This spring, I rode the Harley Davidson from Minneapolis to Portland, Oregon to visit my brother, Greg; eighteen hundred miles of hard, cold rain and sixty mile-an-hour winds riding the high plains and the Rocky mountains on two-lane asphalt.
Greg is sixty-six, two years younger than me. Growing up, our family moved every couple of years, new house, new school, new neighbor kids, new siblings. Greg and I were best friends, we had to be. Then the Army, college, Peace Corps, travel, careers, marriages, kids, and all the other oddities of adult life happened and we went our directions. Greg was a windsurfer and the wind blew him to Portland.
Greg can no longer assemble coherence. His stories are predicates without a subject. My refrain, as we work to communicate, is “Who?” who are we talking about, who did that wonderful, awful, amazing, inexplicable thing? Only to discover often that the predicate itself, that event, that story, that meaningful anecdote that he’s working so hard to relate, is itself a figment. He’s started having conversations with his bathroom mirror.
A few weeks ago, he walked out of his house at six o’clock in the evening and spent the night on the streets of downtown Portland. Drugs are a problem in Portland and the streets at night are tense and dangerous. Greg struggles with anxiety, his terror as he wandered those dark streets must have been overwhelming, stumbling over people sleeping on the sidewalks, recognizing buildings and street names and unable to assemble that information into directions home. He didn’t have his phone, he can no longer work it anyway, and it took his son, Morgan, until four o’clock the next afternoon to find him.
His kids, Morgan and Madeline, are on it. They’ve hired help and visited assisted living situations and they’re on waiting lists. The memory-care facilities of drooling old people staggering behind walkers are not an option; Greg hikes the Cascades several times a week with his care-provider, Evyn. A large, extended family from the Philippines hosts people struggling with dementia. There is gardening and home repairs to do. It sounds promising.
I’d joined the Army. It was February 1975, I was eighteen and I was hitchhiking from Solana Beach, California to Minneapolis to visit my mother before riding the big dog to Fort Knox for Basic Training. It was evening and dark, six or seven o’clock. I didn’t own a watch. I was standing on a ranch access onramp to Interstate 15 some miles east of Mesquite, Nevada, the country around me was desert. A guy in a ’55 Chevy 3100 stepside pickup, Trademaster V8, 3-speed transmission with a column shift; a twenty-year-old ranch truck, the meadow-green paint faded and the fenders, box and doors wrinkled and banged from the work, had left me there.
Harlan, the guy driving it, a hard-lived fifty or so, cowboy lean, saddle-leather complexion, sun-chapped lips and broken, whiskey-colored teeth, his sweat-stained Silverbelly Stetson on the seat between us, pulled regularly from a bottle of Jimmy Beam he held jammed between the thighs of his jeans. His left hand, a Camel Straight wedged between his nicotine-stained little and ring fingers, his middle finger amputated to a stub just above his palm, he draped over the wheel to steer the truck. His right hand he used to shift and raise the bottle. He’d picked me up just north of Las Vegas.
The level of the whiskey in the bottle had been dropping steadily as we rode the miles. It didn’t seem to have much effect on his driving, he kept the truck at forty-five miles-an-hour and mostly between the lines. He offered me a pull and I took it, seemed like the polite thing to do. When he reached to take the bottle back, he let his hand rest on my thigh for a moment before he took it. When we got off at the ranch exit, he invited me to spend the night in his trailer, said he lived alone and had a hot shower, more whiskey, burgers and beans in the fridge. Cowboys, I knew where that went; I’d once traded with a cowboy for my life. But that’s a different story.
I got out of Harlan’s truck at the bottom of the exit and watched as the red round taillights and the grumble from the little V8 disappeared into the dust of the gravel road toward the mountains on the north horizon. Cold, windy, hoary skies and getting dark, I stood on the on-ramp for maybe an hour and six or eight pickups and a long-nose Peterbilt hauling hay accelerated past my thumb. The warm from the whiskey gone, the chill was starting to dig in. I thought about Harlan’s invitation and wondered if I’d made the right choice, a burger, whiskey and a warm place to sleep sounded good. And maybe worth the swap. But that decision was made. I checked to make sure the zipper on my jacket was all the way up and stuffed my hands back in the pockets of my jeans.
Hitchhiking on the freeway is illegal, the law is posted on a black and white aluminum sign on every on-ramp in America; violating that law risks you a ticket and maybe an overnight in the local constabulary on a vagrancy charge; I had almost ten bucks in my pocket. But it was dark and the cold was coming through the soles of my boots and I was shivering and I walked up the ramp and down the shoulder and kept walking, the muscle work taking some of the bite off the wind. The freeway was almost empty and I’d walked a couple of miles when a Cadillac a few years from new, gold paint, gold vinyl top, ski racks and skis, braked hard onto the shoulder.
The passenger side window rolled down and a woman’s voice yelled at me from the driver’s side.
I couldn’t hear her, “Ma’am?” I said.
A guy my age sitting in the passenger seat exhaled warm cigarette smoke in my face, “She wants to know if you can drive in snow.”
“Yes, Ma’am. I’ve driven through Minnesota winters.”
“We’re from Bel Air. We’re going to Salt Lake City. Do you have a drivers’ license?”
“Yes Ma’am.”
“Can I see it?”
It was dark and I was cold and I pulled out my wallet and handed the card through the window. She clicked on the dome light and held up my Minnesota license as she considered my face and my facts. I looked over the car; a four-door Sedan de Ville, glossy dark wood trim on the dash, gold brocade seats with brocade buttons. The idle had the deep, quiet lope of GM’s 472 cubic-inch big-block. They were young, the guy wore a Hansen surfboard’s t-shirt (my first stick had been a Hansen), shades, shorts, blond beach dreads, baby smooth skin, cigarette pinched between his fingers, his flip flops braced against the dash, a box of Marlboros and a Zippo between them. The woman wore a filmy gold blouse with no bra and white culottes. Her hair was long and straight, the same blond as her passenger’s maybe with a little color, her skin under the dome light almost the same baby smooth. She gave me a long look through the open window as she handed me my license, “If the snow gets bad, I need you to drive.”
“Happy to do it.”
The back seat was the same gold fabric and buttons as the front seat, I threw in my bedroll and closed the door and she chirped the tires and accelerated hard up to eighty-five miles-an-hour, I watched the speedometer over her shoulder. The speed limit was fifty-five.
“This is Norman. I’m Esther. We’re going to Salt Lake City.”
“People call me Luck.”
“That’s not the name on your license.”
“It’s what my mother calls me.”
“Luck. That’s fine. We’re going to need all the luck we can get tonight; there’s a blizzard coming, that’s what the radio’s been saying.”
“Good skiing,” I said from the backseat, not knowing shit about skiing.
“I’ve never driven in snow.”
“I can drive,” Norman said, his voice pouty.
“No. Absolutely no. No more lawyers, no more judges, no more POs. No, you’re not driving.”
“Rollers ain’t out here.”
“’Aren’t,’ Norman, please. Texaco next exit.”
The canopy at the Texaco was brightly lit, three pumps underneath; two red pumps for regular, a silver Sky Chief pump between them for ethel. There was a faded red Studebaker Commander parked on one side of the pumps, two flat tires on the driver’s side. Parked on the other side with the hood up was a mist green Ford F250, most of the paint baked off by the desert sun, orange rust climbing from the running boards up the doors and fenders, mid-fifties truck, heavy-treaded tires, a flatbed made from steel plate and angle iron with wood two-by-eights bolted down for a bed. The steel work was rough like somebody’d fabbed it up in a hurry with a cutting torch and a buzz-box. They’d used a lot of 6010 welding rod to do it, I recognized the spatter. The welds weren’t pretty but they were straight and the penetration was deep; that bed was going to last a lot longer than the truck. A guy wearing a straw cowboy hat, flat-soled farmer boots and faded jeans, and the Texaco mechanic in his army-green bus-driver hat and uniform, the back of his jacket and the butt of his pants caked with oily dust, leaned on the V-grill and a round fender and fiddled and studied under the hood.
Esther pulled the Cadillac in behind the Ford. Both the red pumps had cardboard taped over the glass, “Out” hand-lettered in black marker. Norman slammed the door and angled for the men’s room at the back of the building. I got out and followed him.
The floor was grey-black concrete, puddles under the urinals, the stool stained with shit spray. The mirror was broken and the beige walls were covered with names, pictures and commentary done in colored markers, spray paint and ballpoint pen, a lot of it sloppy or stylized and unreadable. There were comments about Nixon, McGovern, Viet Nam, women’s names and proclivities, n****rs, sand n****rs and OPEC, hearts and arrows, swastikas, the Hells Angels’ logo, red and white banner above the skull and feathers, a blue pen calling somebody’s mother a whore, hippies with locks and beards and hairy armpits, enormous dicks, tongues, and dangling ballbags, lady crotches, people sucking, licking and screwing in ways that defied gravity and the human body, all painted with varying amounts of creativity, talent and color. The piss stink made my eyes water.
The Texaco mechanics used the sink to wash up, an open tin of Goop mechanic’s soap, mostly empty of its creamy goo and smeared black with grease, sat balanced on the edge of the sink. Norman unzipped at the urinal, I stood next to him. There were no partitions. Above the urinals sprayed in swooping letters in red paint over the words and pictures drawn before was a message, “Sometimes, luck is all you need.” I thought about that, about how much our lives depend on which side the lady takes in the flop of a spinning coin.
