Chapter 16
September 4, 1984. Cruising the mountains and valleys of sweet lifetime, we were eleven days into the journey, a journey born as a simple idea, but unlike so many others, an idea that was boldly acted upon.
In his sister’s empty house, Lucas laboriously vacuumed around me. Kerry and Sam were already on their honeymoon, and the others had left for Kansas. With no one left to say good-bye to, we said our heartfelt good-byes to rustic Aspen, the small beautiful ski town in the sky. It was good-bye forever. Denver, Topeka, Kansas City, Oklahoma, all of the other cities of beautiful America still lay ahead of us on the unwritten road. New adventures were out there; we were turning the page. Our next stop would be Denver where Declan’s younger sister Megan lived. She was a young professional who had moved out there for a job after graduating from Ohio State a few years before. The plan was to only sleep there for a night and quickly push on toward Topeka.
As the fleeting Fairlane edged its way out of the mountain driveway, I felt a sense of restful and celebratory peace. I had finally surrendered to the great weight of life, at least for a few minutes. I relaxed my mouth and unclenched my teeth and my anxiety lifted for a while.
Weaving over Independence Pass, at 12,000 feet, we witnessed the high-altitude tundra fields of grasses and shrubs. The crisp air gushed in with our windows rolled down and brought on a sudden shortness of breath to me, but it felt good just the same. Meadowlands and greyhound-colored mountains precluded abandoned communes of log cabins overgrown with brush, some of them were roofless, on our gradual way down the mountain to the Midwest. These empty communities were the ghost town bookmarks that solemnly held the places of another time period in our great America, lest we all might forget them amidst our own fleeting lives. Why did they go? Finally, everything grew thicker again in the lower altitudes, and I wearily stumbled into pages of time that would be forever unwritten. I had writer’s block now, where a sudden fog settled in and slowed down my copious note taking. I put everything down, closed my eyes, and ultimately surrendered to sleep.
When I awoke, forests of beautiful pines, marching up mountains like columns of the retreating cavalry, surrounded the hillsides around us and threatened us all with promises of scenic forever peace again. The last war was behind us now, for sure, but memories from that war in Vietnam and how she had torn apart America were still evident in the music that we all listened to. Our poor returning veterans had been treated as outcasts by society; it was so tough for them to find work . . . and the politicians . . . They never seemed to help at all, for they quickly forgot about our soldiers and were now anxiously marching on to the next big race. Another bigger war, the Cold War with the Soviet Union, loomed frightfully ahead. The Fairlane would soon enough roll right over the sleeping nuclear missile silos that promised to protect our doom as they lay buried below the cornfields of eastern Colorado and Kansas. Everything seemed squeaky quiet for now, but Russia was the sure enemy in our blind spot, our leaders said. They told us this over and over again. Be ready, for the end of the world might happen with the errant push of a button! Ronnie will be up sleepwalking one night and Ka-blam! Good-bye world. It was garbage, I thought, with the Democrats and the Republicans always the ones drawing the hard lines, and everybody else always caught in between it all. Don’t get me wrong, I believed that the Soviets were surely capable of doing it . . . Gorby pushing that crazy button, with his own secret Siberian missiles all pointed at us, if he had the chance to, but I also believed in the core goodness of people. Of course, I would fight to the death to defend my beautiful country, but didn’t the citizens of Russia feel this way too? How much propaganda were they really feeding us? Ronald Reagan, the president, the ex-governor, the movie star, was running for reelection, and the world still believed he might be a little trigger happy if Gorby pushed him too far. The election and the fate of the free world would all be decided in just a few short months.
I saw the changing 3D depth of the landscape around us as we descended the Rockies into the plains; forests turned to rocky streams that winded through aspen greens and meadows. Autumn leaf gold reigned on the hillsides; hints of red and yellow-colored flowers were spattered by the Creator’s hand. It was true beauty in a country so grand.
