Chapter 29
Saturday, September 15th, the 22nd day
Bridgie made everyone pork chops for brunch and cooked up lots of vegetables from her backyard garden: cabbage, carrots, tomatoes, broccoli, and cucumbers, all cooked in olive oil. And, of course, there was homemade lemon meringue pie for dessert. I asked Bridgie how broccoli in her garden grew, and she brought me over to the kitchen window that overlooked the backyard.
“See the back left corner of the garden?”
“Yes.”
“Well, come up to the first yellow flower and do you see the green leaves below it?”
“I see them.”
“Well, the broccoli grows in the middle of the leaves. You can pick it off, and it will grow again, just as long as you keep the leaves intact.”
From the kitchen window I looked out past the broccoli and through two yards to see the back side of the Schmidt’s green garage, the garage that Wilhelm and his dad had built ten years before without a permit or plans. And there to the left of it was the back deck where we had sat.
I thought of all of the things Wilhelm’s father had said to us that night when we sat on that back deck drinking all of his Stroh’s beer.
“Eat it up; ain’t no good warm!”
I thought about poor Wilhelm all by himself out on the West Coast now. What would become of him? And all of my other friends I had made out there like Brian Kelly and Sean Tarrytown. The consummate funnyman, Sean Tarrytown was transitioning to another engineering job up in Northern California. He left the comfort of the circuit board factory for more money. With his move from the beach, I wondered if we would lose contact with Tarrytown forever, because that’s usually how those things went. I also realized that these last three weeks of travel had only been but a few pages in my wonderful life. It was such a short snap of the towel, yet, we had reconnected with so many friends, and we already had so many great memories of this trip: Zane and Maureen, Roni, Anna, all of Luke’s family, and many, many more. Would I ever see any of them again?
There were so many chapters ahead for me too. This journey wasn’t a linear thing, though; it wasn’t like having to get through a long book. I had to keep telling myself to get inside of every moment along the way. Life was about the power of the present, for the present moment mattered more than anything. Heck, it actually dictated what would happen in the future when you realized this simple notion and fearlessly acted on it. I wasn’t simply reading through the written pages of War and Peace or another long work of art, with thousands of pages to turn and the burning desire to gauge the marker to measure how far I had to go to finish. I didn’t have to get through anyone else’s written words. You see, here I actually was, the writer.
Our plans were to drive straight through to Philadelphia. The hard Cleveland rain had stopped now, and light drizzle graced the afternoon. As we readied to leave Taft Avenue, the cool air with that clean smell that fresh rain often brings with it was exhilarating. A low fog hung above the moist asphalt of the streets of Decky’s old neighborhood. Bursts of sun broke through the fast-moving throws of white and dark clouds. The sun’s bright silhouette outline appeared to me like a ghost behind a rolling cloth sheet. In the driveway, Decky’s little sister Molly prepared to leave for Ohio State. Molly sang to the music, a song from The Kinks that blasted out of her bedroom window as she made her happy trips back and forth from the house to her car, packing it with her full crates and clothing. Her first day of school was Wednesday, the 19th, but she was moving back to Columbus today. This was already her junior year, Decky quipped to us. She was the last Brady left in college. Poor Molly was going to be a chemical engineer.
Philadelphia was next for us where we were going to spend a night at Decky’s older sister Maggie’s place. Maggie’s apartment was situated just outside the city in rural New Jersey. She was away on business, but her husband Jimmy would be expecting us in the evening. From there, we would move on and visit Sandy, my writing friend from California. Sandy had recently moved back home to help her family out since her brother had been framed for something he didn’t do and sent to prison. I had promised Sandy in a letter that I’d have a screenplay synopsis to her by the time we landed in Jersey. This was an exercise to keep us both focused and on track with our individual goals, for Sandy would, in turn, have me critique a screenplay synopsis of her own. When I had left Huntington Beach, I had a few ideas and thought there’d be plenty of time to come up with a complete screenplay synopsis while we crossed the country, but now, I realized it was too late. It had all gone by so fast.
“Don’t shelf that cocaine story idea just yet,” Decky said to me. “Why don’t you just give her that one?”
Fourteen Lines was the name of the screenplay. It was a story that I had started at Orange Coast College about a businessman crack addict who carried around a pocket mirror and a Swiss Army Knife. I based the idea on some of the stuff that I had seen while I worked at a company called IBC in 1981. The sales professionals in suits at IBC spent their evenings in and out of Newport Beach Happy Hour powder rooms; they’d sometimes even offer me lines to snort in the empty break rooms of the workplace during the day, but I always nervously refused. Because of this, I was ostracized from the sales group overnight. All of them were up-and-coming executives with too much money to spend, living in the sweet spot of life, that beautiful lap of luxury, Newport Beach, California. Disillusioned with it all, I left IBC and stumbled into the street again. This led to the ketchup-and-white-bread sandwiches and the attempt to work the Hollywood intern jobs before my last desperate circuit board factory gig.
I had come up with this title Fourteen Lines to symbolize a lot of things, with fourteen also being the number of lines in a sonnet. Fourteen lines became fourteen lies in the end. My main character was a person a lot like myself, only older, a future me who had made all the wrong choices; he had become addicted to crack cocaine. He was an executive who had it all without ever knowing it, without ever being happy; he was always chasing the next great thing. He forgot how to breathe in life, to drink the whole glass of orange juice and let it run down the sides of his face. He blew it all by snorting powder up his nose.
“You’ve got to write the ending first,” our writing professor, Mr. Blakely, always said. “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.”
So I wrote the ending first. It was beautiful . . . a beaten man finally finding the goodness in life again.
