Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
She held up her hitchhiking thumb. “I got the key to the highway right here,” she said, a nod to one of our favorite cuts from the stack of 45s on the Grundig. And with a grin, she added, “Archer, you are a pessimist, a cynic, a killjoy,”
“I prefer skeptic,” I said.
Billie girl-talked the attendant at the Texaco station out of a free-with-a-fill-up Lupoyoma County map, then we walked out of town while she lectured me on the rudiments of hitchhiking etiquette.
Hold your thumb this way, don’t turn your back on the cars, look the drivers in the eye with a friendly, open face.
I was nervous as a kid stepping up to the plate in his first Little League game, fidgeting with my hair and rocking foot to foot in the roadside dirt.