Chapter 22
Sunday, September 9th. We showered early and said good-bye. I ate several pieces of a cut pineapple that Fran had prepared as we headed out the door.
It was my turn to put gas in the tank. At the gas station, I reached into my bag that had been stored in the trunk of the car to grab the mileage notes that I had been logging since our departure. The odometer read 72,680 miles now. It had started at 69,500 miles in Huntington Beach, sixteen days before. It was amazing to me that we already had logged over 3,000 miles. I squeezed the nozzle handle on the hose in order to get every last drop into the tank for the long journey ahead. The gallon numbers slowly churned down, stopping at 12.8 gallons. Spin, Cherries, Cherries, Orange, Nothing. Good-bye. It was $14.10 out of my pocket, just about $1.10 per gallon of gas.
The party is over, the wine has been drunk, more barrels of oil on back order
Seven veiled sisters hold out their hands at the front of a line,
Worth more to the desert than water
The Fairlane was refreshed now. While I finished filling the tank, Decky had squeegeed the windshield clear of all of the splattered insects that had run into us on our journey across the plain. We were now ready for Interstate 40, all 678 miles of it; we would try to make it all the way to Nashville by nightfall.
We would try to go from the west to the east in a day. And out on the open road beyond the city, as we pushed further east, we were fully prepared to witness the terrain changes, fully desiring to turn those pages from stretching western plains to hilly eastern woodlands. I longed for the early colors of autumn and to see the leaves changing; I looked forward to those once-familiar images of home.
The vast morning sky was gray and overcast with September gloom. Decky and Luke began working on the second loaf of banana bread that Faith had given to us back in Kansas City. They broke off hunks and corners into their hands, pulling it from the plastic wrap that had so neatly held it all together; the crumbs fell on their clothing and onto the seat of the car around them. We were immediately surrounded by nothing but farmland and old abandoned Creole barns, with the grazing cows out there watching us again. Further out there was some scattered marshland here and there as we pushed further eastward, amidst now desolate roads that disappeared into the hills of an ever-lamenting America.
“Luke got his monkey scrubbed twice last night!” Declan screamed to all of Oklahoma with the windows rolled down and the stale Midwest air blowing in and around us. “That crazy cat! Fucking Dillinger! I was ready to take his ninth life last night!” he added. “Dillinger almost went into the freezer with the ice cube trays and the TV dinners!”
Luke laughed. “Dillinger almost met Smith and Wesson, did he?”
There were hitchhikers every few miles on this long Oklahoma stretch. A man, perhaps in his fifties, open mouthed and wearing a baseball cap, looked at us going by as if he was looking back at his own fleeting youth. We were a moving picture of who he was, thirty years before, riding in a ’49 Hudson on an adventure that would never end, perhaps getting too caught up in it all and never going home. Out there on the highway he looked at us as if he suddenly realized that life had sorely passed him by. I wondered about the places that he had been and the stories that he could tell us, but thought it better to not stop for him. I figured that he might be too old to be a Vietnam vet but maybe too young to have fought in World War II; maybe he had been in the Korean War, or simply a member of a lost generation caught in between it all. Everything material he had ever cared for sat in a weathered duffel bag at his feet on the side of the road now. Where have you been, old man? I wondered if I might be looking out at a future version of me.
On the highway between Henryetta and Checotah we crossed the bridge over Lake Eufaula. A speedboat passed under us with a group of happy people aboard. I saw three beautiful girls with their boyfriends who pushed the air from their faces so confidently. Here were six other lives rolling in a tangent direction below us while Casey Kasem and his weekly Top 40 radio broadcast counted down the top songs of the week as we cut above them in the car.
Springsteen was on tour all across America. Anna’s fiancé Laird told us back in Topeka that Springsteen would play eleven long days in New Jersey. We might try to see him in concert if we got there in time, although money might be an issue for us. Tickets for The Boss would be pricey, for sure. Maybe we could surf with our bungie cord surfboard along the shore when we got there instead. We’d send out postcard greetings from Asbury Park, postcards that looked just like the album cover.
