Cold Desert: An Interstate 80 Picaresque

Selected Excerpts of a completed but unpublished work
of nonfiction

2nd Place Winner of the Utah Original Writing Competition, 2018

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A travelogue, in the style of a picaresque, across Interstate 80 in the dead of winter with a family of three. To this flight attendant of 20 years, now furloughed, America looks very different from the ground up here at the end of 2010–the tea party on the rise; the Great Recession settling in; racism in the age of the country’s first black president. It’s the chilly prologue to the rise of Donald Trump. It’s also about the divides within and trying to connect to that 17-year-old in the back seat.

[S]afest way to travel, the airline is. Safe from the real world. For me it was a working life made up of a series of great parabolic arcs connecting the dots of America in a way that, though it was a simulated life—at least made a kind of sense.

Prologue

It’s the gabled porch on the front of the house of my sister and brother-in-law’s that finishes me for the East. I’ve already seen the three-car garage Pete built out back, the house he built for their neighbor Fred over yonder, the myriad trees he’s felled on his thirty acres outside Farmington, Maine. There’s that. And then there’s the house in Arizona I’ve already seen that he and his hard-drinking buddies, all wearing the same shirt emblazoned across the chest with “I’m Mo,” framed and roofed in a matter of a week. It’s that and the upstairs addition he put on his kid Jeff’s place outside Providence.

 

It’s the auto and snowmobile repairs and the spinning of buildings out of whole cloth that have tipped me over and made me feel like a sloth.

 

Don’t get me wrong. I love Diane and Pete with their boisterous, bawdy New England accent. When my wife Cath gets off the phone from talking with Diane, there’s a cross-country  remote that commandeers all of her diction for the next two hours: “Goddamn this” and “Goddamn that” and, “So I told my sistah, I tell, Die-annne that they gotta git a new kah and buay a new campah this spring for their trip out west, maybe fa’a visit to Utahr and Arizoner.”
We live in Utah, not “Utahr,” but it’s no use, acting as the corrective. Really, I can handle the accent, the goddamns, having lived in New England for two years back in the 80s, but it’s the handyman ethic of it all, the I-can-do-anything-including-brain-surgery-even-my-own that rankles me. Perhaps as in the poet’s “the world is too much with us,” the perpetual consumer, adrift in the mediated sea is “too much” with me.

 

The day we leave to return to the West, post-Christmas 2010, it’s the porch with its carefully mitered corners, its smooth underside, its perfectly positioned turned posts, rotating just the right way… it’s all of that which makes me long for home. The desert. The urban western way of things where I’ve made my living in the airline–an existence clearly not animated by this property-centered, “can do” spirit of Diane and Pete. They remind me too much of my distant ancestors who were of this ilk, Anglos who via New England or straight from the old country crossed the American continent in a covered wagon. Who built cities in the dust out of little more than adobe and the pine they could bring down from the mountains. Who, marshalling the sensibility of Back East, created whole systems of irrigation to make the desert supposedly “blossom as a rose.”

 

It’s time to go home. Back to civilization where you call a plumber when you need him; where you don’t Yankee-up with “this goes they’yah, and this . . . hmmm . . . this has gotta go they’ah” while getting tennis elbow under the sink. I know that this is an America that does exist because I married into a family that goes back to the Mayflower, I’m told. But it’s decidedly not the America where I hang my hat.

 

So we say goodbye, Cath, the man-boy, and I. And we jump into our rental car to drive back to Logan International for our flight home. Diane and Pete stand waving from under the porch that if I had attempted to build would have been the end of me. Or at least this, my second marriage.

Chapter 1

~In which a small, cobbled-together family on Christmas vacation in New England decides it’s time to flip the bird at the airline industry and just drive the hell home~

 

Cath is doing all the talking on the red “Need Help?” phone nearby while the man-boy and I sit, he plugged into his I-pod, I stewing in my thoughts while trying not to be drawn in by the elevated screen flashing the inevitably bizarre landscape of American news.  

 

“Did you tell her we wanted to buy tickets? On any airline?” I say when Cath comes back to our territory marked with coats and bags, an empty sandwich box, my beer on the floor next to my seat, just waiting to get kicked over. “I think this is a good time to use that emergency credit card, you think?” Cath can manage her wan smile even under duress while I feel that at a certain point of aggravation I deserve the luxury of a frown. After all, I’m now furloughed from the airline. I don’t have to sport the molded plastic smile of customer service anymore.

 

“There are no flights,” says Cath and sits. She is rummaging in her tote bag for something, her thumb still in the book she’s reading—a fictional meditation on cholera.  

 

“Then we’ll just fucking buy full fare. We’re never going to get out of here as non-revs.”  I glance at Derek, for that is what I will call him here. He is still plugged in. He gets upset sometimes when I punch up my language. Something kicks in that happened to him in his past. But he didn’t hear me. Oblivious.

 

“You don’t understand,” says Cath. “They aren’t selling anything for today, or tomorrow.  We’re looking at January first, the earliest.” Four days away.

 

“What about American? United? If we’re going to go full fare . . .”

 

“None of them are selling tickets, Dave,” she interrupts and then looks at me, waiting for it to sink in. Our situation. The man-boy is trying to read our conversation through the clamor of classic rock ‘n’ roll. Led Zeppelin? Pink Floyd? Or his favorite right now, the Beatles? Classic or not, the three have virtually nothing in common with each other, I think. But these days, at seventeen, Derek is far-ranging. Perhaps he’s turned down the volume . . . or turned off the i-Pod which he can do discreetly with his hand gripping it in the pocket of the coat he never seems to shed.

 

Cath looks at me and gives me her smile. This is the critical moment when a decision must be made, and despite my forceful language, I am going to wait for her to do it. Being the older of us, she is the decider. What do they call it? The one who is pro-active. That way if it goes badly I can complain as the put-upon-one. And if it goes well . . . well, I’ll always be able to find something to harp on. Either way I won’t be the reason we’re going further into debt. Plus, I have a back-up. Even if we don’t rent a car or buy three, full-fare tickets back to Salt Lake City, we’re paying a dog sitter for Jiggs fifty dollars a day at, already fifteen days. Cath’s insistence.  

 

“Let’s just rent a car and drive,” she says from what I’ve come to think of as the Yankee in her. “Let’s just get in a car and get out of here.”  

 

This is what I wanted her to say. The thought of sitting in this chrome and carpeted concourse—eating fifteen dollar lobster rolls—and counting my beers is more than I can handle.  We will leave Boston’s Logan International Airport determined to be self-directed, free. I’ll be damned if I am going to sit here for up to four days. We’ve already had to drive from Portland at the recommendation of the gate agent there who told us our chances of flying non-rev–airline employee short-hand for “non-revenue-yielding”—were better out of Beantown. The agent, with hair carefully arranged to look non-arranged and a bust that her otherwise tidy uniform could not hide, was standing with me in the baggage claim room, the smell of plastic and sweat from the piles of tagged, tipped-over and sometimes mutilated luggage. The buzz of a fluorescent light above us. She was being inordinately helpful, as fellow airline employees are to each other, giving the inside scoop, the way around the problem that only those of our tribe can access.

 

The three of us gather up our stuff spread out over six seats in some kind of effort to stake a claim on airport real estate while we’ve been waiting. It has occurred to me that we are at a distinct disadvantage. Our level of technology is woefully inadequate. I have only an old LG flip phone. No access to the internet where we can roam the standby lists, make new listings, look up passenger loads. Strategize. (Thus Cath’s earlier phone call to reservations.) Half of my desire to get out of the airport is based on the embarrassment of not having at least a laptop I can tool around on. This punching of numbers on a phone whose tones I haven’t learned how to silence for my fellow, more tech-savvy Americans, will never do.

 

We leave, Cath and I rolling our carry-ons, the man-boy carrying his, probably for the same reason I carried mine everywhere right out of flight attendant training: to distinguish myself as somehow not gay like the rest of the guys in my class. And we head down the escalator, through the corridor that splits off between arriving and departing passengers and towards the heavy metal doors, complete with sentinel, through which, once we traverse, there will be no returning. Check Point Charlie.

 

We move to the door. It whisks open. The sentinel follows us with his eyes, one leg up on the foot rest of his black-cushioned bar stool. What are we supposed to give him? Some kind of secret handshake to pass through?  

