Chapter 4
The girls had made dinner for us: baked chicken, wild brown rice, fruit salad, and pumpernickel bread. As we sat there around Roni’s kitchen table and talked into the calm California night, we wondered aloud where we were really going and what we were leaving behind. We tried to explain to the girls why we had just up and left Southern California in the manner that we had. We were out of our gourds. Part of my reasoning, of course, was the whole Colette thing. We talked and talked and all the while dreamed in table conversation about what we all intended to do once we got to Europe. We were going to make music videos.
From Roni’s kitchen table, I suddenly looked around to find Declan, for now he was gone.
On the side of the room, away from the dinner table, Declan was bouncing around in a late-night fit of rejuvenated energy, already aching to move on. He was road restless, he said, as he yelled over to the rest of us who still sat around the table talking. That was Declan—he loved everything about the moment—but now he couldn’t sit still for we had started talking about Europe again. Declan screamed that he couldn’t wait until the morning when we could push onward. This was the most incredible journey of a lifetime!
But what if the three of us had just made the biggest mistake of our lives?
Lucas and I told the girls what had happened at the going away party back in Huntington Beach, which was already a few days behind us. We caught three guys stealing our beer off of our back porch cooler. On Lucas’s first alert of the raid of our cooler, the three of us ran out the front porch door, running down the back alley across the street and cornered the three bandits in the dark. They were our parallel lives, I thought. We cornered them in a dead-end garage door cul-de-sac. I confronted one of them dead-on as the other two threw full bottles of beer at me; they were whizzing by our heads like giant cocktail missiles. Just then, the guy I had cornered went into a roundhouse kick and hit me square in the chest, knocking me on my ass. Ooompff! . . . And how I tried to get back up and give him a roundhouse kick in response, remembering my Nashua karate lesson days with Zane and the maddening rain, but I failed to connect with the guy and landed square on my ass again!
I lay there on the dark alley ground thinking, Oh no, maybe this is where I get my nose broken! Like the time it happened in the cold, icy driveway of a fraternity night brawl at UMass, someone just kicking at my face on the ground while I lay on the bottom of the pile.
But these three guys were more frightened than I was, and with me on the ground, they ran by all of us, right out of the alleyway. Declan talked of the sheer comedy of all of life after watching me fall. He laughed in the alleyway at me, holding his stomach and falling with his back against a garage door. He forgot about everything else during that moment.
On the way out of the alley, we all laughed in relief when Lucas spotted the getaway car just a few houses down from our dilapidated porch. Lucas had seen them arrive in the car, so he knew what it looked like, he told Roni and Elizabeth. But the beer bandits were nowhere to be seen. Their car, however, sat in the dark on the curbside. Opening the hood of their car, Declan immediately went to work and pulled the distributor cap off while Lucas disconnected all of those blue wires that go to the spark plugs. With our work done, Declan slammed the hood and wiped his hands clean while Lucas carried the wiring with him back up to our porch.
“This is great!” Declan screamed. He told Roni and Elizabeth, “It was the next morning that one of the guys had to come back with the tow truck! Lucas and I stood on the front porch laughing at the guy!”
“The guy flipped us the bird,” Lucas added while he chuckled.
“Hope you win the big one!” Declan yelled back to the guy as the poor soul just sat in the tow truck looking at them both. “Karma will get you every time!”
Back in high school, Roni was a cheerleader and had been the girlfriend of one of my high school friends. She always had a boyfriend through high school, and come to think of it, even college. And, of course, everyone was always secretly falling all over the cheerleaders in high school; they were beautiful, all of them. Roni was the prettiest of them all with the kindest of eyes; she never seemed to be down, I thought. She had like this weird sense of confidence, like she knew how life was going to turn out in the end—an eternal positive attitude—it was always going to turn out perfect for her. This glass of life was more than half-full.
Ah, the cheerleaders. Back in high school, Jerry Russo had me laughing all over myself as he teased the cheerleaders while taking a test in art history class one day. He showed me a question on the test and how he had answered it, just to be funny.
“Who is Ra?” the question asked (we were studying early Egyptian art and culture).
“THE GOD OF THE CHEERLEADERS!” was his answer.
Seeing this written answer on his test, I broke out into crazy laughter in the middle of class. Jerry laughed aloud with me. The teacher came over and pulled both of our tests and that was the end of it all. We both got Fs.
“No more conventional jobs!” Declan yelled to us from Roni’s living room. He was back to bouncing around.
“No more endless nightclub scenes off of Beach Boulevard! No more paying five-dollar cover charges to be suffocated in cigarette smoke, beer-drenched carpets, and deafening music!” Lucas added. “How can you meet anybody that way?”
