Cruisin'

I would never have thought of blogging this story, since I usually stay away from personal stuff, and it's an icky subject, but suddenly Senator Wide Stance comes on the scene and it's topical. Why, even the august Washington Post is talking about the fascinating subculture of anonymous sex in bathroom stalls, so I guess I can talk about it here.

So I'm driving a truck on California's busy I-5 couple weeks ago and I pull in to gas up. It's a big truck and I don't go to the "civilian" truck stop but to the special "trucker" one. It's a regular Mos Eisly spaceport of seediness. This stop offers to record your mileage and weight for your trucking company, and my co-pilot spots a trucker offering to buy the cashier a candy bar if he'll roll back his recorded mileage by a few miles--presumably so he can take the company truck for a quick frolic a little farther down the road.

It's clean and well lit and has cool trucker merchandise they don't sell in the civilian side, but like everyone there I'm in a hurry. I come out of the bathroom--nothing happened there--and there's this wormy looking guy kind of looking at me like he wants to say something helpful like "hey, there's toilet paper stuck to your shoe", but he doesn't. So I go to the Pizza Hut counter and order a small supreme and the girl is baffled that I want to pay with a credit card? Huh? People use those things? (Apparently everything is usually put on a trucking company's tab.) Sorry, pal, you'll have to pay at the front. So I get the receipt and stop at the fountain to get my Big Gulp.

Umm, my coke.

And while I'm at the fountain, wormy-guy comes up behind me and says, "That's a nice large cockpit you've got there". With this pervoid smile.

Now, written there in black and white, that looks like grounds for immediate uppercut therapy. But when someone says something like that to you in an unfamiliar environment it's not like that. You assume that he said something reasonable and your brain just hasn't sorted it out yet. You kind of think "did that guy just say...was he trying to...what the F***?" But before this had quite reached the WTF point and I had quite figured out his meeting I just looked at worm-perv with a cross between "I don't understand" and "Okay, I acknowledge your presence" and moved on to the line to pay for my pizza. Where the significance of his remark finally hit home. But I had a truck to drive a long way and no time to spare, so I just got in and drove on and eat my pizza.

Sorry for the anticlimax. (Well, no, I'm not, really.) But I'd contrast that with my dad's experience, returning from working as a cowboy on a ranch in Kansas back in the late fifties or early sixties. He took a Greyhound into Tulsa and used the facilities there, when a weirdo he had seen lurking outside stuck his head under the stall divider to leer at him.

He received a swift boot to the head for his trouble. My dad cleared out and found a cop and told him there was a pervert in the bathroom. The cop asked what he looked like, and my dad told him, and the cop said, oh, him, I'll take care of it. And that was the end of that.

Was there a point to this post? No, I don't guess there was.