My cousin Molly lives in suburban Cleveland and has a husband, three kids and cancer. Her parents, my aunt Mary Jane and uncle Phil, live nearby; I stopped for a visit. Phil taught geology at Case Western Reserve and brings real knowledge and understanding to the climate change conversation. Despite complete agreement on the subject, we spent two hours yelling at each other; climate change is real and humans are stupid and fucked. Yelling about climate change is easier than yelling about cancer.
Highway 2, two lanes, curvaceous and beautiful, crosses the Ohio river and runs east from Gallipolis into West Virginia. Russ had taken a break from trimming Susie’s hedges and was sitting on a lawn chair in the shade when I rode by. I turned the motorcycle around on that skinny road and turned around again at the hedge, “Is this the road to Ripley?” I asked him. I knew the answer, I’ve got GPS on the bike.
After a few minutes, he invited me into his screen porch where we drank sweet tea and he smoked a cigar. He’s 74, married to Susie for fifty-six years, they got married in 1968 just after her father died. She was sixteen. It was their anniversary.
That same year, Russ was drafted. He went to basic and AIT at Fort Campbell where he trained as a 13 Bravo, Field Artillery. When he was done training, he went to Viet Nam. Russ has PTSD, diabetes, three stents in his heart and needs hearing aids.
I joined the Army in 1974, trained at Fort Knox and went to Germany instead of Viet Nam. It was still Russ’s Army of blood, Jesus, alcohol and drugs. My First Sergeant, Sergeant Allen, had a baseball-size purple bulge at the base of his skull that oozed shards of bloody shrapnel in the shower. Our Troop CO, Captain Tenney, tried to make me a Mormon, I guess Joseph Smith got him through his stint. Our unit Sergeant Major bought a bottle of vodka from the Class VI store every night and I mean every night. He was a vicious son-of-a-bitch come morning. The lower ranks depended on drugs to salve the wounds, speed, hash, LSD, heroin, whatever could be had. The VA considers Russ 100% disabled.
I stayed at McCoy’s Inn in Ripley last night. Maria’s the night front desk manager. As I was going to dinner, she told me she was hungry and I bought her tacos and we had a conversation. She runs a toiletries pantry for homeless people out of her house. She says homelessness is rampant in Ripley but they’re invisible, the police have no tolerance. She votes Democrat. So does the waitress on the Upper Peninsula in Michigan who is in recovery and in a bitter custody fight with a step-grandmother for her four kids. Her ex and the grandfather are both in jail. The young waitress at the Italian restaurant in Gallipolis looked at the booths on either side of me before admitting that her politics are not the politics of southern Ohio.
Smokey ride across northern Wisconsin yesterday, I guess Canada’s still on fire. Spent the night at the Four Seasons Motel in Crandon, a town of abandoned two-story brick buildings and out-of-business businesses. For dinner, I had a California burger, fries and a root beer float at Palubicki’s Eats & Treats drive-in diner. The fries were salt-crunchy and hot out of the fryer, unfortunately the ketchup was in packets so I had to eat them naked. The concrete slab the restaurant sits on is cracked and broken so the high school kids running trays and bags out to the cars and picnic tables wear shoes instead of roller skates.
The Four Seasons Motel shares a potholed and oil-stained asphalt parking lot with a BP gas station and the rooms face the gas station. Each room has a folding metal chair in front, a sand bucket for cigarette butts next to it. My room cost $49.00.
Besides the pylon sign flashing $3.49 in neon green, store signage at the BP advertises Bud Light, Hunt Brothers Pizza, AmeriGas propane and ice. I sat outside my door for an hour as the sun went down slapping mosquitos in the humidity and watched BP customers slam the doors on Cadillac SUVs, old and new pickups, tired sedans with tired mufflers, and rusty Dodge minivans then a few minutes later come striding, shuffling, stomping back out yelling at their kids and lugging clear plastic bags of Dr. Pepper, laundry detergent, chocolate milk, diapers, cartons of cigarettes and beer.