In Southern California, we had all been victims of this pitiful nightclub existence. There didn’t seem to be any other way for shy nerdy guys to meet someone, so we went to that slaughterhouse every weekend night. Snaggletooth the DJ played the latest ’80s stuff while our friend Brian Kelly shrieked the corn dog whistle in the corner at passersby. He’d tell us that if the girls turned to look his way while he shrieked that whistle, they were certainly corn dogs!
Everyone always seemed so desperate to find a girlfriend in these places, but nice girls didn’t go there! Hah! If they did, it was by mistake. Declan admitted that he wouldn’t miss these clubs any, but would sure miss the great sound of KROQ that Snaggletooth always seemed to play from her booth. KROQ was Declan’s and this other friend, Vandy Vanderkampf’s, favorite radio station. KROQ boasted the new sound of alternative rock that was slowly taking over the eighties. Declan told us he’d also miss KROQ’s morning Southern California surf report, for he loved to surf, especially when he was supposed to be working. He had an outside sales job, selling ad space for the Daily Pilot, but he managed to get a few hours in every day on the surfboard, the same surfboard that was now bound to the Fairlane roof, without the Daily Pilot ever knowing anything about it.
We talked and talked around Roni’s table that night. It was around twelve thirty in the morning when we all decided it was time to finally sleep. Declan, Lucas, and I, just like the night before at Zane’s, slowly found our respective spaces to crash, either on Roni’s living room couch or her floor while Elizabeth (and her dog Cloey) headed home. The girls both had to work in the morning. Hah! They had to work!
We all agreed that night that if we ever came back this way, Lucas Coppens, Declan Brady, and me, that we would have to all have dinner with Roni and Elizabeth again. Maybe we would have great stories to share about our great journey throughout the romantic European continent. Maybe we’d all be married someday.
Morning came quickly. Lifting an eyelid, I caught Roni trying to slip out quietly to work at eight thirty without trying to wake us. She worked as a sales manager for one of the big hotel chains (either the Marriott or the Hilton) and had to be there by nine. From the front door, Roni whispered to me across the great space of her living room as I still lay on her couch—“Good-bye, Mike!” Her warm smile brought a smile back to my groggy face as she told me in loud whispers to help ourselves to breakfast and showers, but to be sure to lock the door on our way out! And then, just like that, she was gone.
Before we left that morning, though, Lucas, Declan, and I ran a couple of miles through the Sunnyvale neighborhoods to get in one more short morning workout before our next stop. Then I left Roni a thank-you note on the same table that we had crowded around the night before. I noticed that the table had been completely cleared of the wineglasses and beer bottles that we had left all over the place the night before. In my note, I thanked her again for the dinner and everything.
It was ten in the morning now. Our next stop was San Pablo, which was a town just due east of the San Francisco Bay. San Pablo was where one of Declan’s Ohio State friends, Mary, now lived. It would only take us a little over an hour to get to her house, a very short trip in the grand scheme of things, but we had to stop and see her just the same, because after Mary, there would be no more friendly faces until Aspen.
We all secretly hoped that the money we had each carefully saved and took with us would hold out throughout our entire journey, wherever we all may end up. Before quitting our jobs . . . before we left Huntington Beach, we had carefully plotted this course across country. It was a crazy zigzag route that included a lot of our families and our friends; there were some college buddies too—just about anyone who might take us in. Lucas had graduated from Kansas, KU; Declan graduated from Ohio State; and I had graduated from UMass. We were giving ourselves some time to get to Boston; actually about a month, and there were even two weddings to go to—one that was along the way—Lucas’s sister in Aspen and then my friend Billy’s in Lowell. After Billy’s wedding, we planned to jump on a big aluminum cylinder all loaded up with jet fuel and fly across the great Atlantic Ocean. Our tickets to London would only be one-way tickets, of course, for we never knew if we would ever make it back.
And from London, who knows . . . We needed to find ourselves in this beautiful life. Maybe we would get jobs in the music video business, or television, or movies because of our collective Hollywood experience. Maybe we would go to Amsterdam, or maybe Munich. If things got so bad, we could go straight to the Greek Isles and drink ouzo and lay on the beach with beautiful women in the warm Mediterranean sun. Maybe it would be like the Endless Summer documentary; we would chase the sun, and it could always be warm. I would write about everything we did; I would record the whole journey in a crazy journal. We were destined to find happiness if we persevered. I imagined that there had to be a formula for happiness, because life was full of formulas. If you followed the formula, everything could be pretty easy. We’d forgive everyone who had ever wronged us or who had never given us a chance if we did ever make it. All of my writing, all of our ideas, all of our crazy scripts, all of our poetry and song lyrics, even the “You Can’t Harpoon-a Generic Tun-a” song Eddie Kinsley and I wrote—everything would be published someday. We were leaving Hollywood to invent Hollywood somewhere else. There was so much irony in the whole mouthful of it. And Declan had all of the reckless ambition crazy luck that might allow us to stumble into it all. Lucas was more balanced than Declan and I; he could reel us back in if we ever got into any real trouble along the way. And that was the plan . . . so we thought.
