Chapter 30
Sunday, September 16th, it had been twenty-three days that we had been on the road.
Decky’s brother-in-law, Jimmy, told us all about Springsteen’s “Born in the USA Tour” that he had been to at the Philadelphia Spectrum the week before. “The Boss,” he said, “played from eight o’clock until one o’clock in the morning. Throughout the whole show, there were waves of arms and hands in the air, with bodies surfing across this whitewater wash of people, bodies slowly getting passed toward the stage, as if they were riding atop invisible surfboards!” All their minds were driftwood while Bruce pulled pretty girls up out of the audience to dance with them in the dark.
“This guy will be sold out forever!” Jimmy exclaimed. “It was the best rock-and-roll show I’ve ever been to! . . . Across the sea of people some large signs in the audience proclaimed, ‘F Michael Jackson, we got The Boss!’”
Springsteen was everything, and this was New Jersey, where he had gotten his start. I thought back on how Buddy Love used to play Springsteen’s Live at Winterland bootleg over and over again back at UMass in 1979. “BackStreets” echoed throughout those empty fraternity hallways with Guido always singing the loudest to The Boss’s song.
Buddy Love got so excited when we played that album, that one night at the fraternity while he danced about to it, he knocked over his overcrowded rat cage, and all of those rats ran mad to the holes in the walls, running from the light of the night. The rats haunted us for months after that. Every time we flicked on the light in our rooms, we were scared to see one of them scampering for the walls. When I tried to sleep, I had to pray (The Lord’s Prayer) endlessly just to take my mind off of them, just to block out the thought of a rat crawling across my face in the darkness.
One spring day before graduation, the Board of Health condemned the fraternity building because of all of those rats and the deplorable conditions of the house itself, and we all had to move out. I had such sweet memories of the stench of beer in those old, worn-out carpets, the New England springtime blowing reverie through broken screens, my stereo speakers behind them, screaming back toward the campus with sounds of Bruce Springsteen on a sunny afternoon.
In Jersey now, Luke, Decky, and I, after spending a short night at Maggie and Jimmy’s, were quickly moving again. We noticed a small-town, boarded-up movie theatre with frontage signs that called out “For Sale” right off of New Jersey Highway 61. The price was a mere thirty-five thousand dollars. It was an indication of a sad, disappearing rural America; it seemed that everything had to be in a strip mall now. Who would ever buy a one-screen movie theatre that just sat out there in the boonies all by itself? Everyone was moving west to California, chasing the sun, anyways, chasing a better living; that is, everyone except us.
“Last night was Highway 61 Revisted,” I said to Decky.
“If this is the road that Dylan wrote about, I feel that poor guy’s pain. After this drive, I never want to visit it again,” Decky replied.
“Hopefully, no more bloody drives after yesterday,” Luke echoed.
We only had six more hours if we wanted to go straight to Massachusetts, but we still had people to see between here and there. Besides, as Luke said, there would be no more bloody drives. Our next stop was Medford, New Jersey, to see my writing friend Sandy. It was only about thirty minutes away.
A disc jockey on Philadelphia’s WYSP proclaimed that Tina Turner actually bought a new fur coat every day . . . and then the DJ played “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” He came back on the air after that and told us that Prince brought purple rain to wherever he went. I jawed around on the meaning of his words and realized how tough it must be to be a DJ, always trying to come up with clever things to say.
We headed due east on Interstate 70 and an old green Maverick passed us by; it was like the old Maverick that my friend Richie Clark used to drive. The Maverick also had a very similar body style to my old three-on-the-tree red Comet that was buried somewhere back in California now.
It was late one night in 1977 when Richie and I were headed back from Paradise Beach, New Hampshire, and he lost control of that Maverick. The first time he lost control that night was right as we got onto Route 495 from the beach. You see, Richie fell asleep at the wheel. I was sleeping beside him and woke up on Route 495 in a panic as we veered onto the dirt shoulder of the highway. The rubber tires hit the soft sand, and thankfully, jolted Richie out of his sleep and back into wakefulness. Ka-bling! A mile marker reflector that we had hit head-on flew up over the windshield.
