In my memory it is a Spring day, maybe early April, and the windows are down in my old Datsun as I headed out of Eugene toward Seattle and a rendezvous with a beautiful redheaded Welsh girl who had stolen my heart. The highway was just picking up a groove and I was probably listening to Paul Collins' Beat or Gun Club when just outside of Coburg I blew past a forlorn figure hunched on the side of the highway. He was rolled up like a potato bug, arms wrapped defensively over his head. It couldn't be anything but a silent plea for help so I pulled over. The figure didn't move. I backed up on the shoulder and still no sign of life. I got right up to him and honked and he....uncoiled. Taller than I expected, lanky and dark dirt brown, he took long strides to come up to the passenger window where he ignored the door handle in favor of sticking his face and shoulders through the open window.
"So what do you think about the whole Jewish-German situation? I think that if the Vulcan Army could be brought to bear everything would work out alright, y'know? And Spock and Kirk, they'd be cool and I think maybe we could have everyone be friends again!"
I've never seen anyone else with really YELLOW eyes but his were a wild combination of jaundiced AND bloodshot. Six or seven days of stubble on his face and dried spit in the corners of his mouth. More out of reflex than anything else I said the first thing on my mind. "Where are you headed?" He hopped in and in a tone that was both eager and matter-of-fact said, "Dammasch. I'm going to Dammasch. It's a hospital and it's my friends' birthday and I'm going to see him for his birthday and it's at Dammasch." I didn't know exactly where Dammasch was but it didn't take much to convince me that the state hospital for the criminally insane was a good destination for him.
We drove north and he talked. Mostly it seemed that he had seen a lot of science fiction and had somehow blurred it with reality and Germany and conspiracies. He told me that he had escaped from a Nazi prison that was hidden in Eugene and that his girlfriend had been a Jewish spy and that he had killed her (!). He had stolen NoDoz from a 7-11 and had been running through the hops fields for three days while "they" searched for him with dogs and airplanes and spy rays and tractor beams. Chewing dry NoDoz and stealing food from farms along the way. He had to escape because he knew it was his friends birthday and he had to see his friend. He had a present for his friend, a present, you see, and it was for his friend who was in the hospital at Dammasch and he had to take him this present. THIS present! He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a wadded napkin that he had tried to keep damp. Unrolled with shaking hands the napkin yielded a tiny little pot plant. All of three inches long and with just a first trio of leaves he had been pouring water into his pocket to keep it alive until he could give it to his friend, his friend in Dammasch. Whew.
I stopped at a truckstop above Albany so we could get water. I thought about driving away and leaving him but thought it unfair to the truckers and that it would probably wind up in some kind of brutal stomping when he tried to peddle these stories to them. As we got toward Salem, though, I wondered if I would regret not leaving him as he began to tell me about his mental prowess. He was a warlock, you see, and could steer the car with his mind. There was a jumbled story of eternal life that could be achieved by cloning someone but to clone a person you had to cut out the roof of their mouth and that was something he offered to do right there in the car. He would drive the car with his mind and all I had to do was lower my bucket seat and he would cut out the roof of my mouth and clone me. Right now. Right here in the car. I was calculating how hard a kick it would take to break one of his ribs or maybe jar that passenger door loose and kick him straight out of the car at 65 miles per hour. Then he told me where he had learned about cloning.
For a long time, no one knows how long, for centuries, there has been a war between the Anti-Men and the Satellite People. The Anti-Men are tall and thin and gaunt and tend toward very rigid fashion codes that wouldn't be foreign to a leather bar or Berlin in 1938. The Satellite People are bigger than raccoons and have fur like cats but with monkey fingers and curiosity. They jump up on your bed at night and will touch your face while you sleep. They have long tails. The Satellite People live in a cloud that orbits the earth and watch everything that happens down below. They're probably related to the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz. And the Anti-Men hate them.
So on balmy summer nights, when the cloud dissipates and the stars twinkle in the warm clear sky, the Anti-Men will force orchestras onto flat bed railcars and ride across the open countryside. The orchestra plays and the Satellite People become more and more curious. The orchestra plays faster and faster and the Satellite People come down lower and lower to see what this amazing thing is, this orchestra on a train car, playing feverishly across the broad plains under starlight. And when the Satellite People reach a certain altitude, just close enough, giant spotlights mounted on the corners of the railcars are turned on and the Satellite People are stunned and drop from the sky like frozen lizards in Florida to be captured. And once captured they are cloned and turned into slaves of the Anti-Men, the roofs of their mouths cut out to create a race in chains. Enslaved forever.
And right about this point, and as he began to explain in great detail that his girlfriend had tried to enslave HIM and he had killed her in self-defense because she was working with the Anti-men....right about the point he began to get really insistent about the need to clone ME here in the car....here came the circular drive and sliding doors of Dammasch State Mental Hospital and I slid to a stop and he gathered up his damp napkin with the fledgling pot plant and crowed jubilantly that it was his friends birthday and he had a present a present a present for his friend and went loping gleefully, ecstatically, through those sliding doors and so passed from my trip and this story. Had it gone on any longer I suspect this would have a different ending but as it was I thought I had done a good deed by delivering him to this particular place and continued on my way to go see a beautiful girl in Seattle.
Now, you might think that such a thing would put me off hitch-hikers but in truth I took the new 205 cutoff around Portland and somewhere around the Estacada exit I saw a burly bearded biker-looking guy with a scrawled sign for Seattle. Thinking to myself that "nothing could possibly top that last guy", I pulled over and he limped up to the passenger side and heaved his bulk into the little bucket seat. Then took off his left leg and threw it in the back seat saying "that damned thing was about killing me! Say, buddy, do you know any Hells Angels? I'm a wanted man by the Angels and I'd just as soon avoid any of them so they don't do me in." And off we went to Seattle and perhaps the wildest night of my life but that's a whole 'nother story.