Chapter 26
It was now Wednesday, September 12th. We had been traveling for nineteen days.
I woke up early on Xander’s couch and immediately saw my two friends strewn across the floor below me. When Decky and Luke awoke, we decided to take a run, to go about a mile all the way down to the sandy beachfront of Lake Michigan in order to dive into the dirty water. It was Decky’s dream to do this, and we badly needed to wash off the crazy ghosts of the night before. It was cold, ugly water at the shoreline, yet so refreshing. We waded in a few feet and dove into the low-breaking waves of the great ocean of the Potawatomi.
Back at the brownstone apartment, we said our good-byes to Xander and Colin, who were in the throes of their own morning depression, like millions of other Americans. They had to go to work. I remembered the mental preparation, the grooming, and the solemn walk to the car every morning; it was a routine that we three weren’t a part of anymore. It was so foreign to me now that even the disdain and bitter feelings that were associated with it had all but left me, the old thrill of “working for a living.”
We were back on the road by ten thirty. A cabbie cut Decky off just as we tried to find our way east out of the city. Decky tooted the horn and flipped the cabdriver off, and the driver nonchalantly flipped him back “the bird” in response. With the windows rolled down now, a strong smell of exhaust permeated the busy thoroughfare air. The sulfurous aroma smelled like hard-boiled eggs.
“I get it,” Decky said aloud. “That’s the way they communicate around here!” With another accentuated hand gesture out the window, he yelled to the cabdriver, “Hope you win the big one! That’s how I communicate!”
We wanted to be Columbus bound. Luke, our copilot, manned the road atlas; he tried to look for the big streets, picking eastbound roads at random until we could get to the interstate that we had come into the city on. In the crosstown traffic, passersby were tooting at us and rolling down their windows to tell us that we had tennis shoes and shorts hanging from the back of our car.
“Thanks,” Luke yelled back from the passenger seat with a wave of his hand. “We’re just drying them off; we swam in Lake Michigan this morning. It’s Decky’s fault!”
On the interstate, we passed three guys in an old red Dodge pickup truck, riding three across in the cab, with a camouflaged canoe hanging out of the tailgate. They were wearing army greens and browns, the same color as their canoe, and looked over at us in amusement when the Fairlane passed them on the left. Our laundry was hanging out the trunk and our canoe, the surfboard, was still bungie-corded down on top. I wondered where these soldiers were headed. They were three parallel lives on the road not taken. Maybe they were going to Fort Wayne. Did they think we were fools? The waves weren’t big enough to surf Lake Michigan. We were the idiots that they were training to defend. I nodded to them from the backseat, and all three nodded back politely.
There were middle-aged men and women all dressed up on the interstate, going to lunch, going on sales calls, on their way to meetings, who knows, some seemed unnerved and uncomfortable. A van drove by with some disabled adults all seated attentively inside. A pretty blond woman, their trip chaperone, had both of her hands tense on the steering wheel. She looked from side to side across the wide road as she tried to change lanes. Blessed be the disabled and the children; they have no voice; they have no choice. In kindergarten, Miss Lansing told us that kids with Down’s syndrome were closer to God than anybody else in the whole world, and that’s why we should treat them with kindness. That was when you could talk about God in school. We used to say prayers for them before class every morning.
A blue late-model Ford station wagon cruised by us in the right lane. Two thirty-something ladies had two small children seated in the back. The kids pointed to the surfboard and appeared to ask questions to their mothers, but their mothers kept on talking to each other, never venturing from their bubble, never hearing anything more than the sound of their own voices while their radio played . . .
People in jars
Stay away from the stars
’Cause they’re airtight
In Merrillville, we transitioned from the 65 and traveled southeast on Interstate 30, through the farmlands of Indiana. We passed cornfields with the overpowering smell of manure and all kinds of heavy farm machinery. The roadside billboards advertised wholesome milk. These were the baby-blue highways of America, I imagined, where native corn and whole milk were the lifeblood of these communities, staples that would ultimately feed our great nation. We were now blazing through the center of the country like a twister, I felt, leaving in our wake family and friends whose lives we were privileged to touch once more. We had infected all of them with our sickness, I secretly knew it. We exposed them to our restless search for something, for life. But the oil derricks had to keep on pumping somehow, despite our lack of responsibility, feeding the thirst of prosperity, working on overtime while we played, humming in the background of progress. The oil derrick in the Huntington Beach backyard lot had stopped, though. I was certain she still wasn’t working.
It was a humid day in Indiana. A bee flew by, buzzing around me and then carried on while I sat at the truck stop just outside Fort Wayne. The air was cool, fresh; the high blue sky streaked with stretches of cirrus clouds, all of them curving and holding onto our beautiful earth like an omnipotent pair of cupped hands. Truckers were greeting each other with their customary nods as they jumped from their rigs. They loaded up with their road ammo in the store near the pumps after also relieving themselves. It was just like back at the earlier truck stop we had driven through in Rensselaer. I likened the truckers to highway cowboys; their rigs complemented the freight trains on the lonely plain, running food and goods, back and forth all over the country. These road warriors were always in touch with the underlying pulse of the nation.