“Stay away from my mother, Luck.”
“What?”
“I said stay the fuck away from my mother.”
“Who?”
“Esther. My mother.”
“She’s your mother?”
“Don’t talk to her.”
“What do I say when she talks to me?”
“Fuck you,” he said, shaking it off and zipping up and not bothering to pull the handle. While I was still pissing, he pulled a mirror and a folded paper packet out of the pocket of his shorts, razored out a couple of lines, horned them straight off the glass, a line into each nostril, and wiped his nose with the back of his hand.
As we came around the corner of the building and into the canopy light, Straw Hat slammed the hood and climbed into the Ford. The starter cranked slow and hard; the guy had the door open and I could see him toeing the starter button with his left boot, his heel on the clutch, and working the gas pedal with his right, and yanking the choke knob in and out until a brown-grey cloud of raw gas and burned oil coughed out the tailpipe and the engine caught and hacked itself into a rough idle, an inline six by the sound of it. Straw Hat revved it a few times to clear the idle and let out the clutch and pulled away from the pump. The wind had picked up and snow had started to fall and swirled in the truck’s wake as it disappeared into the dark. Esther pulled forward and got out. Her culottes were lacey and thin and whipped around her legs. She was wearing flip flops, too.
“Normie, come pump the gas.”
“Make Luck do it. He’s your driver.”
I said, “Glad to,” As I walked around the back bumper, the Texaco man stepped in front of me, “I’ll do it, kid. What’ll it be, Ma’am?” he asked her as he cranked Straw Hat’s gallons and dollars back to zero and lifted the handle. He had the red Texaco star stitched above the brass-zippered breast pocket, his name, Lemuel, embroidered below the zipper in the same red thread. He wore black-rimmed glasses and had the scrawny build, leathery skln and big hands of an old man who’d spent his life working outside.
“Fill it up, please.”
“We’re about out. All we’ve got left is ethel. Should be enough to get you on your way. We’re supposed to get a delivery in the morning if the snow holds off. Check under the hood?”
“Please.”
I glanced at the motor as he was pulling the dipstick, the 472, just like I’d heard.
An hour later, we were back on the freeway and the snow was blowing sideways, heavy enough that it reflected the headlight beams back into the windshield and the road ahead was hazy grey against the swirling white and I had to squint to judge our place on the lane. Esther was driving sixty-five, Norman was dialing the radio knob through the AM stations, the only sound in the car was the slap slap slap of the wipers and preachers preaching about sacred taxation, Brigham Young’s beard, the holy wrong of criticizing church leaders, how black folks represent Satan and white folks represent Jesus; station after station, mile after mile. There weren’t many stations that time of night in that part of Utah, preachers on all of them, their voices rising and falling all with the same sexy rhythm; a just-you-and-me whisper rising in urgency and volume to a final fevered, “Jesus!” then falling back to pillow talk, the same voice, the same erotic tempo, every station, over and over, for miles. I stretched out sideways on the brocade and tried to fall asleep. I used my bedroll for a pillow.
I wasn’t sleeping when Esther said, “I think he’s asleep.”
“I can’t stand that fucker.”
“Honey, stop it.”
“Let’s drop him at the next exit. Fuck, let’s drop him here. Right now. What’s he going to do?”
“Your language. And no, I’m not dropping him off, I might need him to drive.”
“You’re driving’s fine. Let’s get rid of him.”
“Why don’t you like him?”
“I don’t like the way you look at him.”
“Honey.”
“You know what I’m talking about.”
“Honey, no.”
“Fucking forget it.”
There were no exits and the blowing snow was fingering onto the road and giving us a hard thump in the lower back as we sped over its digits. The wind was strong enough that it was pushing the car around and I could feel the tires losing traction then grabbing then losing it again. There was almost no traffic and no light except the glare of the headlights reflecting back through the windshield lighting the gold seats and leaving black shadows. We passed a semi on its side in the median, no cops or wreckers, and we kept going. We passed another semi rollover and then a car in the ditch and another and still no flashing lights, and still Esther didn’t slow down. What little traffic there was, stayed in the right lane. When we caught up with a car or truck, she’d merge into the left lane, the Cadillac slewing side-to-side as it wallowed through the deep snow, and once past, she’d merge back into the right lane, the car slipping back into the deep tracks that grabbed the wheels and steered us north.
Still driving sixty-five, we’d just passed a semi, when suddenly we were spinning, the car whirling counter-clockwise down the middle of the freeway so fast the force threw me against the passenger side door. Then we hit what must have been clear concrete and the tires hooked up and the Cadillac rolled up on the passenger side wheels so I was looking straight down through the window at the snowy road on the other side of the glass and I thought, “Oh, fuck.” And then the tires lost traction again and the car slammed back onto four wheels hard enough that the springs and shocks on the driver’s side hit bottom with a loud, steel-on-steel crunch that sounded like damage and I was thrown back across the seat to the driver’s-side door and we continued to spin.
I heard Norman scream, “Mommy!” as he was flung against the passenger door and then against her. She sat silent, both hands on the wheel, elbows locked, all four tires skidding. When finally we stopped, we were in the middle of the interstate the car facing backwards in the lane, Esther frozen at the wheel, Norman scrunched tight against her and quiet, both of them staring through the windshield into the brilliance. In the silence, the sound of the big motor idling too deep to hear, a pair of headlights blinked through the glare and the slow-moving semi with a box trailer we’d just passed eased silently onto the shoulder and motored around us and kept going.
From the backseat, I grabbed Esther’s shoulder and shook it, it was rigid in my hand and she didn’t move. I got out and opened her door and stood in the blowing snow and leaned in grabbed both her shoulders and shook her and still she didn’t move, her elbows still locked, her hands frozen on the wheel, her eyes wide and staring. One clenched finger at a time, I loosened her grip on the steering wheel all the while looking for headlights coming toward us. When her hands were free, I reached across her and gave Norman’s dreads a shove, he’d been staring into the glare while I pried Esther’s fingers free, he turned and looked at me like he was surprised I was there. “Give me a hand,” I said, “We’ve got to get the fuck out of here.”
He came around and stood next to me in the blowing snow in his flip flops and shorts and we pulled her out from behind the wheel. She dropped a flip flop as we muscled her into the backseat, I threw it on the floor by her feet. She moaned and turned her head side-to-side on the seatback until she saw Norman and whispered, “Normie, Normie. Are you okay? Are you okay, baby?” She held out her arms and Norman slid into the seat next to her and she hugged him with both arms. I shut the back door and got behind the wheel. She was short and I had to move the seat back, it was the first time I’d used a power seat.
I drove north at twenty-five miles-an-hour. The car pulled hard to the left like she’d bent a tie rod or maybe a control arm. The Cadillac had power steering and that made it easier to keep it in the ruts. The wind continued to blow the snow sideways across the windshield and the interstate remained a brilliant white and gray blur. In the rearview mirror, Esther and Norman sat close, Esther in the middle, Norman against the door behind me, his head on her shoulder, his eyes closed, his hand resting on the filmy fabric covering her right breast. She gripped his hair in the fist of her left hand, the other she laid on top of his hand cupping her breast, her eyes were closed, her head leaned back against the brocade seat.
It was 4:30 in the morning when I started seeing exits for Salt Lake City, the snow had stopped and the plow trucks were starting to catch up. I reached over the seat and woke up Esther and she gave me directions to the apartment.
It was a small one-bedroom apartment, second floor, neatly raked gold shag carpet, wood-frame couch with square gold and white stripped cushions and matching chairs opposite a coffee table. The rooms were painted a low-lustre gold; dozens of movie posters and photos of people, black and white and in color, with scrawled notes and signatures and framed in tarnished brass hung square and level throughout. Across the living room, as you walked in the door, hung a full-size poster for the movie Duel; a collage of sepia-tone photos, Dennis Weaver’s eyes open wide in panic above the long-nose Peterbilt semi-tractor, the star of the show, with its streaked and dirty windshield, glinting headlights and terrifying rusty train-rail front bumper, “The most bizarre murder weapon ever used!” The poster was signed by Steven Spielberg in Maybelline-red marker across the grill of the truck, “Thank you, Esther,” he’d written, his signature below illegible but for the two Ss.
“Normie,” she said, “you sleep here,” she patted the couch. “Luck, come in here.”
The bedroom had the same gold carpet as the living room, the curtains were a sheer white fabric with embroidered gold flowers, the bedspread and pillows were gold, the sheets were silky white. There was a brass incense burner and a box of incense on one of the nightstands. Esther lit a stick, I read the label while she was in the bathroom, sandalwood, patchouli, rose, bay and vanilla: Tapping into the powerful energy of the earth to attract abundance, healing, and overall well-being; Creating an environment perfect for manifesting desire; Drawing prosperity, good luck, success, and blessings; Removing blocks, setbacks, and obstacles preventing you from accomplishing goals. It smelled good, too.
Esther knew what she was doing and didn’t seem to care that Norman could hear her moans and loud-whispered commands, or that I hadn’t showered in a week. When she was done and her breathing was quiet and I thought she’d fallen asleep, she rolled suddenly on top of me, grabbed my hair in her fingers and pressed her palms into my temples and in the dim light stared into my eyes like she was trying to recognize me, her L’Oréal tresses covered my nose and mouth. She stared at me for many seconds, the pupils in her hazel eyes slowly shrinking and focusing, her lips pulling back into hard rails, her expression becoming one of rage. She rolled off me and turned her back and whispered over her shoulder, “Get out.” I was too awake to sleep, too tired to ask questions. Her tone left no room for conversation. I slid on my jeans and boots and grabbed my bedroll. As I walked out, I saw Norman still dressed in his shorts and Hansen t-shirt lying on the couch. In the morning light coming through the curtains, I could see his eyes following me. I didn’t say goodbye. He didn’t like me, either.
