Hitching to Nirvana: a novel
by Janet Mason

Hitching to Nirvana is a recently completed novel by Janet Mason. Excerpts of this piece (chapter 4 in the ms.) have been published in the Schuylkill Valley Journal of the Arts and in Drive: women's true stories from the open road (Seal Press) and has received a favorable mention in The Kirkus Review. To read future excerpts of Hitching to Nirvana, be sure to return to amusejanetmason.com

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Diane, Helen, Adrianne, 1977
(To the ocean)

Voices whispered: do it, do it, do it.

The compass of their bodies pointed toward ocean. Waves crashed.
Toward the end of the day, at the time when they normally would have headed back to high school to catch the bus home, Adrianne and her friends Diane and Helen were standing on the side of a highway. The ocean had blown its scent under their noses. One of them stuck out a thumb. They might have talked about it. Maybe it was a dare. Adrianne didn't remember if they had a destination in mind or if one had chosen them.

The driver had a receding hairline and a scar in the middle of his forehead. The scar was puckered and inflamed, so pink it was almost red. The pickup truck he drove was green, a dark battered green. This was before the days of shiny new pickups. It was the mid-seventies. Post recession, pre gas wars. The steel mill was cutting back. Free trade was gearing up. It was the Industrial Northeast. Adrianne, Helen, and Diane just thought of it as home. The three of them jammed into the cab next to the driver. He passed them a bottle of tequila that was half empty. They didn't pass it back.
Five miles down the road it was empty. They were headed to the ocean.
The driver said he would take them there.
He said he'd take them anywhere they wanted.

Thud. The thick glass of the empty tequila bottle hit the dirty rubber mat on the pickup floor. The driver pulled into the parking lot of the Jack-in-the-Box where Adrianne worked. It was late Friday afternoon. She worked weekends, so they might have stopped there so she could swap hours with someone. None of the girls had eaten lunch, except for a candy bar or two. Hunger hadn't occurred to them.

Adrianne was standing up in the bathroom looking in the mirror. Then she was flat on her back. She remembered staring at the ceiling. But she didn't remember the in-between: falling down, her shoulder hitting first, the pain of the exact spot where she would later find a bruise, bright red, purple. All six feet of her stretched across greasy ocher fast food bathroom floor tiles.

She didn't remember getting back up.

She walked back out of the bathroom and out the front door toward the sea. She remembered the tilt, the blur that was a conversation with a co-worker. She only worked there several years, but would dream about it into mid-life. It didn't matter that she would go on to work in jobs that were worse and jobs that were better: shift work at a chemical plant, too many factories to remember, office after office, a labyrinth of cubicles. It didn't matter that she would come to be self-employed for much of her adult
life. She would always dream about those yellow name badges; the orange polyester uniforms with the yellow collar and cuffs; the brackish, slippery tiled floors she futilely ran a mop over; the deep fryer's hiss and suck. She was trapped. But that Friday afternoon, she walked a studious straight line right out of there, back to Diane and Helen and the strange man they had just met.

They were headed towards ocean…

…waves pounding…

…vastness…

"Pull over," demanded Helen, when they had crossed the state line and a liquor store came into view. The driver did what he was told, and just in case-since none of the girls were yet eighteen-went in by himself.

He came out of the store and sauntered back to the pickup. Adrianne stared at the puckered scar on his forehead and then--when he looked back at her--down at her fingernails. Already, from the tequila-and from the day spent smoking weed, Jamaican Red, and hashish-- she felt disembodied, as if the stubby pink fingernails (where were the moons?) she looked at were on someone else's hands. There was a rim of dirt under each of her blunt cut fingernails. Adrianne dimly recalled digging her fingers into the earth earlier that day when she had been laying down with Diane and Helen on the grass behind the dilapidated barn. This morning, when they had started the day by cutting out of school, seemed like years ago. The strange man pulled out of the liquor store parking lot and drove down the two-lane highway, past the Donut Den, the Burger King, the Aurthur Treachers. Then he handed them the wrinkled brown paper bag that had been clenched under his armpit when he was grinding the gears. Helen was sitting next to him. She held the crumpled paper bag by the bottom and pulled out a quart of tequila. She unscrewed the lid, took a swig, and then peered at the label on the bottle. "I don't believe he bought this cheap shit."

