 She's the creator of this amazing book, Edgewise, a picture of Cookie Mueller, which I couldn't believe when I saw that it existed. It's just like the greatest book in the world that I've been waiting to happen. So I'm really excited that she's here. Please welcome Chloe Griffin. Yeah, so my name's Chloe Griffin and this is Edgewise. And what we're going to read tonight is we're going to read one of the conversations I had when I was meeting all these amazing people who knew Cookie Mueller. Edgewise is an oral history. So it was all about the conversations I had with these people. And one of the wonderful stories that Cookie wrote about was this hitchhiking trip that went bad. It was a trip that she took in 1969 with her friend Minx Stoll and Susan Lowe, two people that you might know from John Waters films. Anyway, so basically Cookie wrote about this story in her book, Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black. And when I met with Minx and Sue, they told me the story. And so what I thought would be interesting would be to kind of inter-slice Cookie's version with Minx and Stoll, with Minx and Sue's version. So what we're going to read today, I'm going to read Cookie, Minx Stoll, Maria, and Michelle, Sue. They were just three sluts looking for sex on the highway. The two abductors and rapists said later when asked to describe us. This wasn't the way we saw it. Yes, unless it had been 1969, you know the story. Well, my version is probably different. In Cookie's story, she had me wearing a ball gown, which is completely not true. I was wearing brown bottom jeans and a brown leather jacket. I had black nail polish, many skirt up to here, black lipstick. We were the punks. And I, the blonde, was dressed conservatively in a see-through micro mini dress and black velvet jacket. We were such sluts. We had taken three black beauties each, and we had a big ol' bottle of wine on us. True, we were hitchhiking. True, we were in horny redneck territory, but we hadn't given it a thought. We started out, I don't remember. Might have been Memorial Day, might have been before that. The three of us got out on the road and we were just getting short hop rides. It was a sunny day in early June, and Mink, Susan and I were on our way to Cape Cod from Baltimore to visit John Waters, who had just finished directing us in his film, Multiple Maniacs. When we told him we were going to thumb it, he said incredulously, you three, you're crazy, don't do it. Then a couple of guys picked us up. We were still in Maryland. They promised to take us to New York, and we believed them. We got in this car with these hillbillies because they had beer in the back seat. They looked like, are you know, greased back hair or a flat top maybe, farmer-ish. Burgundy Mack Four Mustang with two sickos, gigantic honkeys hopped up in horny on a local joy ride. The three of us got into the back, and the stupid thing is that we put our luggage in the trunk. That was our mistake. And Cookie carried everything in her bag, an iron. I mean, she was loaded down. For the 12-hour trip, we didn't forget to take our two courts of Jack Daniels, a handful of Dexter Dream Spancils, they were new on the pharmaceutical market, and 20 black beauties. Aside from these necessities, we had a couple duffel bags of Salvation Army and St. Vincent de Paul, Formals and Unaware. We started getting a bad feeling about these guys. I don't know how long we were in the car before we realized that they were never going to take us to New York. That they had no intention of taking us to New York and never had. What they intended to do, I don't know. There comes a time when even the most optimistic people, like myself, realize that life among certain humans cannot be easy, that sometimes it is unmanageable and low down, that all people are quixotic and haunted and burdened, that there's just no way to lift their load for them. With this in mind, I wanted to say something to Mink and Susan about not antagonizing these sad slobs, but right then the driver turned to me, you ain't going north, honey. You ain't going nowhere, but where we're taking you. These were those certain kind of humans. I don't know if they thought they could just ride us around. I don't know if they tended to rape or kill us or what. I really don't know. Anyway, it was still daylight when we were in this town called Elkton. Smack in the middle of a famous love zone, Elkton, Maryland, the quickie honeymoon and divorce capital of the eastern seaboard. At one point, we went through a car wash. We sat in the car through the whole thing. We could have hopped out while the guys got out, but they were fucking with us already and we started to get scared and they knew we were scared and they were somehow getting off on that. Well, this is how I remember it. I remember seeing the same toll taker and I'm going, what the fuck? And then we realized the guys were trying to make us lost and then one time we tried to pass a note to the toll booth. It was me because the toll booth was on the driver's side and I was behind the driver and they caught us trying to slip a note. We were laughing because we didn't realize the danger at the time. We were high on black beauties. We have knives, the guy riding shotgun said and he grinned at us with teeth that had brown moss growing near the gums. Big fucking deal, said Susan. So do I. And she whipped out a buck knife that was the size of my mini skirt. The driver casually leaned over and produced a shotgun and Susan threw the knife out the window. Eventually they drove us to some small rural house somewhere in the area of Elkton. There was a woman with a small child doing the laundry. She was wearing blue jean cutoffs and a t-shirt that said mall borough country on it. She looked 45 but she was probably 20. A hillbilly house that I have never seen before except in pictures of Appalachia maybe. It was in the woods. Mink and I were on the edges so we jumped out but Cookie was in the middle and they drove off before she could get out. Mink and Susan got out but mossy teeth. Elle grabbed my thigh and held me fast. Merle spun the car around and we took off making corn dirt dust in the faces of everyone who was standing there in front of the house. I began to feel the mood change. As they were talking to each other I noticed that they sounded scared. Elle even wanted to get out and go home. After a lot of fighting Merle finally did let Elle go. I've always been an astute observer of sexy women and unsexy women. In all my years I've never seen a crazy woman get chased by a man. Look at bag ladies on the street. They rarely get raped I surmised. And look at burnt out LSD girls. No men bothered with them much. So I decided that I would simply act crazy. I would turn the tables. I would scare him. I started making sounds of tape recorded words running backwards at high speed. This shocked him