“Gotta stay awake, gotta make it to the boulevard,” Richie kept saying to me that night.
But by the time we got to the boulevard near Lowell, which was another half hour away, Richie had succumbed again to the sandman. Wide-eyed, I awoke to the loud screeches as we crossed into the opposing traffic lanes. Luckily for both of us that night, it was so late that no cars were around. But just as we crossed the lanes, I saw the river. Oh crap! I looked at the stationary guard rail on the other side of the road that was now in front of us. Behind it was a good-bye steep drop into the rushing Merrimack River. I thought in a fleeting moment that Richie and I were going into the river that night! And then, Ka-blam! We hit the guard rail head-on and bounced right off the heavy steel barrier. The car spun a flying one-eighty degrees before coming to a dead stop on the edge of the steep grade. The front end of Richie’s Maverick was really banged up, but the guard rail had saved us; it was the only thing between us and the cliff that looked down on the rushing dark water below. Richie quickly regained his senses as we sat there on the rail and he tried to start her again, but she wouldn’t start. The bent and twisted steel rail hugged the right side of the Maverick so close that I had to hop over the driver’s seat and jump out Richie’s side to escape the car and the moving water below me.
In the quiet darkness in that 1977 night, Richie and I pushed and pulled tirelessly at the weary car to get her off the rail. When we finally got her bumper untangled, we pushed her back across the empty lanes of the road. The Maverick’s front end dragged and scraped the asphalt, fighting us all the way. When we had her over by the side of the highway near the hill at First Street and out of the way of the Pawtucket Boulevard, Richie tried to turn the ignition one last time to see if he could get her started, but she wouldn’t kick over. She just choked and coughed; steam gushed from her radiator. Richie and I buried the Maverick there at the bottom of Christian Hill on that night. There were cuts on our heads, cuts on our knees, but we were happy to be walking and alive. We were sober again and drank in the dawn with enormous gulps, letting it run down the sides of our faces as we walked slowly home. We were very lucky that day.
Now here in New Jersey, Luke, Decky, and I noticed that the Maverick on the New Jersey 70 had a surfboard affixed to her roof just like we did, and it was clear that she was headed to where this road ended; the infamous Jersey Shore. Luke tooted the horn and hollered madly at the long-haired teenager driving. The kid looked over nervously at first and then looked up to the surfboard on the top of the Fairlane and smugly gave us the “thumbs-up” sign.
“Yes! All right! There we go! From ocean to ocean, coast to coast, we’ve seen our first signs of the Jersey Shore!” Decky yelled. “Our crazy surfboard finally looks normal again! Yes!”
It was about three o’clock in the afternoon. From a payphone, Sandy gave us directions to Tuckerton Road where she was going to meet us. I called the directions out to Luke. “From Main Street take Stokes Road until we get to Lenepee Trail. Stay on Lenepee Trail for about a mile until we see Tuckerton Road.”
Once we rounded the corner to Tuckerton Road I spotted her, standing on the street corner outside of a brand-new Toyota, with two little kids, Rachel, about two years old, and Roxy, about five, bouncing around in the back of the car.
She was beautiful standing there. She wore a red flannel shirt and blue jeans, countrylike, the beautiful New Jersey sun studying the perfect lines of her face. When I saw Sandy there, it made me realize how much I missed Colette. How I longed to touch her lips ever so softly with my index finger again, run it over her beautiful cheeks as she closed her eyes gently, run the bridge of her perfect nose forever.
Luke looked ahead at Sandy and before we all got out of the car he said aloud, “Is there anything ever more beautiful?”
The light of the world touched her face as she stood there; it highlighted her cheeks. We all were breathless. It had been a long time for the three of us. She was such a wonderful contrast to the darkness of the weary road we had been traveling.
I had visions of Colette. I missed her. My heart was racing; it felt as if it were going to rip the fiber of my flesh and shirt to show itself again. It trembled in the soft New Jersey afternoon, for nothing could ever be more perfect than being in love again.
“I am enjoying this moment! Drink in her beauty!” Luke whispered to Decky and me.