* * * *
It was morning rush hour when I got to an on-ramp to Interstate 80, the sky was deep-winter blue and clear and it was cold. Standing on the ramp with my thumb out, the second car, a faded dark green, two-door VW Squareback, air-cooled boxer engine, 4-speed transmission with a cue-ball shift knob, black leather-wrapped steering wheel, Nevada plates, picked me up. The car stunk like cigarette butts, coffee, burgers and sweat. Ziggy, the smiley guy at the wheel, early thirties, clean shave and getting bald, was a professional pool player on his way to New York for the Eastern United States Championship. When I was in high school, I hung out at the Pit & Paddock, a biker bar in St. Paul, and learned to play 8-ball. I’d never heard of 14.1 Continuous or 9-ball and so Ziggy explained the games and I tried not to fall asleep.
From Salt Lake, Ziggy and I headed up the interstate into the mountains and for a few hours the road was plowed and we were driving seventy on the flats, forty in third gear up the hills. We were climbing a steep curving grade in third gear when we caught up with the blizzard; as we drove past the apex, the freeway was suddenly covered with snow and the snow was blowing straight at the windshield and the road was invisible.
Ziggy screamed, “I can’t stop. I can’t stop. I can’t stop.” As he was screaming, he banged his chest and shoulders violently back and forth between the seat and the steering wheel all the while stomping the brake pedal hard enough so that I could feel it through the floor. For many seconds, I didn’t understand his panic, there was no reason. And then I saw what he was seeing, the snow blowing straight at the windshield and buffeting the car so it rocked on its springs made it seem to Ziggy’s senses that the car was racing backwards down the interstate. In that moment, Ziggy went from rational guy explaining the rules and strategies of 9-ball, to a man feverishly insane, his body bouncing uncontrollably between the seat and the steering wheel, his eyes bulging, his breathing fast and shallow, his mouth agape, his words, as he continued to scream, disintegrating into meaningless syllables.
His screams hurt my ears and I tried to calm him down, “Ziggy, we’re okay. We’re okay. It’s blowing snow. We’re fine.” When I put my hand on his shoulder, he flinched away from me, clicked open his door and rolled out of the car onto the snow-covered freeway and on his hands and knees crawled frantically toward the center median, screaming, crying, trying to stand up and run, slipping, falling back into the snow, trying again and falling again. As I watched through the open door, the car started rolling backwards on the grade and I yanked the emergency brake lever between the seats and the car stopped and idled quietly. Ziggy reached the shoulder, still on his hands and knees, and looked back at me, the blowing snow making his features hazy and gray.
The road was deserted and I got out and clumped through the snow across the lane to the shoulder, he was still on his hands and knees, “Ziggy, we can’t stay here. Your car’s going to get hit. We’ve got to get moving.”
“Luck, help me. Oh God, Luck, help me.”
I reached down and took his arm and he shook it off, “I don’t want to die out here.”
“We’re not going to die. Let’s get off the fucking freeway,” I grabbed his arm and he yanked it back again.
As we were arguing, a late sixties Chevy C20 pickup, four-by-four, fleetside, I couldn’t see its color in the dark, idled to a stop beside us. Because of the heavy snow and the howling wind, I hadn’t heard it coming, “You guys okay?”
“Oh my God. Oh my God, help us, please.”
“The blowing snow is fucking with his head. Give me a hand. Let’s get him in the car.”
“I’m not getting in the car. No. I’m not. No.”
Guy in his twenties, Carhart coveralls worn through at the knees, leather and beige Sorels, the laces untied and hanging loose, a beige knit cap, got out of the truck and the two of us grabbed Ziggy’s arms and pulled him to his feet. “No,” he screamed, “No.” In his panic, he swung his fists at us and I took a hard blow to my cheek, the Chevy guy took a punch, too, and cussed about it. Ziggy got away and fell in the snow and rolled away and we picked him up and he kept fighting and fell again and finally we wrestled him to the car and shoved him into the passenger seat and slammed the door. He opened it and I slammed it again and he didn’t move.
“Thanks for stopping,” I said.
“That guy’s fucking nuts, you better get him some help. Good luck.”
The Squareback is a light car but its engine is in the back, the weight directly over the rear wheels, giving it good traction in snow. As I drove us east further into the blizzard, the snow got deeper and dragged against the bottom of the car and the winds howled and raged around us and the gusts of snow blinded me so I couldn’t see the hood. The drifts were getting deeper and when we hit them, the snow would explode against the grill and the windshield and the wipers would take several swipes before they cleared it, and until I could see the ghostly profile of the road again, I was driving entirely by feel. I stayed in second gear and didn’t dare take my foot off the gas.
The wind buffeted the car but with the deep ruts from the invisible cars and trucks ahead of us and the steady push from the rear wheels, we stayed on the road. When we were ten miles or so out of Cheyenne, it was dark by then, a snowplow passed us, blazing headlights, flashing amber lights, loud scraping blade, the salt spreader pinging pellets off the side of the car. There were thirty or forty cars, pickups and semis stacked up behind the plow and we merged in at the back of the line. Ziggy was unconscious on the seat next to me.
* * * *
The plow led our convoy to Little America, a truck stop with a motel, a restaurant, a bar and a hundred and eighty gas pumps, that’s what the sign said. The motel lobby and restaurant were crowded with travelers led in by the plows. Truck drivers hauling diesel, lumber and laundry detergent, salesmen selling office supplies, farm equipment and helicopters, Viet Nam vets in their dress greens humping duffel bags and headed home, parents yelling at little kids playing hide and seek, people traveling alone and in couples and threes, people going skiing, people moving and starting new jobs, people going home.
Those days, Irving was the General Manager of Little America, beer gut, no wedding ring, acne scars, crewcut going bald, yellow-tinted glasses with polished brass frames, blue sport jacket over a beer-stained white shirt, no tie. He stood behind the receptionist gal holding a half-empty glass and watched us stomp the snow off our feet as we came through the doors. Rooms were sold-out for those who asked and Irving had to explain to people unaccustomed to sleeping on the floor that there were no beds, listen to their complaints and threats with sympathetic nods, then explain again, for the second, third and fourth time. The freeway was closed for three days, for three days Irving walked the hallways and venues of Little America with his bleary eyes and hospitality smile and begged us all for amity, and kept his shirt stains damp.
Ziggy and I walked into Little America together, he was stumbling and leaning heavily on my arm. People were staking out places to sleep, laying out jackets and suitcases against the walls to mark their spots. Ziggy and I claimed a piece of floor between a cowboy hauling horses to Bitter Creek and a couple of guys in jeans and ponchos with long hair and beards hitchhiking to San Francisco. Every person in the room of roughly legal age had a cigarette in their hand and the air was thick with smoke and loud conversations about the snow and the roads as we negotiated for places to sleep. I leaned my bedroll against the wall and held Ziggy’s hand as he slid down the wall next to it and I went back to the car for his suitcase. The leather case for his pool cues lay on top of the suitcase. I left it in the car. When I got back, Ziggy was sleeping; I set his suitcase down next to him and leaned against the wall and I fell asleep, too.
Outside, the wind blew the snow in swirls and eddies and the drifts piled up against the windows on the west side of the building and the windows were dark to the ceiling other than a faint blue light filtering through the snow from the wall pack lighting and the floods in the parking lot. The windows on the east side were clear, the pump islands blown clean by the wind except around the cars abandoned at odd angles and the drifts piled up in their lee until they were buried entirely. For three days, the flickering fluorescent ceiling lights in the lobby and the canopy lights glowing dim and gray through the blowing snow and the east windows offered no hint as to the hour asserted in roman numerals on the railroad clock above the reception desk.
When I woke up, the lobby was stirring awake. Ziggy sat leaned against the wall next to me with a cigarette looking out the east windows at the dark gray dawn and blowing snow. The hippies and the cowboy were still snoring on either side of us.
“Sleep okay?” I said.
“Good enough.”
“Hard day, yesterday.”
“What do you mean?”
“The snow?”
“What about it?”
“The blizzard, the car going backwards, the guy in the pickup, you don’t remember that?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t either. Let me buy you breakfast.”
As he was talking, the cowboy sat up, rubbed his face and pulled on his boots, “Better feed and walk the horses, going to have to borrow a snow shovel just to get in the damn trailer. Owner wanted them two days ago. He’s going to be pissed. This storm ain’t letting up.”
Sitting in a booth with fake leather seats and a dark wood-grain Formica table top, a pile of pancakes in front of me, I said to Ziggy, “You sure you’re okay?”
“What are you’re talking about?”
“I was there. I pulled you out of the snow. I shoved you back in the car. I drove you here.”
“That never happened.”
“I was there, Ziggy.”
“So was I, Luck.”
I stared at him across the Formica then pointed to my face, “The bruise, the split lip, you did that.”
“We’re not having this conversation. You drove when I was tired, I fell asleep. That’s our story.”
