walking to the museum in rollerskates?. Oh well, at least I tried. I stand by the curb of an intersection and shout over to the first guy. Hey mister! Could you gimme a ride up to South Street? “Yeah, sure.” I get in and he starts telling me his life story. “…Blah blah…got real fucked up…blah blah… but she was such a cunt, you know…blah blah blah…and I just got outta jail a couple weeks ago…” Oh that’s wonderful. You can let me off right here, thanks. I walk the last couple blocks to the museum where I had to skate through the offices of the National Roller Skating Association in order to get to the oneroom
“museum” in back. All the offie workers looked at me real snooty, not cuz I was wearing rollerskates but because they were such a pitifully low breed of skate. I ws the only person in the museum and just like the brochure promised I “enjoyed learning about the fascinating world of roller skating, as sport, recreat, entertainment and business.” Lemme just tell ou one thing, there was an entire dispaly devoted exclusively to toe stops. TOE STOPS! No shit! They also had motorized rollerskates, rollerskates on stilts and rollerskates that turn into ice skates…weird museums totally rock my world.
The next day I walked to Shakes with my backpack and blanket and waited for Greg. (I had to leave the Adidas skates by the stack of yoga newsletters cuz they didn’t fit in my bag. Oh well.) He showed up in clean white clothes with a brand new turquoise athleteic bag, looking more prepared to go play suffleboard than to hitchike halfway across the country. He gets his friend to drive us to Shoemaker’s Truckstop a few miles out of Lincoln and I suggest that we splut up in the parking lot and ask if any drivers have room for two. Every response I got was some sort of variation on this:
Me: “Hey, are you running on 80 West?”
TD: “Well, yeah I am, honey.”
Me: “Do you think you could give me and a friend a lift?”
TD (with sinister smile): “Two girls?”
Me: “No, me and a guy.”
TD (walking away): “Forget it.”
Me: Oh, go suck an egg!
That obviously wasn’t getting us anywhere. We made a sign that siad “I-80 West” and stood by the road in front of the truckstop. Greg said we’d probablly have better luck if we stood right on the entrance ramp to the highway, so we walked over there and stuck out our thumbs and in a few minutes a van pulled up. The man inside said his name was Fred and he was atraveling sadal salesman. He asked where wwe were going and we said Olympia. We asked where he was going and he said he didn’t really know, so we got in.
Fred was about fiftyfive, With a bald head and full beard and a strong tan body that must’ve frozen in time when he was about twenty. There was a pretty little scar on his right arm that I stared at while he drove, it looked like someone had taken a carrot peeler to his skin and sliced off a strip. He had this in credible aura of calmness. He’d ask all about your life and spin stories back at you and smile in a way that made you think angel or the Buddha or something. He lived in the van with his dog Journey and had no schedule and no conception of time besides a wistful acknowledgement of morning, noon and night. He’d just spent a few days at a lake in the Missouri Ozarks and was now casually looking for another body of water where he could sell some sandals. Of all the people who tell me about being free and carpe diem and all that shit, I never met anyone who actually lived it as perfectly as Fred.
“I prefer taking side roads, you get to see the country better that way.” He pulled off the highway and found a little route that slugged through the back country of Nebraska In every town we came to he would drive around slowly a little bit, the three of us peering out our windows at the churches and playgrounds and abandoned drivein theaters “Isn’t it nice to look at things? Most people don’t really pay attention to places like this,” he said while steering us down some random Main Street. We stopped in North Platte when the sun was getting ready to go down and bought some groceries to make sandwiches and then got in the van and drove back into our conversations. It was probably around midnight when we finally stopped, and by then I’d forgotten that Fred was just some dude who picked us up at the side of the road and Greg was just some kid I’d met two days ago. We looked around for a good place to camp and ended up on a nice stretch of grass next to a farm. We ate the rest of the food and laid our blankets next to the van and I tried to go to steep but I was too excited. I mean, here I was sleeping in the middle of Nebraska with nothing but myself, the sky, the stars and one of the ‘kindest wisest people I’d ever met in my life. Greg turns to me and says “Doesn’t it seem like Fred is our dad?”
