Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer, #131: Weak Stories with Strong Points: "The Phantom Hitchhiker"

An old song by the Rolling Stones begins, “I’ve had good times, I’ve had bad times”—very typical blues, but I think writers can identify with that statement. It could mean good times and bad times with publishing success or lack of it; but it could also mean good/bad times with stories. We have good stories and (if we’re honest we will admit) bad stories as well. Now, when I say“bad” I don’t mean they were a total loss or something we would not want to acknowledge. But some stories are weaker than other stories; some are not as well-crafted. The reason can be that we are just beginning to write (though, ironically, I’ve found a lot of my really early stuff is pretty good). They can be “bad” because they develop a weak idea or an overdone theme. One of these is a story I published called “The Phantom Hitchhiker.”

The phantom hitchhiker is an old urban legend. A guy picks up a girl who is hitchhiking. She tells him her car has broken down and she need a ride home. She is pretty. He is attracted to her. She says she is cold and asks if she can wear his sweater. But just before he gets to her house, she disappears. The young man is puzzled but goes to the house she indicated and knocks on the door. Her father answers and he asks if the girl was out tonight because he was giving her a ride, but somehow she got out of the car and disappeared. The father is, in different versions of the stories, defensive, hurt, bewildered, angry. He says that his daughter was killed in a car wreck on the way home a year ago to this day. The young man goes back to his car, wondering if it was all a hallucination or dream. As he drives home he passes a graveyard, sees something, and goes to investigate. He finds what he is saw is his sweater, draped over the gravestone of a young woman with the name she gave him and who, according to the dates on the stone, died one year ago on that day.

The story is so well-known there was a popular song called “Laurie (Strange Things Happen)” by Dickey Lee (1965). The story has been told and retold in various forms. I decided to write a story about the legend and wanted to give it a twist. This happened because some people in my writer’s group marveled that I had never heard of the “phantom hitchhiker.” When they told me the story I said that had heard it but had never heard it called that. I decided I would try my hand at a revision of the tale.

In my revision, an ongoing character, Sossity Chandler (about whom I published 27 stories) encounters the phantom hitchhiker. Sossity is a struggling blues/rock player who eventually makes it big, but in this phase of her career she is playing in bars and taverns. At intermission at a bar called One-Eyed Mick’s, she has a confrontation with two bikers who have designs on her. With the help of the manager, she rebuffs them. The manager tells her that she should not take the main road back into town because they might follow her. He suggests another road but jokingly tells her to watch out for Vanessa. She is a ghost, he says, that haunts that road.

When Sossity travels the road she sees a girl hitchhiking and picks her up. She rides with Sossity and asks to borrow jacket because she’s cold. The girl is mysterious and enigmatic and soon turns transparent and lets her host know she is a phantom. Sossity’s reaction, however, is not what the girl expects:

"So what's next in the script? I scream? Run the car off the road?"
Vanessa looked back in troubled puzzlement.
"And," Sossity continued, "let's see... oh, yes, you're supposed to ask for my sweater - or I guess my jacket, since I'm not wearing a sweater. I take you to One-Eyed Mick's, you disappear, I go to the graveyard, and there's my jacket on your grave. Right?"
"You're real funny," the girl said, her eyes dark with anger.
"You're even funnier. Did you think I'd be afraid of you because you're a ghost? I'm not afraid of ghosts."
"Stop the car and let me out!"
"Can't you just vanish like Laurie did in the song? You faded out pretty well just a minute ago."
The anger in her eyes intensified but then it drained away. She looked forlorn.
"I can't do that. I want to go now. Stop and let me out on the side of the road."

Sossity won’t let her out of the car. She hears Vanessa’s story. She was in an accident when riding on a motorcycle with her boyfriend, who is one of the bikers who harassed Sossity. Sossity tells her she needs to stop living up to his expectations for her. Even in death, she chides the girl, she is playing his game and letting him dictate her existence.

Sure enough, the biker shows up. He buzzes Sossity and tries to run her into a ditch. Finally, Vanessa acts. She has Sossity pull over, gets out of the car and stands in the road. When her ex-boyfriend sees her, he is horrified, swerves to miss her, and wrecks his bike. Sossity calls the police. Vanessa vanishes.

