Chapter 23
Monday, September 10th. It had been seventeen days.
Another morning in another city. I woke up and momentarily did not know where I was. There were sounds familiar to me, though, Steppenwolf (the lonesome wolf of the steppes) sang “Born To Be Wild.” The music coming from Clark’s stereo slowly built to a crescendo.
“You always have to put on an album side; there always has to be tunes playing if you’re anywhere near the stereo,” Gary Pare from Paradise Beach (when I lived there with Zane) used to say. “No matter if you’re just waking up to help that hangover or just getting in from work, it should be automatic. You always need to put on a side to relax. You always have to have music—because music is as bad as the ocean, man! Music is life!”
Here in Nashville, all dressed up in a shirt and tie, Clark sat at the kitchen table and nursed his own hangover. I noticed that he was balding, like me, and also stood at about my height and build. I was Clark in a parallel life, making morning sales calls. It was some other random universe. I noticed his audible Kansas drawl. Clark had a degree in mechanical engineering, just like Luke, but he had moved to Nashville for a sales job in GM’s robotics division. He told us that he hated every minute of it. Clark was doing what he thought he had to do. He was out on his own, renting his own furnished apartment, two bedrooms, for four hundred dollars a month. Clark was living the bloody American dream.
Clark’s sales calls made it into my hangover sleep while I lay on the couch. I was in and out of half dreams. It was a scenario of robotic arms on factory show floors with someone narrating in the background. It was all about automation and the future. The average production bled into something called lemonade horsepower, and it all replaced a workforce who wanted to go bowling, because that is where the dream ended.
“Help yourselves to anything in the apartment. I’m off to work.” Clark left us.
“And Mike,” he said before he left, “you can use my MCI work line to make those calls you need to make to California.”
“Thank you, Clark.”
So in my morning depression, I called the Subaru Sales Manager Ernie, who lamented that there was still no sale on my consigned vehicle that sat on his lot on Beach Boulevard in Huntington Beach. Even though he had promised that he would have it sold in under a week, he didn’t have a crystal ball, you know. He sang his well rehearsed ballad to me. Three weeks had gone by. I tried two phone numbers that I had for the bank, but both of them rang and rang and rang with no answer.
I agonized for several minutes there at Clark’s kitchen table about making yet another car payment. Finally, I traded Decky one hundred and eighty-five dollars in American Express traveler’s checks for a personal check that Decky had to write to Bank of America. It was almost like playing Monopoly, except I had nothing to show for the money I just spent. There would also be an insurance payment that would be due in another few days if the Subaru still hadn’t sold. It was sand slipping through my fingers. A plane ticket to Europe was hinging on how many grains would be left when we got to Boston. The Subaru was my sad addiction. I had wanted that new car when it first looked out at me from the lot earlier that year, but now, just a few months later, I couldn’t get rid of it. I wondered what old Ernie had listed my car for. What kind of profit was he making off of me?
Clark came back for lunch, and we listened to the Stones again. We spun their Big Hits (High Tide and Green Grass) greatest hits album from the sweet sixties. At the table, Clark and Luke reminisced one last time about all the good times at KU, for the past was now gone and everyone was moving in different directions. They may never see each other again.
When we left Clark, we navigated north toward the on-ramp to Interstate 65. We traveled through Kentucky, and I slept in the back all the way to Louisville. It was such a slow and comfortable sleep. It was one of those forget-all-your-troubles sleeps, a hover-outside-your-body sleep. It took me all the way across the big murky Ohio River into Indiana, and I felt rejuvenated when I finally awoke.
And so we continued on and rode that sweet crazy Interstate 65 all the way through the farmlands of Indiana. We drove on toll roads where road construction was happening everywhere. I watched teams of road crews rejuvenating these superhighway veins that connected every city in America. Potholes banged on our wheels on the frontage detour roads, divots knocked at our alignment as we searched for places to rest. We were moving forward on the zigzag line that had been marked on the Rand McNally Road Atlas, the line that eventually would lead me back to Lowell.