When we were done with breakfast, we walked over to the bar. It was 7:30 according to the railroad clock above the reception desk. It was a big bar and it was getting crowded, bar stools and a bunch of high-tops already full. At one end, there was a 7-foot Valley pool table, a four-foot chandelier with fake leaded-glass light panels that said “Billiards” hanging above it. Two guys shooting, eight, ten guys holding drinks and talking about the blizzard and watching; a long line of quarters queued up under the cushion over the coin mechanism. Ziggy stopped and watched a few shots, walked over and slid two quarters into the queue then turned his back and went to the bar and I followed him, “The second quarter’s for you, thought we’d play a game. Rum and Coke?”
“Sure.”
“You play much?”
“Hung out at a biker bar when I was in high school, played some eight-ball.”
“Got a rating?”
“I won some beers.”
Sitting at the bar, we could see the table and we watched as Ziggy’s quarters inched up in the queue. At the same time, the line of quarters behind us was getting longer as people woke up and realized the freeway was closed and the blizzard was raging and they weren’t going anywhere and there was nothing to do but drink, sleep, argue and maybe play pool.
When Ziggy’s first quarter came up, he jostled and bumped his way through the crowd to the table and said hello to the guy who’d won the game, shook hands like they were old friends, and pulled a cue off the wall rack, glanced at the tip but didn’t bother to look for a weight or roll it on the table to check it for straight, put in his quarter and racked the balls and chalked the cue.
It was an ugly game. The other guy dry broke, Ziggy got up, open table, missed and sat back down. The other guy pocketed the ten and missed, Ziggy sank two balls and missed but hid the cue ball behind the eight. The guy tried to hit one of his balls with a bank but missed and fouled and gave Ziggy ball in hand. Ziggy ran two balls and hooked the guy again and he fouled and Ziggy ran the rest of his balls and won the game. Luck, that’s what I was seeing.
I was up next. Ziggy dry broke, I ran four little ones, Ziggy knocked in two but left me hooked and I gave him ball in hand. I won the game, anyway. And the next two. The third guy I played, Chuck, broke and ran and I was done. Chuck was a bald guy maybe thirty; he had a two-piece Palmer cue with a linen wrap and mother-of-pearl inlays. He talked a lot of shit, “Hope this kid’s ready for an ass whoppin’” he said to the crowd just before I broke. He shot hard, every ball hitting the pocket with a plastic crack and rattle you could hear across the bar. Chuck was drinking Jack straight up with a beer back. His wife was sitting on the floor in the lobby with a glass of bourbon on the carpet beside her. It wasn’t 10:00 yet.
Ziggy put up two more quarters and when he got up, Chuck still had the table. Ziggy won the game when Chuck scratched on the eight; Ziggy’d missed a shot and hung the eight on the lip of a side pocket and Chuck knocked it in to lose the game. When I got up, Ziggy said let’s put some money on it. I told him I had six dollars to my name and he said don’t worry about it and laid two fives on top of the chandelier. He told me I’d win and I did and he handed me the two fives. The next guy wanted to bet on the game and I put one of the fives back on top of the light and won the game and another five bucks. I lost the next game. But from then on, every game had money on it. And I had sixteen dollars in my pocket; I ate and drank for three days on that.
Interstate 80 was closed and for most of us marooned in Little America, it was a three-day drunk, there was nothing else to do. Except smoke cigarettes. By noon the first day, the smoke had overwhelmed the motel’s air handling equipment and a blue-grey cloud hung head-high from the ceiling. The staff was exhausted and Irving quit trying to keep up with the lobby ashtrays and by afternoon the first day, they were overflowing onto the carpet. The smoke and the stink made my eyes itch and my throat raw. We coughed constantly, all of us.
The first afternoon, a woman going home to her parents in Pittsburg and leaving her husband in Salt Lake City, stood in the middle of the lobby and told her story, the lost jobs, the foreclosure, the wrecked car, the lost friends, the bloody noses, the AA meetings, the being broke and the crappy apartments getting crappier. Tall, blond, heavyset, thirty-five, maybe forty, orange lipstick smeared around her mouth, she told us she wasn’t going to be married to the loser bastard any longer. Her words were slurred and hard to follow and she struggled to stand and not spill her Johnny Walker. When she was done, the crowd around her cheered and raised their glasses. She passed out in a corner by a window, her feet pulled up to her butt, her drink on the carpet beside her, her head leaned back against the snow-blue glass and the tears ran down her cheeks.
The afternoon of our second day, a guy sitting on the floor and leaning against the wall, puked a frothy cream-colored puddle into his lap and passed out and sat with the puke in his lap for hours and the Bacardi stink surrounded him. A drunk woman spanked her screaming kid and the kid screamed louder and she dragged the kid to the door to shove her out into the blizzard. Another woman stopped her at the door, talked to her quietly, and sat in one of the lobby chairs with the kid in her lap until the kid fell asleep. A woman gave her boyfriend a blow job, her head in his lap under a jacket pretending to sleep and thinking nobody was watching.
As we got drunker, there were threats and shouted arguments and a couple of fist fights with haymakers and clumsy kicks and guys grappling and rolling on the floor with bloody noses. During the first fight, Irving called the cops. They told him they couldn’t get to us. That evening, the snow stopped.
Our third day, Ron and Terri got engaged, they were from Cambridge and driving to Pasadena for graduate school. The two of them stood on a table in the lobby to make their announcement. They were both drunk and after they announced and toasted and we all cheered, Terri fell backwards off the table. She was fine. It was Kristi’s birthday and the cooks made cakes and we sang Happy Birthday and she blew out the candles, there were six, and we all had a piece. Her father was there, her mother was sleeping in one of the lobby chairs.
All three days, Ziggy hung out in the bar and drank rum and cokes and played pool. After the first night, I don’t think he slept. A lot of cash got set on top of that light, four or five twenties on some of the games, and the pool table got to be the center of the carnival, drunks crowding the players and yelling at them for good shots and bad and throwing bills on the table and crowding around so players had to push the people back to take a shot. Ziggy kept shooting, winning a few games then losing one and cycling back through the line of quarters under the cushion. That third afternoon, the freeway was still closed but the rumor was that the plows had it almost clear and they were going to open it later that night.
Before they opened it, Ziggy played a final match with Chuck, eight-ball, race to five; the first person to win five games wins. It was a five-hundred-dollar game. Chuck had to take a leak and while we were waiting, Ziggy took me aside and gave me his keys and told me to put our luggage in the car, fill it with gas and park it by the door and to let him know when I was back. Most people were in the bar watching the games and only a tired-looking mom bouncing her kid on her knee saw me pick up our luggage and carry it outside.
The crowd was loud and drunk and they’d been waiting. They saw Chuck as the guy to beat; for three days, he’d won every game he’d played except the one the first morning against Ziggy and another one or two the next day. Ziggy’s wins were just luck, we all saw that. When I got back, I nodded to Ziggy. Chuck had just won the lag and got the break; the lag is where the two players both shoot from one end of the table, bounce the ball off the far rail and whichever ball ends up closer to the near rail wins. I had nothing riding on the match; all the same, I was disappointed but not surprised when Ziggy lost the first three games, Chuck pounding the balls into the pockets as though hitting them hard earned him extra points. He was on the eight-ball about to win his fourth game of five, Ziggy had three balls on the table and hadn’t won one when he said to Chuck, “Want to make it interesting?”
Chuck was drunk and didn’t see it coming, none of us did, “Fuck yeah, I’ll take your money. How much you got?” Ziggy pulled five neatly folded hundred-dollar bills out of his shirt pocket, counted them so Chuck could see them and set them on the light. Chuck waved his wife over, she was drunk, too; she turned her purse upside down and wadded bills, ones, fives, tens, twenties, spilled onto the table and Chuck smoothed them out and counted them and set the stack on top of the light next to Ziggy’s hundreds. Now it was a thousand-dollar game.
When Chuck fouled on the eight ball and Ziggy won his fifth game, he bellowed into the crowd, “Lousy, cheap fucking win” and demanded another match, double or nothing. Ziggy shrugged and Chuck’s wife dumped out her purse again. With all the ones counted, there were sixteen hundred dollars and change on the table. The truckers, ranchers, sales guys, vets, hippies, college students, moms, dads, me, all of us drunk and in need of a shower, stood packed so tight around the table it was hard to move. We all knew who was going to win; the side bets were running two-to-one. To make Chuck whole on the bet, one of the guys staked him the four-hundred, he was that sure. We were all that sure.
In the next five games, Ziggy missed shots twice, both times because he narrowly missed cue ball position for a following shot. In game two he was forced to shoot a long bank that he just missed, in game three he missed an impossible combination. Both times he missed, he didn’t leave Chuck a shot and when he got back up, he ran out both games. He was shooting with the bar stick. Chuck, sitting on a stool with his Palmer between his knees and a bunch of guys standing around him, didn’t sink a ball the entire match. In game five, the final game, as Ziggy trickled the eight-ball into a corner pocket on an easy final shot, Chuck crashed over his stool and lunged to his feet. He was drunk and since the second break he’d been cussing Ziggy to the crowd around him and getting steadily louder as he lost games. Now he’d lost the match and a couple of thousand bucks. “You son of a bitch. You sorry son of a bitch. You hustler motherfucker, I’m going to break your fucking neck.”
Ziggy grabbed the cash off the chandelier, caught my eye and I shoved through the crowd toward the door, Ziggy’s hand on my shoulder pushing me forward. The yelling and Chuck’s threats got louder behind us; a lot of people had lost money on that match. “You drive,” Ziggy said as he pushed me through the door. The big thermometer on the wall just outside the door said the temperature was six degrees.