The scenery took me back to my hitchhiking adventures on Route 2 back and forth to UMass in the late 1970s . . . How those were colorful times. During one of these rides, I was picked up by a lonely philosopher-entrepreneur who spent his days traversing New England in his big white van picking up scrap unused toilet paper from Massachusetts paper mills. The white van gypsy sold the stuff to packaging houses for a quick few bucks. I remembered the guy tried to sell me on his whole philosophy of life as we drove that winding road, as all of the people that picked me up did, for I was always at their mercy for the cost of a ride. What should a young college kid do? I was obliged to listen as payback for their graciousness. The gypsy talked of how every tree of a different color had a right to that color, and they did, and I agreed with him on that. He also said that Catholicism should be the only religion because it was the first religion, and it was there before the Protestants and all the other religions.
“But that’s not correct,” I timidly spoke out to him from my seat in his toilet paper van.
“What do you mean that’s not correct?” he angrily turned to me.
“Catholicism wasn’t the first religion,” I said. “Jesus was a Jew.”
“Well, I will give you that,” he reluctantly said to me. “But the Jews had the chance to believe in him! And they didn’t!”
The guy was certainly crazy, but for some reason I kept pushing, somehow thinking I might be arguing with Frank back at the kitchen table in Lowell. “But it still wasn’t the first religion,” I said to him. “I think there were all of those Indian and Chinese religions that came before Catholicism like the Hindus and the Buddhists.”
The gypsy turned confused and silent all at once. He didn’t say a word as he looked straight-ahead and drove on. When I exited the white toilet paper van, I felt bad for what I had caused in him. I turned his whole belief system upside down. I might have sinned.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” I pictured myself as a boy in the dark recesses of St. Matthew’s Catholic confessional; there was a little window with cloth over it so the priest could not see our faces, but he really could. The elaborate wood-latticed confessional door provided the only light inside the little prison booth, and a scary shadow of a man loomed behind the cloth. It was so intimidating; this was a man closer to God than all of us.
“I told an old man that Catholicism wasn’t the first religion and shattered his belief system,” I would have to confess someday.
“And for that are you truly sorry for your sin?”
“Yes, Father, I am sorry. I just blurted it out without thinking. I was looking at all of the colors of the leaves on the trees of Route 2. I didn’t mean anything by it. I thought I was back home at the kitchen table arguing with Frank. I swear it, that’s how it all happened,” I imagined myself stumbling through it.
As children, our parents had always taught us to clear our plates and eat all of our food; it should never be wasted for there were starving children in China (on the other side of the world). When I was about four or five, I really believed that the Chinese people lived below the deep red dirt in our backyard, all the way through it, clear to the other side. I often tried to dig my way to China out there in the backyard on those long summer days. If I ever was so lucky to dig deep enough and get all the way through, I could take all of my unwanted food off of the dinner plate and pass it down to the Chinese. But I was never able to dig deep enough though. There was always just more red dirt. So the food just kept on getting wasted at the dinner table. Every week I had to confess in the confessional all of the times that I had left food on my plate. One week I had added up a lot of wasted food.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned . . . I wasted.”
“What? You’re wasted?”
“No, I wasted,” I confessed to Father Downs. “I waste almost every day.”
“You waste what?”
“I waste the food on my dinner plate.”
“Is this Michael Hogan again?” Father Downs asked, “For the love of St. Peter!”
My brother Steve was smarter than me. He used to put all those chewed-up pieces of meat in different places, like under the overturned soup spoon on his plate or under the table for Schnopsie, our inbred Schnauzer, to eat. Steve sometimes wedged the chewed meat or liver in the corner of the table, underneath where the legs come up and connect to the top in a spectacular aluminum “V.” He was really creative with those pieces of liver that tasted like they had been marinated in chlorine. Steve was brilliant.
The incredible beauty of the Colorado hills pushed back at us through the Fairlane windows as we eased our way closer to the plains. We leaned into the last of the hairpin turns. Pale aqua brush, rusty bushes, yellows, and meadows of purple haze were everywhere.
Bob Marley soon had us bouncing and jamming toward the smoggy Denver skyline. The light of the morning was miles and miles behind us, and the late afternoon loomed just a few miles ahead of us. Salmon-skinned clouds covered the whole sky in a uniform pattern, with glimmering bumps all of the way to the horizon; I had never seen the sky look like this before.
