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22 December 2023
DAY FIVE - 10:20AM
We’re sitting at a Denny’s in Arkansas. Outside, the rain is pouring in avalanches. Inside, the breakfast is hygienically lit by bright squares on the ceiling. I’m drawing a fat lady in my notebook. Today we have to get all the way to the Wal-Mart in Springfield, Missouri, to meet with Alex’s second cousin. It’s kind of a long story. We’re in bad standing, you see. We made a whole bunch of her relatives get together at a park the other day to meet us, but we never came because we were in Mississippi. We thought we were meeting them the next day. Which puts us in a strange position, because we’re on our way to meet a bunch of family members who might quite possibly be waiting for us with pitchforks.
40 WEST TO 65 NORTH
"I think I have a bug bite."
"Well, that means a spider pressed its butt against one of your pores and laid eggs."
Alex calls up Margaret and warns her that we might be late. “We ran into the Ozarks without realizing that that would happen.”
“She probably hates me now, guys. And I got fuckin’ purple marker on my face.”
Ah, life. How can you bare it any grudges? Here we are, hauling ass through the Ozarks because we have to meet someone’s sour second cousin at a Wal-Mart.
WAL-MART - 4:09PM
Margaret is a stocky, frank lady who works in the fabric department and intimidates us somewhat. She reminds us every few minutes that we made all of her relatives get together the other night and didn’t show up. Jesus Christ.
While she finishes off her work, we sit in front of the huge Wal-Mart doors and stare at the never-ending clientele wobbling in and out of this air-conditioned world of goodies. There’s something so sad about mid-sized towns. You watch people’s empty faces and lives. Their thighs seeping out of hot pants, disposed in all their blue and white glory, like layers of a rock formation. They must have had bizarre goals and dreams as four-year-olds. I wonder when it all went down the drain. They never think about those things anymore now, and all the blank contentment in their faces is fake.
I know we all feel kind of devastated for the first time on the trip. We’re lost here. We’ve derailed into some kind of purgatory where no one ever moves up to Heaven or down to Hell.
Eventually, Margaret takes us into the suburbs to meet her mother and brother. We enter a small, dim livingroom where a television set is playing full blast, even though the sounds are muted. It’s like a carpeted cave. Everything is so awkward, I feel that we’re about to spontaneously combust. Do we sit? Do we stand? Do we ask to see photo albums?
And then we shake hands with Aldine. In her eighties, this lady stares us down with one of those halfway grins that are only possible in the Old West, where tumbleweeds blew across deserted towns at high noon. You watch her make her way cautiously across the livingroom with her walking stick, and just when you think she’s about to collapse, you realize there’s no danger. This lady could tackle a bear if she felt it were necessary.
Without Aldine, I think we would have imploded in that livingroom long ago. She was as easy as everyone else was clumsy. She’d hold out old family pictures for us to look at, and then begin to smile at us as we nodded politely.
“I bet you guys are having a hell of a time, having to look at an old lady's photographs.”
We get passed from distant cousins to distant cousins, and end up that night at Dean’s house. Dean is a large man with a red face. The sweat is forever running down his forehead, and his breathing is so forced that you think each minute will be his last. It’s painful to watch him pause mid-sentence just to catch his breath. You wanna tell him to stop chain-smoking and become a vegan. But somehow you know that he’d rather go out with a bang than extend his life at the price of those torturous, clean minutes. One person’s salvation can be up to a million people, but I guess that won’t get him nowhere if he’s not interested in it.
We get taken in and shown to a room decorated in navy blue and white. Everywhere you look, there is some little pillow with ribbons on it, or a blue porcelain poodle. It’s hard to decide whether you should be allowed to give into the soft atmosphere of your claustrophobia. Standing alone in there, I just want to drift away and imagine all sorts of terrible things,.. but I figure I have no right, and it’s bad manners. So I snap out of it and join the others in the livingroom where Dean is just telling them that the reason he moved away from California was because there were, “...too many niggers there”.
This place is the Twilight Zone. The bathroom has dark blue towels with gold lace trimmings. There are shadows haunting our midnight stroll, hellhounds barking somewhere close by, and the sweet man who is taking us in for the night is completely racist in that old clumsy way.
MOTHER PRAYED FOR ME - DAY SIX - 11:45AM
We ended up having lunch at the The Hungry Fisherman with Alex’s kinfolk, while the huge head of an elk hung over the table and looked on while the conversation traveled from tropical penguins, to Mardi Gras, hunting clubs, and then homeless people in Springfield.
