The Perilous Peanut Butter Poet

One summer, many years ago, I picked up a hitchhiking poet and learned that peanut butter is a dish best served cold. As it happened, that was also the summer I realized that short term car insurance is a great idea if you are travelling with a disturbed peanut butter smearer.

The year was 1962 and I had just graduated from a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. Kennedy was in office, hats were becoming unfashionable, the Beatles were still just another band playing some club in Hamburg and I was driving my 1955 Chevy Bel Air through New Mexico on my way to San Francisco. I loved my car. It was impeccably maintained, inside and out. I spent every last dime I had on that car and so, when I decided to take my trip, it didn’t occur to me to get short term car insurance. Besides, both me and my car were young and invincible.

It was late June. I had the windows down and the AM radio blasting the only station close enough and powerful enough to come through static free - some station devoted to putting the shine back on what was, at that time, Elvis Pressley’s somewhat dimming star. I swear, every other song was by the King, which would have been fine except that, for some reason, hearing Elvis Pressley sing has always had a peculiar effect on me: to this day it makes my eyes water.

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While this had often proved handy in the presence of liberal arts college girls who were known to appreciate a sensitive man who didn’t mind showing his feelings, the last thing I wanted as I drove alone that day through the desolate desert landscape was to spend my time wiping tears from my eyes with the back of my hand and blowing my nose into sheets of toilet paper yanked from the roll I had acquired (just in case nature called where civilization feared to tread) from the gas station bathroom I had recently visited in Albuquerque.

Needless to say, years later when Elvis died tragically young, some of the tears I shed dripped with more than a little irony.

As I rolled across the land that water forgot, I spotted in the distance a lone figure standing at the side of the road. This was 1962 and people still picked up hitchhikers but this guy looked a little scary. I pulled up beside him and stopped the car. He looked like he could be anywhere between 20 and 60 years old. He had a straggly beard that stretched almost to his belly button, his hair was long and, like the rest of him, unkempt. He wore jeans, a long sleeved shirt and a tattered jacket that had the dual effect of denying the existence of hot weather and implying the absence of a screw or two in the wearer’s noggin. It didn’t help that he was dipping his hand into a jar of peanut butter and licking his fingers. But like I said, this was 1962 and I figured that to leave this character on the side of the road in the middle of the desert would be to spend the rest of my life wondering if I had left him to die. I told him to hop on in.

It wasn’t long before I regretted my decision.

He was in the car for less than a minute when he started spouting something resembling poetry. “White cold air breathed in breathed out expanding spanning time this world our world crushing dying dust.” He punctuated this verse with more peanut butter finger licking.

I figured I should say something. “Where you headed?”

He stared at me for what seemed an eternity, peanut butter dribbling from both corners of his mouth. “Oblivion.”

From where I sat, he seemed to have already arrived at his destination. I drove faster, wanting to get to Anytown USA as soon as possible. An hour later we pulled into something that, if it were twice as big, would have resembled a sleepy nothing of a tiny burb. I dropped my strange passenger at the Greyhound bus stop with twenty bucks and a hearty “farewell and happy travels”.

As I steered back onto the roadway, breathing a sigh of relief, I noticed something on the passenger seat. It was large, brown, chunky, and it smelled like peanut butter. In fact, there was peanut butter on the door handle, peanut butter melted into the carpeting and peanut butter on just about every surface that had been within reach of my ex-friend, the disturbed desert poet. I sighed and silently kicked myself for picking up someone who couldn’t keep his peanut butter to himself.

I drove on, wishing I had thought to purchase short term car insurance with a peanut butter rider rider.
 

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