The morning clouds stayed with us and light sheets of misty rain started to come down by the time we got to Clarksville, Arkansas, but it was here that we began to finally see some real trees. The confederate gray forest of the South in the barely visible rain surrounded us. We saw groves of forlorn trees in a misty foggy cloud that extended back from the road; it was a cloud that sat at ground level right atop our earth. The thickness seemed to go back forever, through this deep, mysterious southern forest, a vivid color grey, with ghosts of soldiers of another time, Red Badge of Courage-like, still dwelling within the dreamy past of it. The pine needles on the forest floor, seemingly soft, a blanket in time, invited all of the weary . . . those that had walked here as ghosts for over 100 years, to lie down and finally sleep forever.
The gas needle on the dash fell from full to empty quickly. We stopped in Clarksville for Luke to take his turn and fill the tank back up. He stood out at the pump while the price wheel turned. I wondered if the song by The Monkees, “Last Train To Clarksville,” was a song about this place. We were at the blanket heels of the Ozarks. Was it about another Clarksville in another state? Maybe there were lots of Clarksvilles out there across America. The hit had risen to the top of the Billboard charts in the late sixties. It was about a soldier going off to Vietnam telling his girl to meet him in Clarksville ’cause he wasn’t sure if he would ever return from the war.
As we pulled away from the station, Decky fiddled with the radio dial. He briefly got some reception, KINB; it was a broadcast chasing after us all the way from Oklahoma City, but it faded forever after only a few minutes. The airwaves were filled with static now, broken and pulsating waves of snow, throbbing like a heartbeat, but then they slowly faded away too. We pushed further into the state of Arkansas toward Little Rock. Decky refused to give up as he continued to try to work the dial. After more fiddling, he finally settled on a country music station where Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” broke through softer roars of static. The white noise eventually gave way to the somber melody, with the clarity of the tune coming into full reception.
I looked out from my backseat window and felt a pit of horror in my stomach as the arches passed by, McDonald’s golden arches, with their large, bright, familiar yellow plastic “M” trademark on a tall post hanging high over the beautiful dark green backdrop of the hilly Ozarks. Decky twisted the dial again, for we were drawing nearer to Little Rock, and there was a better chance of finding more stations. He landed on a clear DJ announcer who talked about the 20th Annual Arkansas State Horse Show.
I thought about Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass standing in that pristine meadow of yellow flowers again, that empty album jacket just sitting beside the parlor turntable during my Eighteenth Street teenage years. Decky finally gave up on the dial and the airwaves and now resorted to the tape player. He put in Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Freebird” and “Sweet Home Alabama.” I tried to focus on a stack of Topeka postcards on my lap as I sat in the backseat of the car, methodically addressing them to our friends Henry, Brian Kelly, Ingrid, and my parents. The road and the endless day droned on and on. We guessed all of the states that border each individual state, figuring that Tennessee bordered more than any other; we counted nine states that touched Tennessee. All the while, Lucas determinedly drove further. In the afternoon, the sun finally broke through the clouds of the Arkansas sky. I finished a postcard from Carl’s Pharmacy in Aspen that Decky and I would send to Brian Kelly. I felt hungry again, not having eaten much since the pineapple for breakfast and likened my diet to that of a python, stuffing myself for just one huge meal every twenty-four hours. Perhaps I would do it again tonight, like I had done with the spaghetti. Perhaps I might overeat again and even feel sick. Life was all about this.
We talked about taking German lessons in Europe, just for something to talk about. We listened to more rock and roll from Luke’s collection. After ten hours of mad driving, we finally saw the great bridge, and drove across it, watching the massive brown water river pass below us. It was the great Mississippi River! It was the great river that splits America into the East Coast and the West Coast, the river of Lewis and Clark. Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn may have paddled on a raft somewhere below us, traveling throughout America’s real and imaginary past. My mind seemed to be everywhere at once during the crossing; it transcended all of time. I felt the essence of the South, with the great Memphis skyline off to the right staring the tiny Fairlane down as she approached her. We crossed over the “M”-shaped scaffold bridge, the Hernando De Soto. It was named after the Spanish explorer who was buried beneath the body of the river somewhere, although some believed he wasn’t here but buried at the bottom of a lake back in Arkansas.