Right around the Interstate 44 exit sign for Shelbyville, Indiana, a sudden impulse overcame Decky, who reached into his things and pulled out Ohio Max’s lost pot pipe that Mary had given to him back in San Pablo, California. This was the same pot pipe that Decky was supposed to return to Max in Columbus when we got there. I watched as Decky swiftly cranked on the handle on the front passenger window. The raw cornstalk Indiana air blew in, and he heaved the pipe out the window with the arm of the lefty ball player that he had once been. We both watched the pipe bounce once off the shoulder and down the side ditch and out of our sight forever.
“Why’d you do that?” I laughed.
“If it truly has a mind of its own, let’s see if it can get back to Max in Ohio now!” Decky said to me, all wide-eyed and convicted.
“The weirdest thing happened, guys!” I imagined Max saying to us back in Columbus. “I pulled over to take a leak on my way back from Indiana, and I looked down, and right there in the ditch at the edge of the cornfield was my pipe!”
There were truckers at a truck stop in Rensselaer, Indiana, just wandering about. They had nothing but miles and miles of open road separating their present state of being from the future. A few of them talked on the side amongst themselves, trading handles and road stories. CB radio smack was their only other social outlet, I thought. They were on a forever-moving journey, a map occupied by their lonely big rigs and their changing precious cargo. I imagined the commonality of their running into a long forgotten acquaintance on these pit stops. It was a marvelous sophisticated subculture with its own language and its own rules.
As we closed in on Chicago, we roared through Gary, Indiana, the birthplace of Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5. It was music videos like Michael Jackson’s Thriller, a John Landis directed sci-fi music video, that had got us all pumped up about making this kind of stuff in the first place. Thriller was all the rage on MTV, when it had been released in late 1983. The video, just like Landis’s film An American Werewolf in London, had some pretty cool special effects. But Gary, Indiana, seemed like nothing more than an old steel town on the lake now. It didn’t appear that anyone was home; they had all moved out west. American industry was shipping offshore where labor was cheap. It was a somber state of affairs.
Decky and I rummaged through our collection of tapes (three boxes of them). Luke slept outstretched on the back bench seat. To burn the time, we had decided to randomly select a tape without looking at the title, pop it in the deck quickly, play at least three songs on it before we could pull it out, and then repeat this by popping in another. We had to do this until we hit the city limits. Decky went first, pulling Joe Walsh, Boston, and Meat Loaf. It went okay. Then it was my turn, and I pulled the David Seymour Band.
“Who is the blasted David Seymour Band?” I asked Declan. Of course, it was one of his Cleveland bands. I jumped to pull the thing out of the cassette deck. I had to break the rules.
“You can’t break the rules of this stupid game!” Decky said laughing.
I ejected the tape and dug into the box looking for something else. I pulled out Foreigner and played a song that had lyrics that I loved, “Starrider.”
I loved the thought of all of the stars out there in the vast night sky and “Starrider” took me there. I thought back to the millions of blinking lights in the Utah night sky. What were they really? Suns? The ever-expanding cosmos, the great unknown, and the answers to all of life’s crazy questions were somewhere out there too, I felt.
In my head, I went back to California again to Torrey Pines State Park with Colette and the hang gliders launching off of the cliffs. “Starrider” rhymed with hang glider.
Hang Glider
Tattered wind-drawn kite
Like a moth flies toward the light
I wanted to soar back to Aspen, too, but Aspen now seemed like a whole lifetime ago. I wanted to be marooned on her peaks again, revisiting all of the emotions and desires that I left there.
Gray spider
Cannot find his way
The thoughts won’t go away
Is the pain just here to stay?
“That’s bloody plagiarism, Mike. You stole the melody!” Trent had said to me back in Aspen. And then the hang glider crashed.