The boyfriend, it turns out, must have his leg amputated. Knowing the story, Sossity drives to the local graveyard and, sure to form, finds the jacket Vanessa borrowed from her draped over her grave. She drives off satisfied that the girl has at last found rest.

The story is strong and weak. I told it pretty well. I did a good revision of what happens in the tale. It is weak in that Sossity is too unafraid of Vanessa. I had written other stories where she encounters ghosts, so I knew she would not be frightened of a spirit being. But my readers did not know that and that part of the story—their encounter and argument in the car—comes across as a bit shallow and glib. Still, it was good enough to be published. A UK magazine, Fiction on the Web, accepted it and you can still read it.

Good times, bad times. Every writer has them in the form of a story. But we are harsh judges. Maybe the bad stories are not quite as bad as we think they are.

"The Phantom Hitchhiker" was published in Fiction on the Web, a British journal. Read it here.

I have a new novella up at Amazon, a vampire story. Get a copy here. 

Happy reading.

Dave's Anatomy: My History As a Writer #130: Art and Love: The Mural of Tillotoma

Choice is a conflict that propels many stories. In the Odyssey (which I am reading in Emily Wilson's marvelous translation) Odysseus turns down the immortality the goddess Calypso offers him and chooses to remain mortal (and eventually die) so that he can return to his wife, family, and people; in Pilgrim's Progress, written a thousand years later, Pilgrim turns his back on Vanity Fair and all the temptations he encounters in order to arrive at the Celestial City; in my favorite novel, John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, Charles Smithson chooses the woman he loves over Victorian respectability. Choices always mean conflict, and conflict is the essence of storytelling.

In "The Mural of Tillotoma," the main character, Kairavi Nagaswami, has to choose between the opulent lifestyle her family would enlist her in and what she comes to value in love. 

Kairava's family is wealthy, lives in a mansion, and has everything they could want or need. She and her sisters fly to London to attend concerts and theatrical productions; to New York to shop; to Delhi and Tokyo to meet with friends and spend money. Of the three young women in her family, she is considered the least beautiful. On a trip to New York she meets an Indian girl who is studying to be an anthropologist and, in the summer, is going on an archaeological dig in Israel. When Kairavi asks her why she is going she simply says, "Because I want to." Kairavi's outlook on life begins to change. She tells her parents she does not want to marry right away. She would like to attend college.

Tel Aviv University

They are puzzled but, since she is the youngest and, in their opinion, the least marriable daughter, they grant her request, though they are surprised when she elects to attend not Cambridge or Harvard or the University of Delhi, which are prestige schools, but the university of Tel Aviv. The school, she tells them, has a top-rate archeological department and the location provides opportunities to go on digs that might yield significant artifacts.

She graduates, still not married (but with an Israeli boyfriend), embarks on a career, and finds, on her first dig in India, a perfectly preserved chamber with a completely intact set of murals depicting the story of Tillotoma.

Tillotoma was, in Indian legend, created by the craftsman of the gods to be the most beautiful women of all time. This turns out to be a problem because two very powerful gods, Shiva and Indra, both fall in love with her. To avert a war in heaven, Brahma, the chief god and creator, transforms her to a mortal woman of average looks and she marries a mortal man and is able to live a life without gods fighting over her.

The discovery propels Kairavi into an archeological celebrity. Her discovery is carried in National

Tillotomma

Geographic, Smithsonian, and Indian Archeology. The BBC, Indian Public Television, and PBS produce reports on her and her find. She receives offers for jobs at prestigious universities. Kairavi sees her choice as auspicious. She will be able to marry the man she loves and pursue the career she decided on. She reflects, ironically, that, like Tillotoma, she has gone from privilege to being an average woman.

A good decision, she is able to tell herself.

The story appeared in a now-defunct journal, Intellectual Refuge. Someday I might try to remarket it.

Read my latest novella, Sinfonia: A Painted Lady. A vampire girl who is a lute player and has been alive for hundreds of years finds out that someone painted a portrait of her back in the 1600s. And its existence is threatening her, her coven, and vampires everywhere.

Happy reading.