There were signs on the side of the road for Tupelo, Elvis’s birthplace. The signs beckoned to us to venture down Interstate 78 where we might see where Elvis grew up in a little white one-room house, and the place where he bought his first guitar. But we resisted the temptation because we were sick of driving, and Luke’s friend Clark awaited us in Nashville.
In Memphis, we stopped for more gas, and paid $1.03 per gallon this time. I noticed a distinct Southern accent coming from the jumpsuit-wearing attendant as he spoke to us. His drawl was so much like the TV show and movie characterizations that we all had come to know. Was this the Deep South? Or was that place a little bit further down below us? Perhaps it was just Mississippi and Alabama, neighbor states of Tennessee that were the “Deep” part of this South; I wasn’t sure. Alabama was infamous, of course. It was where George Wallace, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird all came from. I liked that book To Kill a Mockingbird because it was so easy to read.
It was funny how people seemed to mock the South a lot, and its stereotypes. It was all about cotton and tobacco sometimes. Remember those rednecks in Deliverance? That banjo-playing hillbilly that sat on his rundown porch could play acoustics like no other. We dreamed of Southern Belles, the great football rivalries of the SEC, sweet tea, Georgia peaches, fried green tomatoes, and stacks and stacks of Waffle Houses that took up more real estate than the golden arches ever would.
But the dark memories of slavery also hung in America’s closet, and recently, the long march for civil rights. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis. I noticed the late-afternoon sun throwing shadows across these downtown streets. I thought about what Dr. King said the day before going out on that motel balcony . . . He had been to the top of the mountain and had seen the Promised Land—“God’s Will Be God’s Will.” He didn’t fear any man because he had “seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” It made me sad. Here we were in Memphis. It was a sad chapter in the great unraveling American ball of yarn. How hatred existed in someone’s soul just because of the color of another’s skin. It was only thread and cloth on the outside, yet people couldn’t see past the suits they wore to see what someone was like on the inside. We fought wars over the color or style of our suits, without even realizing it was never our choice to wear them in the first place; we were born into them! People even segregated themselves into exclusive groups because they wore the same suits. How silly it all seemed. Why so many would never grasp the stupidity of all of it . . . Heck, we were a bunch of idiots.
I wondered now, if Alabama was considered the Deep South, then what about Florida? But the Yankees had infiltrated Florida in golden droves in the fifties and the sixties, so perhaps Florida wasn’t Deep enough anymore.
I remembered going to Daytona Beach in 1980 during my senior year at UMass. Five of us drove twenty-four hours on rotating shifts, all in one car. We went 1,200 miles from Massachusetts to Florida in one shot. It was my first drive through the South. One of the guys I was with got nabbed for speeding in South Carolina, and we had to follow the cop to an off-road courthouse. We had to pay cash before the cop would let the guy go. When we finally got to Daytona Beach, we talked to a barefoot hillbilly in a pool hall that had never worn shoes or a suit in his whole life. I used to imagine that as the picture of the South.
But, alas, here in 1984, we were in Memphis. We had 200 more miles of rolling green hills on Interstate 40 before we would get to Nashville. We stopped at a roadside variety store where Decky bought a piece of fried chicken for seventy-four cents just to try it out. Luke and I ate the last of Faith’s banana bread and what food we had left with us. We split a banana. I took an apple, and he took a plum.
Listening to Aerosmith now on the tape deck, we pushed on into the cool early-evening searching for Nashville and country music. On the rolling ribbon of Interstate 40, a few occasional houses, nothing more than wooden shacks, appeared through the thick trees. The rolling landscape changed from thick pines to leafy, deciduous colors, to rare fields of alfalfa, before ending with a few grazing cows along long, flat stretches of the road. Even though it was still Sunday night, my mind was already on Monday and the calls I would have to make to the auto dealer and the bank in the morning.