For breakfast, I bought a copy of The Forest Republican, the county newspaper, and a cup of coffee at the BP. Front page above the fold, a story about a motorcycle cancer fund raiser, “Ride for Research,” and two Crandon High School students, Maya Quade and Madelynn Erdmann, having been selected for a U.S. State Department grant program. The paper was 16 pages and included obituaries, legal notices and a flyer for Menards. It cost a dollar.
Vincent is my neighbor two doors down. Forty-seven, untrimmed beard, divorced, four kids, three at home with the ex. He’s raced motorcycles, built custom bicycles and worked as a union electrician. Now he works as a mechanic at an ATV shop and lives at the Four Seasons Motel. The shop is seventy miles away; Vince doesn’t have a driver’s license and carpools with a coworker, they drive an hour and a half each way. He had a pack of American Spirit cigarettes resting on the leg of his jeans and we chatted while he smoked one and then another.
On the wall at the BP, alongside the handicap ramp, are cork-boards thick with advertisements and business cards for stump grinding, a farmers market, masonry, opioid addiction support, an indoor craft and flea market, a classic car show, real estate agents, taxidermy, homemade jewelry, off-road expeditions, lawn services, hair stylists, military recruiters and dozens of other hard-times hopes and scams.
My worn and dusty shoe dangles Above a billion years Three thousand feet of history Just beneath my sole
The river’s cut is steep But the fall is not my fear Instead the eons stacked in shades of red Countless to a squint Each the span of all of human history But not fissure, crack or grain of sand To mark my desperately important life Humility here is cast in stone
Clear sky night Mirror to infinity My quarrelsome curiosity persists What chance I am now? What chance I am here? And because of me, who is not? By what chance me instead of they?
Reflecting on infinity There is no chance that I exist My carbon chain evolving Since long before Amoeba fucked amoeba And for all time since Through famine, drought and war Flings and rapes Disease and rarely peaceful bounty The chance of me Ten thousand eons beyond the one
The other then Who if not for me? In the star-light blue it’s clear There must be none but me My parents parents parents lay upon themselvesu And their parents parents parents lay upon themselves Through all of time And I became inevitable
And you, Dear, became inevitable And these words became inevitable And this moment became inevitable And you and I became the resolve of all of history We are impossible to be We are impossible not to be Yet the eons insist That we take this our moment With and without our will To enrich the sediment of having been And become a part of our own grand and deep canyon Our rich and colored geologies Celebrated by futures hence
When I arrived at O’Brien Barracks, I was tired. I hadn’t slept on the plane from JFK to Rhein-Main or on the bus from Rhein-Main to Schwabach, my low-quarters were scuffed and my dress greens were wrinkled and stunk from the travel. There were five of us ‘cruits and when we got off the bus in the middle of the dirt parade ground in front of the barracks for the 1/1 Cavalry Squadron, there were catcalls of ‘fresh booty’ and whistles and threats, ‘get back on that bus ‘cruit ‘fore I beat your ass’ and we stood there, in the September sun with our duffel bags at our feet, all of us privates E-deuce fresh out of Basic and AIT, and we wondered what we’d gotten ourselves into. It was 1975.
The story circulating in our new unit as we shuffled our feet in the gravel and dust waiting for what we didn’t know, was that a guy had been court martialed and given a jail sentence and a dishonorable discharge for pedaling dope. The guy who’d narced him out, Spec-4 Jimmy James, Jim Jim they called him, Jesus-freak and likely Army lifer, was jammed into his own wall locker and thrown out the third-story window of his barracks room. A noteworthy event, even for the Cav.
The Army is gossip driven and Jim Jim’s demise was, if nothing else, good gossip. The story with its oddly specific details was told over and over for weeks. There were discrepancies and inconsistencies between tellers, but overall the story hung together. And because of those details, it seemed to me more likely true than not. Even though it would take a several guys to do the thing described; even though they were complicit in murder; even though there had to be absolute trust amongst conspirators as Jim Jim’s roommates, platoon members, friends, NCOs and officers, were called into the MP station and questioned, no one was ever charged with Jim Jim’s death by broken neck.
