. . - Lou Reed, "Heroin" Car Crash While Hitchhiking A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping . . .A Cherokee filled with bourbon ... A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student . . . And a family from Marshalltown who headonned and killed forever a man driving west out of Bethany, Missouri . . . . . . I rose up sopping wet from sleeping under the pouring rain, and something less than conscious, thanks to the first three of the people I've already named---the salesman and the Indian and the student---all of whom had given me drugs. At the head of the entrance ramp I waited without hope of a ride. What was the point, even, of rolling up my sleeping bag when I was too wet to be let into anybody's car? I draped it around me like a cape. The downpour raked the asphalt and gurgled in the ruts. My thoughts zoomed pitifully. The traveling salesman had fed me pills that made the linings of my veins feel scraped out.