It was 8:30 p.m. when the lit-up city skyline of Nashville came into view from our creeping position on the interstate. Country radio stations ambushed the dial at the outer city limits. Billboards were everywhere; some highlighted the 1984 Tennessee State Fair, another the infamous KZ100, a billboard featuring Willie Nelson, then more with Barbara Mandrell in concert and advertisements for her One-Hour Photo.
We were only eight miles from Clark’s house when we ran out of gas. When I had tucked it under a hundred miles outside of Nashville we were still showing above a quarter of a tank. How could I be so stupid to let that needle go down to nothing? I must have lost track. Everyone was quiet when the car choked repeatedly, stuttered with multiple jerks forward, and then came to a sad final stop. We sat there in the breakdown lane of the interstate. Decky and I quickly changed from shorts to jeans and set our sights on a Texaco sign about a half mile in the distance. It was down through the shoulder trees along the highway, so we begin to hoof there on foot. Lucas stayed with the car.
“I should have pulled over. I saw we were close to running out,” I whined to Declan.
“Sometimes the needle will go below the empty hash and get you a few more miles; sometimes it won’t. It’s funny like that,” Decky said.
We had run out of gas in the Fairlane before, the three of us, on a weekend trip from Huntington Beach to Las Vegas. Luke had been at the wheel that time. It was right at the California-Nevada state line. We had climbed up and through the mountains on Interstate 15. It was the darkest night of the year. The Fairlane coughed and sputtered bone-dry right as we crested the top of the desert grade. Thinking quickly, Luke shifted into neutral, and we rode that mountain almost all the way down to Nevada at near roller-coaster speeds. As we neared the state line, the lights of Whiskey Pete’s, a great casino oasis, sat out there all alone. But the desert road eventually flattened out, and the casino was still miles away. The Fairlane slowly decelerated from seventy to fifty to thirty to ten to nothing, and then the three of us were out and pushing it from the middle of our desolate stop to that glittering mirage that we saw on the Vegas backlit horizon. Southern Nevada has the only night sky in the world where starlight comes from the sizzling hot desert floor. In the Nevada desert, Luke threw the driver’s side door open. He pushed with his right arm on the steering wheel while Decky and I pushed with our backs to the bumper. We tried to get traction with our slippery shoes on the warm asphalt; we rocked her through mere inches at a time. We pushed for not more than a few minutes when this old guy (he looked like Sam McCloud, Texas Ranger) in an old Ford pickup came up right behind us and yelled at us to get back in the car.
“I’ll push you all the way to Whiskey Pete’s! Get back in there, fellas!” he cried.
Sam McCloud pulled right up to the bumper, and then he pushed us all the way! When Sam pushed us down the exit to Whiskey Pete’s, he hit his brakes and backed his truck off. We rolled right on in and up to the gas pump. Sam McCloud waved a passing wave good-bye to us in Nevada.
“Hope you win the big one!” Decky yelled to him as he drove off. Some people are saints and go through life always doing good for others. I couldn’t understand it.
Now in Nashville, there was no great mountain with a steep grade to ride all the way down to salvation. In the grand scheme of things, in this great plan, I figured everyone’s allowed to run out of gas at least once in their lifetime, but we had already used up our free pass.
“Am I stupid?” I exclaimed to Decky as we walked down the lonely exit ramp in Tennessee. We ducked under a concrete overpass and hiked a quarter of a mile over a worn dirt footpath through brush and the invading kudzu in order to get to the station that we had seen from the interstate.
Decky and I approached two attendants who stood out in front of the pumps. One guy was about six foot four and wore an old faded green T-shirt and a pair of ragged bell bottoms; the other guy was as small as I was and wore a greasy Texaco jumpsuit.