Time had stopped. I felt the slow motion around me as I reached out to give her a hug. I wished it was Colette; I wished it could be forever.
Sandy had us follow her first to her aunt Theresa’s fruit stand where her aunt gave us several bags of free fruit for our journey ahead. It was all fresh, all tree-picked. There were peaches, apples, and pears, right out of a line of just picked wooden baskets on the old wooden stand. The fresh breeze off of the roadside orchard scented the air with memories of a carefree life. There was a cat in a rocking chair out in front of the stand that opened one eye to look us over; it didn’t seem to trust us at all. Decky immediately had a premonition. When we got back to the car, he told us he had a horrifying flashback to Luke’s friend Fran’s cat Dillinger in Oklahoma and thought that this cat might really be Dillinger, the cat who had tormented him so all night long. Decky was spooked by this . . . The cat looked just like Dillinger! With this karma, I thought back to the distant night where we had been clawed and tugged at.
“Dillinger almost went in the freezer that night, I swear it!” Decky exclaimed.
We left the stand and followed Sandy to the house that she was babysitting the two little girls at. The lonely street that the two-bedroom house sat on didn’t even have a street sign. Once we all were inside, we sat around the kitchen table where we talked away the rest of the sunny afternoon.
Taking Decky’s suggestion, I brought a copy of my Fourteen Lines synopsis in with me. I suddenly realized it was a poor excuse to hand over to her, for Sandy knew that this was the same synopsis I had been working on back when she was in California with me. She simply smiled when she saw the title.
“His is a good one!” Decky spoke up, not knowing that Sandy had heard about the idea before.
Now, Sandy’s synopsis was a Romeo-and-Juliet love story, she explained as she laid out the neatly typed pages before us. It was about a poor boy from a labor union home that fell in love with the daughter of a big business owner. The girl’s father’s company employed most of the people in the tiny East Coast town, but the business was dead set against the union coming in. Because of this, there was violent bloodshed at the climax of the screenplay, with the two lovers caught right in the middle of it all.
“That sounds like a good one too!” Decky proclaimed at the old wooden table we all sat around.
We talked about our trip; where we had been, the people we had met, the places we had seen, the sheer loneliness of the transient life, and the longing for the next stop in between the long stretches of road. Sandy listened with big wide eyes. Deep inside, I could see her reeling, going back to her own lonely travel across our magnificent country all by herself.
“My sister called from Hawaii the other day,” Sandy said, “and the first words out of her mouth were, ‘I have some bad news for you.’ So I gave the phone to my aunt and said, ‘You take it!’ But Aunt Theresa gave the phone back to me saying, ‘You take it!’ . . . I was scared and screamed into the phone back at my sister, ‘Gabriella, you first got to tell me that no one died, and then I will calm myself!’ And my sister screams back, ‘Calm yourself, girl! I was only going to tell you that Ryan broke his arm!’”
This was the simple girl that Sandy was. We talked about religion. Sandy had moved in with a born-again Christian roommate in Medford who preached to Sandy daily about how everyone that didn’t repent for their earthly sins would go to hell someday. The two little girls that Sandy babysat ate graham crackers at the table beside her.
“But what about my aunt? Or little Roxy? They surely can’t go to hell like you say,” Sandy had said to her roommate. “Roxy knows no bad; she was born an angel.”
“It’s too bad that these people give religion such a bad name,” Decky spoke up.
I told Sandy that Decky and Luke had streaked through a Christian Revival tent during a service in the big park across from our house in Huntington Beach just a few weeks before we left California. Her eyes got wide again.
“But they meant well,” I said, “they just did it for a laugh.”
All evil was an illusion, I felt. I didn’t want to think about hell or a wrathful God any more. From the little bit that I knew, Jesus showed nothing but compassion for the sick and the poor outcasts, the prostitutes, the beggars and the thieves. My image of a kind God just didn’t fit in with the wrathful God of the Born-Agains.