She stared straight ahead and spoke as if the driver wasn't there.

"Cheap shit! What do you know?"
"I usually drink Jose Cuervo," said Helen, pronouncing the words with a slight Spanish accent, except that she used a hard "J." She held the bottle up in front of her and stared through it "Look at this shit. It doesn't even have a worm in the bottom."
Helen must have listened carefully, at some point, to one of her older boyfriends.
"Eeeww," said Adrianne and Diane in unison, and at the same time Diane reached over and yanked the bottle out of Helen's hand. The driver was turning a corner, both hands pulling the steering wheel to the left.

Diane handed the bottle to Adrianne who took a swig and handed it off to Helen. Adrianne felt queasy. She had just eaten one of the chocolate bars that the driver had bought with the Tequila at the liquor store. She was always doing that-washing down a chocolate bar with a gulp of beer. It made her feel filthy, out of control and young. It was the only way she had to acknowledge that a few years earlier she had been a child, and the same amount of time later she would be an adult.

The ocean was two hours away. The blue sky deepened to violet and then to a night where headlights swerved. Adrianne sat between Diane and Helen, the outside of her thighs pressed against them. The driver had finally gotten his hands on the tequila and downed the rest of the bottle. He kept turning to stare at the girls, and saying: "When I get my hands on you." "What I'm gonna do to you." --he paused to make a hacking noise in his throat, bringing up phlegm, spitting out the window and then slurred, "aahnn yyyooou."

Rolling up the window, he took his eyes off the road and veered onto the shoulder of the road. Gravel crunched under the tires.
Adrianne gripped her knees tightly. She could feel her kneecaps under her worn thin dungarees. Slowly, turning her head to the left, toward the driver, she looked at Helen. The side of Helen's mouth was twisted into the shape of a lopsided pink button. Her eyes were as wide as the dark night outside the pickup. It was the first time that Adrianne had seen fear on Helen's face. The strange man grabbed the steering wheel and twisted it until the pickup was back on the road. That fast Helen stared straight ahead and spoke into the windshield. "What he's going to do to us? That fucker can't even drive."

Diane snickered. The lining of Adrianne's stomach felt like it was rising. She made gagging noises and poked Helen in the ribs with her elbow. Helen twisted around, sliding open the rectangular window behind the seat just in time. Diane gave her a shove. Adrianne turned around and wretched up the entire day into the back of his pickup. The truck was green, but her mind turned everything red.

The next day, all Adrianne would remember was a long dark blur. Her adolescence was one black out on top of another. She felt like a creature from Greek mythology. One minute the Maenads would be sleeping on smooth pine needles and layered oak leaves padding bare ground. Then they woke, ravenous for human flesh. The limbs of men were everywhere, torn off at the sockets, thrown about. The Maenads feasted. They frenzied. Snake locks, hair, licked their cheeks. When they went back to their normal lives, to husbands, to children ( to school, to parents) they didn't remember (or admit to) a thing of what they had done.

A long stretch of road went by before the driver pulled over next to a marsh. The pickup door creaked on rusty hinges. The girls stumbled out into salt wind whipped darkness. The marsh, meandering to the mouth of a bay, was home to wild birds. Long-legged cranes. Snowy-white egrets. The reeds were high. Sharp. Adrianne didn't remember this until the next day, late in the afternoon. She was sliding off her jeans, and her hand brushed long sharp welts on her buttocks. Diane told her she was taking a piss and fell backwards, backwards into the reeds, down, down toward the quiet dark water.
Adrianne stood in the rented room she had found, running her fingers slowly over the slashes on her ass. It dawned on her that the skin on her buttocks had been burning all day. As she listened to Diane, it all came back to her: the darkness, the white blur of
headlights streaking by. Hands had reached for her. Diane or Helen, or both, pulled her up from the reeds, back to what for a little while longer was safety, the battered green truck driven by the man with the third eye.

Half a lifetime later when Adrianne would look back, she would remember herself suspended in mid air tumbling backwards. She had mythologized her life as a miracle. She may have been jumping out of a plane without a parachute, but
somehow a current of air managed to come along and catch her. Decades passed. Then she remembered that the hands that reached out to save her belonged to Helen and Diane.