The details were explicit, consistent and horrifying such that I imagined them for myself; yanked from dreamless sleep, a sock jammed into my throat; the crunch and blinding pain of my nose cartilage smashed flat by gloved knuckles, the salt-taste of blood, the whispered curses in the sleeping quiet, voices I knew from the mess hall, the EM club, local gasthofs; my blankets tangling around me as I twist and kick, trapped in a stockade of hard-muscle as the blows don’t stop; gloved hands grabbing my legs, my shoulders, my arms; fighting for air through the blood in my nose and throat and the sock and the leathered hand crushing my neck; my locker door banging as I struggle and kick and beg without voice as they wrestle me to it, and limb by limb force me inside, my dress greens and overcoat and khakis cascading from their wire hangers around me; the darkness, the darkness, the hideous fear, the hollow sound of my grunts and voiceless pleas echoing around me and the locker doors slam shut. As I kick and push against the sheet metal walls and the flimsy shelves give and buckle around me, my locker is tipped on its side, hoisted and balanced by whispered curses and moved in shuffling steps and then no longer balanced and starting to slide with me head down and the horrifying realization; and the long, long, forever long fall.
I don’t know whether my imagined story is what happened or not. What I do know is that it doesn’t matter, because it could have happened. In 1975, three years after they were pulled out of Viet Nam, soldiers of the 1/1 Cav were still in shock that they had been ground down and thrown out by barefoot farmers. For combat units, and the Cav was that, it was particularly humiliating. It destroyed for us the legacy left by our fathers and uncles; we were no longer the unbeatable force for good. It was personal. It was emotional. It was something felt and not talked about. It was PTSD before PTSD was a thing. That disorder, that humiliation, that 7.62mm headshot to morale had left the Cav badly wounded. And throughout the ranks, troops were drinking and taking drugs and talking to Jesus to ease the pain. And so we learned, we ‘cruits.
There are a lot of ways to die in a peacetime army. The Jeep, the ubiquitous M151, canvas top, no seatbelts, no roll bar, was notorious for rolling over and killing driver and passenger, usually an officer, not that its reputation slowed us down; being mostly teenagers, we’d wind up that gutless 4-cylinder engine, bang out the clutch and drive those little trucks as fast as they would go. POL drivers, a lot of them teenagers, too, would race five-ton trucks through mountains and villages on thin German roads in the dark of early morning, a pair of 650-gallon fuel pods behind them sloshing full. Stoned on hash and crank and awake for days, they rolled those trucks off the road, ran them into barns and other trucks and tracks and civilian vehicles and whatever else that didn’t get out of their way. They died, too. A Sheridan driver going fast down hill can’t make a curve on a mountain road and the little tank plunges fifty feet to land upside down in a creek, the TC standing in the turret crushed and dead, the driver drunk and court-martialed. Tank gunnery at Graf, guys sleeping on cots in Tent City, an artillery round lands on their tent and kills them all. The arty guys said it was a short round. Didn’t matter, eight guys dead and Jesus nowhere to be found.
And we killed each other, too.
In the mess hall, two guys arguing, a dozen of us not watching over coffee dregs and cold scrambled eggs, getting late, time for formation. I knew them both, not well but well enough to know their names and nod in passing, Snow and Hook. Brought up on a dirt farm in Alabama, Hook was getting out, he was in the final days of clearing post, signoffs from S1, S2, S3, the Arms Room, the Mailroom, Supply, the Reenlistment NCO, and the rest. He was going home, back to “the world.” Four days to go.
As “fuck you” and “motherfucker” and “n****r” got louder, Snow and Hook stood up from their mess trays and faced off. And then we were all standing and the shouted hard-consonant whispers to “kick his ass,” “beat that motherfucker,” “slap that bitch” engulfed us. And from the circle of starchless fatigues and stubbled cheeks and unshined boots, no call to stop, to think, to shut the fuck up and sit down. I share that shame.
Hook shoved Snow, two hands on his chest, and Snow followed up with a wide, slow roundhouse that banged into Hook’s cheek. Hook looked surprised, like the punch hurt his feelings more than it hurt his face. He stared at Snow like this wasn’t part of the story, as though the punch had taken the narrative in a direction he hadn’t expected. Then, as though at just that moment an idea occurred to him, Hook groped for his belt and unsnapped the sheath and pulled out his knife, a 4” folding Buck, the same knife that was on my belt, the same knife on display in the lighted glass counter at the PX. Snow watched with the rest of us. He looked surprised, too.
