I saw a hitchhiker on the road the other day. I was heading west and he was trying to go east, I looked in the rearview mirror when I passed - sign said he was trying to get to Winnipeg. We were both fifty kilometres from Calgary, which is a mighty long way from Winnipeg - no matter how you try to get there.

I tried to imagine what was calling this guy out east. Maybe that’s where he was from, just trying to get home and see some family. Or maybe he had no family left but still needed something familiar. Maybe he’d never been and needed something totally new. Maybe he was trying to get out there to catch the Jets playing the Stars in the second round of the playoffs. Maybe he wanted to see Neil Young’s childhood home. Or maybe he wanted to see where The Guess Who played their first gig. I’m not sure of any other reason why someone would want to go to Winnipeg.

Hitchhiking is something that I’ve never participated in. I did a lot of other things when I was young and reckless, but that was never one of them. Granted, this guy was not young, and I am not privy to his particular brand of recklessness, but that’s beside the point.

I had this friend, Les, in the tail end of high school and beginning of college that brought out my latent restless recklessness. He liked to longboard, and he showed me how. We both liked to drink beer and we were teenagers so we listened to ska and punk and hip hop while we longboarded, then we would drink beer when we were done. He liked to longboard faster than me, and he liked to drink the same way.

He had a rusty, old Nissan Pathfinder that was a shade of white that made me feel like I was in an alternate universe where the heroes wore black hats and the villains wore white. The spare tire mount was hugged to the hatch and hinged on the passenger side, so you could unlock it on the driver’s side and swing the mount so it pointed straight back. Most people did that to access the hatch, but one time we did that so we could skitch on our longboards behind the car in our high school parking lot.

It was a Friday evening in the middle of summer and we had nothing to do so we did that. There’s really no better time to try something new and probably stupid than when the orange sun is dropping, the asphalt is hot, and the atmosphere is so still you could hear your heart race if you just stopped to pay attention for one second.

I went first and I did a lap or two, and I held on ok. But then he went up the main lane of the parking lot, and instead of driving where the cars would typically drive, he took me through the empty parking spaces which were littered with gravel and dirt and all the shit that cars drag around with them. My wheels struggled to maintain contact with the asphalt, and then he picked up speed, which gave me a case of the speed wobbles. Gnarly - we might have called it at the time. Gnarly because I couldn’t handle the board any longer, and it shot out from beneath my feet. I held on tight to the steel of the tire mount with both hands and kept my feet pressed together, horizontally surfing on the dirty pavement with my shoes. When my strength began to fail, my hips dropped down and scraped against the blacktop too, then my left arm, dropping my hand like a bomb.

But none of this matters. What matters is he took a turn too, and I drove much more cautiously which he probably hated. I ended up with holes in my Vans and in my jeans and road rash on my hand and elbow with no feeling in my pinky or ring finger, or on the blade of my hand. I haven’t stepped on a board in a long time, but the thought of speed wobbles still makes me clench my fist to make sure the tingles of dead nerves aren’t there. But none of this matters.

What matters is we were driving around, riding around, up and down an empty parking lot, moving constantly - just trying to feel something.

Something was always happening when I was with Les. I could always count on something happening. For a while it was fun, but the demeanor of it changed after a while. We learned new tricks on the longboard. We played Call of Duty and talked shit to strangers. We went on Omegle. We learned how to skank while listening to Streetlight Manifesto. We searched his parent’s house when they were gone one day cause he heard that his dad might have a bag of weed hidden in their linen closet. We got drunk and looked through his dad’s record collection when we couldn’t find any. I found The Velvet Underground and Nico and put the needle down - Venus in Furs came on and blasted a gaping, pulsating hole through my brain that still has yet to heal.

Another time he vomited all over my parent’s bathroom. He punched the mirror off of my car’s passenger door. Those both happened within fifteen minutes of each other. I was furious with him, but only long enough to realize that I was furious with my own dormant emotional ghouls. I didn’t know yet that I also would have to punch things when I felt lost in the darkness too. I had the opposite affliction of my friend, I got happier the more I drank, and angrier the less I did. Intoxicated by surplus sober rage.