1:30PM
We got back on the road north, heading for Iowa, where a friend’s dad whom we’ve never met is going to put us up for the night. I can’t say that we’re--
“WELCOME TO HUMANSVILLE" - 3:05PM
MONTGOMERY CITY - 5:35PM
Church of the Nazareth. Auto Parts. Texaco. Water tower. Krumbly Burger. The Medicine Shoppe. Freemason Lodge.
One thing is for damn sure: there’s no shortage of water towers, barns, or shops that sell auto parts up there.
“Slow down, motherfucker.”
Out of windshield wiper fluid.
By the time the day was drawing to an end, we were three very different people from that morning. Exhaustion was blooming into an art form. We had lost track of the delicate network of country roads, we were pissed off at road signs, and our religious vocabulary had become infected by such words as “no-blinker-ass-moron”, “ass-fuck”, and “lame-o”. Sad as it might be, language is created every day just to mirror life. And if life happens to consist of a bunch of truck drivers cutting you off late at night, then most likely you won’t be responding with, “Sweet Jesus!”
Insanity came knocking on our door with a friendly grin, and we were ready to open up. It was just too late to be lost in Iowa. Too late be trying to find a friend’s father’s house. Too late to be staring out the window looking for inspiration. And I’d imagine it was much too late to be pregnant.
12:35AM
We met up with a bearded man waiting for us in a pick-up truck by the side of the road. This was our friend’s dad, Jack.
INNOCENT WHEN YOU DREAM - DAY SEVEN AND EIGHT
Our days in Iowa were like one of those soft dreams you have in a coma.
Waking up in the mornings and eating oatmeal out on the balcony, listening to the story of how true love came in one day and hit Jack with a sledgehammer. The sun was hiding behind trees, speckling the floorboards, and the yellow fields were off in the distance. There was the sweet fragrance of oxygen, the desolate countryside, the endless time and the complete lack of anything to do, which made you wonder where to put your hands.
No fueling up the car, no motel room carpets, no swearing at truck drivers, no billboards, no road atlas, no distant cousins, no little soaps packaged in paper. Just lying around in hammocks and playing on tire swings. It's ridiculous how soft around the edges those two days were.
We took walks down lonely, little dirt roads, and in the afternoons we drank tea and talked about tax exemptions in Ireland, hating celery, and how blue is a good color for Beth.
I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder. I felt like maybe I was ripping someone else off of their slice of dreamland.
LITTLE OLD COW, LITTLE OLD HORSE - DAY NINE
Out of the coma and back on the yellow brick road.
Our next stop was going to be in Minnesota, where a childhood friend of Beth’s was getting married. This meant another day of the road-– but, hell, after Jack’s Iowa, we were ready to skin a live moose. Or at least we were pretty sure we could, and that’s even better.
Driving off, we encountered a cozy little group of cows cluttered together in the shade of an old tree by a river. The landscapes up there are so blindly innocent that you’d think God just created all this yesterday, and no one’s realized yet that they’re naked. But then you drive by Hardee's, Dairy Queen, and Sonic and you think, “Well, maybe we’ve all been around longer than we think.”
5:00PM
I was beginning to feel like I was born in the car and had many more years to go. Life in Los Angeles seemed like a distant joke. I couldn’t remember what it felt like to be putting my toothbrush in the cup by my sink. I couldn’t remember the dimensions of my room, or getting dressed out of a closet. It was odd to think that people wake up every morning in the same place. For us, everyday life had morphed into a strange brew, and it was spread out all over the back seat. The camera equipment, the tea bags, the water bottles, the knitting needles, the yarn, the notepads, the road atlas, and the protein bar wrappers.
There’s always a need for caffeine. There are the conversations about lovers and boyfriends and bugs on the windshield wiper.
And then there’s the sweet country blues that give you emotions too large for your little body to handle.
I'LL RUN BEFORE I DIE - DAY TEN
Another home. Another family not even remotely connected with me.
We stayed at Beth’s sister’s house, and I began to realize the secret charm in being thrown from family to family. It dawned on me that there’s something kind of moving about entering an alien household for a night, watching the day go by-– watching other people’s habits, routines, and vocabulary play with life. The further removed the household is from your universe, the greater the potential of fascination.
And besides, Americans are good hosts. They give you beds, they open their fridges in the morning and give you free range in the kitchen, they barbecue for you, they hand you beers, and they always try their best to understand your addiction to English Breakfast tea.
MORNING
Alex and I woke up in a little room with baseball wallpaper that morning-– the kind of repetitive pattern that makes you stand in front of it and just stare. I couldn’t help trying to figure out where one piece of the pattern ended, and the new one began. Every time I walked by, I stuck.