Crossing the Indiana border, the lyrics from Neil Young’s song “Ohio” at once came marching into my head. This song was the anthem song of Kent State that told the story of the 1970 college kids that had protested the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. They were gunned down by the Ohio National Guard. Neil Young’s emphatic repetition, a line about the four that died there, laid into me, over and over again as we crossed the state line. This was all I had ever known of Ohio before I met Decky.
Sure . . . Caprissi, Taboo, and I had cruised through the state once before in the darkness of the night, border to border, Pennsylvania to Indiana, on our way out west. But we had never stopped, save to get gas once. In the light I now noticed that we were surrounded by cornfields and random rustic barns here and there, a countryside reminiscent of rural New England. One barn in the distance had an old tin windmill beside it, the rusty blade turned ever so slowly in the humid wind. We exited from the 30 onto Ottawa Road, Route 65, and headed south to Lima. I read the road sign and enunciated “Leem-a” like the bean. Decky laughed to tell me that it was pronounced “Lime-a, like a lime.” When we stopped again for gas, five farm boys came out of the station laughing and pointing to the surfboard on our car.
“Which way to the beach?” one of them said, laughing, with the others busting up beside him.
I pointed eastward toward the flat horizon with green stalk cornfields stretched out in front of us farther than any eye could see.
“We left California, and we seem to be a little lost,” Decky held out his open palms as he walked toward them, wearing a wide-eyed grin.
The farm boys laughed, all of them, and directed us to the 117 South, another tributary road, where we picked up the 33 into Columbus. The 117 South reminded me so much of the back roads of Dracut and Methuen that I even pictured the hundred-years-old carriage house of my father’s uncle Arthur out there, somewhere, just like it had been in Dracut. Maybe it was next to a dilapidated barn with Frank’s 1934 Indian motorcycle hidden somewhere in its depths.
We tried to pick up music on the radio but could only find a weak Stevie Wonder singing “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” This made me think again about Jeff Beck’s “’Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers” from the Blow by Blow album. The guitar took a breath as it sobbed when I played it in my head. It echoed in and out; it kept pulling at me. It was amazing that all of humankind shared a similar connectedness when confronted with moving music. It tore at everyone’s core being in much the same way, I was sure of it, bringing back inner desires that were once a part of another distant moment. The beat of the music would take me somewhere else, a place in the past, old feelings of love, happy memories from yesterday, and then sudden feelings of sadness, for now it was gone. Music was the language that spoke to us all and told us that we were uniquely human. I still missed her.
Throughout the din and the flatness of the western Ohio landscape, there were outbreaks of occasional sanity, oases of majestic green trees in the middle of abundant life-bread cornfields. From the distance, a monster tractor approached us on a small winding road. It passed loudly behind us as we moved quickly by it in the opposite direction, the loud roaring sound trailing the machine by a few seconds after the beast had already gone by.
“Boy, what a big mother!” Decky exclaimed.
“And the tractor he was driving in was pretty big too!” I responded smartly.
Luke elicited a loud shriek of sudden laughter, the response that the road itself had come to know, one that was so characteristic of Luke’s whole being.
Decky fiddled with the radio dial and happily found what he had been searching for, WMMS, “Home of the Buzzard!” Cleveland Rock Radio! We continued to drive along another country road alongside a small river as dusk quietly approached. With our windows rolled down, the slow marching hum of the crickets came with dusk, trying to bring the day to a close; they sang their love songs in unison to each other, millions of them, all along the tall grasses of the Columbus roadside. We took in the sounds of the late afternoon, to drink in all of Ohio State, for we had landed.
Once on campus, Decky took us first to the football stadium and had us climb to the top of the bell tower to take in the early-evening view. We watched the sun setting peacefully on what was now the forgotten west; the distance between the bell tower and the orange-pink horizon appeared so great to me that it was hard to believe it was the same west we had just shuffled across. And there was nothing but a warm and calm purple darkness out toward the east. The breeze up at the top was light and relaxing, with the smell of the fall air igniting old memories of more cornstalks and maple leaves. I looked out on the canvas of surrounding trees, the leaves that would soon turn colors and fall to the campus corridors below us, and imagined crowds of students shuffling through them; the greens of summer gone. I imagined thousands of students marching to home football games, classes, midterms, the bitter cold of the Ohio winter, and ultimately, those dreadful final exams. Neil Young’s “Ohio” played once again in my head.
From the bell tower we walked amongst the tree-lined parkways of the campus. Hazy purple light from the onset of night caused the faint shadows of the trees to trip the paths and eventually disappear. On the right was a pond with a shooting fountain and summer algae stagnating all along the edges of it. We walked by old Ohio architecture, university buildings, searching for some sign of student life, longing for a connection to the world that we had once been so much a part of.
“It’s weird how every college campus is like its own little world,” Luke said. “You know how they all have their own school colors, traditions, culture, beliefs, a sense of individual school spirit . . . all of them tiny islands unto themselves.”
“Hundreds of random colleges with their own mascots like Brutus the Buckeye,” I said. “Come on, Decky, how can you have a fierce and intimidating chestnut as a school mascot?”