Every piece of drywall, bathroom door, truck door, steering wheel, or part of my own body that I ever punched began and ended with me as sober as I’d ever been, retching with the indigestible truth and bloody knuckles of a half formed man completely incapable of facing himself with any true honesty.

I don’t know if he could see himself in the rearview mirror when he wound up to shatter it, but from where I stood on the driver’s side, he looked just like me. Smashing the past, obscuring the future.

Les’s dad would stay up late and drink beer and I always looked forward to visiting with him in the kitchen at the end of the night when our party died down. At a certain point I secretly became more concerned with impressing Les’s dad than Les himself.

His dad once told me after a big party at the community hall about a CD he had recently bought by this band called Drive-By Truckers. Said the album was called Dirty South and proceeded to tell me why it was great. It being the beginning of my college days, I soaked up everything from anyone I thought was smarter than me, which should have been a lot more people than it was. The next year, I planned to tell him at the same annual party about all the great new stuff I’d learned. I’d been listening to Jay Reatard a ton, and read that before he died, Jay was planning on recording a country record under his birth name. I explained to Les’s dad about the through line between country and punk and how they’re a lot more similar than people think. He didn’t think I was as smart as I thought I was, but he let me tell my drunken thesis anyway.

Once at a party Les and I were with another friend of ours, Scott. This friend had a lot of the same tendencies as Les, but his parents went to church. When Scott would get drunk he would run away from everyone. Then, when he got drunker he would come back and ask me to pray with him. At this party the three of us huddled up, and he started to pray. He shared a story with us, a plan that he had made a couple years prior. A plan that he had made that he even started to go through with. But something went wrong in the plan, and he was so shocked and scared by what he’d done that he abandoned it altogether. He cried when he told us about it. I wanted to cry too, but didn’t know how.

Then Les told us that he had made a plan too. That he never did try to go through with it. But he had the whole plan figured out. Where, how. Had the things he needed for it too. Was going to be the same way as Scott. Just never got around to it. They cried together, and prayed some more. I didn’t do either. I heard the shrieking violin from Venus in Furs. I knew how much darkness there really was now.

As we got into our mid-twenties I learned that more of my friends had stories like that. Some had tried it, some hadn’t. But too many had made a plan. I’m real goddamn lucky that every one of us made it through.

I’ve since lost touch with Les. Last I heard he’d gotten some pretty gnarly speed wobbles of his own, though I never did hear how far the road rash had spread. I hope that no matter what Les finds himself skitching behind these days, that he’s white knuckling it, burning holes through his shoes and taking a beating, but holding on just the same.

The last time I saws Les’s dad was in the club house of a rural golf course, he had on hearing aids and didn’t remember me, though I think there was a glimmer of recognition. He’s not nearly as old as the sentence makes him sound, but after a while age doesn’t crack up your mind and body by time alone.

When I was driving back from Calgary I passed the hitchhiker again. He was in exactly the same place he’d been six hours earlier. Not one taker. I was a little confused why he wouldn’t have at least started walking, but I guess it’s his trip, he can go about it as he pleases.

I watched him stand perfectly still, knowing his ride would come when it would. I passed and watched him in the rearview one more time, perfectly clear. I saw everything. He was Les, he was me, he was Scott. Driving in meaningless circles, pounding on the throttle, hanging on for dear life, inspecting road rash, testing nerves. He was the driver, he was the passenger, he was the hitcher, he was the skitcher. He was John Cale’s electric viola, he was the simmering tunnel through my brain. He was Dirty South, he was a record never made. He was a father, he was a son. He was the smashed mirror and the bloody knuckles. He was the plan, the snapped rope, and the prayer.

He was an old man who once was a young man, and he was trying to get to the next place - just like the rest of us.