I still had his keys and as the engine caught, I jammed the cue-ball shifter into reverse, stomped the gas and side-stepped the clutch. The tires spun in the snow as Chuck, roaring curses and swinging his cue stick, burst through the doors and the lobby light and the blue smoke and the yelling drunks spilled into the parking lot behind him. Chuck swung the butt of his cue at the hood of the car and missed and slipped in the snow and fell and dropped the stick and picked himself up and kept coming and about then the rear tires of the VW hooked up and I drove us the hell out of there.
“Jesus,” I said, “Where we going?”
“That Palmer’s an eight-hundred-dollar stick. He’s lucky he didn’t hit the car. Freeway’s open, been open for a couple of hours. The announcement’s at 10:00. Irving told me that’s when he kicks everybody out.”
We hadn’t gone fifty miles before we were out of the snow and the freeway was clear. I drove all night while Ziggy slept. We got gas in Ogallala, Grand Island and Omaha. We hit Des Moines at morning rush hour and stopped at Donut King. We sat at a booth and we both ordered coffee, black. I had a cake donut with sprinkles. We talked about Little America and our thrilling getaway and Irving tipping him off about the freeway (that tip had cost Ziggy five bucks). He pulled Chuck’s wadded bills out of his pocket, counted out ten twenties and handed them to me, “Luck happens sometimes.” he said. I’d never held that much money before.
“How much did you win?”
“A little over six.”
“Hundred?”
“Thousand.”
“Jesus Christ.” Ziggy dropped me at a ramp to northbound 35. That night I ate dinner at my mother’s house. And took a long shower.
I’m 67 years old, I’m a US Army veteran, I’ve lived overseas for many years in both Europe and Asia, and I’ve traveled the planet including 13 months riding a motorcycle around the world, the Sahara Desert crossing sticks in my memory. I’ve been married to the same woman for over 30 years, I founded and ran a business for 28 years (you know that, you worked for me), I put two kids through college without debt, paid off our house and had enough money left over to retire. I spend my summers traveling the southern states on my motorcycle talking to people I meet and writing about them (last summer I was in Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama (including a NASCAR race at Talladega!), Tennessee, North Carolina, West Virginia and Ohio). I subscribe to several newspapers including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Guardian, BBC News and Al Jazeera; I read a lot and I am passionately and unabashedly liberal in my beliefs.
Having laid out a little of my history and perspective, and you know me as a co-worker and an employer, besides, I have to ask: Do I seem delusional? Do I seem like a person likely to be seduced by propaganda, false media and angry friends? If I do, stop reading. You shouldn’t read shit from delusional people.
If you’re still reading, here’s a quick thought experiment for you: apparently, a lot of people believe that Trump’s 4 indictments and 91 felony charges in 4 different jurisdictions are a “deep state” operation orchestrated by Joe Biden or his henchmen. A scenario like that would require that literally thousands of people be able to keep a complicated storyline absolutely secret not just for years but for the rest of their lives. Nobody, not attorneys, not juries, not court officials, not clerks, secretaries, police officers, or janitors can disclose their secret enterprise, despite the fact that revealing the secret would earn them thousands (or millions) of dollars and hours and weeks of TV fame. Does that seem likely? Really? People are people.
Now, let’s talk about you: I assume from your messages that your news sources are primarily Fox, OAN, Newsmax, Qanon and the various other websites, blogs and social media outlets that inform the MAGA faithful as well as the friends and people you choose to surround yourself with. And from those sources and associates, you have taken on a world view that is both false and destructive, a world view that is vengeful, bigoted and cruel, a world of lies, partial truths, conspiracy theories, self-dealing, self-aggrandizement and nonsense. The MAGA arguments are not something you will convince me of; in fact, it is not a conversation that I’m willing to be part of. But it is something you should reflect on.
And so, my former friend and co-worker, I wish you the very best. I warn you that outside the media and social bubble that you now live in, the world looks much different, it believes in science, humanity, justice and equality, it believes in an imperfect country forever working to better itself. That’s the America I believe in and want to be part of. Let’s go our different paths.
The black vinyl snapped and cracked when I sat on it. The night was cold like that. I fumbled the key into the switch, twisted it and the engine ground around until it’d hacked itself into a roar. Even in the cold, the cab stank like gas and sweat and grease burgers.
I grabbed the mic off the dash, “Eight-two in service, whatcha got Ronald?”
“H.P., northbound 35E at Maryland. Accident, car’s in the lane.”
“Ten-four, in route.”
I stomped the clutch and ground the stick into reverse. It was five-thirty in the evening, dark and starting to snow.
Eight-two’s one of Ronald’s wreckers. It’s got a strong motor and good tires, but the body sits on the frame like the fat on Ronald’s belt, kind of saggy and loose. It makes a racket going down the road.
At the end of the block I was driving forty miles an hour. I blew through the stop sign with my foot on the floor. The Highway Patrol contract is big dough and they like us on the scene quick.
I caught a yellow at the intersection and was hoofing it fast up Rice Street when I saw Eight-eight coming the other way. Red with white lettering, Ronald’s trucks stand out from the traffic. George in his blue company coveralls was on the seat.
He tossed me a thumbs-up as he rolled past, then cracked the radio, “Stevie, you got that Highway Patrol?”
“Ten-four.”
“Just come south on 35, looks a good one. Bet you want to know who’s at the scene, don’t you?” I could hear the cackle in his voice.
“Shit.” I said, then keyed the mic, “Nice George, ain’t it, I can’t cuss your mother over the radio?”
“Why’d you want to do something like that for?” He laughed.
“You might want to circle back and get on at Pennsylvania, traffic’s jammed tight down to spaghetti bowl.”
Spaghetti bowl’s a little hollow in the middle of Saint Paul where a wad of freeways and ramps come together like noodles. “Ten-four,” I said and swung Eight-two down a side street.
The radio cracked again, “Lovely Rita, meter maid…” That’s George’s idea of being funny. I screwed down the volume.
The road surface was good yet and I drove fast down Pennsylvania. Two blocks from the ramp, the street turned into a parking lot. Nothing moving. I flicked on the red lights and went up the oncoming lane, a sure ticket if I was caught. According to the law, wreckers aren’t emergency vehicles. They’re supposed to appear on the scene same time as the ambulance and fire guys but with no red lights or siren or fast driving.
I went up the ramp at a crawl, leaning on the horn, red lights flashing. They moved over as they could and I inched by, wheels crunching axle deep in the snow on the one side, mirror grazing cars on the other.
On the freeway, the shoulder was open. I turned off the red lights and put my foot down. By the time I reached the scene, I was doing sixty-five still on the shoulder. I slammed on the brakes and skidded in rodeo-style, pisses her off every time.
Like George said, it was a good one. Somebody’d driven a Delta 88, a beater, banged and rusted to the knees up the bumper of a brand-new Pontiac. Parts and glass and pieces of yellow plastic were spattered all over two lanes of pavement.
I said hello to the cop. She was in the lane directing traffic.
“How you going, Rita?”
She was a few inches shorter than me, five-eight or so, with black hair she kept chopped off at the middle of her neck. Her hat, one of those Smokey the Bear things, she wore tilted down over her face. When she was feeling friendly, she’d tilt it back and pinch it there with her thumb and finger while those green eyes strolled around your face, then she’d yank it back down and all you’d see would be her chin and the brown felt brim of the hat.
She’d been on the force a couple of years, us seeing each other on the job now and again, when we ran into each other in a burger joint. Both of us were eating alone so we sat together. We talked for must have been two hours. When we were leaving, I’d asked her out.
“What do you do, Steve, for a living?” she’d said to me.
“You know what I do, I drive for Ronald.”
“What are you going to be doing in ten years?”
“Hadn’t much thought about it. Same thing I suppose.”
“Think about it,” she’d said. “Call me when you change your mind.”
That was six, eight months before. I hadn’t called her though I still saw her on the road.
“If Ronald wants to keep the contract, he’s going to have to get you guys on the scene faster. I’ve been out here dodging drunks for forty-five minutes.” The hat brim stayed low on her face and her chin, lit by the lights of the passing cars, looked like the butt end of a two-by-four.
“You expect this raggedy piece of shit’s gonna fly, Rita? Traffic’s stopped solid all the way down to spaghetti bowl.”
“Get it out of here.”
“How about the Pontiac?”
“She can drive it.”
The Olds was tore up good. So was the kid driving it. Young, eighteen may nineteen, he looked a Minnesotan, dirt blond hair, heavy shoulders and stumpy legs. He had on a jean jacket over a red vest and chopper mittens on his hands. His nose was bleeding from where his head must have hit the wheel. You could see on his cheeks where he’d been spearing it around with his mittens. He’d been sitting in the cruiser but came over when I backed up to his car.
He right away started talking about his old man. Said he was going to thrash him for wrecking the car. I looked it over. He wasn’t going to be impressed, that was sure. The grill was stove in all the way to the motor block, the hood was wrinkled and the bumper was lying on the pavement under the car. But that wasn’t my business.
I told the kid to sit in the truck while I hooked up. I threw a 4×4 under the twisted metal where the bumper used to be to protect the straps. They weren’t cheap and I’d cut one a couple of weeks before on a twisted bumper. Ronald would not be pleased if I wrecked another one. I threw the bumper on the back of the wrecker with timbers and chains and made a fast pass with the broom to make Rita happy.
“Where to?” Rita’d stopped traffic and waved us into the lane. We were rolling north on 35.