All the while, the two little girls, blond and blue-eyed, innocent and beautiful, sat there intently watching us, just taking everything in. Roxy had cerebral palsy. Her eyes turned inward; she wore heavy glasses. Her bright little mind was housed in a body that couldn’t work right, with nerve signals misfiring and not knowing how to tell her muscles to move without having to exert some great effort. It was something the rest of us took for granted, like breathing or sleeping or anything that was life. There was so much that we didn’t understand. Why should any disease or even death scare us like it did? We were eternal spirits, and somehow, every single experience here on earth had to have a reason, something we could learn from.
It quickly became time for Luke, Decky, and I to move on. I told Sandy that we might try to stop by in the morning before leaving New Jersey, but I knew we wouldn’t be stopping by; it was all a part of the formality of everything. You just couldn’t walk out of someone’s life forever without trying to see them one last time. But it just wasn’t possible. I knew right then that this was good-bye forever, and Sandy knew it too. “And be sure to thank your aunt Theresa for all of the fruit she gave us!”
“Oh, and I brought you this book,” I told her reaching into my bag now, “How to Write for Television. You can have it.” It had been a book I had bought to figure out the formula for sitcoms, but I decided after reading it that I really didn’t want to write for this medium after all, for I loved the feature film format too much. Sandy thanked me for the gift.
On the way out of the swinging screen door, Luke whispered to her, “Thank you for being the prettiest thing I’ve seen in such a long time.”
We jumped into the Fairlane, and I watched Sandy one last time as she still blushed from Luke’s compliment; she held little Rachel on her hip. Sandy opened up the door and waved good-bye to us all. Roxy’s taut, turned arm reached out below Sandy’s, her small fingers stiff and clawlike. She tried to wave good-bye with her other hand, grabbing Sandy’s leg tightly; Roxy’s own little legs buckled at the knees.
And somewhere in another place Springsteen sang that beautiful song to her . . .
And then they were gone. We cut back toward the 295, northbound, to take the turnpike. We put the “Born to Run” tape into the tape deck, for it was only appropriate now. As Springsteen sang, I thought about the saxophone player in San Francisco who had so reminded me of the Big Man Clarence Clemons, himself. The Big Man was The Boss’s right-hand man. San Francisco was so far gone to me, on the other side of the country now, but the black man with his black, wide-brimmed hat still played his song of life on that crowded corner as the nameless and the famous continued to walk on by. I just knew he was still there.
“Because in life, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch!” he yelled out to us all.
The sun set behind us. We headed eastbound on Interstate 195 toward Asbury Park, Southside Johnny, Tom Petty, and the New Jersey Shore. Bright orange and pink plastic slides grew above the trees on the side of the road. I think it was an amusement park. Nature’s edges were superimposed around it; the trees pushed by it all to engulf the highway, and the wilderness came right up to the edge of the road and looked for a safe place to cross. This wasn’t the concrete and smokestack New Jersey that I had envisioned, but a beautiful land waiting to be discovered again.
At a Texaco station off the side of the interstate, Laird’s mom Tina met up with us. At first sight, I immediately remembered her from Kerry and Sam’s Aspen wedding. Laird, Anna’s fiancé, had called ahead to his mom from Topeka to tell her of our passing through. It was Tina’s idea to have us for the night. She wouldn’t have it any other way; after all, Luke was a part of her family now. She was divorced, happy, and full of life. We followed her to her small apartment a few miles inland from the shore where she had prepared sandwiches, cheese and crackers, a big jar of pickles, and had some cold Molson Golden Ale for us. We camped in the living room watching the NFL highlights of the Chiefs and Raider game while we ate her food. After that, we watched Monty Python’s Flying Circus and a Star Trek rerun, “The Doomsday Machine.” It was about 10:00 p.m. when we decided to head out to “Gary’s Bar” on Tina’s suggestion. Luke invited her to come along, but she laughed at this, thanking him and advising us that we were better off to go it alone. “You don’t want to be seen with someone as old as your mom now, do you?”
We really didn’t mind, and we told her that, but she politely refused. So we walked into the quiet neighborhood bar in the dark of the night, three happy travelers.
“If everyone in the world was like that,” Decky spoke aloud of Laird’s mom as we walked into the bar, “just think of it . . . There’d probably be no wars!”