In the middle of the night Greg starts shaking me and I wake up soaking wet “Jenn, it’s raining We gotta get inside.” So we gather up our shit and get into the van and sleep the rest of the night as one big pile of people, sandals, bags, newspapers and dogfood. It must have been fate though cuz when I went outside in the morning I saw that we were right next to a grazing ground for three bulls. They’re charming creatures, but nothing I would’ve wanted to nuzzle up with at night. After Journey took us for our morning walk we pulled back out to the road and began to realize that we’d have to split up soon. Fred was trying to delay the separation. He stopped at a little take to take a swim, and then he cooked us grilled cheese sandwiches on his small gas stove. I tried to tell him that we were in a hurry to get to Olympia but it was hard to explain needing to be anywhere except right there. We were edging out of Nebraska now, watching its flatness get some bumps into the program and the first hints of rolling hill, just waiting for mountains to explode out of nowhere. Right after we crossed the Wyoming border Fred wanted to stop in a little town called Pine Bluff and, check this, he took us thrifting. No shit, it was a tiny little thriftstore called Care n’ Share run by the Pint. Bluff PTA. I found a cool shirt and when I asked the woman there how much it cost she said “Well you just pay whatever you think it’s worth sweetie.” Then we walked from one end of town to the other (not that big of a deal at six blocks) and found the Texas Trail Museum of Laramie County. Fuck yeah! A weird museum! It was open and free so we went in and learned all about Pine Bluff’s history of Indians and pioneers and cowboys, and you’re never gonna believe this but they had the world’s largest collection of antique barbed wire I swear to god they did, an entire room filled with a thousand different kinds of barbed wire! It totally tripped me out
After that we came to Cheyenne which is the biggest city in Wyoming. I wasn’t expecting skyscrapers or anything but Cheyenne turned out to be about as big as this zit on my butt. I mean, if Pine Bluff was six blocks long I think Cheyenne was seven, maybe eight. Fred had decided to head down to Colorado and we had to start heading north. He was sad to see us go. “Are you sure you’ll make it there in time for this music festival?” I don’t know, lemme go make a couple calls. Fred looked in pawn shops while Greg and I went to call the Girls, Guns & Rock n’ Roll Tour up in Olympia. Ananda picked tip the phone wherever they were staying. “Hello?” Hey freak, what’s up? “Jenn?” Yeah, it’s me…… “Jenn! Where are you?” Um, I’m in Cheyenne, Wyoming with this guy Greg. We hitchiked here “You did?” Yeah, yeah so how’s YoyoaGogo so far? “Oh, it’s okay Are you still coming here for it?” I don’t know, I just don’t know if we’ll make in there on time…
While we’re talking it occurs to me that I really don’t give half a shit about going to Olympia anymore. I can’t even remember why 1 wanted to go there in the first place except maybe just to have someplace to go. Now I wanted to travel like Fred, yes, I have found my life’s destiny! By god, I want to be a Traveling Sandal Saleswoman! (Ha ha, just kidding.) No but seriously I just wanted to travel without a schedule because in two days I learned that it’s so much more fun that way. So Greg and I decided (or really I decided and Greg obeyed) to go to wherever we wanted to go. We bought some popsicles and went back to find Fred and tell him the good news and he was happy. We only drove for twenty minutes south with him into Colorado when he looked at the map and said he was gonna go west once we hit Fort Collins. I wanted to keep going south and maybe check out Denver or Boulder. He understood and let us off at Fort Collins in a McDonald’s parking lot. He hugged us both and instead of saying “Be careful” like most adults he said “Don’t worry we’re all taken care of somehow.” We hiked over to the next entrance ramp, feeling sorta like orphans all of a sudden and stuck out our thumbs again.
For like twenty minutes nobody even slowed down to see if we looked like maggotinfested runaways A couple people even flicked us off and someone yelled “you’re stupid!” Greg started joking that we should’ve hitchiked in style, like maybe bringing along lawnchairs and lemonade for slow days like this. Then a car pulled up, a gigantic Ford boat driven by a gigantic blonde woman. She was on her way hack home to Colorado Springs, so I decided that we’d pass up Denver and ride with her all the way down there. Her name was Sue and she had lived in Colorado Springs her whole life, and we spent the threehour ride talking about well, Colorado Springs and her whole life. It’s kinda funny how much personal stuff people will tell you when you’re just slipping through a few moments of their lives. It’s kinda nice. She asked where we were gonna stay that night and I melodramatically say that we’ll be sleeping under a bridge, and of course she invited us to stay with her. She lived in a trailer park in perfect view of Pike’s Peak and when we pulled up to her trailer the first thing I saw was a plot of land with rocks and a cactus and lots of dead animal skulls carefully arranged. I was about to ask if she had any special feelings for Satan but when she saw me looking at it she said “Oh, that’s Tony’s garden.” Tony was her boyfriend, a huge fullblooded Apache who ho was just the coolest. He cooked up a big dinner for everyone and then we watched that movie The Bodyguard. Can I just tell you, it was so strange sitting in this trailer filled with Indian spiritual stuff, watching Whitney Houston belt out cheesy songs with this huge tough Apache guy kinda humming along next to me.
[Well…that was just a small part of one of Jenn’s Gogglebox zine adventures.]