Adrianne memorized Helen and Diane. Helen's eyes sparkled blue. To look into them was to forget everything. You had to make an effort to look beyond those eyes and see her face. It was a long oval, covered with pale freckles. Her face was plain but luminous. It was a night-time face, the kind that shone in the sky. Helen's long neck tapered down to the perfect breasts-the rising slope of creamy skin into brownish pink aureoles--that she loved to show off anywhere she could.

Once, at a rock concert, Helen had ridden topless on a sea of shoulders. She bragged that she drank seventy-two beers that night, ponies, the short ones, but still seventy-two. When her boyfriend lifted her up, she tore her own shirt off. She was that free. When her friends thronged around her, before class in the hallway, and later when she told the story again the bathroom stall jammed with girls, thick with smoke, they were right there with her as she bared her breasts and reared, throwing back a mane of
frizzy blond hair.

Diane watched Helen intently like she watched everything. She was like a cat with all that watching. Her knowing smile most often ended in a sneer with the right corner of her upper lip sharp as a fishhook. The precisely rounded little square of her
nose, skewed off to the right side, matching her lip. Her hair was naturally blond and cut into a shag. It was swept back, brushed to top of her collar. Breezy. Toward the end of high school, she told Adrianne that she had slept with four
guys in one night. This was a few months before she disappeared. Somehow Adrianne was still, in the technical sense, a virgin. She was shocked by what Diane told her. "Four?!" she exclaimed, sitting on the bar stool next to her. Stoned. Disbelieving.
Diane looked back at her with the eyes of a cat. "Yeah. Four. So what."

Adrianne didn't know if she loved Helen and Diane then, but much later in life she would come to love them. She loved them for pulling her out of the reeds, away from the dark quiet water that would have sucked her under. She loved them for not leaving her passed out in the truck when they stopped at the restaurant. That night, when Adrianne finally came of the bathroom, the man with the third eye was gone. He had been getting belligerent. She remembered his muttering and Helen's outrage when he grabbed her breast in the parking lot. She remembered the lining of her stomach. Buckling. She remembered the bathroom had black and white
tiles on the floor, the walls. When she bent over the white enameled sink and splashed water on her face. She felt enclosed, safe. She didn't want to leave.

When she did she found Helen standing at the counter talking to the waitress.
The waitress walked over the strange man (he was inside the restaurant leaning against
the front door with a cigarette dangling between his lips) and told him to get lost. "I'd go fast if I was you,"-she said, putting a hand on her hip-- "I just called the cops."
He turned around and walked out, muttering.

The waitress gave them a ride after her shift, lecturing them as they drove along the highway, "You girls shouldn't take lifts from strange men." Adrianne was sitting in the passenger seat. Her eyes were downcast and she felt rotten. "I know," she said. She hoped she wasn't going to heave again. She told the waitress her they were going to visit her aunt who lived nearby. They were always making up stories like this when adults were around. But this wasn't a story. Adrianne never did have a strong sense of direction. She needed landmarks, breadcrumbs, a silver thread to find her way back. But that night-during the long winding ride where she was mostly blacked out-she had a destination.

The waitress dropped them off on a tree-lined street and then crawled between bushes and under low hanging tree branches into someone's backyard and flopped down for the night, talking, laughing, singing. The surprise was that anyone could hear them.
They must have thought that the darkness would erase them from the night.
A beam of light, a police officer's flashlight, jolted them out of their enclosed, swaying world. The next thing Adrianne remembered was sitting in the back seat of a patrol car. Everything was shiny bright-the vinyl covered white arm rests inside the doors, the back of the seat in front of them, the dashboard. The cop was a baby-faced rookie. His crew cut was so short that his hair appeared to be colorless, transparent. He turned back around, pressed down on the gas, and zoomed past the speed limit. He wanted to impress them.

"Where are the bars?"

Diane and Helen turned their heads and sssshhhed her.

"The metal bars." Adrianne pointed to the empty space above the passenger seat.
The rookie explained that not all patrol cars have bars. His voice was low and halting. It was an apology. Adrianne was disappointed. This was the first time she had been picked up by the cops. She wanted to see the picture from the outside, bars framing her face. She wanted to look as dangerous as Art zooming away on her motorcycle. She wanted to look hard like Dana, trailing a throaty laugh. She wanted to rear back bare breasted like Helen-except that Helen was now sitting next to her, looking nervous, in the patrol car. They were still innocent to the consequences of living dangerously.