“How much do you think to fix it?”
“I expect it’s junk.”
The kid moaned. I looked across at him. He was sitting doubled over with his face in his hands.
“Go easy,” I said, “It was a piece of shit.”
He didn’t say anything, just sat there hunched over on the seat.
“Where you want to go? It’s costing you by the mile to have me drive you around.” I pulled off my gloves and slapped them on the defrosters to dry.
“Shit, how much is this going to cost?”
“Twenty-five to pick it up, buck-a-mile after the first three.”
The kid was quiet for a couple of seconds, then told me his address. It was in a little burg about forty miles north of the city. In that weather, it was going to be a ride. The snow was coming down thick and it was starting to blow, the gusts were shaking the truck, and the road was getting icy black. I could feel it getting slick through the wheel. I crunched around on the seat until my back was comfortable, lit a cigarette, then picked up the mic and called Ronald. I could hear in his voice he was pissed I was going out of town. Bad weather’s where he makes his money. He’d want all the trucks he could get.
“What work do you do?” I said to the kid.
“I’m studying some classes at Vo-Tech.”
“What are you taking up?”
“Pipe fitting.”
“You like it?”
“Could you not talk to me,” he said.
It was dark in the cab, but I got a glance at him in the headlights of on-coming cars. His head was leaned back against the window and his eyes were closed. His hands were fisted up on his knees. His jacket was open and he’d unzipped the vest. His bloody mittens lay on the seat between us.
“Whatever, you’re paying.”
We rode along like that, not saying anything. After a while, I clicked on the radio. It was a piece of shit Ronald’d salvaged from a junk car when the original died. Outside the city, the only station it would pick up was top-forty. I left it on to cover up the racket from the truck. The D.J. was babbling on the telephone to some teenage girl, ‘the ninth caller’. Every time he’d pause, she’d squeal. She’d won some record by a group I never heard of.
“Turn that shit off.”
“Look friend, you don’t have to listen to my conversation, but I’ll do what I want with the truck.” I twisted the volume up. The kid was starting to annoy me.
I glanced at him again, he was staring out through the windshield. Wasn’t much to see, just snow, big flakes of it coming straight at us in the headlights.
“I get a smoke from you?”
I didn’t say anything, just took the box out of my pocket and tossed it on the seat.
He punched the lighter. “I got to apologize,” he said. “We just bought that car and we ain’t got money to get another one.”
“Been there.”
“You been following that shit about farmers?”
“Seen something about them having troubles on TV the other night.”
He laughed, “I seen that. Bunch of guys standing around with shotguns holding off the sheriff. Ain’t no point in it. Banks and the government are going to get theirs no matter what. I know. My old man’s a farmer and that shit happened to him. Fucker’s took damn near everything we owned. Pretty much all we’ve got left is a few acres and the house. That’s how come we’re driving that piece of shit car and I’m going to pipe-fitting school, ain’t no future in farming.”
I looked over at the kid. He was staring again through the window at the snow.
We rode along not saying anything. After a while, he kept talking. “Now my old man’s got a job at a gas station. Works with a couple of guys I went to high school with. Makes four-fifty an hour. My mother’s cashiering down at the dairy store.”
“No money in that,” I said.
“Nope.” He changed the subject. “You know what the icing on this shit cake is? You know that cop back there?”
I said, “I know her.”
“Bitch gave me a ticket.”
“No shit? For what?”
“Following too close.”
I had to laugh. “Don’t surprise me. She gave me a speeder once. Said she’d clocked me over the limit four times in a week, time to slow me down. But I’ll tell you what, the woman gives a shit. Once saw her give mouth-to-mouth and CPR to a guy for must have been half an hour when it was twenty below, her going back and forth and back and forth between blowing in his mouth and sitting on his chest. Guy puking all over the place and her down on her knees on the shoulder just keeping on. Had to haul her away in the meat wagon, too, but the guy lived.”
Kid didn’t say anything. By then the road was slick enough we were only going about thirty and I was putting my attention to managing the truck. We’d passed a bunch of cars in the ditch already. Ronald would have my ass if he had to come pull me out.
I figured we had to be getting close, but the snow was too thick to see the exit sign. I told the kid to watch for the ramp. Fifteen minutes we rode like that, not talking, him peering out a hole he’d rubbed in the ice on the door window. We found it, skidded past and backed up.
The ramp had about eight inches on it, but the Eight-two with the kid’s car on the back rolled on up. He told me to take a left at the top. It was a half hour, him giving me directions, before we got to his place.
The drive curved up a hill to the house between two lines of trees. I could only barely make out the wheel ruts under the snow.
The truck slid around some getting up the hill but we made it and I pulled it up in front of the house. It was grey and even by the headlights you could see it was needing paint. There was plastic taped over the windows. Out back was a barn and a pole building.
“Where you want it?”
“This is good. Go ahead and unhook it. I’ll get my old man.” His voice was quiet.
“Can’t put it down ‘til I get paid.” That was Ronald’s rule. Ronald ran a tough outfit – over the radio. Always seemed kind of amusing when he expected a driver, who’d be standing in front of some hardass customer, to be so tough; “Take nothing but cash, don’t unhook ’til you got it.” Then you go in his office and he’s got bars on the windows and a .38 in the drawer.
The kid went inside. A couple of minutes later a guy came out. He was wearing Sorels, laces dragging in the snow, and zipping a parka. It was green with fake wolf fur around the hood. He tromped over to the car and I slid out of the truck.
He stood there staring at it, his bare hands resting in the snow on the fender. He didn’t say nothing. Just stared at it. Under the boom lights it looked bad, it looked like a loaf of bread somebody’d stomped on. I was facing him on the other side of the car. I’d turned off the truck and in the quiet you could hear the snow hissing when it hit the ground. And you could hear him breathing, slow and deep.
Then suddenly, he spun around and started yelling at the house. “Jesus Christ! Roy! Get your ass out here. There was a hoarseness in his voice, the kind that comes from dry cold and cigarettes.
The door slammed and the kid came stumbling down following in the old man’s footprints.
“You little son of a bitch.” Then his hand swung around and hit the kid in the face. It must have hurt, especially with that nose, but the kid stood there and took it. The hand pulled back again, “You goddamned, worthless…”
“Sam, don’t you hit that boy.” The door crashed again and a woman came running down the path. She slipped and fell, picked herself up and kept coming. She didn’t bother to brush off the snow. An old woman, maybe sixty, she was wearing just a brown dress and house slippers on her feet.
“Ellie, goddamn it, you stay out of this.”
“Sam, I’m not going to stand here and let you beat my son.”
“It’s okay, Mom.”
“Shut up, Roy. Get up to the house.” The old lady was standing in front of the old man, her hands on her hips, her elbows poking straight out to either side, “Don’t do this, Sam.”
“Look what he did to the car, Cat.”
“I don’t care. We’ll get another one.”
“With what?”
They kept on that way. I got back in the truck, I didn’t need to hear it.
After a while, the old man came around the truck and I got out, “How much?” he said. He had his wallet out.
“Seventy-three.”
He’d pushed his hood back and under the boom lights I could see his face clear. He looked older than the woman, bald on top with straight grey hair hanging down over his ears. His nose was red with busted blood vessels and his lips were raw and blistered like he spent a lot of time outside. He stared at me. His eyes were glassy and grey but steady, like the headlights of an old car on a dark road. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days.
“Look,’ he said like he didn’t want me to hear, “we ain’t got it.”
“I don’t set the prices, I just drive the truck. You can’t pay, I got to take the car.” I could feel Ronald leaning on my shoulder.
He stared at me for what must have been a minute, the headlight eyes flickered, “Take it,” he said.
I got in the truck and started it, then turned It off. The old man hadn’t moved. I got out and shuffled through the snow to him.
“Look,” I said, “I’ll tell you what I’ll do.”
“Get the fuck out of here.” The headlights had come on strong and bright and were aimed straight in my face.
“Listen,” I could see the old lady standing on the other side of the car watching us, “I can get a couple of hundred bucks for that car at a scrapyard. Lots of good parts in it. Why don’t I give you the difference now between the cost of the tow and what I can get for it. Save you some trouble and you’ll get a few bucks out of it.”
I didn’t see it coming. I guess I didn’t expect it. Out of nowhere his fist slashed around and caught me on the side of my head and threw me back against the truck and then I was lying on my back in the snow with a tingle in my spine and a whistling in my ears and the old lady was bending over me asking about my health.
She pulled me to my feet and leaned me against the truck while she brushed off the snow, all the while saying how sorry she was and please don’t get pissed off. The old man didn’t move, just stood there.
I didn’t say anything, not to the old lady, not to him, just put my foot on the running board and got in the truck. He didn’t move even when I backed the car right up to him turning it around. He just stood there. He wasn’t looking at the car or the truck or me or nothing.
I headed down the hill. I was at the bottom pulling out onto the road when I felt the truck start to go. I spun the wheel and stomped the gas. Too late, and slow and gentle Eight-two and the Olds slid into the ditch.
I didn’t bother trying to drive it out. Eight-two was a two-wheel drive truck, dualies in the rear and it was almost on its side, the car jackknifed up against it. It wasn’t going anywhere. Ronald was going to be pissed.
I called him.
“You what? Damn it, Steve.” He clicked off the mic and there was a long quiet during which I knew he was saying a lot of shit you can’t say over the radio, then, “Can’t you winch it out?”
“Got a car on the hook.”