A good screenplay, like everything in life, was mostly in the formula, Blakely said. Just like life itself, if you could master the routine of it all, the rest was easy. A screenplay formula, just like a math formula, was a simple series of clear-cut steps. After all, didn’t everything in the universe ultimately have a sense of order to it? Introduce the characters and the situation in your setup, throw in your hook, establish some resolve in the midpoint, after the midpoint build it to a crescendo-like climax, followed up by the final twist where everything falls into place, and then, smack—you finish with the happy ending, the good wins over the bad, and love always triumphs. Like a well planned event, he said, everything in a good screenplay could be carefully spelled out in a linear sequence; there was an order to it. Of course, you needed the vision too, Blakely said, but once you had that, the easy part came—a standard blueprint to put it all out on, the sweet, passionate unraveling of everything and anything.
“A writer’s vision flows from the power of the present moment!” Blakely exclaimed. “When you are in it, you will know it!” That was the line of his I loved the most.
But sometimes a good visionary probably needed a good screenwriter too. I wondered if it was ever possible to be both. I scratched my head and wondered if someone could also have a well planned life just the same as a well planned event. Something always seemed to come along and screw up the plans.
The odometer read 74,481 miles. We stopped on our way out of Akron to fill the tank with fourteen and a half gallons of gasoline. Luke paid $15.10 at the pump, and we were once again on our way. With Interstate 76 all rolled out before us, we headed east toward the Pennsylvania line. Fields of wildflowers, with yellows, scarlets, greens, and browns, stretched out beyond imaginary stanchions as they aligned the sides of the big asphalt carpet that went forever to the eastern horizon. Further along the road, off to the right, I noticed that a field of sunflowers had captured an oil derrick, overrunning it with beauty as the oil digger still tried to pump away nervously, droning on amidst an onslaught of climbing vines; its very existence was threatened by this gradual manifestation of nature. The bright colors of life were slowly overtaking the grays of a once-determined progress.
Before Youngstown, the 76 rolled into Interstate 80, where we continued on into western Pennsylvania. Pittsburgh and all of Steeler Nation sat below us to the south. I had never been there, however, we had no time for it now. We would stay on the 80 eastward all afternoon. Seas of tall green mossy grasses adorned our peripheral field of view, with speckles of violet flowers everywhere. We were running furiously through the poppy fields toward Oz, looking for the great city beyond the horizon. I felt dreary.
The wildflower
Will always grow free
The world should let it be
The candle
Needs oxygen to burn
Takes in everything to learn,
To grow
I once knew the wildflower, I thought, but now she was gone. I still held her in my memories, though.
A rainy, damp, refreshing smack of East Coast autumn hit us head-on, right in the windshield, as we listened to Gordon Lightfoot sing “Carefree Highway.” There were many seasons along this roadside, I observed, some still stuck in summer with no signs of any changes and some way ahead of autumn, almost barren, with the rest of the landscape around us at various stages in between. It was like one of Ingrid’s ever-changing paintings. I remembered she had a rolling landscape masterpiece that changed from left to right, where winter had to find a way backward through fall and then summer in order to get to spring. I looked hard for spring again, but saw no signs of her. I noticed red, orange, and gold-leafed trees all intermingled with the stable firs of a certain December.
“I can’t wait to get to Europe to have sex!” Decky screamed out of the open window of the car and then turned to me to say, “And you can quote me on that! This trip has been some trip!”
We crossed over bridges on Interstate 80 where I immediately experienced the great perception of depth. Faraway rivers hundreds of feet below us nestled in deep green wilderness roared with the spirits of ancient voices. With one bridge came vertigo and sweating palms. I had to avert my gaze upward again to steady myself on the three-dimensional hills across the valley. There were several hints of coal country beyond the hills, and trees were now everywhere across the landscape, covering all of life’s colors. It was so different than the subtle browns and yellows of the now-distant American West. On the right side of the car, I counted seven hills in sequence, just like standing dominoes. The low western sun behind us caused them to throw shadows on each other. The weight of the eclipsing darkness from one cast longer shadows upon the next in line, but these were such futile attempts for darkness to take each of these hills down, I thought, for even though I had never been here before, I innately knew these hills had endured the night for centuries and would never fall. They would still stand tall in the morning, for sure.
Wild green grass that graced the sides of the road turned shades of purple and rust browns as we pushed on. The failing light played tricks with the grasses’ hues; hints of orange still burned on the grass tops, like embers, as the disappearing sun tried to ignite them all one last time, but tragically, to no avail. For any who doubted the return of daylight, the night beckoned them to not be afraid of her ominous illusion anymore. It was a peaceful blanket, she promised, and the morning light would certainly be magnificent, like no other light you have ever seen before.
We tried cutting from I-80 from Bellafonte toward Reading, all the while looking for the mad turnpike. Maybe it was Route 147? Maybe it was Route 61? We traversed small Pennsylvania towns of yesterday, and I had visions of bearded Amish gentlemen riding in horse drawn wagons beside me. I saw mountains to our right now that had already swallowed the orange setting sun. Dusk. A barn stood in the distance with silver and gray fields before it. Everything was quickly losing its purple now. It was a crazy time study; the colors moved fast to black and white, with the only movement in this still life that of color itself. And then the roads curved and winded for another 174 miles.
We drove on into the night toward Philadelphia and eventually crossed over the Delaware River toward Voorhees, New Jersey, where Decky’s sister, Maggie, and brother-in-law, Jimmy, lived. It was midnight and another 120 miles by the time we arrived there. Jimmy was the only one home, for Maggie was traveling out West on business.
“Eat it up; ain’t no good warm!” Mr. Schmidt had said. This was the life that the darkness had promised.