 

In Baggage Claim I frantically call from the car rental kiosk, lighted by every garish and stylish car rental logo available—which is to say all of them in this great country of ours. Frantic, because I’m convinced that the hordes of stranded passengers will be doing the same thing and that cars will quickly disappear. Over ten thousand flights have canceled across the country due to weather, and more are certainly to follow. Cath and the man-boy have gone to see if we can claim our luggage–we won’t be able to, it’s all left for Utah without us–while I stand guard over our meager belongings and try to figure out whether Hertz, Avis or Thrifty will be our rental of choice.  

 

Armed with a plan but with little or no accountability for making the plan, I am still driven to make sure that it all happens. And too, I am driven to walk out of the airport and into the rain that is about to begin to freeze, into the New England night and into the shuttle, my little family with our modest belongings slung over our shoulders, hats pulled down, i-Pod glowing. We will motor over to the Mass Pike, spurning the massively disappointing airline industry as well as the inconvenience of life on the east coast, with a collective flipping of the bird over our left shoulder. Yes, The Bird–the great American gesture of defiance, like the glass John Hancock Tower standing on the back bay of Shawmut Peninsula and flipping off Mother England. But this time we will be shouting the equivalent of Screw Fucking You! to someone/something infinitely closer than our touted enemies–Iraq or Afghanistan—or that great, brooding, as yet non-touted enemy, China. Considering the national state of mind here at the end of the first decade of the new millennium, we will be cursing an enemy infinitely closer, indeed.  

 

But first we have to get out of the rental car parking lot.

 

The attendant looks at me blankly when I ask her how best to get to Interstate 80. For some reason, I thought 80 ran all the way from Boston across the fruited plains, all the way to the West Coast. She hands me a map of greater Boston with an inset of Logan International, and keeps typing up the details of our Toyota Corolla with an $800 drop fee. She is a large woman, with a practiced, put-upon smile—nigh unto a grimace, really–that doesn’t put up with any shit. I am more than familiar with that smile, having worn it myself as I walked the aisles of many a Boeing and McDonnell Douglas contraption, the beacon of a full body composition that says, I am a professional but only skin deep. Don’t fuck with me. It’s a variation of “Don’t Tread on Me,” from colonial times, now contemporized.  

 

Sitting in the driver’s seat of the Corolla, I pull out my phone from another age as thick, with its faux-leather sheath, as thick as a bean-and-cheese burrito. I call Pete back in Maine.

 

“Where are you?”

 

“Boston.  We’re driving home.”

 

“To Utah?”

 

“Look. I need you to do us a favor.” I look around, through the windshield. There is nothing life-affirming in a parking lot at night. Even less in an East Coast parking lot at an airport. Something about plopping down behind the wheel of a car that isn’t yours while vibrating to the sound of jet engines that makes you feel lost.    

 

“Can’t you just buy a ticket?” he says. “You guys are going to be a week . . .”

 

“I need you to look up the northern route to Utah. I-80.” Outside, the night converges as I remember dark, dirty Boston nights did when I lived here thirty years ago. Cath looks at me with patience. She is in trouper mode. Gonna get out of here in one piece.  

 

I can hear Pete talking to Diane who is clicking away on her keyboard. The two of them in protracted, internally-heard cyber-speak . . . coaxing, thinking out loud with all the markers of our shared, webbed world.  

 

“It’s I-90,” he says finally. You need the Mass Pike, I-90.

 

“Then where is I-80?”  

 

“You sure you don’t want to go the way we do to Arizona, south to DC and across through Tennessee? The weather, you know. Freezing rain . . .”  

 

I persist. “I thought I-80 was a straight shot west to the Rockies, north of Denver.” Really what this is all about is that I don’t want to have to think beyond the nose of the car, about what direction to go. Plus—and this is something I don’t really want to admit—I need the comfort of something familiar. “I wish I had a road that I could skate away on” to quote the warbling Joni Mitchell, and for me that road has to be I-80.

 

Diane gets on. Gives me the directions. I repeat them, and Cath scribbles them down, her glasses perched precariously on her nose. I snap my phone shut.

 

There was a time when I was completely charmed by Boston, the cradle of the American Revolution. So charmed I didn’t want to return home after my two-year stint as a twenty-year-old going door-to-door and peddling religion in Harvard Square. But now there is only one way through my mental fix. One way out. And it is west.         

 

Mass Pike is broad and steely cold, bee lining in a dingy trough below the street level of the city. There are billboards flat against the cemented walls on either side, one, I see out of the corner of my eye, touting the God-given right to own a gun–a too-tidy reaction if you ask me to the election of Barack Obama over two years ago. Even so, in the yellow city crime light, there is a moment where it actually seems to make sense, this owning a gun out of some inchoate fear.  

 

The man-boy is in the back seat, legs folded sideways in the best Japanese car made in the U.S. (sort of) for our money and good mileage to boot. It’s too dark to read his book on John Lennon so he is just sitting in the alternating bands of light and shadow. He’s watching, just as Cath and I are, the world opening out in a ribbon of road. I am not above projecting what he might be thinking, and, as the man in charge here, making a quick judgment of him. He can’t possibly know what lies ahead of him. My live-in grandson can only be thinking that this is a drive a little further than Evanston, Wyoming where we have taken him to buy illegal fireworks, or Arizona where we visit Cath’s sister when the Maine winters get to be too much for her and Pete.

 

We make a pit stop at a Gulf Mart, in West Framingham (or so the sign says), one of the infamous private/public partnerships: exclusive rights to road-weary interstate travelers in need of gas, or a hot dog on a limp white bun. The Pike reverberates behind us, and as the three of us cross the damp parking lot and into the brittle light of retail, I am still in charge, having just spent more money than we have. We walk towards the chrome and glass bank of refrigerators. I can tell the man-boy is waiting for permission of some sort. “Whatever you want,” I say as off-handedly as I can. I am performing a kind of swagger motivated by a sense that I am the wagon master here.  

 

Cath is humming along in survival mode. She’s picking up huge bottles of water, one for each of us. Trail mix. Dried fruit, as if we’re in need of pioneer stores to load into our prairie schooner. The next thing, I think, will be matches and a poncho. I head to the wiener department, snagging a road atlas on the way. We haven’t had anything since the fifteen-dollar lobster roll at Logan, and the man-boy won’t figure out he’s hungry for something other than a candy bar until we get back on the road. I load up two hot dogs for him. One for me. Ketchup on his, but no mustard—the way he likes them. The dogs are my rough, inarticulate caring gesture for the one now as tall as I am.  

 

We get in line. The clerk, not much older than Derek, is intolerably cheerful to the flannel jacket amassed in front of us above blue jeans and scuffed work boots with the metal showing through on the big toe of each. The clerk is smiling, eyes aglow. Red vest in place. (“Can I help you find anything else?”) The man in front of us—in his late 30s—at least ten years my junior, is grizzled. Leaving work late. Probably drives a truck. The kind of Bay Stater you forget populates Massachusetts even a handful of miles outside of the capital city. While we wait for “Nana,” still eyeing the lip balm, I look at my grandson, give him a tight smile. He pulses his eyebrows up, once. It is our shorthand for acknowledging one another without giving away where each of us is. It’s our aerial handshake that, like a gangsta—knuckle bumps and fancy grips—speaks somehow as much of our distrust and suspicion of each other as it does any kind of familial intimacy. Nana arrives with everything, it seems, but a bathtub quickly filled with water.

 

“What?” She says sheepishly. The boy and I exchange another look, consummately sexist. This is as good as it will get tonight, between him and me. A conspiracy of ridicule designed to elevate ourselves. The kind of vaulting brotherhood, hard-wired, even for me, a now furloughed flight attendant who walked proudly the line between the sexes for twenty-plus years without seeming condescension to the other half.       

 

Back on the Pike. Just before it starts looking like the Berkshires, we pay the exit toll and then angle south on I-84 toward Hartford. If we can just get beyond there, we can look for a place to overnight—maybe even get as far as PA. Compared to the Pike, our way now seems to be through the wilds, the forbiddingly dark Mass.-to-Connecticut countryside, towering pines on either side. This feels like the real start of our journey. I tilt my head back into the narrow headrest. A sigh is in order. The way is now clearer.  

 

I reach out to grasp Cath’s hand, still tight as a nut around her other hand, a fist. She isn’t ready to take my hand in return. Not yet. She pats me and says something about the number of miles we will need to log each day (490) if we are to make it home before we both have to go back to work on the third. She is very much in charge here. What she says, we will do. I know that, and it is both a relief and an irritant. A contradiction that you would think I would transcend here in my forty-ninth year of life. It often means that I have to be on guard whenever we are in real, decision-making time: where to buy a house, how to think about something, and when to change lanes. On guard because I have to appear as though I have my own opinions, and more important, compelling reasons for those opinions that sing with clarity.  