“Do you guys have a container that we can fill with a gallon of gas? Our car is broken down out there on the interstate,” Decky said to them.
“Talk to that fella over there closing up the garage,” the big guy said to us, pointing to an old guy with a light scraggly goat beard. The old guy was dressed in a greasy T-shirt, high water jeans, a pair of climbing boots, no socks, and a worn-out Atlanta Braves baseball cap.
“Here, take this old plastic container. You can keep it,” old Goat Beard said to us as he poured water from the container before handing it to us.
“We’re just going to put in a dollar ’cause we’ll be back with the car for more,” I said to him.
“Put in $1.04,” he said to me as we walked back to the pump. “That’s your cash discount.”
Decky carried the container, and we trudged off into the darkness. We took the same shortcut up the frontage road foot path, under the bridge, and over the guard rail to the spot on the interstate where we had just left Luke and the car. But Luke and the car weren’t there. We were befuddled. This was the same road and the same spot where we had left him. Confused, we started back to the gas station again, but walked by way of the road, with cars speeding by us all the while, our backs to them as they came at us off the soft shoulder. As we neared the station for the second time, down in the clearing under the station lights, we saw Luke and the car. The hood was open, and Luke was bare-chested and bouncing around underneath it.
“I’ve never seen that done before,” Decky said aloud, “getting a car to start without any gas. How did he do it?”
“I pushed it to the off-ramp, cruised a little, then pushed it some more,” Luke told us as we got nearer to him.
Inside the station, I bought two six-packs of Schaefer beer. Luke filled the tank and then tried to call Clark from a phone booth in the corner of the lot. He couldn’t reach him. We jumped in the car, but now the car wouldn’t start, so we had to push it back under the brighter station lights. As the Fairlane rolled back, her right side front bumper unintentionally scraped a parked Ford pickup truck.
“What do we do?” I whispered to the others. “Do we tell them?”
Luke and Decky both shook their heads silently. We couldn’t. Besides, it was just a little scratch, we assured ourselves.
We looked over through the darkness to see if any of the three attendants had seen what had just happened, but none of them had noticed. But four black teenagers were pulling out of the station in a VW bus, and they saw it happen. They looked at us, the car, and then up to the surfboard in scratch-your-head wonderment as they slowly pulled away.
Under the lights, the scraggly bearded attendant brought out a battery charger and plugged it into an outside outlet, hooking it up to our battery before turning it on.
“Black California plates, heh?” he said to me while running his check. “Y’all going to school out here?”
“No, just passing through visiting friends. We’re on our way to Boston,” I told him.
“That’s an awful lot of miles for an old engine like this,” he said to me.
“But it’s only got 73,000 on it now,” I said. “Luke bought it off of an old lady that kept it in her garage for years.”
“Oh, I didn’t realize she only had 73,000 miles on her. Never mind, then,” he apologized. “You know, I’ve been as far west as Denver. I went to auto school for about four months out there and even got job offers out in California and Arizona at Anthony Rigatelli’s $69.95 Tune-Up Time!” the goat-beard man said. “I’d really like to go back to Denver someday,” he suggested as he continued to work under the hood.
“Do you want a beer?” I asked him. I drank from an open can of Schaefer as he worked beside me.
“No, sir, not on the job,” he told me. “Go ahead and start her up,” Scraggly Beard signaled to Luke who now sat behind the wheel.
Lucas cranked it up, and the Fairlane turned over right away. She was all raring to go now.
“Heh, heh, we sort of put the fire back in that old baby, didn’t we?” the bearded attendant laughed out loud, lowering the hood and wiping his hands on the rag that hung from his back pocket.
“Thank you!” I shook his greasy hand.
“Have a good one!” Decky laughed as we jumped into the car, thanking the three of them again. We were on our way, full of gas and full of life. We all had a cold can of Schaefer to celebrate.
Decky yelled out one last yell to Old Scraggly Beard as we pulled away, “Hope you win the big one!”
