Book Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America

‘Carsick,’ a Hitchhiking Memoir by John Waters JUNE 5, 2014 Calls to literacy come in many forms, most of them smug and self-defeating. Then there is the cult-film director John Waters’s advice. In his one-man show “This Filthy World,” he instructs audiences, “If you go home with somebody, and they don’t have books,” don’t sleep with them. Mr. Waters (“Pink Flamingos,” “Hairspray”) has long been that relative rarity among American film directors. He can write. His memoirish volume “Role Models” (2010) is observant and light on its feet, and his essays and journalism, sure to be collected in their entirety someday, are fond, exotic, well groomed, debonair — “natty,” to borrow one of my father’s favorite words. Mr. Waters’s new book, “Carsick,” arrives with a capital-P premise, one that could double as an elevator pitch for an A&E reality show. Now in his mid-60s, he proposes to touch up his pencil-thin mustache and hitchhike from Baltimore to San Francisco while holding cardboard signs that say, among other things, “Midlife Crisis,” “Writing Hitchhiking Book” and “I’m Not Psycho.” Credit Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times This writer has proved himself to be good company. So how terrible, I thought to myself, could an account of this trip be? Let me put off that question for a moment, because Mr. Waters puts it off, too. The first 192 pages of “Carsick” — nearly the first two-thirds — don’t address what he calls his “hobo-homo journey” at all. Instead, they present a long string of comic short stories, best- and worst-case scenarios for the trip he’s planning to take. It’s as if Thor Heyerdahl had filled the first 200 pages of “Kon-Tiki” with an optimistic fictional dream about his grueling raft voyage that involved a minibar, the Swedish bikini team and an Evinrude outboard motor, and then a pessimistic one that involved termites, typhoons and a vengeful giant squid with a special animus toward Norwegians. Mr. Waters’s stories are pure filibustering, and an early warning that while he’s gone shopping, he may not have brought home enough groceries from the road. Yet his fantasies and nightmares are lewd and pleasantly surreal. In one of his best-case scenarios, he’s picked up while hitchhiking by Johnny Davenport, his favorite porn film star. In another, he joins a hipster carnival that features a “Meat Wheel, where you spin and, if you’re lucky, win a pork butt.” In yet another, he has sex with an alien and winds up with a magic rectum (please don’t ask). Later his rectum sings a duet with Connie Francis. The worst-case scenarios involve serial killers and stalker fans and contagious goiters and diseased sexual organs and a Grace Metalious look-alike who pulls a giant tapeworm from her maw. Every story has a musical cue, and there’s a Spotify-ready playlist at the back. Mr. Waters eventually dies and is glad he’s not sent to heaven, because Anita Bryant is loitering there. The downside of hell is that “It’s a Wonderful Life” plays on a continuous loop. Buyer beware, though. I hate to get all Consumer Reports here, but nothing about this book’s cover or title page warns you that you’re mostly buying a porny-pulpy volume of short stories. When Mr. Waters does hit the road, it’s a rainy day in Baltimore, and things go poorly almost from the start. No one wants to pick him up. He resembles, he fears, “a sopping-wet junkie Mary Poppins.” Not that we ever really worry for him. He’s brought along his credit cards and a cellphone and a GPS so his staff can track his movements. He plans to sleep in hotels and to call cabs when he’s forced to. He’s willing to suffer a little bit, but this is not going to be “Into the Wild,” Part 2. Most of the rides he gets are from nice, ordinary Americans — a Walmart manager, a farmer, a coal miner, a young Republican in a Corvette. At one point, he is scooped up by the members of an indie band called Here We Go Magic, and its members tweet about their celebrity encounter. Those tweets go viral. It’s hard to blame Mr. Waters for not finding trouble, for not meeting any floozies with Uzis (to paraphrase a song title from Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland”) or alighting upon Kerouacian ecstasy. Hitchhiking isn’t what it used to be. It probably doesn’t help that Mr. Waters is essentially a teetotaler now. He turns down drugs and booze and opportunities to go out barhopping. He wants to get his beauty rest. He writes about the joy of regular bowel movements. “Carsick” functions partly as a close examination of modest fame at work in immodest America. Mr. Waters has far better experiences when he’s recognized than when he is not. He’s amused to find that he is not recognized for his movies as much as he is for things like his cameo on “The Simpsons” and in amusic video that also featured Nicki Minaj. Some mistake him for Steve Buscemi. To his credit, Mr. Waters spares us deep think about the soul of America. The best bits of “Carsick,” for me, were watching this finicky man being forced to eat, shop and sleep, often for the first time, in indifferent chains like Burger King and Walmart and La Quinta hotels. He comes to prefer Days Inn over other chains because its rooms are brighter; he likes to read in bed. He notes that Ruby Tuesday is superior to its dark twin, Applebee’s. The Applebee’s in Grand Junction, Col., is, he writes, “the worst chain restaurant I’ve eaten in on the trip so far.” He unhappily chews a “kind of gristly” filet in an Outback Steakhouse. The breakfast buffet in a dingy Holiday Inn features a chipped-beef dish that “looks like liquefied mucus mixed with Dinty Moore canned stew.” At a McDonald’s, he has his first Quarter Pounder, and finds it almost tasty. I quickly grew bored with “Carsick,” though, and began circling phrases that sounded like cult movies Mr. Waters might still make: “sugar frenzy,” “goiter odor,” “scary gratitude,” “food pity,” “sugar-daddy road warrior.” I was also occasionally poked awake by the casual observations of this lifelong eccentric outsider. When he sees a road sign for Lovelock, Nev., for example, he writes: “It sounds good to me. Like ‘Lovelips’ or ‘Liplock.’ There’s a prison there, too, which always makes me feel included.”