The stabbing was overhand and clumsy. Snow never raised his hands to fend it off, never backed up, never looked away, as though he never believed that his friend would cut him. But cut him Hook did, striking down and hard into his chest. Snow stepped back, a sad, maybe disappointed look on his face; he never said a word, just stared at his friend and then he stumbled back another step and collapsed on his side halfway under one of the mess hall tables and there was silence and the blood pooled on the floor and we who’d stood and watched turned in our trays at the dishwasher window and hurried out to morning formation while the Mess Sergeant called the medics and the MPs. And so Hook didn’t ETS or go back to the world and marry Margaret or Mary Sue or buy a new Chevrolet or a Kenwood stereo or eat mom’s cooking or go to college on the GI Bill. Instead, he went to Mannheim, the Army prison in Europe, for twenty years. I testified at his court-martial.
Have you ever had a conversation truly free of consequence?
People pick up hitchhikers because they feel sorry for them standing in the rain, the blowing snow, the bitter cold, the cruel sun; because they’re bored; because they’re shitfaced and need somebody to grab the wheel; because they want to call another person home to Jesus; because they need somebody to keep them awake; because they’re people who recognize that another human’s miles of need don’t disappear just because they’re no longer in the mirror.
Hitchhiking is getting involved for a couple of minutes, a couple of hours, a thousand miles with a person you would never know were it not for happenstance, luck and a shared fate. At the end of the minutes and miles, parting will happen and there will be no last names. Conversations are rattle-mouth stupid, deeply personal, ego-laden, spellbinding, dull, giggly and high, slurred and drunk, cries of despair so wrenching a driver pulls his longnose Peterbilt onto the shoulder to sob out his loss, all entirely free of consequence, no debt to upbringing, environment or occasion. And no shared future.
Once in a while there is silence, no conversation at all, the driver doing right and nothing more.
Everybody — doctors, cowboys, housewives, tie-dye hippies, traveling salesmen – everybody picks up hitchhikers (except lawyers, lawyers never pick up hitchhikers). They drive shiny Cadillacs, rusted Beetles and loaded Freightliners. They pull over slowly and cautiously or explode the brakes and skid smoking tires onto the shoulder, flashing right red invitation. Through the open passenger window, cautious greeting, assessing, judging, sometimes bartering (windshield sticker from the day, “Ass, Grass or Gas, Nobody Rides for Free”). And, of course, the questions that determine the future: “Where are you going?” and “Where are you going?”
Standing thumb out, back to the horizon, watching fate motor toward you and wondering whether this one or that one will be your ride into the future is hot, cold, wet, frustrating, boring, infuriating, and, ultimately, liberating having cast off the bonds and obligations of dollars and schedules, trading them for the largess of humanity, offering in exchange for a flick of the turn indicator and nudge of the wide pedal, entertainment, companionship, sated curiosity, the joy of giving, bread broken and shared, and maybe, just maybe, a damn good story.
Of course, there’s risk. For everybody. People die out there.
It was December, 1974 and I was living in Solana Beach, California. I’d joined the Army in October but wasn’t going on active duty until April. I’d been trimming trees and painting houses since I’d graduated from high school in June and I was broke. My mother had moved to Minnesota and I thought I’d spend Christmas at her house, maybe get something to eat while I was there.
Standing in the dark on an onramp to northbound Interstate 15 in Barstow, a fifties Chevy truck braked onto the shoulder, Gold’s Plumbing stenciled on the blue door in chipped and faded gold paint. The window stayed closed and I pushed the button on the door handle and the door swung open and the guy in the passenger seat fell out of the truck into my arms. I caught him and the guy driving, young guy, grabbed his sweatshirt, and between the two of us we wrestled him upright onto the seat, “Kid brother, fell asleep. Where you headed?”
“Minnesota.”
“Louisville. Money for gas?”