THE WEDDING
We arrived late, of course. It was out in the middle of a storybook nowhere, where a little white farmhouse sat with nothing better to do than wait for the world to crumble. Having established our lateness as a fact, we cautiously made our way over the gravel and took our positions at the back of the crowd.
The ceremony was in swing: a little girl, swallowed by a huge pink dress sang a love ballad with a faltering voice. After the bride and groom had been religiously combined and everyone was done clapping, Beth started hugging people, and Alex and I made for the rocking chairs on the porch. Sitting there, looking out at the fields and the sun and the kids running around, I felt like I had reached the peak of something indefinable. I had managed to check something off on my list of American-obsessed agenda-– somewhere in the “rocking chair on a porch” department.
THE WEDDING RECEPTION
We found ourselves in some kind of community hall-– the kind of place a DMV staff Christmas party might be held. Sadly lit tables and canteen chairs, people wearing pale flower patterned dresses. Food consisting of watery green beans and glossy chicken slabs in gravy. Poetry for the newlyweds was being improvised into a microphone on a stage, and beer was free until 8:00PM.
It made you wonder where the farmhouse had melted to, and my stomach suddenly fell through a pit. I couldn’t help but care for these strangers. I wished they’d notice the tragedy; even more, I wish they’d never know.
7:30PM
Alex and I sat on the swings of a nearby playground with our little cups of beer. If at least we could have been inebriated,.. but, apparently, we were doomed to soberness-– blessed with an extremely acute vision when I would have loved to see everything blurred. Why is this beer tasting stale when we want it to be tempting?
8:16PM
We drove back from the wedding much earlier than we had originally planned, and while our spirits lay somewhere in a bloody pulp, we watched the sun pouring like liquid gold through the wind and the fields.
Beth, for some reason, knew the antidote. She pulled to a sharp right, the car came to a halt. The doors were suddenly wide-open, and we took off running down the highway like a bunch of dogs to whom nothing can be more exhilarating than their tongues hanging in the wind. It was like a stupid dream fulfilled-– frolicking in the roadside fields-– but it proved to be more satisfying than we’d have ever imagined.
Back in the car, our love for life on the road was fresh out of the oven.
CLICK HERE TO READ PART FOUR
We’re sitting at a Denny’s in Arkansas. Outside, the rain is pouring in avalanches. Inside, the breakfast is hygienically lit by bright squares on the ceiling. I’m drawing a fat lady in my notebook. Today we have to get all the way to the Wal-Mart in Springfield, Missouri, to meet with Alex’s second cousin. It’s kind of a long story. We’re in bad standing, you see. We made a whole bunch of her relatives get together at a park the other day to meet us, but we never came because we were in Mississippi. We thought we were meeting them the next day. Which puts us in a strange position, because we’re on our way to meet a bunch of family members who might quite possibly be waiting for us with pitchforks.
40 WEST TO 65 NORTH
"I think I have a bug bite."
"Well, that means a spider pressed its butt against one of your pores and laid eggs."
Alex calls up Margaret and warns her that we might be late. “We ran into the Ozarks without realizing that that would happen.”
“She probably hates me now, guys. And I got fuckin’ purple marker on my face.”
Ah, life. How can you bare it any grudges? Here we are, hauling ass through the Ozarks because we have to meet someone’s sour second cousin at a Wal-Mart.
WAL-MART - 4:09PM
Margaret is a stocky, frank lady who works in the fabric department and intimidates us somewhat. She reminds us every few minutes that we made all of her relatives get together the other night and didn’t show up. Jesus Christ.
While she finishes off her work, we sit in front of the huge Wal-Mart doors and stare at the never-ending clientele wobbling in and out of this air-conditioned world of goodies. There’s something so sad about mid-sized towns. You watch people’s empty faces and lives. Their thighs seeping out of hot pants, disposed in all their blue and white glory, like layers of a rock formation. They must have had bizarre goals and dreams as four-year-olds. I wonder when it all went down the drain. They never think about those things anymore now, and all the blank contentment in their faces is fake.
I know we all feel kind of devastated for the first time on the trip. We’re lost here. We’ve derailed into some kind of purgatory where no one ever moves up to Heaven or down to Hell.
Eventually, Margaret takes us into the suburbs to meet her mother and brother. We enter a small, dim livingroom where a television set is playing full blast, even though the sounds are muted. It’s like a carpeted cave. Everything is so awkward, I feel that we’re about to spontaneously combust. Do we sit? Do we stand? Do we ask to see photo albums?