With the city ahead of us, we fiddled with the knob and the snowy radio airwaves. We picked up Magic FM out of Denver, and Gordon Lightfoot’s ballad “If You Could Read My Mind” came through.
I listened to this heartbreaking story of a love lost, a song I was very familiar with. It brought out the latent feelings inside; I had been ambushed again. The story tore at me like it was uniquely mine, like I intimately knew the person that this heartbreak was about, almost as if the words had been written by my own hands.
I soon drifted again within the rolling miles. In my Mittyesque daydreams, I segued into our trip being a movie on the big screen. Outside of myself, I watched the three of us in the car, driving toward Denver, with opening credits rolling all over us. The hero is lost (I am the hero). Maybe it ends in New England somewhere; perhaps in a small town in the White Mountains, somewhere off of the Kancamagus, with a roaring fire crackling away in a log cabin and a blizzard raging outside. The girl of my dreams is with me. Of course, in the movie, Declan and Lucas would continue on to Europe or go off to make their own sequel in the last turn of the script. They had probably imagined their own ending anyway.
“You’ve got to write the ending first,” our Orange Coast College writing professor, Mr. Blakely had told us. “The screenwriter must always have his ending in sight. Take the classic Chinatown, for instance; there is no other screenplay written more perfectly. It is truly a masterpiece.”
The soundtrack was also important. The right music would weave the whole story together, I felt, for, after all, music was the soundtrack of life. Music had a way of igniting fond memories in us all. It could bring back moments in time; you could close your eyes and be back there again.
When I ran track in high school, I played the songs of the Rolling Stones’s album Hot Rocks over and over again on the parlor turntable each night before a big meet. This is how I would prepare for it. The next day, I’d close my eyes as I silently sat in the blocks waiting for the starter. I was running the 440 at Cauley Stadium. Right there, I tried to hear in my mind the lead-in to “Gimme Shelter” with that crazy clock winding down, followed by Keith Richards coming in with the guitar . . . the rising crescendo of his instrument increasing ever so slowly, and ka-blam, with that pop of the starter’s gunfire, I would burst out all at once from those nervous blocks . . . and Mick Jagger with his incredible vocals would push me into the raging race.
At the turn in the track, I would cut in, swinging my arms, one arm sweeping in front of my body in order to conserve every ounce of energy. I breathed from my mouth like a blowfish, with arms thrusting . . . whoosh, who, whoosh, who, whoosh . . .
Pushing toward the end, pushing hard, seeing blurry people, they were edging closer, and closing in on the finish line . . . all the while, Mick and Keith wailing me through that song and the final seconds of the race. Gimme Shelter was the soundtrack to my life’s race.
Charlie Donavan would always beat me in all of the races that we ran. I usually took second place ahead of the opposing school. Charlie and I were oftentimes the one and two finishers in all of those articles in the Lowell Sun. My mother cut out every single one and stuffed them in a manila envelope that she placed in the back of the china cabinet. They’d all be there someday for me, if I wanted them. When I got to UMass, I told Will Garrity, the dark-haired Irishman from Southie, about having “Gimme Shelter” in my head when I sprinted, ’cause it helped me to focus. But then Garrity from Southie says to me,
“A song about rape and murder helps motivate you?”
“It’s not about rape and murder! . . . It’s about getting shelter, Garrity; Come on, now.”
Why were people always looking through the good to find the bad? Life was this great yarn to me, colored red, white, and blue; it was like a giant quilt made up of all different patches, squares from different places, different people, and different music all pieced together. The human experience was a giant jigsaw puzzle, with jigsaw people connected everywhere. I jotted down something in my notebook as we entered the Denver city limits:
Jigsaw puzzle people
Pieced together
Church without a steeple
Stormy weather
It rhymed. I thought how incredibly crazy it all seemed that everyone else might have these mad thoughts going on in their heads all of the time too. People just like me in similar places but with entirely different observations on life; just like passing cars on the highway and thoughts inside of them always traveling at the speed of light, or whatever the speed of a thought would be.