Lucas screeched a one-pitch laugh as a sudden feeling of déjà vu overcame me. Scraggly Beard had helped us just like Sam McCloud had in the Nevada desert. We had scratched the truck in his lot, and I had this pit bull guilt again. Bad karma would be coming back now for sure, I thought, with just more penance to pay some day. But the wooden confessional box built from stolen boards from the neighbor’s barn was too far gone. We were quietly pulling away after having shredded across old Sam McCloud’s Ford pickup, ignoring our demons instead of confronting them head-on.
“Oh-oh,” Luke said shaking his head as we drove away, almost as if he could see right into my troubled mind. “Mike’s feeling all guilty again.”
But what were we supposed to do?
We arrived at Clark’s about thirty minutes later. His apartment was just on the outskirts of Nashville. On the couch off to the right of the doorway, his friends Hannah and Kirk got up to greet us when we walked in. Kirk was a KU alumnus and Hannah was Kirk’s sister. She was a tall, pretty blonde with green eyes and long, curly hair. A thin layer of makeup covered her broken-out complexion. Luke vaguely remembered Kirk, who also lived here in Nashville now. He was studying for his master’s at Vanderbilt, he told us. Hannah had been a sales rep at IBC here in town but had just recently quit her job. She was headed to Colombia, South America, she said, on October 1st, with a one-way ticket to see her boyfriend who lived there. Hannah hoped to never return to the USA. Clark had cooked a whole chicken for us, and we were grateful as we stacked our plates with food in the kitchen.
After dinner, Luke pulled out the videotape that he had brought along on our journey. It was a videotape that he had shot on a rented recorder back in Southern California. He popped the tape into Clark’s VCR for everyone to watch. Here, we watched as Luke interviewed people back in our lonesome kitchen in Huntington Beach. You could see gas pipes sticking out of the wall beside the refrigerator. The pipes looked for a stove to plug into, but our landlord never gave us a stove. I tried to hear the oil digger on the tape, the constant hum that we had become accustomed to coming from our backyard, but couldn’t hear her at first. She had stopped silent the night that we had left, but on the tape, she should have been still humming. The video recording now moved toward the back of the house as Luke rack focused through the back screened-in porch and, sure enough, there the digger was, just dipping her head up and down behind a chain-linked fence enclosure. Luke cut back to an eight dollar and sixty-two cent royalty check on the kitchen table that had been made out to the landlord from some oil company. We had opened it by mistake. We assumed it was for the rights to dredge for the crude. On the tape, Luke interviewed everyone at our house party. He asked them about life on the coast; he asked them about the constant hum of the oil digger; he asked them if they believed in the afterlife. Luke was chronicling the American dream. It was a short documentary on videotape. Tape was a much-easier medium to record on than film was, he felt. This would be the first of many documentaries to follow, for this is what we were all going to do, Luke told Clark, Hannah and Kirk; we were going to make it big someday for sure. But the tape abruptly ended and Hannah and Kirk got up to leave. Kirk still had homework to do, he said, and Hannah had to get ready for South America. As they left, Hannah wished us good luck in our travels, and we wished the same for her.
“Hope you win the big one!” Decky yelled to them both from the second-floor apartment door.
“And when you’re in Europe, don’t forget to visit Scotland!” Hannah yelled back to him.
We drank into the night, eating chips and dip and anything else we could find in Clark’s lonesome kitchen cabinets. Clark played cards with us into the approaching Tennessee dawn, a crazy card game called Bourgeois. We drank to Pete Townsend and the Stones blasting on the stereo; we pounded down one beer after another. They went down just like water and spilled out of the sides of our mouths. After cleaning the chip bowl dry, I ran my finger around the sour cream and onion container in order to get every last bit of it. The beers kept going, and we never thought about what it all was going to feel like when we lay on our backs and watched the spinning starry world crash around us after the lights went out. I tried to sleep, but the bed spins made me crazy, and I had to throw my leg off the edge of the couch. I wished the world would stand still.