And then we shake hands with Aldine. In her eighties, this lady stares us down with one of those halfway grins that are only possible in the Old West, where tumbleweeds blew across deserted towns at high noon. You watch her make her way cautiously across the livingroom with her walking stick, and just when you think she’s about to collapse, you realize there’s no danger. This lady could tackle a bear if she felt it were necessary.
Without Aldine, I think we would have imploded in that livingroom long ago. She was as easy as everyone else was clumsy. She’d hold out old family pictures for us to look at, and then begin to smile at us as we nodded politely.
“I bet you guys are having a hell of a time, having to look at an old lady's photographs.”
We get passed from distant cousins to distant cousins, and end up that night at Dean’s house. Dean is a large man with a red face. The sweat is forever running down his forehead, and his breathing is so forced that you think each minute will be his last. It’s painful to watch him pause mid-sentence just to catch his breath. You wanna tell him to stop chain-smoking and become a vegan. But somehow you know that he’d rather go out with a bang than extend his life at the price of those torturous, clean minutes. One person’s salvation can be up to a million people, but I guess that won’t get him nowhere if he’s not interested in it.
We get taken in and shown to a room decorated in navy blue and white. Everywhere you look, there is some little pillow with ribbons on it, or a blue porcelain poodle. It’s hard to decide whether you should be allowed to give into the soft atmosphere of your claustrophobia. Standing alone in there, I just want to drift away and imagine all sorts of terrible things,.. but I figure I have no right, and it’s bad manners. So I snap out of it and join the others in the livingroom where Dean is just telling them that the reason he moved away from California was because there were, “...too many niggers there”.
This place is the Twilight Zone. The bathroom has dark blue towels with gold lace trimmings. There are shadows haunting our midnight stroll, hellhounds barking somewhere close by, and the sweet man who is taking us in for the night is completely racist in that old clumsy way.
MOTHER PRAYED FOR ME - DAY SIX - 11:45AM
We ended up having lunch at the The Hungry Fisherman with Alex’s kinfolk, while the huge head of an elk hung over the table and looked on while the conversation traveled from tropical penguins, to Mardi Gras, hunting clubs, and then homeless people in Springfield.
1:30PM
We got back on the road north, heading for Iowa, where a friend’s dad whom we’ve never met is going to put us up for the night. I can’t say that we’re--
“WELCOME TO HUMANSVILLE" - 3:05PM
MONTGOMERY CITY - 5:35PM
Church of the Nazareth. Auto Parts. Texaco. Water tower. Krumbly Burger. The Medicine Shoppe. Freemason Lodge.
One thing is for damn sure: there’s no shortage of water towers, barns, or shops that sell auto parts up there.
“Slow down, motherfucker.”
Out of windshield wiper fluid.
By the time the day was drawing to an end, we were three very different people from that morning. Exhaustion was blooming into an art form. We had lost track of the delicate network of country roads, we were pissed off at road signs, and our religious vocabulary had become infected by such words as “no-blinker-ass-moron”, “ass-fuck”, and “lame-o”. Sad as it might be, language is created every day just to mirror life. And if life happens to consist of a bunch of truck drivers cutting you off late at night, then most likely you won’t be responding with, “Sweet Jesus!”
Insanity came knocking on our door with a friendly grin, and we were ready to open up. It was just too late to be lost in Iowa. Too late be trying to find a friend’s father’s house. Too late to be staring out the window looking for inspiration. And I’d imagine it was much too late to be pregnant.
12:35AM
We met up with a bearded man waiting for us in a pick-up truck by the side of the road. This was our friend’s dad, Jack.
INNOCENT WHEN YOU DREAM - DAY SEVEN AND EIGHT
Our days in Iowa were like one of those soft dreams you have in a coma.
Waking up in the mornings and eating oatmeal out on the balcony, listening to the story of how true love came in one day and hit Jack with a sledgehammer. The sun was hiding behind trees, speckling the floorboards, and the yellow fields were off in the distance. There was the sweet fragrance of oxygen, the desolate countryside, the endless time and the complete lack of anything to do, which made you wonder where to put your hands.
No fueling up the car, no motel room carpets, no swearing at truck drivers, no billboards, no road atlas, no distant cousins, no little soaps packaged in paper. Just lying around in hammocks and playing on tire swings. It's ridiculous how soft around the edges those two days were.
We took walks down lonely, little dirt roads, and in the afternoons we drank tea and talked about tax exemptions in Ireland, hating celery, and how blue is a good color for Beth.
I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder. I felt like maybe I was ripping someone else off of their slice of dreamland.