 

But we are set in our ways. “Wicked” set, as her nephews back in Rhode Island would say. And so I do not, or cannot at this point, realign the dynamic. What drew me to her nineteen years ago was her seeming certainty. Something from which, ironically, I was desperate to flee after the end of my first marriage. All the certainty that had collared me into a bad marriage, a bad life and an impossible view of the world. But what is strong enough to wrest one from a certainty, of one’s youth, and of one’s family and of . . . everything, than another, equally certain certainty?

 

All of that seems irrelevant now as we follow our headlights through the trees because I am not only ordering up a sigh after our harried removal from airline-land, I am inured by my beloved. I confess, it is the countryside. The land from whence she came coupled with the time that has passed—oh, I’ll just say it. I feel nostalgia. Adrift in it, remembering how freeing she had made me feel and therefore how everything that spawned her settled sweetly in me. The hoary pilgrim homes, myriad hardwoods and pine that, unlike the arid West, grew without anyone having to plant them. The abrupt conversational style. Her father’s penchant for doing all things for himself, risking life and limb to re-roof that hoary pilgrim house with the twenty-percent slope.

 

Cath, who is eleven years my senior, sometimes says that perhaps I would have been better off left alone after my divorce. That what she brought into my life has made me older before my time. But for me there is infectious daylight in her smile even here in the dark. Even though her worried state, as she leans forward in the car and peers into the terrain of her past life, has yet to bend into that smile. And I remember that this is the place she left by choice. This is her desert, just as Utah is mine—the place I once entertained for the express purpose of someday leaving. Which I did, only to return later. And what has ostensibly made me older—the sleeping man-boy in the backseat, his head jacked back and to the left against the window, his mouth wide open—is, I’m sure, something more than just an agent of agimg. But what I’m still not sure.

 

I’d like to think that now in 2010 my nearly five decades have led me through the knee-jerk rejection of the old, received certainties. For my parents, the end of the world was always just around the corner. I have a different vocabulary than they do for, if you will, “end times”:  non-sustainability, the end of work/civility/public education (fill in the blank). The abandonment of the age of enlightenment for the “-isms” of nation and religion. Melting ice caps.

 

But it is a vocabulary filled with trepidation nonetheless, and at the end of the first decade of the new millennium, I have another reason for thinking that, in the voice of the poet W.B. Yeats’, “the center cannot hold.”  

 

It wasn’t just the disastrous mid-term elections and the rise of the Tea Party that was getting to me. It was also, the persisting “Great Recession.” Congressional gridlock. The ubiquity of reality TV as inane as Survivor or The Apprentice. By the close of 2010 I will have been furloughed from my career as a flight attendant for five years. For two decades my view of America has been from seven miles up, flying over the broad contours of the land and its inhabitants held together like the patches of a giant quilt. My first domicile was in the West and my second in the East. Why bother getting into a car, or a bus, a train or even a subway—except to go to the grocery story, or to a play in mid-town Manhattan? The world seemed to be my neighborhood, easier to fly to London’s Heathrow than to get even somewhere in the Maine. Satisfactorily convenient to jet off for that wedding in Texas, or Massachusetts, than to wend one’s way through the interstate freeway system.

 

The country and the lifestyle, the landscape, even the people I felt keenly connected to and thought I knew were suddenly invaders, foreign and unfamiliar. The fall from 40,000 feet to just under six has been precipitous, even more so now that four days of travel stretch before us.

 

There was the collapsing and then transforming industry of the airline. The eventual loss of my job and my sense of self into someone with a much more modest income, working at first one then another non-profit. And then there was the man-boy. Skinnier than I, but just as tall.  The live-in grandson who migrated from his mother’s house to ours. Yes, there was Derek, and the mortgage Cath and I had to take out. (Just the food bill with a teenager in the house was, as Derek would say, “ginormous.”)

 

There was that.

 

And now there is this. These storms that have slammed both coasts and virtually everywhere in between. Suddenly, airplanes are on the ground, and so are we.  It is America from the ground up, and it is scaring the shit out of me.

Chapter 2

~In which fellow travelers are engaged over breakfast and the narrator recalls the only kind of intimacy he and his grandson have been able to inflict on each other~

 

We manage to get to Southington, Connecticut by 9 p.m., and, since this is Connecticut, there will be no cocktail or glass of wine tonight. By law, we can’t even buy beer as it is after 8 p.m. This is not hospitality even by Utah standards, especially for the “Microcosm of America” which Southington was apparently billed by the War Department during World War II. Photographers, we are told, roamed this small town on the Quinnipiac River, and published their photos of busy residents at work, and in their homes and churches in a pamphlet which was then dropped by the thousands from military aircraft over Nazi-occupied Europe. This to highlight just how bucolic and value-driven Americans were in a land that also inspired the bucolic and value-driven illustrator Norman Rockwell.

 

We find an EconoLodge on the edge of the American Microcosm, in a neighborhood known as Milldale, famous for its American Clock and Watch Museum, which we won’t be visiting. Being without alcohol, we can nevertheless log in and tune out on a guest computer which the motor lodge happily provides. So while the man-boy collapses in front of the TV upstairs, his boots tumbled to the floor at the foot of his bed, I am in the lobby downstairs, and navigating Google Maps. Interstate 80 stretches across the screen in blessed digital form, the yellow brick road home that in my imagination has come to represent a lifeline out of the tunnel of trees that is the East. Oh to see a vista! To shoot across the prairie in our little Toyota! To be home!

 

We have 2,250 miles to our driveway in Salt Lake City . . . by car. Thirty days and one hour if we are to walk on a carefully planned path that will take us through a section of Canada and require that we board a ferry. (“Use caution – This route may be missing sidewalks or pedestrian paths.”) If we prefer to bicycle it home, it will take us a mere nine days and two hours if we follow the 1,341 points of direction filtered by Google and provided by the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy with the following disclaimer:

 

These directions are for planning purposes only. You may find that construction projects, traffic, weather, or other events may cause conditions to differ from the map results, and you should plan your route accordingly. You must obey all signs or notices regarding your route.

 

Hell yeah, we’ll obey all signs or notices.

 

We decide to stick with the Corolla, despite Toyota’s recent recall of sticking accelerator pedals, real or imagined.

 

Still there is some weird comfort in knowing that one can Google every configuration of how one can cross the country with the exception of going by camel. Weird because the internet is paradoxically home and an alien spacecraft the longer we traffic in it. It’s a Niagara Falls of the utterly inane and, at the same time, the utterly absorbing, so that when we leave life on the screen we are reminded—most of us are reminded—that it is virtual. Fake.  

 

Now that I’m a desk jockey, I have learned that cyberspace is also the great facilitator for resisting work. At my job, I somehow feel as though sending an email is the same as getting work done when most of the time after clicking “send” what I’ve really done is just contributed to the debris of inner space. Compounded by the ability to pull up whole threads of emails, one can show definitively (in a cyber-kind of way) that WORK HAS BEEN DONE. Not so. Work done digitally has been delayed, flayed, held up under fluorescent lights as a monument to the similitude of work, of thought, of even, perhaps, real connection. Email is where we go to avoid work or at least subsume it. It elevates TO, FROM, RE, SENT to a mere performance of productivity.

 

Some offices, I’ve heard, have a quiet competition going on using email to see how long one can avoid talking to another live person.  

 

I have a theory: here, at the end of the year 2010, the majority of us middle-agers are so damn happy to think of ourselves as on what we used to call the “superhighway,” and no longer trying to figure out why we can’t get a dial tone on our AOL, that we are now doing what we always do. We are digging in, making the collective groove that–as in unbridled “growth,” as in the discovery of the wheel–is eventually going to turn out to be a problem so acute, like carbon footprints stampeding into global warming, that we are left again sitting around with our thumb up our collective ass and requiring a new generation of long-haired pink-o commie roustabouts to batter us over the head for two decades to get us to wake up and smell the ultraviolet rays beating down through the ozone layer.  

 

My burrito rings.  It is Cath, upstairs.  

 

“Where are you?”

 

I want to tell her that I am located somewhere over the news now pulsing on Comcast, our server of choice, about missile strikes inside Pakistan and how short weekly bouts of eccentric exercise may offer big health improvements, according to a story in the Los Angeles Times.

