You don’t meet interesting people at the Holiday Inn Express. The best motel rooms for a good conversation cost less than fifty dollars.
Sarah and Pradeep are on vacation, traveling the country in his Porsche. The Grand Central Motel in Ely, Nevada is a $65 room in a building with a cant to the floors, a potholed asphalt and gravel parking lot, and a cold water spigot in the shower that doesn’t work. They each held a goblet of red wine and puffed my weed as we chatted.
They’re from Victoria, Canada. Sarah is forty-eight and walks dogs for a living. Pradeep was born in Kuwait, the son of an oil worker, schooled at the foreign encampment until middle school; he went to high school and college in India where he earned his Doctorate in Psychiatry, and spent his career working in Canada as a psychiatrist. He’s sixty-nine and retired.
They invited me to dinner, the Prospector Hotel & Gambling Hall was a good walk. Sara had a sixteen ounce sirloin well done, a baked potato and three beers. Pradeep’s diabetic and had a salad and two glasses of casino red. He explained to her that Morocco is a country in Africa.
They’ve been together for twelve years, both divorced, no kids. I asked them why they weren’t married and she assured me that they were trying, they almost got married last year; Pradeep had a family emergency. They’re going to try again this year. She nudged him while she described the plan, Pradeep picked at his lettuce and the conversation moved on to motorcycles.
Canadians don’t like us. Our products are now labeled on grocery shelves and boycotted. Friends were appalled that they would spend money in their reviled southern neighbor. I told Pradeep about seeing a dozen men with rifles forcing two dark-complected men onto their stomachs in a bar ditch in Montana. He assured me that no one would mistake him for a Muslim. “Those guys in Montana didn’t look like muslims, either.” He bought me dinner.
In the morning as we said our goodbyes, she gave me Pradeep’s phone number, “He won’t turn it on until we get home.”
I rode my motorcycle to Portland, Oregon to visit my brother, Greg. Greg has dementia. Dementia is a terminal condition.
Waiting for the pilot car at one of the many long Montana road construction sites, the guy in front of me got out of his car and I took off my helmet. He was on his way to Walmart. His job, he told me, is to teach Walmart employees to merchandize books, “The money’s in hardcover. We have less than four feet of paperbacks.” I said, “I like a paperback.” “To be honest, me, too. The only hardcovers in my bookcase are Stephen King.” He was tall, thin and sixties and wore a voluptuous grey 10-speed handlebar mustache.
Following the Columbia River into Portland, the wind pushes the bike around so that I have to pay attention and there are whitecaps on the water. Greg wind surfed that river for many years with great skill and passion. He had a Ford van full of boards and sails.
The difficulty with loss is that it’s so ordinary. The words have all been written. For Greg, there is no happy ending. Things will not get better. The avid hiker shuffles short steps. His balance is tenuous. He doesn’t see the ducks, he can’t follow a pointed finger. There is no trial medication or treatment in Mexico. There is no hope. There is only sadness and guilt, guilt that it isn’t me watching lacrosse on the big screen while my housemate snores beside me.
The Military Police brought us home in their jeep when I was four and Greg was two. Dad was a captain in the Army stationed at Fort Ord. We lived on post. They caught us at the main gate, a mile or more from home; we were holding hands, going to the beach on Monterey Bay. We were barefoot, Greg was in diapers. That’s who we became.
As we sat on the couch, I asked him, “Greg, do you know who I am?” He stared into my eyes for many, many seconds and I stared back. The disease has turned his eyes a pale sky blue, almost a grey, the bright Norwegian-blue eyes he got from Mom are faded and gone. He never answered my question.
In his stare I looked for him. There’s a temptation to romanticize, “He’s still in there,” I say to myself, I want so badly for it to be that day again when the jokes were worn and the conversation easy. But that’s about me, not him; it’s about my own struggle with finality, my inability to cope with the void, with infinity, with my own frailty and pending death. The empathy is horrifying. As we walked, we passed a guy with a yapping Chihuahua on a leash. I said under my breath, “The only good thing about a Chihuahua is that it’ll fit in a garbage disposal.” He chuckled, maybe in response to my quip. There’s no knowing.
