"If you're a true road sister, common courtesy requires that the cute chick doesn't always get the guy," Tuttle explains. "In fact, it's her duty to do whatever she can to help the other girls get laid."
All I need to hear are three little magic words and I'm the happiest girl in the world: a road trip.As in, "Screw all this, it's time for 'a road trip.'" There is just nothing quite like sailing down the open road with two or three of your best chick friends, windows open, singing Born to Be Wild off-key at the top of your fresh-air filled lungs looking for adventure in whatever comes your way. Sheer bliss.
Cameron Tuttle knows what I mean. "Road tripping is an autoerotic adventure where you get to do the things you don't allow yourself to do at home. Eat like a pig. Wear the same underwear for days. Go-go dance in a wet tube-top. Flirt with strangers," she writes in The Bad Girl's Guide to the Open Road (Chronicle Books). Perfectly sized for the glove box, and complete with a "Road Sister" bumper sticker and protective pink plastic cover, the Bad Girl's Guide is "an On the Road for chicks," if you will, Tuttle tells me over the phone from her home in San Francisco.
The BGG is chock-full of handy advice about what to bring ("sunblock for your left arm and a credit card that's not maxed out") and what not to bring ("No small children. It's so easy to lose small things on the road. And nothing that needs to be ironed.") It's also loaded with practical info about everything from basic car maintenance to how to pee roadside without splashing (choose an absorbent target; grass is better than pavement). Lose your keys? Attach an extra set to your belly button ring. Beer bottle not a screw top? Tuttle includes 14 ways to open a beer with your car. No gun? You no doubt have a few non-gun weapons (metal nail file, keys or a pen or pencil) on you already.
Other everyday items also come in handy on the road. Stick a pantyliner to a hot coffee cup for insulation. In a jam, they also make great post-it notes. Condoms can be used as a ponytail holder or even a change purse when you're wearing a bikini.
Of course, you could be really wacky and have safe sex with them, another excellent road-trip activity. Like the time a girlfriend and I drove to Graceland in my father's Buick Park Avenue with the personalized licence plate that read XFRMRS (my father was a retired farmer, you figure it out). We found ourselves at a county fair in Buttfuck, Kentucky, rounded up a coupla cowboys and invited them back to our hotel, which we realized later was a rent-by-the-hour outfit. Only we weren't chargin'. Though I probably should have. My friend got the cute one that time. It was her turn. I got the cute one when we picked up a couple of Queen's University boys on another mini-road trip that landed us in a cottage near Kingston, Ontario. Looking for some action, we headed into town and stumbled upon karaoke night at a rather poor excuse for a bar. We snagged ourselves a couple of locals and brought 'em back to our homestead. My friend still holds a grudge over the fact that she had to fight off creep boy all night so I could shag my cutie. Kentucky was payback time. And she got me good. I slept with Ferret Boy, as he will forever be known, because there was nothing else to do with him while my friend was busy making out with her boy (a Tim Robbins lookalike, who could have been mine, except for an ill-timed trip to the bathroom at the bar). And there were many others. Road trips and boys.
I know what you're saying. How can you be so reckless about sleeping with total strangers? But that's the beauty of the road. Tuttle agrees: "You can have perfectly guilt-free sex with no worry about bumping into him at the gym later." But you have to mind your road-trip manners, she says. "If you're a true road sister, common courtesy requires that the cute chick doesn't always get the guy," Tuttle explains. "In fact, it's her duty to do whatever she can to help the other girls get laid."
Even if that means three of you have to pretend to be lesbians, as Tuttle once did, so a fourth could get some action. "I wouldn't have the guts to do that at home," she says. That's why road trips are so much fun. You get to be and do whatever the hell you want. With no witnesses.
In fact, Tuttle says, an alias might be just what you need to really forget yourself. The BGG tells you how to come up with a road name by combining what you had for breakfast with the name of the last place you peed by the road. If Waffles Minnesota doesn't suit, try your homemade porn name. Combine the name of your first pet and your mother's maiden name (Uh, that'd make me Mandy Koks, not bad).
"Using an alias frees you from your usual hang-ups," according to Tuttle. "Not just in regular road situations but in bed too. And if you don't like the person you play, who cares, it's just a role and no one in town knows you anyway."
Mind you, not all road-trip encounters need be consummated. "If you're afraid of intimacy and commitment," writes Tuttle in the BGG, "drive-by dating is for you. The object of the game is to get the object of your desire to exit the highway, expecting you to follow. You of course floor it and keep on sailing."
Or try a little "strip driver" to get his attention. A shoe for a shoe... you get the idea.
As always, if you do go for more than a road test with the guy, play safe. Keep him in public or have a girlfriend in the next room, or even better, in the next bed with her own roadkill. Also, you don't know where these things you pick up on the road have been, so pack lots of condoms. If you don't end up usin' em for sex, you can add a little mayo and use them to score free accommodation if you're getting low on funds. "I found this used condom in my sheets and I refuse to pay for this room."
You won't get advice like that from the AAA.