a bit but he kept driving farther into the woods as the sun was setting and the trees were closing in. What the fuck are you supposed to be doing? He asked me nervously, you a maniac or something? I just escaped from a mental hospital. I told him and continued with the backward tape sounds now sounding like alien UFO chatter. I think he was believing me. Anyway, he pulled off into the bushes and unzipped his pants and pulled out his pitiful limp wiener. He tried to get it hard. For a second I saw him debating about whether or not he should force me to give him a blow job. You devil woman, you'd bite my dick off wouldn't ya? He tried to force his semi-hard peewee rod into me as he ripped my tights at the crotch. I just continued with the sounds of backward tape as he fumbled with his loafing meat. This infuriated him. I'm gonna ask Jesus to help me on this one. Come on, sweet Jesus, help me get a heart on, come on. He was very serious. Susan and I got the woman to call the sheriff. He came and got us and took us to the station. Susan was drunk and passed out and she had tattoos on her belly and her shirt would ride up and well they just thought we were trash. We were beaten next, we were hitchhiking and we deserved whatever we got. There was absolutely no sympathy. We described the guys to them, described the car. They had to have known who we were. It's a small rural town, who they were. But they denied all knowledge. So Susan and I stayed in the sheriff's office for a while and during this time there was a jailbreak. Someone pretended to be hurt in the jail cell and had gotten himself put in an ambulance and taken to the local hospital and while he was there he escaped. So everyone in the sheriff's office was completely upset about this. They're all very excited about this jailbreak and I remember there was this one really fat guy walking around in his Bermuda shorts. He had a two hole stern, was yelling leg irons. Next time we put him in leg irons. So that was going on while we were trying to get them to look for Cookie, trying to get them to pay attention to us and realize that we had a friend who was really in danger. I mean, we had no idea. Cookie had disappeared with two guys. We were terrified. Not waiting to see whose side the Lord was on. I pushed his wiener quickly aside and threw open the door and dove out into the darkness. I ran faster than I'd ever run before and I wasn't a bad runner. As my eyes grew accustomed to the half moonlight, I saw that I was running into very deep woods. Aggressive brambles grabbed at my thighs. Poison ivy licked at my ankles and yearling trees slapped me in the face. After a long time I decided to stop running so I got under a bush next to a pile of rocks. I felt a bunch of furry things scuttle away. Rats or possums or raccoons, I guess. I laid there for a while, trying to see things in the darkness and then I heard his voice. He was far in the distance yelling, girl, girl, where the hell are ya? Did he really think I was going to answer? As he got a little closer, I saw that he had a flashlight and I got scared again. If his light found me there would be no hope. My white skin was very bright in the bluish flood of the half moon. I had a black velvet jacket on with black lining so I ripped out the lining in two pieces and wrapped one around my head and the other on my almost bare legs. Those brambles, those brambles had shredded my stockings. No light would bounce off me now. I was awake for a long time and then I just fell asleep sure that he had given up the search. Eventually a cop showed up from Delaware and he had pictures of decapitated girls. He wanted to show us what happens to girls who hitchhike. Then they threw us out of the station and Susan and I were on the streets of this stupid little town, a hick redneck awful town and we were walking and kids were throwing stones at us. I mean, children are throwing stones at Susan and me. We have no place to go, no where to stay. We have money, travelers checks and we go to one hotel and they say they're full. Well, they couldn't have been full. There was just no way they would take us. It was getting dark, it was creepy. We had been walking for a while and the town was very hostile. And then someone actually stopped and offered us a lift to a motel and we took it. I mean, here we had just almost been kidnapped while hitchhiking but we took the lift because we wouldn't have been able to stay at the motel without a car. It was like nobody wanted us. At sunrise or thereabout I woke up. I didn't even have a hangover. I felt very proud that I had melted so well into the underbrush just like Bambi. Without too much trouble I found this little dirt road and I started walking to the right. All roads lead to Rome, I told myself. So the next morning we went back to the sheriff's office and it turned out that Cookie had found her own way to the state police station. The state police who didn't know she was missing. The sheriff's office had not even notified them. It's funny, I remember telling Mink at some point in the morning, Mink, I know it's going to be okay. I know she's going to show up soon. I know it, I know it. I know it, I have a good feeling now. And five minutes later she showed up. We knew Cookie was clever enough to do something. She hid in the bushes all night. Then she found a road and got picked up by a forest ranger giving a bunch of kids, school kids a tour or something. I told my story and they were really peaceful, sympathetic people. The ranger called the police station and I found out that Mink and Susan were there. The ranger's wife liked me I could tell and they were both and they both drove me to the police station. When they let me off the wife kissed me and said, I hope everything goes well for you honey. That's a nasty thing to happen. Watch yourself around these pots. There's some hanky-panky round every corner here abouts. I know my husband deals with it every day. Inside the police station the police weren't so nice but they were patient with my story. They knew the guy, it was a small town. He was just released from Jisab's cut. They said, he's a bad ass for sure always in trouble. His dad is a religious man though, had one hell of a religious upbringing. One of them said, tone I know it. I thought, he believed the Lord would raise the dead even. We called friends in Baltimore who drove us to one of the Washington airports and we flew to Boston and the Hinch Hike to P-town. That's how we knew to travel. I mean, that's just what we did. Well we knew there weren't that many hillbillies on Cape Cod. Thank you. Thank you guys. That was excellent. That was really great. That was Chloe Griffin. And Maria, yes, and myself of course. You know, so basically this is the point in radar where we have a Q and A and I'm gonna bring everybody who performed tonight back up here to sit down and you, the audience.