Greg has been kicked out of two assisted living homes for his violence, a common symptom of dementia. His rage is there. You can see it in his fists and rigid 90-degree elbows, you can feel it in his shoulders, you know it when you say, “Greg, this way” over and over and he keeps walking toward his own destination. His anger exists, it seems, as a vestige of a previous life appalled at what’s become. I tried to engage him with kid memories, peacocks at Mooney’s Grove, hiking Snake Lady’s Wall, sneaking into the county fair, surfing the early morning sets at the Eleventh Street beach, stealing Dad’s Opel summer nights, pushing it down the street before we started it and riding the dirt roads of Black Mountain with all the friends we could fit in the backseat. He was silent. What are shared memories when they’re no longer shared?
When I was thirty and Greg was twenty-eight, we rode motorcycles around the world; SE Asia, Australia, Nepal, India, the African continent, Europe. My wife Meredith and I lived in Tokyo during the boom-boom economy of the early nineteen eighties and we bought two Hondas for the trip and then a third. The ride took thirteen months. It was the kind of life experience you enter as one person and come out someone new. Greg came away with a great skepticism for the dictums of capitalism, for money as purpose. He worked, he made a living, he raised Morgan and Madeline, my wonderful nephew and niece. But he recognized something I’ve only learned of late. And maybe it wasn’t the trip, maybe he just knew. Greg has lived life on his terms; travel, windsurfing, hiking, camping. He taught his kids to love life, to love people, to accept risk, to stand up straight and go for it. That’s his legacy. He remodeled kitchens when he had time.
Greg’s is a life to celebrate and even now, as the path narrows, he still, every once in a while, when you’re not looking, twitches the half-smile that inevitably preceded his snark. I knew that smile when we tried to escape Fort Ord. I love my brother and I miss him.
I’m riding from Minneapolis to Portland, Oregon to visit Greg, my brother.
Long travel on a motorcycle gives you time in your head. Nothing to brake your thought, to infringe on your psychic wander except the feel of the day, now cooler now warmer, the splat-crunches as bugs hit the fairing, the arthritis in my left shoulder settling in, not going away but settling in, the ache easing. I rest my elbow on my thigh to give it a break.
On the two-page spread in the Rand McNally atlas, the miles of bright blue North Dakota interstate turn grey as the road shrinks into farm country. Orange topsoil from the green Deeres tractoring the land on both sides fogs the road and the smell of the dirt fills my sinuses and I lick the grit on my teeth and feel the wind pushing it down my neck and turning my long underwear the color of the land.
Pairs of wooden power poles mark my road, sixty feet tall with a timber cross-member and X-bracing between to hold them straight and true. All very much as they should be. This is a god’s country. And once you’re on the grey two lanes, the traffic spaces out and the surface is mostly good and the speed limit is sixty-five and I push it by ten and the carpet of turned soils drops off the horizons all around.
The farm equipment in North Dakota is big and slow but on the long, straight road clear to the horizon, passing them by is easy. There are lots of mobile homes out here and rusty cars with a worn spare tire holding them off the road. A Help Wanted sign at my dinner diner, “All Positions Available.” My burger, fries and chocolate shake are delivered without incident; a tall teenager with black roots under orange big-city hair, an earring, well-built sentences and an easy laugh. He won’t be here long.
The rear suspension on the Harley spanks my butt. There are aftermarket shock absorbers; for a thousand bucks, it feels like a bargain. And the steady mumble of the engine and the constant inputs to the handlebars; everything needs an input, a dip, an oil stain, a bit of shredded tread from a recapped truck tire, a nudge to the right for a passing Kenworth, the constant armwrestling with hard-muscled winds from the south; the inputs, the inputs, I can feel them in my shoulder but it’s settling in. Gas is ninety-one octane at the Kwik Trip; we’re getting just under ten miles per quart in the heavy breeze.
The Harley’s a nanny bike, it protects and entertains. Flicking through the screens on the dash, I know how fast, how cold, how far I’ve come and how far I have to go, the time, my altitude above sea level and when to turn left. It gives me maps and pictures of my exits, brightly colored warnings when I’m low on fuel or there’s an upcoming road project. It warns me about red light cameras and when I cross a state line, a pulsing orange banner cautions me about Next State helmet laws. When the speed limit drops without warning from seventy to twenty-five for some tiny western town, it’s right there saving me a ticket in flashing yellow. It even yells at me when I miss a turn. It’s all brain sugar, something to tickle the neurons while I wait for the horizon to arrive and the dashed yellow lines flick under my left boot. And it distracts me from my shoulder. My room at the Days Inn in Minot was $67.00 plus tax. Business must be soft.