Helen might have been thinking about jail-a place that her older drug-dealing boyfriends had been for brief periods of time. She might also have been thinking about her mother, locked away in a sanatorium. Diane was silent, too. She sat on the other side of Adrianne, staring out the patrol car window into darkness. Suddenly Adrianne was the bold one. She told the cop they were on their way to see her aunt, but that they had gotten lost. She gave him the address, the right one. She had this way of talking to male authority figures that convinced them of her innocence. She reminded them of their daughters, their kid sisters. Later this would get her out of countless drunk driving situations. Other teenagers were given Breathalyzer tests. The cops called their parents, took their licenses away, threatened to lock them up.

Adrianne got let go.

The cop dropped them a few doors down from her aunt's house. He waited as they walked up the cement stairs and pretended to knock. Then he drove away. It was late, and Adrianne's aunt wasn't expecting them. A knock on the door would have
frightened her but this didn't occur to them. They just wanted to be free.

The girls headed into the backyard, and lay side by side on the ground. Stifled giggles drifted into silence. In the morning when they woke, they were oblivious to where they had been, what they had done. Gradually, as they rolled over and stretched, they pieced together some of the events of the night before--the battered green pickup, the man with the scar in the middle of his forehead, the waitress, the ride in the patrol car.

They were three drunken and disorderly teenage girls who-if not for the fact that they were sleeping in the backyard of a relative-could easily have been picked up on vagrancy charges. Decades later Adrianne would still remembered the three of them standing there, the surprise etched on her aunt's face when she opened the front door. Adrianne filled the silence as they sat around the kitchen table. Her head was fuzzy, her tongue thick. She was not a good liar when it came to people she cared about. Her aunt had indulged her since she was a child. There were birthday gifts: a designer handbag, velvet blue, indigo, silver studs; costume jewelry that included a bracelet in the shape of a gold screw with a silver "U" dangling from the catch. Then there were the occasional extravagant checks, shopping trips taken on a whim.

Adrianne opened her mouth and a story came stumbling out. Some friends of theirs were driving to the shore and had dropped them off. (The police officer had been friendly.) Since they were nearby, Adrianne thought it would be nice if they stopped to visit. (One by one, the girls got up to use the bathroom.) Their friends were planning to pick them up again near the highway and take them to the beach. Adrianne's hand shook when she picked up her mug. Her tea spilled onto her aunt's impeccable linen tablecloth. The clear brown liquid seeped into the fine white weave. Instead of getting up to grab a paper towel, Adrianne sat there and stared. She wasn't apologetic or embarrassed. She was amazed that she had been able to make a mark on such a pristine tablecloth.
Everything in the house was perfect. Her aunt was an alcoholic.

There was a wet bar in the split-level's ground floor back room.

This was where Adrianne attended her first cocktail party. She was twelve. The adults danced the Mummer's strut, twirling, knees bent deeply, arms up in the air. The only way they could be this free was to be drunk. Liquor flowed from a bottomless spring. Ice cubes clinked.

Adrianne's aunt told the girls she would drive them to the beach after breakfast.

She and her husband, her fourth or fifth (Adrianne lost count) took her on her first major drinking binge when she was fourteen. Her uncle had bought her a bottle of sloe gin that flowed back out of her just as easily-the liquid content somehow multiplied by ten-by the end of the evening. They had gone to a boat parade held in a nearby town that was called "dry" but, in fact, was swimming in booze. Adrianne smoked two cigarettes at a time, one in each hand. She sang Ziggy Stardust, Rebel Rebel. Her knees
buckled and the night blacked out around her. On the way back, her uncle swerved over the double line, weaving back and forth, driving on the wrong side of the road. She would go on to do this herself a few years later when she was old enough to drive.

Adrianne's aunt dropped the girls at the beach. The weekend passed in a blur.
Wherever Helen and Diane went, with Adrianne trailing behind, men appeared dangling shiny lures of drinks and drugs. When the men got too close-one smelled like stale
Johnnie Walker, another had yellowing cracked teeth-Adrianne began to feel sick to her stomach and said so. That was the cue for Helen and Diane to cut loose. They left the guys high and dry. But they didn't want to sleep outside again. Helen took a strand of her hair, wrapped it around her index finger, and with a look that was calculating, said, "We could pick up some guys we like and spend the night with them."
Diane studied Helen. She was in training to be a girl who would do anything.
" I get like that too," she said with a halfway smile.