 

“Still on the computer. Google Maps. I’ll print it out and be right up.”

 

Derek and I are scheduled to wash our underwear for tomorrow in the sink. Upstairs, Cath is likely playing good cop with him. I am to show up, rapping on the door with my billy club, and demand that he roll his lank off the bed and away from the television showing a re-run of Rocky Balboa, which we’ve seen thrice and is now out on video, but which is nevertheless the balm of the hour. I am to demand that he strip off his boxers and wash them in the sink with shampoo. And, with my boots and gear clanging at my imaginary law enforcement officer blues, I will need to be ready to counter his remonstration with, no you cannot just turn them inside out. (Actually, that’s what I would just as soon do myself.)

 

Our room’s temperature, in typical EconoLodge fashion, is impossible to get just right. By morning we’ll either be sweltering under our starched sheets and polyester bedspread, or freezing our asses off. Or, more predictably, Derek, who is closest to the unit (and in direct line of the massive TV) will be sweltering, and we will be freezing. No matter. We are here for only our short eight hours and then, as Cath has planned out, we will be on our way for the next 490-mile stretch.  

 

I will drift off into a fitful sleep in the Philadelphia of Rocky Balboa, the boxer-turned-restaurant-owner. Then, being the light sleeper in the crowd, the insomniac even, I will wake, either sweltering or freezing, to turn off the TV. Cath will be struggling to breathe and Derek will be lying there, one arm pulled up over his head, his boxers drying on the towel rack. And in his young face will be etched the transient look of one who dreams about John Lennon, born seventy years ago last October.

 

The eight hours of rest turn into ten. We were more tired than we thought. Outside, Connecticut is cold, snow banks in the parking lot, now ice, across from the plastic orange and Day-Glo mauve of a Dunkin’ Donuts that this morning in frigid air shattered by the engine brakes of nearby tractor trailers looks incontrovertibly unappetizing. The Corolla, meanwhile, looks forlorn next to a snow bank, its New York plates giving it an instant contrarian identity in this otherwise sad sack excuse for the Microcosm of America. Can one make a fair assessment of any place from the parking lot of a donut shop and an EconoLodge? Probably not, but assess we do. What else can we do in late 2010 America except peer out from a temporary static point on the superhighway and take a snapshot with our camera phone?

 

I load the car with our luggage, then shiver back inside to join Cath and Derek for the free breakfast that comes with last night’s accommodations. To approach the breakfast nook of an American motor lodge is to approach an obstacle course. Into this vortex one becomes a high school sophomore all over again. Where do I go?  How do I act? Mini bagels . . . with or without schmear? The other two are already seated at a teetering table, everything in Styrofoam, plastic spoons barely concave enough to snare two Cheerios at a time. Two men, one young one old, one thin one fat, are at the next table, leaning against the wall, each with a white disposable cup designed to provide a token of coffee or tea before the Motor Lodge bids ye farewell. Cath, wearing the same black patterned-dress with black leggings and boots as the day before, has a way of ingratiating herself to strangers, prematurely if you ask me. She is already smiling and solicitous to them, eyes bright and inviting. They are working stiffs, cuffed at the dungaree ankle, boot-ed, flannelled both, grizzled as men become, especially when for long periods of time only in the company of . . . other men. I twist my cornflakes out of the Plexiglas dispenser, back and forth. It takes one and a half turns before the sheeny white bowl is filled with no room for milk, and sized to be held between fingers like a thimble. (“Eat thy morsel, then fare thee well!”)

 

The two men are on the road, the younger, David, driving the rig with a double-wide pre-fab home, and the older, Clayton, driving the lead vehicle with “Wide Load” emblazoned on it.  This is their moment of repose, together, the backs of their chairs leaning against cheesy wall-paper. It would appear that because of a recent stroke, seventy-year-old Clayton is no longer allowed to drive the rig. David is saying less than his companion, is less sure of himself and seems ready to hit the road. But Clayton, taking his cues from the inquiring Cath, is now recalling driving his rig in Manhattan on the morning of September 11, 2001.

 

“Been there thousands of time, but never . . . never seen it like that. The traffic either stopped still or racing like the devil. Cop finally come up to me says, just get the hell out. Get the hell out of New York or you’ll be here for a long time.” Clayton clamps down his teeth, looks thoughtfully at the floor. Cath is a good listener. She’s told him how, before we moved out west, she and I heard the second plane hit the towers in our Brooklyn apartment. How we watched it on the television after a phone call from an out-of-town relative alerting us to what was going on.  For Clayton, as for all of us, I suppose, the story of 9/11 hasn’t yet migrated into an archive. To retrieve the memory means to hazard re-living something that makes the throat catch, the heart race, the future to recede as fast as the past normally does.

 

David nods in time to the story. His left boot tips to the side, resting on the floor. There is a hole in the sole. The two of them look as ungainly as I feel, thrown together in a room of wobbly, pressed wood breakfast tables with fellow guests readying for the ride in the three-day old wake of a Christmas past, the lobby tree, tumescent below a holiday cheer banner as flaccid as the tree is artificially erect, humming with lights.     

 

Derek has left his i-Pod in the car the night before and is without wires. Hunkered down over his tiny, inadequate bowl of Fruit Loops look-a-likes, he is listening to the conversation. His long, light brown hair is still wet from the shower and shooting out from under his soiled blue baseball cap. He was eight when America was attacked in 2001. And being the thoughtful grandfather living in New York City at the time, I squirreled away TheNew Yorker (whose somber cover is completely black except for the merest hint of The Towers) along with the front page of the Times. For posterity, I thought at the time. But it’s hard for me to think of him caring for anything material like that in the age of Google.  

 

We’ll see.

 

We bid the men goodbye. Cath still all smiles. Warm. If they could, the two of them might take her to lunch just so that they could keep talking to her. I think of myself as a good conversationalist, friendly with strangers, always doing the asking. But Cath’s authentic while I’m a performer. Genuine while I just work the room. It occurs to me that she is grounded by their regionalism—upstate New York for both of them but close enough to New England which she misses, although she is quick to say that she does not. At least most of the time.   

 

Earlier, while I was showering, Cath had gone out and picked up a couple of T-shirts for me and Derek. While she was wise enough herself to carry extra underthings, and even another dress and tights, Derek and I are wearing what we wore out of Aunt Diane and Uncle Pete’s house the morning before. Now the boy and I are twins, pocketed T’s that have that starched, creased look to them right out of the package. We both wear a size large, and I can’t help but notice as the man-boy slips his on how much he’s filled out in the shoulders. And though I have fifty pounds on him now, I realize that very soon he’ll not only be taller than I am, but larger. This is not what I want to know. The boy has been living with us full-time for four years and, in typical male fashion, our bodies have been the nexus of our competition with each other. It wasn’t that long ago, perhaps eighteen months or so, that the rough-housing had to stop. We were standing in the tiny bedroom where Cath and I don’t make love anymore due to our sudden, full-time parental duties in a tiny house, and the boy was slugging me in the arm. Hard slugs, really, at age fifteen-plus, proving for the hundredth time where he ends and I begin. I had taken to hitting him back, all in good fun. Right?  

 

It’s the way we show affection for each other, I had told Cath who whenever she heard us slugging or grappling would scold us and the dog would start barking.  

 

It’s just our competitive nature coming out, I would say.

 

She looked at me worried, unbelieving. “Your father used to overpower you to the point that it was abusive,” she reminded me. “And supposedly all in good fun. You’re doing the same thing with him. He doesn’t like it.”  

 

That was early on when the boy was first hitting puberty. So I set a policy for this kid who was often trying to get a reaction out of me through his fists: don’t ever start it. But there was another policy I decided on that, even still, I’m not so sure about when it comes to the boy who lives with me. It doesn’t do him any good to handicap yourself, to hold back, or he will never know what he is capable (or not capable) of. He’ll never know what it means to have a worthy opponent in life.

 

That worked for a while. He would give me his best shot, to the arm or to the chest, and I would give it back, both of us ever-calibrating in the tussling way males have when muscle was being flexed and where the kidneys lay. But, as in the tussling way males have, calibrations make way for besting the other, at times at any cost, and emotions flood the plains. Perhaps it was that, or perhaps it was just that sometimes we could not decide when the other was game for the game, and heartily resented it when a fist came out of nowhere in the hall, the car, or, on this particularly fateful day, in the bedroom.