There was a construction crew staying at the Days Inn. They parked their truck next to the bike. I nodded and said “Hey” and the guy in front, a guy my age, a guy who knew his business, looked at me and nodded back, “¿Cómo estás?”; his voice was tired, a construction guys’ moment. I thought about him the next day as I passed a dozen or more cars jumble-stopped in the traffic lane of a bumfuck eastern Montana town, doors open, emergency lights flashing. Traffic was at a crawl as we eased through the congestion and I watched as men in military outfits pointing rifles and yelling forced two men — dark hair, dark skin, green polo shirts — to lie face down in the bar ditch. Most of the cars didn’t have police markings.
And as the clouds skud across the blue I think about my brother Greg, Greg and his dementia, Greg, best friend and constant companion growing up. In the last six months, he’s been kicked out of two nursing homes for violence. This is the third. I hope he recognizes me.
Damn it’s a beautiful evening here in Cleveland, Mississippi. I spent the day riding north from Natchez on Highway 61, The Blues Highway. My motel room cost $50.00. No coffee, no wi-fi.
Last night in Natchez, I stayed at John Quitman’s house, a National Historic Landmark. Quitman owned four plantations, two in Mississippi, two in Louisiana, and four hundred people. The estate is described in writings as “antebellum,” a fancy word that means Quitman’s enormous wealth, acquired through slave labor, was acquired legally. Quitman died in 1858, his daughter sold the estate in 1914. These days, they call it the Monmouth Historic Inn & Gardens.
There is a malaise about the Quitman Inn & Gardens, a brooding sense that something’s not right, a haunting guilt that within the painstakingly manicured gardens, fountains, statues and period-decorated rooms and canopy beds, that we’re celebrating a history better left to revile; that the savagery and human suffering that built those buildings and planted those hedges is a tragedy rather than a weekend getaway.
As I wandered the grounds and read the signs and placards, I learned that in 1834 Quitman purchased 15 people among them Harry Nichols who was became his personal valet. In modern times, it’s tempting for the visitor to see the busy black serving people and the bald white manager with his spittle-flecked lips and ingratiating smile, as direct decedents of the antebellum state. And maybe they are. And maybe it’s just a job.
Later in the evening, I laid alone on the well-manicured grass in the dark and stared at the stars and thought about all the people over the centuries that had laid on their backs in that same spot and stared at those same stars through their pain, rage and despair; a torment that the black and white abstractions of words can only fail to describe. Indeed, we are insulated from the brutality and anguish of our history by centuries of failing words. The faces that stared at those same stars for all those hundreds of years, those same damn stars, stared accusingly back at me. That is our history.
It’s been a hundred and sixty years but there are signs of wear. My fellow guests at the plantation were white, mostly older and overweight, and drove newer mid-price sedans. They smiled at me at breakfast, a curiosity with my motorcycle hair, my jeans and my Equal Justice Initiative t-shirt (from the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama; a token protest). The drive into the estate is rutted and unpaved, shutters are askew and need paint, the gift shop sells expensive white-lady jewelry, the much-vaunted breakfast was eggs, grits, bacon and clumsily sliced cantaloupe and musk melon; Waffle House is just as good. The room was fine, I don’t think I’ve slept in a canopy bed before. My trip into antebellum history cost $200.00.
In Morgan City, Louisiana I stayed at the Morgan City Motel, a small, lonely $60.00 room.
Jim’s room was directly across the parking lot from mine, he was sitting on the front step smoking a cigarette. Sixty and the first mate on a tug, he joined the Navy when he was eighteen and has spent his life at sea. He’s worked with the same crew for twenty years; 28 days at sea, 14 days off. The tug is used to tow heavy equipment between land and deep-sea oil rigs, It’s another week before he ships out again. He’s been married twice and getting his second divorce and is worried about their ten-year old son. He takes medication for his blood pressure.
I went back to my room and rolled a joint and sat on the front step and after a few minutes, Juan shuffled across the parking lot with his cane and his cigarette and asked to sit next to me. Juan’s seventy-six; he was born in Puerto Rico and grew up in New York City. He’s married to a woman who lives in Virginia Beach, he hasn’t seen her in thirteen years. Juan started in the Navy, too, and has spent his career at sea, tugs, cargo ships, tankers. He’s seen so many places, Cairo, the Philippines, Alaska, the Eiffel Tower.