We cruised through the mall at Sixteenth Street in downtown Denver. The city streets showcased old and new skyscrapers side by side. A black homeless person yelled at us at a stoplight, “Crackers, fucken crackers! Crackers who never cut the poor folk a break! You fucken crackers have stepped on me your whole life! You don’t know what it’s like to be me, you fucken cracker looking at me!” he screamed in my face. My window was rolled down.
I was sorry for what he said. “Crackers,” I chuckled to the other guys. I envisioned a box of Saltines, spoiled past their store date with the individual wax package all squished up and nothing but crumbs left of something that once was complete.
I saw the pristine capital building; its pale white dome heavily lighted in the night. The building was empty; a façade for all of the shenanigans that happen in any political forum. The ragged people outside in its shadows; the homeless in the big cities of America, sleeping during the day, but awake in the night because it was the only way to survive.
On the floor at Decky’s sister Megan’s apartment that night, I poured over our Rand McNally Road Atlas. We were exhausted from working out, swimming in the complex pool, and afterward, feasting on a delivered pizza. I found the Jersey Shore on the map. From there, I tried to find Medford, New Jersey, where my friend Sandy now lived, but got distracted and followed the turnpike all the way up to Massachusetts; I looked for Pittsfield, Springfield, Fall River, Brockton, the North Shore, and Lowell; I tried to envision the end of this wonderful journey.
Maps were always great for spinning the time and bending your imagination. I remember studying them for hours on end, throwing myself into their two-dimensional topography, going over every place that my eyes could wander, following the rivers to the sea. I looked across all of the Rand McNally cities that we had pushpin-plotted across our vast continent. I realized that each city was teaming with parallel lives, somewhere similar to my own but also very different; people with their own set of schools and sports teams, with many caught up in their own dreams and passions, trying to get through their blessed days. I thought about the infamous sports rivalry between the Red Sox and the Yankees that I had grown up with, and how this same sports passion could probably be found anywhere in America.
Here I lay on an apartment floor in Denver, one of 230 million strong, a single conscious cell amongst many, thinking about my next stop on our gradual move eastward. California was in the rearview mirror now. Huntington Beach, Newport Beach, Costa Mesa, Irvine, Tustin, Fullerton, San Clemente, Santa Barbara; they were all cities that I didn’t even know in 1980, but in 1984 brought me fond memories and friendships that I suddenly missed. My friend Sandy had moved from Newport Beach back to Medford, New Jersey, just months before we left.
I looked for Medford on the map again. It was barely a small typeface town; yet, I knew that this place probably meant a lot of things to a lot of people. Sandy had taken creative writing and screenwriting courses with me at Orange Coast. She was tall, thin, and beautiful, for sure. We collaborated on ideas; she was crazy because she could never stop writing. She wrote on her hands; she wrote on her shoes; she wrote beautiful ballads; she wrote on pages that slowly turned into real living medieval heroes and villains. I sometimes wondered if Springsteen had written his beautiful song “4th of July, Asbury Park” exclusively for her as I often hummed those lyrics in my head.
I thought about Jersey people. Most of the guys from Kappa Sig were from Jersey too; most of the wrestling team, as a matter of fact: Guido, Belotti, Caparossa, Sandoval, and Murph. And those fraternity hallways always roared so loud with drunken laughter. I remembered the night that Buddy Love knocked over his rat cage. All those rats, tens of them, all out and scurrying across the fraternity floor. They ran to the holes in the walls; they ran from the light of day, only to haunt us all later on in the dead of night when we came home and flicked on the light switch in our room. We’d always see them scampering. Rats were more dreadful to me than sharks on the open water; all of us had to try to sleep through it all until the board of health finally condemned the place. We had to block out the thought of waking up with one of those crazy rats nibbling away at our face. But beautiful Kappa Sig was gone now. So was that stench of days-old beer in the rubbed out carpets. But sweet memories still lingered of New England springtime blowing reverie through the open windows of that frat house. Sounds of Springsteen rang through the empty corridors of my mind; the sound usually came from Guido’s room back there, his door open and Guido’s own soft voice accompanying Springsteen’s melodic poetry . . .
He sang about Sandy. He sang about Colette. He sang about all of the beautiful girls who forever haunted us all.