“I can’t get anybody out there. Highway Patrol’s going to close 35 if the snow doesn’t let up. Let me call Freddie’s and see if they can get a truck out.”
Freddie’s is a little outfit that runs around the area north of the cities.
I was afraid to idle the engine on an angle like that so I didn’t have any heat and the seat was so steep I was jammed up against the door. I lay back on the black vinyl, closed my eyes and shivered.
Ronald hadn’t called back when I heard a noise, a clanking. I couldn’t see anything from inside the truck but it was getting louder. I got out. I had to climb through the passenger door because the driver’s door was wedged against the side of the ditch.
It was a tractor, coming down from the house. I could see the outline of the old man’s parka behind the wheel. And next to him, the kid sitting on the fender. It was an old machine, looked like a dinosaur skeleton with wheels. It had chains on the back that clanked in the snow.
The old man pulled it around in front of the truck and the kid got down. He had a log chain over his shoulder, “Where you want to hook it?” he said.
Links the size of my fist and caked with rust and black grease, damn thing must have weighed a hundred pounds. I grabbed an end, hauled it through the push bumper and shackled it to the frame rail. The kid dropped the other end over the axle of the tractor. I climbed in and started the truck and he flagged on the old man.
Old bastard must’ve spent most of his life on a tractor seat. It it’d been me, I would’ve backed up and put as much slack in that chain as I could then run at it and try to snatch the truck out. Not the old man. He come up against the end of that chain slow and gentle, then eased into the load, letting them tall tires bite down through the snow into the gravel road. As soon as he got traction, boom, he snapped the clutch out and I buried my foot and the Eight-two jerked forward and we earned a couple of feet.
A bit at a time, it took us more than an hour to drag that truck out of the ditch but we did it. And we didn’t break anything. While we were at it, the old lady came down with a thermos of coffee. She was better dressed now in a long coat and rubber boots. She put the thermos on the truck seat and started shoveling snow and hauling that chain. She could pick the damn thing up as easy as I could.
“I was afraid you might have trouble,” she said when we stopped to catch our breath. “Sam and I pull two or three out of here every winter. Sam,” she yelled, “get down and have some coffee.”
Just when we got the truck back on the road, Ronald called to say Freddie couldn’t make it. I explained what had happened, standing on the running board to keep the snow out of the truck, then turned to say thanks. But the old man was headed up the road to the house, the kid sitting on the fender. Already I could hardly see them for the snow. The old lady opened the passenger door and pulled her thermos off the seat, “You want some to take with you?” she asked.
I poured a cup and climbed into the truck. In the cold the black vinyl had hardened. When I sat on it, something tore under my ass and then, stitch by stitch, I felt the seat cover rip wide open. I didn’t bother to look at it.
“Eight-two clear and headed for the barn,’ I said into the mic.
“Ten-four, Eight-two, come on in.”
I dropped the car in the lot and pulled the wrecker around in front of the shop. There were six or eight trucks inside. From under the four-oh, a White tractor with a Holmes 650 wrecker body on the back, I heard the chatter of an air wrench. I squatted down to see who was working on it.
“Stevie, what’s happening. Sounds like you had a time of it.”
“A little tough. Kid ran his car up the ass of a Firebird. The old man couldn’t pay for it.”
George laughed, more of his humor.
I asked him if Ronald was around.
“Nope. He went home just after you cleared.”
I shrugged and walked back to office, picked up the phone and dialed Rita’s number. I didn’t have to look it up, it was one of those that sticks in your head. The clock on the wall read just past midnight.
Spring semester, 1973, eleventh grade. I was sixteen. First day back after winter break, the principal called me into his office and told me that he was putting me on OJT, no more curriculum, no more math, history or French, no more cutting up frogs. On the Job Training was two morning classes a day and a job and that was fine with me. The two classes were the OJT class (we learned how to balance a checkbook) and a gym class; the work experience was to provide the rest of our education. This all happened after my grey-haired French teacher caught me cutting her class for the umpteenth time and sobbed in the principal’s office. In fairness to Madame, it wasn’t just her class, I’d had attendance problems in all my classes.
The first job my OJT teacher found for me was at Apache Carwash at Apache Plaza, a strip mall a few exits up the freeway from my mother’s house. The job paid $1.60 an hour. My co-workers were mostly on work release from the state prison.
It was a full-service carwash. Customers drove in one end, got out of their car, walked to the waiting area at the far end of a long, narrow baby blue concrete hallway with sagging ceiling tiles and paint peeling off the walls in Wheaties-size flakes, then drank stale coffee or not and watched through the fogged plexiglass window for their car to come squeaking and jerking out of the steaming wash tunnel.
Most of the time, I worked on the entry end where we vacuumed the carpet, washed the floormats and pilfered the cars, sifting through the ashtrays for change amongst the cigarette butts, groping under the seats, giving glove boxes a quick rifle. One guy found a snub nose .38 Smith & Wesson under a driver’s seat, put it in his pocket and carried it around for a few days until he lost it. Another guy found a leather blackjack but had to give it back when the owner came looking for it. The pilfering was finders keepers, there was no sharing. When the mats were clean, one of us would idle the car onto the chain and roller belt that pulled it through the sprayers, brushes and dryers.
On the far end, when the car rolled off the end of the belt, the outside was hand-dried, the upholstery wiped down and the inside of the widows cleaned. The best job on that end was driving the cars off the line across seventy-five feet of wet concrete to one of the two overhead doors; the challenge was to spin the tires to get up as much speed as possible then dynamite the brakes and skid to a stop before you hit the door. One of the guys smashed a Corvette through one of the doors and that slowed things down for a few days.
One afternoon, a guy drove in with a dark grey Lincoln Continental, mid-sixties, suicide rear doors, nice car but grimy like it hadn’t been washed in while. As the guy was getting out I looked in the back, garbage covered the back seat and floor up to the top of the front seat; burger bags and boxes and paper cups and fries and chicken bones and chunks of fish burgers and bits of meat patties and half-eaten buns dry and greasy with mayonnaise and ketchup and wrinkled tomatoes and pickles, the whole mass sticky from coke-colored soft drinks splashed over the pile like he’d thrown the cups over his shoulder when he was done being thirsty.
The driver, smirky guy, thirties, wearing a suit and tie and an overcoat, saw me looking at his mess, “All yours, buddy. Have fun.”
I opened the rear door and trash dumped onto the wet concrete floor at my feet. I yanked the yellow rope that shut down the line and Petey, the guy on the passenger side, he’d done time for assault, he and I got to work grabbing fistfuls of the nasty shit with our bare hands and dumping it in the steel trash drums. Frank came stomping back in his rubber boots to see why the line was down. Frank was the manager, he was maybe thirty, rumor was he’d done time for B&E. He saw what we were doing and yelled in my face, “You’ve got my fucking line shut down for this shit? Fuck him. Fuck him. Fuck him if he thinks I’m going to be his fucking garbage man. Fuck him.”
Frank grabbed the keys out of the ignition, opened the trunk; golf clubs, golf shoes, leather brief case, suits and shirts wrapped in clear plastic from the drycleaner, a couple of bags of groceries. Frank picked up the drum I’d just filled and dumped it on top of the groceries and clothes. And then did the same with the drum on Petey’s side. The garbage overflowed the trunk and Frank couldn’t close the lid until we’d tucked and crammed it into the crannies and the three of us slammed it together. We had fun, just like smirky man wanted.
Tex, tall, faded 501s, t-shirts, Mickey Mouse boots, Army field jacket, his last name, Dallas, sewn above one pocket, US Army sewn above the other, long hair, heavy beard, salesguy smile. He’d done a couple of tours as a grunt in Viet Nam. After he got out, he drifted around the country until he ran out of money and tried robbing a gas station. He got busted and learned his lesson and gave up armed robbery. Now he was peddling dope: weed, crosses, reds, blotter, black beauties, junk, blow; whatever a guy asked for, Tex knew where to get it, what was good, how much was too much, what was a fair price. He supplied the whole carwash.
After a couple of months at Apache, my teacher found me a job with Associated Motor Carriers Tariff Bureau, Inc., AMCTB. The company compiled and printed trucking tariffs; my job was to proofread pages and pages of columns and columns of numbers and once proofread, hand them back to one of the dozen or so floral-dressed, high-heeled, big-haired old ladies in the typing pool clacking away at pistachio-green IBM Selectrics. When they were done painting out their mistakes with lumpy whiteout and vaguely aligning the corrections in the rows and columns, they’d slap them down in my inbox and spin around and click click click back to their desks all the while not looking at me like the mistakes were mine. I’d print them on the company’s AB Dick offset printer, collate and staple. The job paid $2.50 an hour, a nice little bump from the carwash.
My immediate coworkers were Dicky and Catman. Dicky was working to make AMCTB a career, he was short, skinny, balding and thirty and had diabetes and a wife. He was our boss. Catman, good looking guy with good hair down to his shoulders and a skinny black mustache, was 24, eight years older than me, and lived in his mother’s basement in a wood-paneled apartment that he’d built for himself. He had a waterbed and no plans for a career beyond five o’clock.
I’d get to work at 10:30 and at noon Catman and I would take our lunch break. On Wednesdays, we’d take his car, a yellow ’66 Impala, 283 V8, automatic, black vinyl top, chrome Cragars, and head over to Mr. B’s, blow a number on the way if one of us had some weed. Mr. B’s was a tired, street-front bar with blacked out windows facing University Avenue that on Wednesdays hosted a lingerie show, Mr. B’s Lunchtime Lingerie.