Juan’s got neuropathy in his feet and struggles to walk. I asked him if he had family in town or friends. He told me he’d shipped out of Morgan City many years ago, he’d liked the town and so he came back. He’s been at the Morgan City Motel for a couple of months, he came from Florida. He doesn’t know anybody in Morgan City except the motel staff and fellow residents; it was like he didn’t have anyplace else to go. Herbert, the maintenance man at the motel, has been making sure he gets out of bed in the morning and takes his meds. He used to have a motorized scooter but it was stolen. He’s worried about immigrants and crime, he talked about it at length. When I got up in the morning, there was an ambulance at Juan’s door. Herbert had called for it.
I went on a swamp tour with Captain Caviar. He spent thirty years fishing for choupique (pronounced “shoe pick”) for their caviar, and so the sobriquet. He sold the business and now Captain Caviar spends his days wandering the swamps with tourists, he gets a lot of Germans. A Russian couple in tall waterproof boots wanted to be dropped off on an island, he refused, too dangerous. The two of us spent four hours motoring the wide and tiny channels of the bayous under a deep blue sky and picture-perfect clouds, the Spanish moss-dangling over our heads from the live oak and cypress, the snow white egrets, the deafening silence when he turned off the engine, the alligators’ invisible presence. Our vessel was a 20’ flat bottomed aluminum boat with a 150-horsepower Suzuki outboard that pushed us fast on the big channels and was whisper quiet so I could only just hear it in the narrows. We motored past Pirate Island, famous for its booty; the booty rumored to be buried there by the pirate Jean Lafitte and the booty driven off the island by mosquitos after just one day on the TV show Naked and Afraid. He pointed to the shore where somebody caught a 13’ 1” gator just the other day.
When I got back to the motel, Herbert told me that Juan had been transferred to a larger hospital in Baton Rouge.
I ran into Colonel Sawyer on Facebook, he’s retired in Pensacola. We had breakfast at Waffle House.
Captain Sawyer was my Commanding Officer when I arrived at the 1st Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment, the 1/1 Cav, at O’Brien Barracks in Schwabach, West Germany, September, 1975. He’d joined the Army as an enlisted man, 11-Bravo, Infantry; a grunt. In 1964, he was sent to Viet Nam as an adviser. He later went to OCS, Officer Candidate School, and was commissioned as an officer. He retired as a Lieutenant Colonel.
I was his Jeep driver in the 1/1 Cav and at breakfast, he complimented me on his memories of my map-reading skills; navigation mistakes are bad when you’re leading a two-kilometer long convoy of tracks and wheels on tiny German roads; it’s hard to turn things around. But when he’d been duty officer the night before, he needed sleep so he told me where we needed to go and I followed the pencil-line roads on the plastic-laminated Army map with klicks-instead-of-miles and thickets of contour lines, and steered the convoy while he slept beside me.
We talked about Jeeps, he preferred the old Jeep, the M151, the Jeep I drove for him, to the modern Humvee. In an ambush, he explained, you can roll out of the Jeep and onto the ground in one fast motion whereas you have to open doors and scramble to get out of a Humvee and that takes time. His unit was ambushed several times in Viet Nam.
When my younger brother, Greg, had his backpack stolen while hitchhiking around Europe, Captain Sawyer let him stay in my room in the barracks, against all kinds of Army regulations. Greg slept on the floor next to my bunk in my Army sleeping bag on my Army air mattress. When he arrived, he had no money and hadn’t eaten in days. When the Supply Sergeant was in the latrine, the Cav donated a case of C-rations to the cause. Greg finished them off the week he was with me, that was twelve high-calorie combat meals in addition to the three meals he ate every day in the mess hall.
Colonel Sawyer was interested in my life and I told him highlights. Breakfast was almost three hours.
I sent him an email afterwards that read in part:
“I spent three years on active duty, perhaps the most significant three-year period of my life. The Army taught me a lot about people, about life, about myself. It gave me time to grow up. I came away proud that I’d served, with an admiration for the institution, and with a deep gratitude and a profound respect for the professionals I served under such as yourself. For that I thank you.”