Adrianne felt herself slipping away. She may have been afraid of sex, or its consequences. In junior high when she was learning how to gulp beer and to hold the smoke of a joint deep in her lungs, some of the other girls were getting acquainted with lightning bolt sex. One day they'd be sitting there in class, getting ignored by the math teacher just like all the other girls, and the next day they'd be gone. "Pregnant," someone would whisper.
The word would be passed without anyone ever really talking about it.

It was as if semen had struck from the sky.

When Adrianne was in ninth grade, the most popular girl in school-who happened to set next to her in math class-got pregnant. When Adrianne joked that she hoped it wasn't catching, some of the other kids thought she was serious.
You can't catch that, one of them said. Chances were that the sex was lightning bolt quick. The boys were young and inexperienced or older and demanding. Either way it was furtive. Some of the girls were no doubt telling the truth when they said they had no idea how they got pregnant. The most popular girl in school dropped out of school. Rumor had it that her older
boyfriend's family made him marry her. Several years later when she was in high school, Adrianne saw this girl at a nearby McDonald's. She was alone at a table with her three little boys, ketchup staining their chins. She had given birth to her first child at fifteen. Two years had passed. Adrianne did the math.

Adrianne dug down deep in her pockets and came up with the ten bucks that would cover the room that she would find.
When she said she wanted to get a room, Helen and Diane laughed at her.
Looking back, Adrianne thought they were also reassured.
Their lives depended on each other that weekend.
They pulled her out of the marsh.
She found them a room that had a lock on the door.

Later that night, after Adrianne discovered the slash marks on her ass, they went out. They followed bright neon and went into the doors underneath. Eventually they found a bar where the bartender would serve them. Grown men bought them drinks. The women were happy, singing. They gathered around the girls, standing between them and the men. Adrianne didn't remember the three of them leaving the bar or finding their way back to their room. But they did return, and one of them was able to turn the key in the lock.
Adrianne knew this because she remembered waking up there-the thin morning light slamming into the heads of three hung over girls.

Later that morning, they went to the beach.

The sky was brilliant. The sand a wet footprint of time. Wave crashed into wave.

The three of them sat on the beach, feeling tiny and immense. Three guys wandered by and gave them a big fat joint. They were bikers. They would have stayed, but a few guys in suits who looked like narcs were following. The girls dug a deep hole and buried the joint. They sat there listening to the roar of the ocean until the men in suits turned into
tiny stick figures. Then they were gone. What Adrianne remembered after that was the digging. Digging and digging. Sand flying. They couldn't find that damn joint. They wanted it more than anything. When Adrianne looked back she thought that was the sad part, the fact that they wanted that joint more than they wanted themselves. Getting high was always the main thing.

Then she remembered the sun beating on her back, the surf pounding. She knew they weren't just looking for the joint. If time had not existed they would have kept on digging, straight through the center of the earth, straight through to the other side of themselves. They wouldn't have stopped until the blue sky above them was the same blue they looked down into. They wanted to see the clouds coming through the hole they had dug with their own hands.

Adrianne insisted on finding the Greyhound terminal and taking the bus home.
Helen and Diane didn't protest.
Chances were that they were terrified of hitch hiking again.
Afterwards life went on as it had before.
Adrianne was perpetually stoned and drunk.
She didn't remember having it out with her parents when she returned, but she was sure she did. She found out later that her aunt had called her mother after she dropped them at the beach. All that time Adrianne had thought she was free, but her
mother knew where she was.

Half a lifetime later, Adrianne still thought of herself as not having good brakes. But she left skid marks all over the place that weekend. For years she had folded up her memories, putting them behind her. The rare times she spoke of her adolescence, she turned it into a funny story. She turned herself into a character, a female James Dean. But there had been nothing invulnerable about Adrianne or her friends. Their lives were fragmented. Together, at least for a while, the girls formed a circle that made them
whole.

It wasn't until they let go of each other that everything went wrong.

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