March 25, 2002

• “I never thought those stories were true until it happened to me…”
  
  The night before last, I slept in my car in a rest area on the high plains of Texas. Texas is big. Very very big. If you stick around Conroe long enough to have some face time with your brother and his wife, then you’ll never make it out of Texas on the first day. Not a big sacrifice, by any means; I was glad to see them.
  
  The point of this story is that I fueled up in Wichita Falls and drove to the rest area just west of there on US highway 287. There to sleep. After peeing of course. By the time I’ve gotten there, I’ve worked up a bladder full of waste fluid.
  
  I parked the car and went into the bathroom building, still in a bit of a daze from driving too long, and from having to pee really, really badly. In the bathroom, there’s a urinal and a john, but the urinal is occupied. The guy at the urinal glances at me and says, “Hi,” when our eyes meet. He looks a little too happy to be in the bathroom. I go over to the john and unzip, ready to release the floodgates. Then I notice some fairly new graffiti on the john itself. It says: “3/23/02: Trucker fucker ready to give you a BJ. Tap your foot.” Since I travel a lot, and I stop at rest areas, I see this kind of graffiti a lot, and I’ve always wondered how successful it is, and how dangerous. Then it dawns on me. Today is the 23rd. That man is happy to be in the bathroom. And down on the floor, next to the john, is a picture of a beautiful young man with a huge honkin’ erection. I glance back to the guy at the urinal. He’s checking out my package.
  
  Suddenly, I can’t pee. There’s no way. It’s just not going to happen. If only I had noticed after I had started. I turn around and, as I’m leaving, I say, “Sheesh. Now I’ll never get to pee.”
  
  Eventually I did pee. He left the bathroom shortly after I did, and got in his minivan, and I went back in and unloaded. The same message was on the urinal, as was more porn. Once I was done being annoyed, I began to think about what it must be like to be a gay man in Wichita Falls. Then it occurred to me that this was a rare moment in my anthropological studies… I was planning to stay at this rest area anyway, and I could observe the trucker fucker and see how it all played out. So I sat in my car and did a bad job of reading a book while observing.
  
  The trucker fucker wasn’t all that interesting, compared to the reactions of men going into the bathroom. They’d come out looking really angry, as if they had been violated simply by the presence of gay porn. They’d look around, as if searching for the guy who had put the porn there. Then there was one guy who seemed interested. He came out and conspicuously tapped his foot and went back in. Then he came back out and went behind the building, in the shadows. My pal the trucker fucker wandered into the bathroom… What a delicate mating dance. Then he came out and circled around the building, just as the other guy started circling, too. They missed each other, and both got back in their cars. The interested guy drove away. Trucker fucker stuck around a little longer.
  
  He gave up after about another half-hour. I went into the bathroom to search for clues as to what had happened, and the graffiti and porn were gone.
  
  I spent the night there in the back of the car. It was relatively comfortable. I woke and made it to Amarillo before noon, so technically I made Amarillo by morning.
  

  • 11:30 am
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