LITTLE OLD COW, LITTLE OLD HORSE - DAY NINE
Out of the coma and back on the yellow brick road.
Our next stop was going to be in Minnesota, where a childhood friend of Beth’s was getting married. This meant another day of the road-– but, hell, after Jack’s Iowa, we were ready to skin a live moose. Or at least we were pretty sure we could, and that’s even better.
Driving off, we encountered a cozy little group of cows cluttered together in the shade of an old tree by a river. The landscapes up there are so blindly innocent that you’d think God just created all this yesterday, and no one’s realized yet that they’re naked. But then you drive by Hardee's, Dairy Queen, and Sonic and you think, “Well, maybe we’ve all been around longer than we think.”
5:00PM
I was beginning to feel like I was born in the car and had many more years to go. Life in Los Angeles seemed like a distant joke. I couldn’t remember what it felt like to be putting my toothbrush in the cup by my sink. I couldn’t remember the dimensions of my room, or getting dressed out of a closet. It was odd to think that people wake up every morning in the same place. For us, everyday life had morphed into a strange brew, and it was spread out all over the back seat. The camera equipment, the tea bags, the water bottles, the knitting needles, the yarn, the notepads, the road atlas, and the protein bar wrappers.
There’s always a need for caffeine. There are the conversations about lovers and boyfriends and bugs on the windshield wiper.
And then there’s the sweet country blues that give you emotions too large for your little body to handle.
I'LL RUN BEFORE I DIE - DAY TEN
Another home. Another family not even remotely connected with me.
We stayed at Beth’s sister’s house, and I began to realize the secret charm in being thrown from family to family. It dawned on me that there’s something kind of moving about entering an alien household for a night, watching the day go by-– watching other people’s habits, routines, and vocabulary play with life. The further removed the household is from your universe, the greater the potential of fascination.
And besides, Americans are good hosts. They give you beds, they open their fridges in the morning and give you free range in the kitchen, they barbecue for you, they hand you beers, and they always try their best to understand your addiction to English Breakfast tea.
MORNING
Alex and I woke up in a little room with baseball wallpaper that morning-– the kind of repetitive pattern that makes you stand in front of it and just stare. I couldn’t help trying to figure out where one piece of the pattern ended, and the new one began. Every time I walked by, I stuck.
THE WEDDING
We arrived late, of course. It was out in the middle of a storybook nowhere, where a little white farmhouse sat with nothing better to do than wait for the world to crumble. Having established our lateness as a fact, we cautiously made our way over the gravel and took our positions at the back of the crowd.
The ceremony was in swing: a little girl, swallowed by a huge pink dress sang a love ballad with a faltering voice. After the bride and groom had been religiously combined and everyone was done clapping, Beth started hugging people, and Alex and I made for the rocking chairs on the porch. Sitting there, looking out at the fields and the sun and the kids running around, I felt like I had reached the peak of something indefinable. I had managed to check something off on my list of American-obsessed agenda-– somewhere in the “rocking chair on a porch” department.
THE WEDDING RECEPTION
We found ourselves in some kind of community hall-– the kind of place a DMV staff Christmas party might be held. Sadly lit tables and canteen chairs, people wearing pale flower patterned dresses. Food consisting of watery green beans and glossy chicken slabs in gravy. Poetry for the newlyweds was being improvised into a microphone on a stage, and beer was free until 8:00PM.
It made you wonder where the farmhouse had melted to, and my stomach suddenly fell through a pit. I couldn’t help but care for these strangers. I wished they’d notice the tragedy; even more, I wish they’d never know.
7:30PM
Alex and I sat on the swings of a nearby playground with our little cups of beer. If at least we could have been inebriated,.. but, apparently, we were doomed to soberness-– blessed with an extremely acute vision when I would have loved to see everything blurred. Why is this beer tasting stale when we want it to be tempting?
8:16PM
We drove back from the wedding much earlier than we had originally planned, and while our spirits lay somewhere in a bloody pulp, we watched the sun pouring like liquid gold through the wind and the fields.
Beth, for some reason, knew the antidote. She pulled to a sharp right, the car came to a halt. The doors were suddenly wide-open, and we took off running down the highway like a bunch of dogs to whom nothing can be more exhilarating than their tongues hanging in the wind. It was like a stupid dream fulfilled-– frolicking in the roadside fields-– but it proved to be more satisfying than we’d have ever imagined.
Back in the car, our love for life on the road was fresh out of the oven.
CLICK HERE TO READ PART FOUR
artid
1691
Old Image
6_2_mercedes.jpg
issue
vol 6 - issue 02 (oct 2003)
section
pen_think