We’d been there a couple of times, me sucking down screwdrivers, before the bartender got around to asking for my ID; I showed him the draft card I’d made on the AB Dick and that was good enough for him and forever after, when I gave him the nod, he’d mix up orange juice and vodka with two maraschino cherries on top and a little plastic straw and hand it to me with a wink. Drinks were sixty cents, I’d give him three quarters.
Once the show got going, Catman and me and twenty or thirty other guys would stand in a press to watch, guys in dusty work boots standing next to guys in shined dress shoes, all of us, drinks in our hands, heavy-breathing the hot fog of cigarette smoke, Mennen deodorant and sweat, shuffling and shifting our feet on the butts and spilled liquor.
And the skinny girls with ribs you could count and no butts and no breasts, and the fat girls with G-string floss disappeared between wobbling cheeks, and the girls trying to hide yellow bruises behind silky scarves and makeup that looked like latex paint, and the girls with scars or bandages or missing teeth just trying to get through their set, would, one at a time, clump around that little stage in their platform high heels, painted fingernails clenching the smudged stainless steel pole as they peeled off their costumes and bras while pretending with no enthusiasm to dance to whatever music was on the cassette tape they’d handed the bartender. And we whistled and yelled and threw coins on the stage and went back to work.
In June of 1974, my high school gave me a diploma certifying that I was educated.
I got out of the Army in March of 1978 and stayed in Europe. It was cold in Germany and I hitchhiked south. I met Clayton at a campground in San Sebastián in northern Spain. Tall, skinny, scuffed leather-soled wingtips with no socks and food-stained khaki shorts, Clay had worked in a shoe store in London. He had an Isles complexion, a perpetually startled expression, and drove a faded blue Renault station wagon with a dented-in passenger door. He was twenty-eight and on the run from his pregnant girlfriend.
In Madrid, we picked up Beau. He was a Kiwi who’d worked as a stevedore in Tauranga before coming abroad. Beau was an ugly man, 5’8” or so, thick legs, heavy shoulders, hard, powerful short-fingered hands, untrimmed beard, bald head, and a round face that looked like back on the docks he might have lost a few, thick, crooked lips, smashed-flat nose, cauliflowered ear, his left ear. The three of us jammed into the Renault with our backpacks and from Madrid, we traveled south through Cordoba and Sevilla to Algeciras.
The Lonely Planet Guide warned us that Morocco was dangerous, that travelers should have experience. After several weeks in Spain, we declared ourselves experienced, filled out customs forms, waited to be waved across the border and drove west along the cliffs toward Tangiers, the Mediterranean with its glassy waters far below becoming more intense and shockingly blue as the sea got deeper. As evening set in, we followed a tiny switchback track to the beach and set up camp under the trees fringing the sand, just like in Spain. Clay set up his tent, Beau and I threw our bags down on the sand, the canopy of trees with the stars of Orion glittering through as our tent. We built a fire.
The axe handle blow to my head made a deep, cracking noise that echoed through my skull and shattered my consciousness into small pieces, each piece part of a larger reality, a jigsaw puzzle dumped out. It was quick, the blow and its echoes, so quick that I didn’t feel it in the moment, but only remembered it afterwards. Putting the puzzle back together took time, and yet, all the while my mind was struggling, my body was twisting and writhing. And that’s when the pieces came together. We’d rolled out our sleeping bags at some distance from each other, I was closest to the car and took the hit. Trapped in my bag, I rolled toward the car and shoved my head underneath trying to protect it from the axe handle and the punches and the stomping feet.
Forever moments later, I heard Beau bellow in his Kiwi accent, “Bloody fucking hell!” as he charged into the mob standing over me. There were six or eight of them and they were focused on kicking the shit out of me and he took them by surprise. As they turned on him, I got to my feet and together we fought, Beau and I, leaning back on each other, shoulder blade to shoulder blade. I remember hearing an animal howl that didn’t stop, that didn’t pause to breathe, that was a constant in our struggle. I wondered what it was as I shoved and kicked and punched at the shadow shapes in front of me before realizing the howling was me.
One of them had a flashlight, the beam slicing through the dark giving my memory of the event a black-and-white cinematic quality. As we struggled, I grabbed a rock from our firepit, perfectly formed to fit my hands and just heavy enough, an early man’s killing stone. I lifted it above my head and brought it down with the force of a hundred and eighty-five pounds of military fitness, adrenalin and terror just as the light flashed across a neck and bare shoulder and that’s where that rock hit, exactly in that confluence. He collapsed on the ground at my feet.
That was the end. They yelled and called to each other and ran into the dark, hauling with them the man whose neck I’d crushed. We called for Clay and got no answer. Frantic and terrified, we felt our way through the trees and underbrush where his tent had been searching for his body, certain that he was unconscious or dead. After many minutes, a faint “hello” and then another. We returned the call and Clay stumbled into the ruins of our camp clutching his hatchet. He’d heard the attack and had ran off down the beach and was unhurt.
We stuffed our wrecked and bloody gear into the car, drove up the switchbacks and spent the rest of the night in a thatched roof truck stop smoking hand rolled black tobacco cigarettes and telling tough-guy stories and bad jokes while the town doctor yawned and set my arm and sewed a dozen stitches into my head and six into my arm and another dozen or fifteen into Beau, all without the luxury of anesthesia.
The next morning when we should have been driving, we went to the police. That was inexperience. My French was horrible, my Arabic non-existent and Clay and Beau didn’t try. To this day I don’t know what we were accused of, but the cops were hostile and serious. At four o’clock in the afternoon, after being questioned aggressively about the night and waiting for hours perched on a wooden bench in a small room with concrete walls and no windows, they gave us back our passports and let us go.
We drove out of that town and stopped the car. The conversation, and I remember it well, was about whether or not to leave Morocco, whether or not to turn around and go back to the ferry, back to Spain. I argued, leaning against the Renault me with my arm in a blood-crusted sling, against leaving a country we hadn’t seen. Beau agreed and then so did Clay.
* * * * *
We needed a place to sleep. As we talked, Taibi and Aref, a couple of carpenters working on a house across the road, came over and squatted down and brought out their kief and a pipe and passed it around and I told them our story. Taibi invited us to stay at his house. It wasn’t far. I translated his offer and Clay shook his head no, “Let’s try to get to Tangiers tonight.”
Beau said, “We won’t make it, mate. It’s getting dark, road’s shitty, we ain’t slept in two days. Probably thieves and bandits out there, besides.”
I said, “Let’s stay with Taibi.” Clay didn’t say anything.
Aref grinned and waved and shouldered his toolbelt and walked away down the road and the four of us climbed into the car and Taibi gave directions, pointing us down desert dirt roads until he told Clay to stop in front of a prickly pear cactus hedge. The hedge was ten or twelve feet tall, maybe four feet thick, neatly trimmed and dense so you couldn’t see through it. We grabbed our gear and he led us through a tiny wooden gate into a dirt courtyard with a small concrete house with a flat roof in the middle. The hedge completely surrounded his house.
Taibi set up a tarp on poles in the courtyard and we laid out our sleeping bags. His wife brought us dinner, couscous and chicken in thick sauce. We sat cross legged and ate with our fingers, copying our host. When we were finished, Taibi wanted to talk. Sitting side-by-side on the ground, we talked world politics, carpentry, fishing, scuba diving and I don’t remember what else. We talked in French and when Beau and Clay couldn’t follow the conversation, they went to sleep. That went on, him talking to me in French and me nodding until it was 3:00 in the morning. Finally, I gave up and told him that that I needed sleep and he nodded and shouted out a command in Arabic.
A young woman, his daughter, stepped around the corner of our tarp as though she’d been waiting and stood silent in front of us. She was sixteen, maybe, and teenage-thin. Her hair, in the flickering yellow light, was a thick, wavy auburn-black that she wore pulled back over her shoulders. Her complexion was smooth and clear, the golden sand color of the North African desert but richer, deeper, more complex. She was wearing a white and gold kaftan that touched her body in a way that accentuated her small breasts and slim hips. She was barefoot.
At first, I thought her eyes were black but as I looked at her and she stared back at me and her father talked, I realized that in fact her eyes were the same unfathomably deep blue as the Mediterranean viewed from the cliffs above. A soft smell of citrus, tangerines or maybe mandarins, surrounded her, the scent just detectable over the stink of kerosene. She stood, her lips tense and pinched, her feet together, her arms stiff at her side, her eyes never moving from mine while her father proposed our marriage. It took a while for me to understand.
Tangiers, Rabat, Casablanca, Fez, we spent a month in Morocco, camping in campgrounds patrolled by uniformed, no-nonsense guards. Our days we spent walking the narrow, thousand-year-old cobblestone streets, drinking mint tea in the markets under cobalt skies, canvas tarps shading us from the desert sun, and in the evening, smoking joints rolled from a mix of hashish and black tobacco.
Beau and I became quite close. Clay became increasingly bitter and distant. The Renault was his, he was our driver, and so we were forced into an uneasy truce when we were in the car and when not, we separated, Beau and me, our tents side by side in sandy campgrounds, and at some distance, Clay’s tent, the nylon sagging around the little aluminum poles bent and broken in the struggle. We never talked about it, but the attack ruined us.
We left Morocco the way we came, on the ferry from Ceuta to Algeciras. Clay dropped Beau and me at a train station. I took the train to Nuremburg then to Rhein-Main Air Base, got on a C-130 and started college that fall.