I had twenty on me, I could spare a couple of bucks for a good ride and part way to Kentucky was a good ride. I nodded, “I can help out,” and threw my bag in the back of the truck, pushed the kid into the middle of the seat and climbed in.
“Skeet.” He nodded his head toward the kid, “Eddy,”
I reached across and shook hands with Skeet. Eddy reached out his hand and I took it, his fingers were cold and limp and didn’t return my grip. When he pulled the hand back, he let his body slump against me and laid his head on my shoulder.
Rumbling up the freeway at fifty miles an hour, Skeet asked Eddy if he wanted a cigarette. He didn’t wait for an answer; he lit a Kool and handed it to him, Eddy reached for it and dropped it. It was glowing on the floor between our feet and I picked it up, took his hand and wedged it between two fingers. His head didn’t move against my shoulder when he put the cigarette to his mouth and took a pull. Skeet offered me the pack and I took one, too. Skeet had the truck heater on high and the windows closed. The air in the cab was a hot, thick fog. It was a good ride.
We stopped for gas just off the freeway, seems like I remember it being a Texaco. Under the fluorescent lights, I got a look at the two of them. Skeet looked tired. Standing next to the truck pumping leaded regular, his eyes were a faded grey-green, his skin in the flickering blue light yellow and dry like he hadn’t slept in a long time. His hand on the nozzle was big for his body and muscly and stained with what looked like mud or dirt. His upper lip was smashed and scabbed black.
Eddy, he stayed in the truck, his head leaned back against the rear window. Standing next to the open door, I could see that his left eye was scabbed and crusted with pus and sticking out in a swollen lump. Below his eye, the side of his face hung limp like the bones had been smashed and what was left was pulpy flesh held up by sagging black and purple skin. His right eye was open looking back at me. He was smoking another Kool; when he took it out of his mouth, he crooked the fingers holding the cigarette to motion me close and I leaned in so my ear was near his mouth. “Out of the ballpark,” he whispered so I could barely hear him. I stepped back in time to see the lips on right side of his mouth twitch upwards for just a flash like he was trying to smile.
Skeet saw me talking to him, “He’s okay, he’s going to be fine.”
“How old are you guys?”
“Thirteen. I’m fifteen.”
“What’s in Louisville?”
The handle of the nozzle clanked. Skeet banged it back on the pump and walked around to the passenger door, “Come on, Eddy, let’s take a piss.” Eddy put his arm around Skeet’s neck. When he tried to stand, his legs wobbled and buckled like he couldn’t control them. Skeet grabbed his belt and mostly carried him into the gas station. I leaned on the truck and smoked my cigarette.
Back in the cab, Eddy asleep on my shoulder, I asked Skeet what happened.
“The old man was drunk and beating on me. I heard Eddy yelling at him to stop and when he didn’t, I guess Eddy grabbed his slugger and came up behind him and hit him, hit him so hard I could hear the hollow crack of it and his blood sprayed on my face and the wall. The old man turned around like it was nothing, like he hadn’t been hit, grabbed the bat and hit Eddy in the face with it. Eddy went over backwards and the old man dropped the bat and stood there staring at him lying on the floor bleeding and not moving. I picked up the bat and hit him in the back of the head with it and kept hitting him until he fell on his face on the floor and quit moving. I took his keys and wallet and we got in the truck.”
Two o’clock in the morning, we rolled into Las Vegas, got off the freeway and drove around looking for a gas station. We were headed back out of town when Skeet ran a yellow and a block later the red lights lit up behind us, “Fuck, Rollers. Eddy, we ain’t going back, don’t worry about it.”
The cop came up to the window and asked Skeet for his driver’s license, the red lights bouncing off the windshield and flickering through the cab. When Skeet told him all he had was a permit, the cop told us to get out and stand on the sidewalk.
“Let’s see some IDs, boys.”
I handed over my license, “I’m just a hitchhiker,” I told him. He ignored me.
Skeet had his arm around Eddy holding him up. “Let’s see some ID, kid.” The cop held his light up to Eddy’s face, “Holy God, what in hell happened to you?”
“He fell and banged his face. He’s okay, he’s fine.”
“Where you boys from?”
“California. We’re going Kentucky to live with our mom.”
