Hitchhiking: The Greatest Game I've Ever Played

In the morning, we walk from the truckstop to the highway and find a nice overpass to start our day from. We notice a sleeping homeless man but ignore him and make a new sign labeled "NORTH". Creative, aye? After about 5 minutes the homeless man wakes up to shank us with his shiv... or offer us beer. Yeah, offer us beer. We shoot the shit with him for a while and he tells us he's a homeless 'Nam veteran (with all his limbs) and that nobody is picking him up here. He said he'd been there for 3 days and he was heading to South Dakota. Because we didn't want to spend money, I asked him how he'd been getting food for himself. He asked if we were hungry and we both said yes. He mentioned that he had about $10 to his name right now and that he needed to go buy more beer but he'd stop and get us some hamburgers at McDonald's too, unknowing that we had $200 sitting peacefully in one of our bags. We tried to talk him out of spending his money on us but he wasn't having it. He was going to buy us food whether we liked it or not. After he got out of sight distance, I asked Bryan to grab a $20 and a pen out of the bag. Feeling just as guilty, he caught onto my idea and got what I requested. I wrote a note thanking him on the $20, slipped it into his bag and got to hitchhiking. It took me only about 5 minutes and a kid around the age of 19 pulled over in a pickup and told us to get in.

He mentioned he needed gas so we stopped at the nearest gas station. He asked if either of us wanted to pump the gas for him, but for some reason he didn't know what side the gas tank was on. I volunteer to pump the gas and I ask him how much he wants and he says "Oh... uh, I don't care. Whatever. Fill it up I guess?" and then he walks inside. I finish pumping the gas, Bryan returns from a quick bathroom trip and the three of us drive away. He tells us that he's leaving his home because he can't deal with his father anymore and I continue to ask him questions about this fairly nice Dodge Dakota he's driving. He doesn't seem to know much about the car but hey, not everybody knows about automobiles, right?... Well... he drives us for about a half hour and about 5 minutes before hes about to drop us off, I ask him how much he paid for the truck and he responds with "Well, I didn't exactly pay for it... and I didn't exactly pay for the gas you pumped back there either. I hope you're not too bothered." I mention to him a few stories about Rusty and tell him that it'd take a lot more than that to freak us out. He drops us off and we continue to hitchhike for a few minutes before getting picked up by a man that reeked of alcohol.

Beyond our better judgement, we decided to get in the car with him and he asked us about our adventures. We told him stories and he said that we could celebrate with dinner at a resturant local to his house. He takes us about an hour and a half up the road further and brings us to a resturant where he proceeds to have 3 gin and tonics with his big stomach cushioning meal of 3 shrimp. Bryan had alfredo chicken and I got some chicken fingers and french fries, which for some reason he referred to as "Finch and Chimps". We get back in the car with him and he takes us back to the interstate on a very weavy trip back.