“Did you know that about one in every three people in Los Angeles is writing a screenplay?” was always the chatter in the west. It wouldn’t break me, though, for a great screenplay was still in us all, I knew it!
Colette was gone. I had lost weight over it. I discovered that I was down about twenty pounds in just three months after weighing myself on Roni’s bathroom scale after our morning run. The scale needle barely registered 140 pounds.
Weeks before we left Orange County, I had secretly camped outside the hotel where Colette worked. Quietly lurching in my Subaru, I tried to catch a glimpse of her one last time. Was there someone else? Maybe I would jump from the car and beg her to take me back if she appeared, just like in the movies. Was I stalking her? I just didn’t want to let her go. Why had she dumped me?
But Colette never appeared in the hotel parking lot that day. Fate had decided it all for me. I was left with no other choice but to leave the place that reminded me of her, to move on. I had to leave Southern California. I was too consumed with it all. I had to forget it.
I had been in love one other time during a teenage summer in New Hampshire, but I was a kid then; I was only seventeen then. Everything was different now; the sadness had left a lot quicker back then. But this feeling now . . . Nothing had ever hurt this bad.
Declan’s surfboard had survived the night on the roof of the car without anyone messing with it. The bungie cord was taut and in place, and we pressed on to San Pablo. The waves of the inner depths of our great North American continent, cornstalks and grass fields, were now ahead of us; we would surf for the next 4,000 miles. The odometer read 69,968 miles in Sunnyvale. We had traveled 468 miles already. I put $14.70 in the gas tank for 13.2 gallons of gas. Numbers meant everything to me, for they really helped to pass the time.
Going north on the 880 Freeway we saw three guys our age in the car right next to us with shirts and ties on. Hah! This was a foreign concept to us all now, an alternate world that we had just exited from, a broken mirror image of the immediate past. It didn’t make too much sense. Everyone had to work a shirt-and-a-tie job just for money to fuel their dreams, doing things they didn’t want to do, wasting the best part of the day. We were never going to wear a shirt and tie again, we vowed, because white shirts and dress ties were symbols of the eight-to-five business world where you always had a boss. We were artists. Artists didn’t have to wear white shirts and tight neckties.
“Who-hoo! No more conventional jobs!” Declan shouted our road mantra.
Lucas rolled down the window and shrieked his characteristic ear-piercing shriek again. The three lost souls looked over at us briefly and then continued to talk amongst themselves in their moving car bubble. We were no great distraction to them; perhaps we didn’t even exist!
Lucas had worked as an engineer for the government. Dedicated as he was, he really hated those few years that he did it. He used to wake up first thing in the morning and realize after a great sleep, “Crap! I’m back here again!” This thought of his was so funny to me. Work was such a downer that he hated to even exist. Naked on the door stoop of life, Lucas imagined himself as an alien in an objectionable place where buttoned-down necks with loud ties choked his freedom. But now he was finally free. Like Moses, I guess, he had been spared; the fleeting Fairlane was his basket of freedom, and he was now floating with the current of the river, hoping to come aground in some new exotic place and be given a second chance.
We pulled up to Declan’s friend Mary’s house and saw her in the open garage. She worked meticulously on the freehand lettering of a sign for one of her customers, UHAUL. Mary painted signs all summer, Declan told us, and taught elementary school in the winter.
“Declan!” Mary cried and ran to him, giving Declan a huge hug after putting down her brush on the long prep table at the side of her garage.
“Why, hello, Mary!” he smiled with that big Declan Brady smile, all of those teeth showing again.
Mary, with her own booming and heavy laugh, brought the three of us immediately inside and had us all take a seat at her wooden kitchen table. She talked quickly, running to the refrigerator to pull out four cold bottles of Coors beer. It wasn’t even noon yet. She sat down across from us all, bubbles and happy, recanting her past shenanigans with Declan at Ohio State. After graduation, she had crossed the great Northwest across the plains by herself . . . with no sleep and in the vast hours of an approaching dawn, she came across the Great Salt Lake in Utah much the same way as the Mormons did, not knowing at first from a distance whether it was water or a dancing hallucination of light bouncing off of the desert floor. Mary was gifted with stories, talking on and on from our moment of arrival, from the seagulls of Utah to her motorcycle daredevil grandmother who lived in Florida and who slept with a forty-five under her pillow. She laughed and laughed and hugged Declan like he was her little brother.