“Whose truck is that?”
“It’s our dad’s company truck. He works for Gold’s.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
He fiddled his gun belt for a while just looking at us then he said to me, “You, over here.”
He stood with his back to Skeet and Eddy tapping my driver’s license against his flashlight, tap, tap, “I’m off in a few minutes and I don’t want to deal with this shit. So, here’s what we’re going to do; I’m going to get in my car and you and those two boys are going to get in that truck. You’re the only one with a driver’s license so you’re going to drive. You’re going to go straight for three stoplights, you’re going to take a left at the third one, you’ll see signs for the interstate. I want you to get on 15 and drive until you pass a sign for the Las Vegas city limits. Once you’re out of my town, I don’t care what you do. But if I see you again, you’re going to jail, all of you. I’m going to follow you just in case you get lost.” Tap. He handed me my license.
I got behind the wheel and turned the key and pushed the starter pedal, the truck coughed and fired up. I squashed the clutch, ground a gear dropping it into second, first gear was a granny gear in those trucks, and we rolled down the street, took a left where he told me to and got on the freeway. The cop didn’t follow us up the ramp.
The sun was coming up when we stopped for gas, we’d been in Utah for a while. Skeet shook Eddy, asked him if he needed to take a leak. Eddy didn’t move, “He’s asleep,” Skeet said and got out and filled the truck with gas and I gave him ten bucks. From Utah, there are a couple of routes across the Rockies, Interstate 70 through Denver or Interstate 80 through Salt Lake City. Skeet had told me they were planning to take the southern route through Denver. I’d told him then that either route worked for me, that it didn’t matter. Now it mattered and I told him I was going north through Salt Lake.
Interstates 15 and 70 come together in a desert on the western slope, desolate, gray, enormous and, other than long curving slabs of interstate concrete and the occasional tiny truck or car, empty of humanity. Skeet pulled the truck onto the shoulder of the eastbound 70 exit. As I was getting out, Eddy slumped toward me, his good eye closed, his eye lashes resting on the pale, young-child skin of his cheek. I touched his neck, feeling for a pulse. His skin was cold and after a minute I said, “Skeet, I can’t feel his heartbeat.”
“He’s still sleeping. Push him over here so I can hold him.” We laid him on his back so his head rested on Skeet’s lap and I closed the door. As I grabbed my backpack, I saw a baseball bat lying in the bed of the truck; it was in two pieces, split longways starting at the label and running through the barrel, the long, straight grain exposed by the split a pure and shocking white against the stains.
I shouldered my pack and walked back down the ramp toward northbound 15. As I walked, I kept looking over my shoulder. The truck never moved.
Remi (brown poodle brat) and I are driving to Death Valley to take pictures of the Geminids meteor shower. We left Saturday morning. We spent Saturday night at a truck stop in Valentine Nebraska, our camper truck parked in a line of idling semis, a sort of bring-your-own-sleeper-cab bunkhouse. The truck stop had a McDonalds and I had an Egg McMuffin. I didn’t tell Remi, although I think he was suspicious.
We left Valentine at 5:30 Sunday morning headed west driving Nebraska Highway 20 which runs along the state’s northern border. Good road, cliffs and buttes and curves in unlikely juxtaposition to movie-set ranch scenes and vastnesses where the prairie meets the horizons all around. It’s a beautiful, beautiful part of our country.
But in the morning, driving into the western dark, you can’t see the towering sand and stone geologies or the grazing cattle in the pine-treed and hilly distances or the snowy, hay-bale dotted expanses, all you can see is the headlight tunnel and the road and the hood and the blue, white and red gauges.
For many miles Sunday morning, the planet Mars, thirty degrees above the horizon and winking red, aligned exactly with the dashed white center line of west Highway 20 and the furthest reaches of our headlight beams while in those same moments, I watched in my mirrors as the eastern sky behind us turned red to blue. And the only sound was the murmur of the diesel and the gossipy whispers of the tires to the asphalt.
In the quiet, I thought about life being so quick and jerky and that it’s in these moments when fate and good fortune put us between the stars and the sun, that joy and peace are relearned.