 

“You hit me harder than I hit you!” he exclaimed, eyes flashing in a head whose hair, at the time, still sported a buzz.  

 

“I hit you as hard as you hit me,” I said. “And I wasn’t expecting it. You always start these things but then you get pissed off when I fight back.”

 

He slugged me again. Hard in the shoulder. I hit him back, my frustration growing. “Cut it out!” He said, rubbing his arm.  

 

“You cut it out.”  

 

Sounds real mature on my part, I know.

 

The on-ramp to I-84 is a bobsled chute that propels us away from the Microcosm, temporarily southwest towards Waterbury and away from the ESPN headquarters in nearby Bristol. Ah . . . ESPN—a microcosm through cable unto itself. A place where a programming team sits around all day in complimentary Nike gear and continues to split the imaginary syllables of the word “Sports”—as we are fond of doing with atoms. Twenty-two TV stations, 19 internet sites and 9 radio stations later and we are watching everything from Scrabble competitions to Rollerblade Hockey–some of those on SKYCAM–and Fantasy Football to the real NFL (if there is a real football league anymore) which ESPN paid $8.8 billion for eight years of broadcast rights. It’s easy to imagine what the fliers of propaganda dropped over Europe would say if it were written today: “Family first in this halcyon town on the quaint Quinnipiac River, where Mrs. Brown serves her famous cherry pie to her hard-working men decamped for forty hours straight in front of homegrown ESPN on a tulip-filled spring day in Southington, Connecticut–Microcosm of America.”

 

These are the sorts of rants that pickle my brain these days, still stinging as I am from our self-imposed exile from air travel. If we can’t make it home before our luggage and our Christmas gifts, by damn, I get to cast aspersions on The Worldwide Leader in Sports, including its coverage of spelling bees and outhouse races. (Shit!)

 

Chapter 3

~In which our intrepid trio finds itself still desperately seeking Interstate 80 before coming to a grinding halt~

By the time we straighten out to a more westward-ho direction, passing Danbury, I am feeling less cantankerous. Having traveled the world at forty thousand feet, I can’t really say that I’ve ever been to Danbury, a.k.a. “The Hat City.” Danbury is the site of a federal prison where during WWII one in six inmates was a conscientious objector. Obviously Danbury is not the microcosm we wanted to front to the Germans. Suddenly this relative outpost had a population of highly educated men who enlisted other prisoners in their cause. It is because local laborers began protesting in solidarity with the objectors that Danbury started desegregating its inmates. One of the nation’s first to do so.

 

Armed with even this trivia, I still wouldn’t recommend picking up a hitchhiker outside of the Hat City.

 

Still no sign of Interstate 80, the continuous thread that pulls Utah in our direction as much as it propels us westward. It occurs to me that if its eastern terminus isn’t in Boston, where the hell is it? San Francisco is its western anchor, which I’m sure of because of family vacations when I was a child to nearby Palo Alto. It is the longest interstate highway, second only to Interstate 90 and its first iteration of the Mass Pike. Interstate 80 is also the closest to the nation’s first cross-country road, the august Lincoln Highway. It was the great American West that cared the most about transcontinental travel, for obvious reasons.  

 

To date, there is still a geographical inferiority complex in westerners, from sports teams to publishing. The only way to compete with the Eastern Seaboard, and to a lesser extent, the Pacific Coast states, is to build one’s own communities, open one’s own universities, found a symphony. Build a damn Lincoln Highway that connects the homeless-tempest-tossed to homesteads in the great Mid-, mountain and desert wests. Endure the quips and quotes from Mark Twain. Celebrate one’s own, whether it be Willa Cather or Wallace Stegner. Stake a claim much like one did in the Sierra Nevada during the Gold Rush.  

 

This is what one is reminded of when crossing the country at the end of 2010. The hierarchy of place. And only those of us from the West—or worse, from the sub-West (Utah)—even register the insult which smarts all the more. No one comes to visit us in Salt Lake City compared to when we lived in New York, except for Tim, a skier who lives in New Jersey and believes the Utah propaganda of the “greatest snow on earth.”  

 

At this point, what hasn’t really registered is how long four-to-five days will be on the road—one bone-crunching day after another over Christmas week. Not good to think about it, right? Get er done, as they say. Pedal to the metal and Get er done. It’s the American way, like going to the moon or executing a hostile corporate takeover to lay off thousands.

 

Eighty-Four takes us to the Connecticut/New York line. Progress! We are going north by northwest toward the Hudson River and Newburgh. When Cath drives she narrates everything, reading signs aloud, saying whatever pops into her head, which can be annoying. She also drives painfully slow and hesitates dangerously whenever trying to pass another car or truck. This is just my opinion, of course. And I know that I am treading dangerous ground when I fault women drivers. But it’s true. And what makes it okay in my humble opinion, is that she finds fault with me as well, but for opposite reasons. I drive too fast and am too distractible. For this reason, we have come up with a brilliant preamble whenever we get into the car together. We both simply say to the other: “You are the worst goddamned driver in the world and someday you’re going to murder us.” We can say this as loudly and forcefully as we wish, but we cannot say anything about this to each other for the duration of the trip. That’s the rule anyway.

 

I am reminded of this after we’ve switched places and when we come to a grinding halt on the freeway for reasons unknown. You’d think that not moving would be relaxing to a backseat driver, but it’s not to Cath who instantly starts calculating how much time we’re losing, how many miles we’ll have to add to the next day to catch up. We turn off the engine. A cruiser with its lights flashing scurries by in the breakdown lane to the right.

 

We turn on the radio. Jesus, country western, the pornography of Glenn Beck. Rock ‘n’ roll. Next? A little NPR, please?  

  

“Hey, that’s Foreigner, dude.” The man-boy speaks. (Apparently, I am the referenced “dude.”) I thought he’d drifted off. But here he is. I had flipped past Foreigner not realizing that “Hot Blooded” is as good as it’s going to get for a while here outside of Pawling, New York, home of the oldest municipality-owned golf course in America and not one but two Metro-North train stops. Nestled in the foothills of the Berkshires, it is a “compelling, stable community,” I will read later on its website. This is what I need. Stable ground that is equally compelling somehow, and not just because I play golf. (I don’t.) “But you’ve got to give me a sign,” the song plays . . .

         Come on girl, some kind of sign
         Tell me, are you hot mama? You sure look that way to me

 

I vaguely remember this song. It came out the summer after my junior year in high school when I was just starting to feel a biting superiority to popular culture (among many other things). That the song was overtly salacious vaulted me further into my on-going critique. Nothing more appealing to an insecure 11th grader than the double shot of esthetics-mongering and righteousness borne of religion. Even though this song is from “my era,” it is Derek who can rattle off names of band members, like the vocalist Lou Gramm whose hard-edged, high-strung voice pummels this song with sexual fire . . .

 

Well I’m hot blooded, check it and see
I got a fever of a hundred and three
Come on baby, do you do more than dance?
I’m hot blooded, I’m hot blooded

 

. . . and even statutory engine brakes.

         Are you old enough? Will you be ready when I call your bluff?
         Is my timing right? Did you save your love for me tonight?

More wailing guitars.  

    “This is really going to slow us down,” says Cath, looking out the window at the wall of woods. Funny how when one stops on a high-speed freeway, a complete stop, the world first takes on the scent of not only inconvenience, but inconsequence. How dare the world conspire to stop me, is the sentiment. But then there’s the resultant wake bumping you up and a little sideways on a swell from behind, the wake you were once leaving as you sped west. It catches up with you, and there is a kind of regret in its aftermath that you have categorically let slip away what was propelling you forward. And its costs. You regret that too. At least the sun is out for a minute, limning clouds as it temporarily seeks a place from which to hang.  

 

We finish out with Foreigner, grateful, actually, for a conversational “in” with Derek. This is where Cath and I come together as I imagine we wouldn’t be able to as easily if we were the man-boy’s biological parents. Holding hands we routinely enter the openings provided by his expressed interests, even when they materialize as discourse about the “radness” of Monster Trucks, or, in this case, a genre of music the two of us claim to have transcended—or just misplaced to be more accurate–at this, the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

 

In the rearview mirror, I notice Derek has been reading USA Today, which this morning at the motel he scooped up of the floor outside our door. He has written all over the Life Section, scrawled words and dizzy designs in pen that make the paper look worn, thin.  

 

“What are you writing?” I ask.

 

“Stuff,” he says. A conversational stopper for sure.  

