'That's How a Tale Should End'

With an old friend I was reminiscing about the remarkably stupid things we did when young. Neither of us had much money when we were students – this was in the early seventies – and we didn’t own cars. To travel any significant distance, we thought nothing of hitchhiking. I often rode across the state on the Ohio Turnpike. The distance from Bowling Green to Youngstown was 180 miles. The typical driver was a young male, often a fellow student. 

Once a guy picked me up who wore his hair in a crewcut. That was noteworthy in 1972. He was about my age, lanky and wore a white t-shirt tucked into blue jeans. In retrospect, I picture him as Charles Starkweather. Mostly he delivered a monologue about himself. He had been dishonorably discharged from the Marine Corps and bragged about it. Life had been very unfair to him. That was his favorite theme. I was bored but not particularly frightened until he pulled up the right leg of his jeans and removed from his boot a long, thin knife. He pointed out the groove that ran up the length of the blade and told me that was to make it easier for the blood to drain.

 

I was seated beside him on the front seat. He never pointed the knife at me or overtly threatened me with it, but clearly he was playing out some obscure narrative in his head. He was almost gleeful. After a while when his inner weather eased, he put the knife away and returned to his monologue. He let me off near Cleveland and I resumed hitchhiking.

 

In Walking Backward (1999), the late Paul Lake has a poem titled “Two Hitchhikers” in which the speaker and a friend pick up the title characters:         

 

“And when they spoke, it was with more than words.

I heard a sudden snickering of steel,

Then saw the knife blade nipping my friend’s ribs

As he clutched the wheel, and sensed near my own chin

The warm unsteady hand poised at my throat

And just the slightest kiss of silvery blade.”

 

The driver and his friend are let go safely, after indulging fantasies of mayhem – attempted escape, a fumbling brawl, murder. The hitchhikers just wanted a lift to the liquor store. Lake ends his poem like this:

 

“That's how a tale should end--in dizzying laughter,

Though some won’t be arranged to end that way.”