Last Friday I hitchhiked from Madison to Minneapolis. I have too many stories, too many reflections to offer all at once. For now, here is a sketch of the first person to pick me up.

Mark is tough. He knows this. He grew up white in the Boston projects where he “learned a healthy respect for reverse racism.” He knocked the rotten teeth out of his wife’s ex’s mouth. He yells at his seven year old son over the phone with such indifference that I can only respond with indifference. He travels with a female pit-bull named Natasha who is one of the most gentle creatures I have met. His dog is deeply symbolic, for his own brutal manhood contends with an unacknowledged sensitivity.

I see his giant red semi-truck pull onto the shoulder ahead of me while I am scoping a good place to stick my thumb up. As I go past, he opens his doors and asks for detour directions. I cannot help him, but ask where he is headed. Baraboo, he tells me, and this is on my way. I ask if I can join him, and he complies without even considering. Between the closed highways and the poorly marked detours, it takes us two hours to travel 30 miles. We talk.

A black trucker once told Mark that his dog would kill him in his sleep. Mark wanted to respond, “Well then you’re going to rob me when I turn my back, because you’re a nigger and you guys steal everything,” but it surfaced only later as a caustic afterthought. “I don’t understand how someone who’s supposedly been oppressed their whole life could have a racist bone in their body,” he tells me. His ignorance is somehow compassionate, his racism is indirect. He objects to the notion that race determines character, but is still holding a grudge from his childhood.

His son cries a lot. “I don’t care if he turns out gay, I sort of expect it,” he explains, “I just don’t want him to be one of those trannies or anything real weird like that.” Some time recently, his son threatened to jump out of a window. Today, his son broke the screen out of the window in his room, violating a no-playing-near-windows rule that was established after his threat. Mark learns this from his wife while they are talking on the phone, and he becomes quite angry. He talks to his kid who tells him the screen broke on accident. “I believe you broke it on accident, but why the fuck were you playing near the window?” All his boy can say is that it was an accident. “You’re a lyin’ motherfucker!” he yells, “How about if I get back home and smash your face in with a hammer and call it an accident and then you can’t complain about it cuz it was an accident!” All his boy can say is okay. At seven he knows this is not a parley, he knows he must let himself be trampled in this way because anything but passive compliance will spark more fervor in his abusive father.

This interaction is going to occur whether or not I am in the cab to witness it, so I am completely detached. My observations change nothing about the situation, and I am powerless to do anything. So I watch. At one point while Mark is yelling, he suddenly disconnects from the intensity and violence of the conversation, turns to me with a smirk and says, “See, the little fag is crying now.”

This is profound. Mark is full of contradictions. All his verbal abuse and physical threats would seem to invalidate the fact that there are two dogs in the cab: Natasha, and a month-old puppy he bought to bring back for his boy. His ignorance would seem to negate his nuture-over-nature sentiments. His sense of rugged mahood would seem to preclude his helping a stranger without a second thought.

Mark was fascinating. I left him without looking back.