 

“Do you like that paper?”

 

“It’s pretty cool.” As a former freelance journalist, I consider launching into my staid-old diatribe about how Gannett’s national paper experiment, USA Today, successfully bled dry its other city newspapers across the country beginning in the eighties. (Bastards.) But I elect to forgo that for a potential teaching moment on the joys of reading print, fast disappearing. Instead, in the silence he surprises me with “Just some of my thoughts, you know. That’s what I’ve been putting down.” He laughs nervously, a laugh that both inures me to him and breaks my heart at the same time. Cath is listening, good grandmother that she is, probably thankful for the diversion from calculating mileages.

 

“Do you read many newspapers at East High?”

 

“Not really,” he says. Another stopper.

 

“How far are you in your Lennon book?”

 

“I dunno. He’s still in Liverpool. They’re talking about his mom.”

 

“What about his mom?”

 

“She gave him up. And then she took him back later.” Nervous laugh. “Then she got hit by a car and died.”

 

“Ouch!”

 

Cath has opened the atlas—an actual paper and print artifact–that is proving woefully inadequate. It’s best if only one of us carries on with Derek, the other feigning disinterest. For his sake, we presume. To keep him talking.

 

“Yeah. It kind of sucked.”

 

“Who raised him? I mean after she gave him up?” He is looking out the window on the driver’s side. I can tell, even though I can’t see him without craning my neck. It occurs to me that maybe he’s perched behind my seat so that he doesn’t have to give me eye contact. This even though he has to sit sideways to accommodate his knees.

 

“His aunt.” He says finally. Now I know that the conversation is over. At least for now. And it’s just as well. The traffic is starting to move again. The sun has disappeared for the rest of the morning.

 

Chapter 4

~In which our narrator finally, really looks in the rear view mirror at his grandson to wonder if it is okay to need something from a 17-year old~

 

Down out of the Berkshires, winding on Interstate 84, still desperately seeking I-80, descending toward the Hudson River which I announce so that Derek will see the important geographical features of our trip.  

 

“Cool” he says in response. “Cool.”  

 

Someday, I think, he will remember all of this. Or will he? He will remember the crazy trip we took in the same clothes for four, five days with his grandparents, and he will remember it with some kind of fondness. That is my hope. It really is.

 

On the bridge, I get a glimpse of the mighty Hudson, and then it is gone. Back into the trees, but we like to think that New York is substantively different than Connecticut. These days, these post-modernist days (or is it post-post now?), perceived culture is reality, right? A social construction.  Isn’t that what we were bandying about in graduate school in the early 90s? So, yes. New York is materially different than its neighbor to the east because culture makes material.  

 

I decide not to share this insight with Derek. Maybe if he goes to graduate school himself someday.  

 

New York is short-lived. And just as well. We’ve done our time in the Empire State. Seen it all. Or at least that’s how we present it to others in Utah. Been there, done that. Burrowed (and “bourough-ed”) about for seven years in the subways. Sampled all the diners from Washington Heights to Park Slope. Done the proverbial upstate swing through the Catskills, Albany, Ithaca, Syracuse, Rochester, the Finger Lakes and Mormon Country (Important to me. Or is it?),  Niagara Falls, then south to mid-PA where we are headed now for an extended segment of the trip designed to show the airline industry just how much we don’t need it.

 

Interstate 80 must be around here, somewhere. As we turn south toward Scranton the hills pile up, the railroad yards tangle against the freeway, the factories lie fallow. The mill town struggling to re-invent itself like Lowell, Mass. where, after my stint in Boston, I was knocking on doors for the Gospel According to Joseph Smith. But, in the spirit of Jacques Derrida, Scranton is defined as much by Steve Carrell’s “The Office” as it is by its disposable history of anthracite coal and Joe Biden. Anyone care to disagree?

 

The Office is a show that we cannot share very successfully with Derek, though admittedly, he does have eclectic tastes in film and video from The Simpsons—which he spent over a decade enthralled by–to 127 Hours in which James Fraco depicts Aaron Ralston’s real-life walk-up to sawing his arm off in a Utah slot canyon is as much about the man’s extended revelatory fever dream as the detachment of flesh and bone. I think this boy who has his generational if not gender-specific appetite for gratuitous video violence sees for the first time in 127 Hours the articulated path for why blood and gore is the necessary expression of something internal. The terror and terrain of my grandson’s life, generically adolescent but also unique to his troubling circumstances.  

 

The Office, with its penchant for celebrating the inanities of life amongst the same group of Dunder-Mifflin dunderheads is the only television show that at the end of 2010 can make me laugh out loud. And it is the only show that will keep me from migrating to PBS at the end of the day, after Cath has fallen asleep amidst shows that spend more than fifty percent of their time lingering over an autopsy. Steve Carrell is the guilty pleasure I indulge in when I’m not turning over every stone funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and “Viewers Like You. Thank you!” to underwrite my perpetual complaint-based inner dialogue with America.

 

Then, before I know it, before I’ve left The Office’s ubiquitous Levelers opening and closing as framing devices around the characters in a Scranton paper distribution company, we are suddenly leaving 84 and the short-lived connector, 380 through the Poconos, and merging with Interstate 80.  

 

Hallelujah! Praise Jesus and Glenn Beck!

 

Cath and I trade off in White Haven where we gas up. I can’t tell you how good it feels to be on the asphalt that extends west through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Wyoming . . . to Utah, “Star of all the West” to quote the old nineteenth-century hymn. It’s a thoroughfare that bee lines for home and allows me to go on an automatic of sorts. No more poring over the atlas, scoping out the tangled freeway signs in green. Now I really can settle in on cruise control:  2,080 miles to go.

 

“We’re going to want to do something fun, something rewarding,” repeats Cath for the third or fourth time. “Otherwise, we’re going to hate this. It’s going to fry us.” She’s right of course. What that field trip might be, however, baffles me. As a flight attendant I was oriented through airports, not freeways. You’re not really in Chicago unless you’re at O’Hare, in the shuttle or at the nearby Ramada with a report time of 5:00 a.m., Central Time. On long layovers Chicago is the Palmer House and a ride on the El to a Giordano’s for pizza or a bar near Millenium Park. Chicago is a walk in your layover clothes along Michigan Avenue past the Wrigley Building and the river dyed green for St. Patrick’s Day or a jog along the lake. It’s the descent high above that lake on a winter day and through the portside window, the noon-day sun glinting off the white caps, the ice and, ashore, the Sears Tower looking like a giant, latticed Taser gun, black against the sky. To the flight attendant, Chicago is the destination, not the destination plus the road to, wherever that may be.

 

Since I’m now back riding shotgun, I break out the atlas. Other than knowing that this is our yellow brick road home, I don’t really know where the yellow brick wends. We are moving at a good clip, making good time. The roads are dry, and even though it’s cold the light is good, lowering in the southwest, rising in inverse proportion to us above the hills of hardwood forests as we sink repeatedly into vales, mist rising above spent fields backed by red Pennsylvania barns, and dotted with houses persistently white. We are quiet through these picturesque scenes, humbled by the static beauty that we are skirting, even violating by our speed. These are not towns, but homesteads, linked by country roads. Here and there, metallic silos, some whitewashed to match the more angular homes, pin down the roads, anchor the field. Repeatedly, I look in turn to my charge now at angles to my seat, to see where Derek is, what his expression holds. Who he is. But always, when he catches my eye, and we bump our eyebrows up in acknowledgment of each other, sometimes with a smile, it is the yellow light of a semaphore:  proceed with caution; clear the intersection.

 

What do I want from this boy sitting just inches from me? What do I need? Is it okay to need anything from a seventeen-year-old who is riding nearly all the way across the country with you? One who depends on you and your wife for virtually everything? Filtered through the windows, the sun lies scattered on his fair complexion. At times the light strobes. He is there.  He isn’t there. He is there. He . . ..

 

“Everything good?” I ask.

 

He nods. “Everything’s good.” And then he does that thing he does. He reaches out casually and pats my shoulder. Once. Twice. Now I am glad that we chose the small car of a Toyota Corolla, even as we risk, with my distracted driving, flying off I-80, elevated as we are on a mountain south of a scene so mysterious that it is as likely to eat us alive as it is to continue to enthrall us.   

Chapter 18

~In which the term “in which” becomes tiresome and our protagonist reflects on  the little house they dance in~

Here in the hotel hall on New Year’s Eve, I am feeling the same way I did shortly after Derek came to live with us full-time four years ago. Derek in need. Like the boy Denver with the match box car. And I was not patient. I was not loving. There was unfinished business.