“Be careful how you talk about Brutus,” Decky warned. Decky told us that back in the day at an Indiana away game, the Indiana fans stormed the court and flattened poor Brutus the Buckeye after the game. They got him on the floor and started punching and kicking him, trying to pull off Brutus’s big head. Poor Brutus was all laid out on the court trying to hold onto that huge papier-mâché chestnut head while getting kicked in the ribs. It was funny and sad at the same time.
We were anxious to move on but decided to hit one of the local pizza joint happy hours, Papa Joe’s, on our way out. A homeless black man sat on the stoop on the side of the restaurant.
“How you guys doing?” he asked.
“Fine, thanks, how about you?” I quickly answered as we passed on the sidewalk behind him.
“Can I ask you something?” he followed it up. “Can you spare any change?”
Luke reached into his pockets. “Well, I got a quarter that I can give you,” he said. We were all three homeless ourselves, I thought, but Luke still selflessly gave to the homeless.
“That’ll be just fine. God bless you,” he said to us all, taking the quarter swiftly from Luke’s outstretched hand as Luke bent over to hand it to him. The black man half stooped back to his comfortable seat on the curb.
It was strange, I thought, that it was always the ones on the bottom of society, with all the misfortune that life had dealt them, who still had all of this faith left in God. They never blamed God for their circumstances like some of the more fortunate did; they never walked out on God like the rest of us. Was it because God might be the only hope left in this crumbling world? Some called it the point of sweet surrender, when the only way back to sanity is to accept where you have fallen and ask someone for help.
Papa Joe’s was filled with young people, crazy, returning college kids, with school not yet in session, celebrating a new semester as the Top 40’s music roared inside. From the corner jukebox, sounds echoed off the walls loudly as we pushed our way to the bar in the center of the restaurant. Decky ordered a pitcher of “Hoody Gold” with three mugs. There were six big guys standing in a huddle at the bar right next to us when Decky passed the empty mugs to Luke and me. Two or three of the guys were wearing red Buckeye sneakers. They had five real cute girls around them, trying to break their way into the guys’ conversation, but the guys were too into their strategy talk about the week’s upcoming game against Washington State; they paid the girls no attention. Luke, Decky, and I were just plain invisible to everyone.
“I don’t think they’re big enough to be football players,” Decky yelled over to me.
“They’re just tiny girls, Decky, of course not!” I yelled back to him.
“That’s what I was thinking.” He scrunched his nose and moved on behind the linesmen’s backs, always keeping a firm grip on our pitcher of beer.
As I said, no one noticed us because we were invisible. We were too old for this crowd. We quickly downed the pitcher of Hoody and prepared to cut out to Decky’s hometown, Cuyahoga Falls, for there was nothing left for us here. Neverland had forever changed. The girls all around us talked amongst themselves, shrouded, protected in their bubble. We sadly realized that the past was quickly fleeting; this wasn’t Decky’s Ohio State anymore. All of Decky’s college friends were long gone, off somewhere, working their grown-up jobs now. We had to move on. We laid the empty pitcher and the empty mugs on the bar. No one turned to watch us leave, for they remained in their own separate world, so sheltered, so naïve, so happy.
Out at the side entrance, our homeless friend awaited us with two white compatriots seated on the stoop on either side of him. These were three parallel lives to ours, just hanging on to that bottom rung. They were definitely on a different journey than we were, I realized, just outside the bubble, but, for as fallen as their lives seemed, I strangely wondered if they had secretly arrived, sitting right at the front of the line at the gate. The homeless all had a certain peace about them that I wanted to possess. I was searching for a way to surrender to this wholeness that the three seated on the curb now all seemed to hold onto. They seemed so calm in their being. God would take care of it all.
“Hey, buddy!” one of them yelled at Luke as he approached.
“No, no, I already hit him,” our old black friend quickly told the others.
We all laughed at this and bid them all to have a good night.
“Stay warm tonight, my friends,” Luke said to them when we passed.
“God bless you,” the black man said, yet again.
Pulling out of the parking lot in the Fairlane, I waved to the curbside angel, who was still sitting on the stoop, smiling, taking a brown bag hit from his bottle of Mad Dog 20/20. He nodded his head and winked to us.
“Hope you win the big one!” Decky yelled out to him from the open window.
We were northbound on the 71 toward Akron and Cuyahoga Falls. Decky assured us it was only a mere two and a half-hour drive. We were restless. We longed for the home cooked food and comfort of Cuyahoga Falls.
In the distant days ahead, perhaps in a week, we’d be going through my college town, Amherst, too. I worried that UMass would be a similar experience to Ohio State, with everyone gone and all grown up.
It was late by the time we arrived at Decky’s parents’ house in Cuyahoga Falls. We were well tired of playing “guess the name of the next song” on the radio. Decky seemed to always win. WMMS, “the Buzzard,” faded in and out before finally just going dead with white noise.
“I wonder if she’s gone off the air for the night,” Decky said. “We should be getting a stronger signal, not a weaker one. After all, we are driving toward Cleveland . . .”