It wasn’t all that long ago that I was riding in the box of a pickup truck that was moving in a southerly direction, barrelling down the Number 4 Highway from Hat Yai (หาดใหญ่ ) toward the boarder of Malaysia.
And it wasn’t long after that that I was standing on a lengthy ribbon of road outside Kuala Lumpur, facing north, my thumb out, my rucksack a slump of blue nylon and webbing on my back, trying my best to look like a suitable companion for the short ride back into Thailand.
Why all this back and forth? Visas. Girls. You know, the usual.
In poorer countries one has little trouble hitchhiking. In El Salvador you don’t even need thumbs. Just stand on the road-shoulder and smile. First automobile to come’ll grow a brown limb from the window and wave, bidding you to board. Sissy Hankshaw eat your heart out.
Malaysia is somewhere within the inky divide of being a ‘first’ and ‘third’ world country. I guess that makes it a ‘second.’ (What I mean by ‘first’ and ‘third’ is ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’; if one can in fact call ‘developed’ countries such things.) I guess Malaysia is ‘developing’ then. And this is clearly illustrated by the length of time it takes to hitch a lift. It’s no El Salvador. But it’s no U. S. of A. either. Right in the middle. Takes about twenty minutes.
An Aside
In that twenty minutes one can observe the two types of tress that Malaysia has to offer: Palm and rubber. Not nice palm trees like one would imagine on the beach. Those are coconut palms, cocos nucifera. No, the palms that are grown en mass in Malaysia are elaeis guineensis. These are oil palm trees used for palm oil. The world’s most widely ingested (but obviously not consumed) oil. They stand across the highway from the rubber trees, both in perfectly aligned columns and rows. Like two armies squaring off. One’ll wonder for a minute what happened to all the other types of trees, the ones that just grow by themselves. One may remember reading something about the rainforest in Malaysia and how it’s pretty well fucked, and one could possibly observe how militarily arranged trees don’t really resemble that movie Fern Gully one watched when one was a child. One would maybe even recall a line in Maureen N. McLane’s poem as published in the New Yorker: “A park’s a way to keep what’s gone enclosed forever.”
No parks on the highway. Too bad.
So then a red pickup stops and I run up to it, all happy like. Twenty minutes are up. The driver is not going to Thailand, but he’s going half way so I ride along. We get to talking. He tells me that he’s one in a very small community from Siam, ancestrally from Thailand that is, but living in Malaysia. He’s a Buddhist and he just had to stop and pick me up out of the compassion that pours from his heart. I tell him I’m a Buddhist too, and I just had to stand on the road shoulder as a means for him to exercise his compassion.
We laughed.
But sooner than I would have liked we reach the turn off for his temple. He let me out and we say goodbye and there I am again on the roadside.
Twenty minutes later a Volkswagen sedan stops. Music blaring. Windows down. Both the driver and shotgun seats are occupied so I get in the back.
This is when the madness starts.
Without even a motion to turn down the dance music the driver starts yelling at me. Screaming really. All I can make out is “Yeah Baby. That’s right.”
The car leaps forward and in what can only me measured in halves of seconds, we are, the speedometer informs me as I look over the shoulder of the driver, at our cruising speed of 160km/h.
All the windows are rolled down and a great rush of wind expands and blows through the automobile. We pass every other vehicle on the road.
The music plays.
I take a minute to look around the car. The floor of the back seat is wet. The bottoms of my Vans are cleaned from the soggy carpet.
In the trunk, directly behind me, the subwoofer sends 6/4 vibrations through the car, reverberating bone marrow seems to not bother the driver or his companion, who, at this point, materializes a Sherlock Holmes pipe and begins packing the bowl with what looks like Oolong tea leaves.
“Yeah Baby, Where you from?”
I lean forward so I can yell into his ear, the only way communication is possible.
“Canada,” I say.
“Canada? Well fuck you baby.”
Alright then.
The new vantage point afforded to me by my communicative forward lean, allows me to see the steering column of the Volkswagen. And from the steering column of the Volkswagen there pours a mess of wires every colour of the rainbow.
The driver says something to his companion in Malay and I lean back and push the power window button but nothing happiness. This is when I see little nuggets of glass in the seam where the window should be. A few of these bits lay on the soggy carpet, looking like diamonds on a jewellers display mat.
“Where you guys going,” I yell.
“We going to Chaing Mai, Baby, you wanna come? We make you come.”
“Na, I’m good, I’ve been to Chiang Mai.”
“You should come again, Baby.”
A sweet aroma comes from the Sherlock Holmes pipe.
The bass beats, jingling the bits of glass on the floor.
“You guys crossing the boarder then yeah?”
“Oh yeah, baby, we never do that before.”
“You have your papers?”
“We don’t need papers baby, we just go’in.”
With the incredible speed maintained by this rather marry pair of bandits, we find the boarder crossing approaching before the diver can even take his own haul of Holmes’ herb, and parking the car in the duty free lot, he turns the Volkswagen off at exactly the same time that I open the door. I can hear him still yelling, about smoke and Chiang Mai and how I should look him up if I’m ever around. But my legs are striding long and sure, and from over my shoulder I yell “Thanks for the lift, Baby.”