 

It was four years ago when Cath’s daughter slipped me a personal check for a thousand dollars. That night, as usual, she left for home without her son. I placed the check on my bureau in one of the two small bedrooms on the main floor of our house and went to bed to maybe dream about it as I might dream, again, about it tonight—Derek, Cath, me . . . and the little house we dance in.  

 

But that night four years ago there was no dream, at least not one that I could remember the next day. In the morning I get ready for work, thirteen-year-old Derek gets ready for school and Cath moves into the small kitchen. That’s where the dance begins. The kitchen is about ten by eight feet, if you don’t count the counters, and she makes herself coffee at the sink which is angled into a corner. Soon Derek is standing in the middle, cold feet the size of boats on the tile, his Simpsons cotton pajama bottoms getting too short. His voice is lower than it should be, almost hoarse this early in the morning. Cath turns from the sink, takes her cup to the opposite side of the kitchen, to the microwave above the stove. Derek steps back, yawning, hair a mess.  There is the whir of the microwave, then she’s back to the sink as if she’s made a giant oval pass in a single move. There is his voice again, saying something at an improbable pitch for a boy his age. And then I step onto the floor.

 

This house seemed very large when we first bought it four years earlier in 2003. But then everything seemed large after our one bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. Now it has settled in to be the cottage that the real estate agency called it: nine hundred square feet on the main floor, nearly nine hundred in the nearly finished basement. We didn’t have enough furniture to fill it and went shopping for extra beds, a sofa for the TV room downstairs, chairs and lamps to fill spaces that looked blankly at us for weeks. Now we all live in the kitchen, it seems. Like the designated emergency gathering spot for airline crews outside a hotel, it is the space we migrate to when we aren’t sure where else we should be.

 

I’ve just been furloughed from the airline. I’m looking for full-time work in some other industry. Meanwhile, I’m adjunct-ing communication classes at two local colleges. Cath, who is making lunches for me and Derek, is to the immediate left of the sink at the bread board above the utensil drawer which is where I’m trying to get for a spoon. She’s half way through cutting a tomato, and she swings the lower half of her body for me to the left. And Derek moves back by the far wall next to the door that leads to the basement. He has an itch on his back, and both arms are wrapped around himself trying to get at it through one of my T-shirts that, despite his lank, has shoulder seams dropped half way down his arms. I merge the spoon into my shredded wheat and move to the opposite side of the kitchen—to the door leading to the dining room–but I stand there to eat. We all stare at each other for a moment, and then the dance starts up again.

 

I consider it a small victory when I began to think it was no longer an imposition to have Derek in our home full time, but that I was getting something from the experience completely unexpected and filled with a kind of haphazard grace. But the conversations in my head with his mother, my daughter–really my step-daughter–continue anyway: furious, sarcastic, mean.  Always I return, a bit sheepish, to the only fact I need to hang onto, a fact I share with those who ask: she is unavailable to her son. That is all. Unavailable.

 

So Derek lives with us in this cottage in a Salt Lake neighborhood known as 9th and 9th, far away from the life we had in New York, and as he grows the house continues to shrink. As he moves through its tiny rooms built in 1950 in what was originally a Dutch enclave of the city, it trembles under his weight but somehow holds as he jumps the last four stairs to the basement with a mighty thud that rattles the new windows we finally had cut into the foundation—for more light in this little house with gray wood shingles for siding. And even downstairs where it is carpeted and slightly more spacious and where we congregate in front of the television for yet another viewing of Die Hard or Ocean’s Eleven, we navigate around each other in a series of complicated steps: step back, twist to the right, step up, fold to the left. We move around great-great grandfather Daley’s leather-strapped trunk serving as a coffee table for Cath who is sashaying through with a basket of laundry. We perform a two-step on the way to the corner office around a pile of videos being organized in the middle of the floor by Derek. “Bow to your partner, one, two, three . . ..”

 

And then there are the cats. How soon we have filled this little house that once seemed so capacious compared to the jigsaw puzzle of a New York apartment with boxes of Christmas wrap carefully stored with Cath’s framing equipment under the bed. The owner of this little house before us, a young man, actually had a punching bag hanging from the door jamb leading into the office downstairs. Room to throw a punch, for God’s sake. Now, Cath and I share the office and Derek has his own inner sanctum with Jimmi Hendrix in skin tight pants posted on the door and the cats like a credit card ad—“everywhere you want to be.”

 

Not unlike my daughter, or so it seems, whose absence is everywhere. In fact, from time to time she still makes a phone call or sends an email to inform us of something all people should know about twelve-year-olds–a summer program that would be good for Derek (and that we will have to pay for), how important it is that a child understand the “natural consequences of his behavior,” a new book out on Attention Deficit Disorder. I can hear the television in the background, the raucous laughter of her boyfriend; the categorically fecund breath of the university where she is a hot shot undergraduate “single mother” at 34. She graduates this June.

 

This is what she can do as a mother. Make a phone call.  

 

There is a conversational arc I travel in my head with my daughter. It is the same every time, and it comes across as sanctimonious and angry, a litany of her crimes and of my woes. It ends with “tough love” demands that start with, “And you will . . ..” I am the good father even though I’m hard and pressing, which is my job, damn it all, to make sure my love for her is earned, not granted as with her mother’s. After all, the world works that way. You have to earn the love of the world.

 

This is how the conversation actually goes this time. We are in the park the previous summer which is between our cottage and the house that Derek does not want to live at. We are at a picnic table. I have asked for the meeting. She is smoking a cigarette.

 

She: I know you think all of this is okay with me. That I don’t care.

 

Me: I’m not thinking anymore. I’m looking for you to actually act. Not just talk about what you’re going to do as if just talking about it lets you off the hook. [She pulls out a piece of paper with a list.]

 

SHE: I’ve brought notes.

 

Me: [Jabbing at the paper] What are you going to do? Itemize our crimes?

 

SHE: I never asked you to take Derek in.

 

ME: I’m not talking about me and your mother. I’m asking you to be a mother to your son.

 

SHE: You step in without my asking and then expect my gratitude . . .  

 

ME: Gratitude?

 

SHE: . . . when you’re really just making me look bad.

 

ME: To whom? Who is it this week? [She searches over her notes, as if for the answer. Turns her head to take a drag. Blows.] Robert? Is that his name?

 

SHE: [repeats] I didn’t ask Mom to take Derek in.

 

ME: That’s right. Derek moved himself in. Took him a year. But he’s not a dumb kid.

 

SHE: He wouldn’t do anything I needed him to do. He’s . . . incorrigible.

 

ME: What story do you need us to tell Robert?

 

SHE: I’m not dating “Robert”!

 

ME:  That Derek is “incorrigible” when he finds someone he doesn’t know passed out in bed below his bunk? You can’t even pick him up on time at school.

 

SHE: I’m a single mother.

 

ME: You were ninety minutes late. He was alone. And it wasn’t the first time. You showed up with a guy he doesn’t even know and then argued with your son that McDonald’s for dinner wasn’t what Mike wanted. Your kid was terrified.

 

SHE: [standing up] I didn’t ask you to take Derek!

 

Maybe it doesn’t really matter how the conversation goes. Only how it ends. My pounding the table and raising my voice so that someone walking by looks at us. Her saying something that sounds as if she pulled it off of Dr. Phil like, “this relationship costs me too much” as she tries to juggle her cigarette, her bike and the two pages of now crumpled notes. And she is leaving. If there were a door, and she had an extra hand, she would be slamming it in my face. But it is I who wants revenge even though it is disguised as foresight. “You need to take care of your son for yourself,” I announce to her back. “You need to be his mother for your own sake as much as his!”  

 

But she is gone. I will apologize two days later, but the damage will have been done.  My gunning for revenge only triggers her spite.

 

That was last summer when dinner could be taken on the back deck.  Now we are back inside, in the eight-by-twelve dining room off the kitchen. There is a seam between the dining room and the living room where, incomprehensively, there appears to have once been a wall.  Impossible to imagine one more wall sectioning off another part of the house that is already . . . so . . . small. We sit at this table for everything right now–dinner, breakfast, homework, model car making. My laptop sits here since two of the four shelves collapsed under the weight of books in our shared office where I’ve migrated since we moved Derek out of the guest room upstairs and into my original office. This is my daughter’s fault as well, somehow. The collapsed book shelves with everything now on the floor. When my books are on the floor, I can’t seem to get anything done. Another convenient excuse–along with the TV just outside the door next to Derek’s Game Cube with spider cords spread eagle–not to write in the morning before I go to work.

 

I consider not cashing my daughter’s check. If I do cash it, don’t I legally accept the terms of the transaction, and in turn, the arrangement? But we need the money. Derek is expensive. We’ve seen an attorney, but her advice is not to anger either of Derek’s parents (whoops). To let sleeping adult children, well, lie. So not only is there no child support, but no state assistance either.

 

Whenever I attempt to tell the story of how we moved back here to be closer to our grandson after his parents’ divorce and how we are now raising him, none of it sounds convincing. Somehow my brilliant but conversationally elusive daughter has perfected the narrative that makes us look as if we are just mid-life co-dependents. Why aren’t we putting our foot down? people ask. Why aren’t we claiming our grandparent lives? Why don’t we go to court?

 

Why is our house suddenly so small?  Why do we put up with it?

 

It’s now eighteen months into my furlough, the summer after my conversation in the park with Derek’s mother. Our little family of three manages to go on vacation, my first in over two years. We drive across the high desert, down through the appropriately named and plunging Virgin River Canyon to Las Vegas and into the San Bernardino Mountains and then to LA where we land on Hollywood Boulevard. Universal Studios will claim our lives for the next two days. We are out of the house but into a single motel room in Little Thailand. One bathroom, one television, one short fuse. Derek has the impossible task of exulting in movie-land while still maintaining “cool.” It’s not unlike my dilemma. How do I love this boy but not feel taken advantage of? To love him, to care for him–doesn’t that mean I’m absolving my daughter of any responsibility? Am I not telling her by my actions, by being here with her son while she’s out gallivanting, that it’s okay what she is doing?

 

We’ve been on the Jurassic Park ride. We’ve visited the Backdraft exhibit . . . thrilled at the spills at Waterworld, eaten ribs the size of mine at a Flintstones’ eatery. And I hate this place.  It represents everything that is wrong with America. Gluttony, living vicariously through movies, the materialism approaching hedonism of a culture that must, I’m convinced, fire the imaginations of an Islamist suicide bomber. Derek is ecstatic. High on sugar, going ballistic over the Back to the Future ride—twice. He’s pushing and pulling me. Demanding this and that.  In a frenzy that he’ll miss something. In short, he is a thirteen-year old en extremis, every angle of his body jutting out above over-sized feet. He’s entered that place where he likes to slug me in the arm.   

 

And then the Blues Brothers are in front of us. A half hour review of their songs built around the bare bones references to a long-lost narrative from the 70s. It’s live, and, finally, there’s something for me to enjoy, the music, the singing. And I can tell Derek is jumping out of his skin, craning to go over here, busy himself with something over there, head out for the Terminator 2 Pavilion to don 3-D glasses to see the Governor of California in leather. The Blues Brothers show appears to be winding down. It’s hot—LA is insufferably hot in July. And Derek starts pulling on me. “Let’s go. Let’s go.” Now he’s pushing me, this kid almost my height with elbows the hardness of squash rackets.

 

It’s time to make him cry. I’ve done this before, of course. It’s easy to do. First, you grip him by the back of the neck with one hand and take his upper arm with the other. You start walking him somewhere, away from where he was pulling you. You get your mouth very close to his ear, behind him so that you have the psychological advantage. He can’t see you; he can only hear and feel you. He may attempt to wriggle free, but you have eighty pounds on him. He may attempt to say something back, but the grip gets tighter to shut him down.  

 

When he’s completely overpowered, you can actually let go and he will do exactly what you say because he can’t control the shaking. Cath has moved away, furious with me, then resigned, perhaps to the situation, at least at the moment. She knows that I will only try to defend myself to her and will be angry with her for taking Derek’s side. As if there’s a war going on between me and a twelve-year-old. Or something.

 

Now that I have made Derek cry, I can become the soft-spoken psychologist that I have learned to hate. And like the soft-spoken psychologist, the conversation is designed to make sure that the patient (Derek) knows that my intentions are good, but that he’s just pushed me (the lay shrink) too far. That my bad behavior is not my fault, but his. Look good (the parent at Universal Studios quietly decompressing with a visibly distraught pre-teen), get what you want (revenge for the way my life is going), don’t be at fault (he made me do it). This is not my fault for one very important reason, but it is my trump card. Derek’s mother is not my daughter. She’s Cath’s. Derek is not my blood grandson. I am not really a part of any of this.   

   

It will take a long time before Derek starts to trust me again, if he ever does, completely. His Poppa is explosive, like the man whose name shall remain obscured, and his Poppa does denial like his mother.

 

The trip home allows me to mentally disappear into the Mojave Desert and for Derek to venture further into Hollywood on the portable DVD player he has in the back seat. He has some good moments after my blow-up in front of the Blues Brothers pavilion. A competition between us of swimming underwater in the hotel pool. A calming moment at an aromatherapy salon, the two of us plugged into the bubbling, bright liquids of jasmine, of lavender, of citrus. A retro lunch at Hard Rock Café where Cath makes us apologize to each other for “the incident” while she is shooting me her mother bear look. She’s right. I have failed the man-boy, and it makes me want to run away from him, just as others in his life have done. To run back to the choices I thought I was making. To be childless, to be a writer, to be in control of what happens to me. To not have to visit Universal Studios.

 

Back in the little house we dance in, we are gearing up for another school year. There are school fees, clothes and shoes to buy. We need a new bed for Derek. He’s outgrown the daybed we folded out for him before he migrated over full-time. We are getting ready to take a mortgage out on the house. And there is the appointment coming up with the orthodontist who will require a couple thousand to be paid out-of-pocket:  at least one thousand from each of his parents, neither of whom have offered. Until now. My daughter’s check is here, waiting to be acknowledged, redeemed, cashed.

 

So there is the check and the myriad failings of my daughter it represents, sitting on my bureau. The latest of her failings is that she has turned me into an abuser of my grandson. Derek trusts me less, of course, digs his heels in more when I do anything other than agree with him or let him have his spurious, adolescent way. I am one who overpowers and shames, one who digs in his heels as well. Someone who wants to win, and who propels every conversation, every interaction into a competition of sorts. A sick contest between an adult and a child.    

 

I have become the very thing I have come to despise in my daughter.

 

The first day of school and we are dancing again. Derek is eating eggs, bacon and toast that I have made for all of us before the start of a new year, to start us all off on a good foot. I am standing at the stove, the frying pan hissing and spitting, and Cath comes up behind me with her coffee. I shift to the right even before her hand rests gently on my back to signal her arrival. She opens the microwave to warm her cup, and pats me twice so that I know she’s retreating backwards in a modified tango to our internal rhythm. I step back into my space for two beats.  Then Derek arrives to get juice out of the fridge which opens into my other hip which bumps it back just enough to send it closed as he turns to the counter with the jug, looking for a glass, which Cath gets for him since she’s now standing at the counter wiping up crumbs. From above it must look like a hive—bees frantically filling in cells, intimate, humid. Or it looks like the choreographed chaos of a street scene in a musical. These are steps both comforting in their familiarity but terrifying as well. This is the little house we dance in, and will dance in forever it seems. Constrained, constricted as we are but at times calmed by kinetic familiarity.  

 

“We need a bigger house,” I say to no one in particular and flip an egg. “I think we should look for something with a bigger kitchen at least. Maybe something on the other side of the park.” Derek stops short, a half-filled glass of juice in his hand. He is a different boy than he was last summer at Universal when he followed the patron saints of the American dysfunctional family, The Simpsons, as they waddled away from signing autographs with their four-fingered yellow hands. He had tagged after them like a puppy as they disappeared after the photo op behind a fence, and he stood, as if in jail, hands on the vertical bars, his pale forehead pressed into the cool steel, his cheeks still stained with dried tears. Now, standing with his juice held half aloft, he is something of a cross between The Beaver (a TV boy sanitized from irony) and a mountain-bred surfer dude (coolness bordering on oblivion).

 

“No way!” he growls as only a man-boy can growl. “We are not moving from this house.  I love this house. This is our house. You’re going to give it to me when you die.” And then he grins. And those four-thousand-dollar braces go a-glint in the kitchen light, and I have a stab of gratitude for the slip of paper signed by my daughter and sitting on my bureau less than a simple, modified foxtrot away.

 

#

End of Excerpts