In August of 1996 I was on the last stage of my around-the-world ticket from Pan-Express. $1400 for NYC-London-Paris-Bangkok-then train down to Penang and a ferry over to Sumtra up to Banda Aceh and then bussed down the west coast to the volcanoes of Brastaggi to catch a Fokker prop from Medan to Bali to rendezvous with a friend.
Surfing with Richie Boy at Bingin and Kuta. The New York diamond dealer was going through a divorce. I had suggest coming to visit me in Asia. It was summer. A slow time of the year in the Diamond District. Success. A road trip around the enchanted island with a Norwegian nurse. Ooon. This helped his pain. I was the chauffeur. Our o menage-a-trois honeymoon ended at the Denpasar Airport. He kissed the nurse Selamat Jumbah. Ooon watched from the take-off from the terminal, then we went our separate ways. Oon to Ubu. Me to stay with a longlost hippie love in Semiak. Richie Boy back to New York.
A week later I caught a Garuda 747 eastward across the Pacific. No one waved Jalan Jalan, but my good friend Slim met me at LAX in her Studebaker Lark. On the way to Hollywood the native Californian told me that she had fallen in love with an artist in New York.
"That's good news, except it's 3000 miles from here."
"I know and that's why I'm driving there in two days." Slim was long-limbed and had several inches on me. Her brown hair was cut short. Working at a restaurant the ex-model hated the smell of food on her hair. Short made shampooing easy.
"In this car?" The '61 Lark was a classic with a V8 engine.
"Yes, you want to be co-pilot?"
"I have nothing keeping me in LA." I had a little over $300 in my wallet. Enough for a one-way ticket from LAX. No rush. My job selling diamonds for Richie Boy and his Manny, his father, started in a few weeks.
"Are we in a hurry?" I certainly wasn't ready to get off the traveler's paths, but the sublet on my Easts Village apartment was up and my fund were as short as Slim's hair.
"Not really. I've never driven cross country. Always flown from coast to coast."
"Then you're in for a treat. Maybe we might make a few detours." I had a hankering to see Monument Valley in person rather than in a John Wayne movie.
"Detours?" Meg was in a hurry. She had a man waiting. I only had a job.
"Short detours."
"When was the last time you cross the country?" She didn't like the sound of detours.
"1975." America had been a different country.
"You old hippie." Slim smiled and stepped on the gas. The 289 was tuned for speed and we headed into the Malibu Hills, where her family lived under the ridgeline on the other side of the mountains slihgtly north on the Ventura Freeway.
"You got that right." And I still was a hippie in many ways. I believed in love and asked, "So what about this guy in New York? I met him out here. We connected like I've never connected with a man before. He wants me to come out to New York. He has a girlfriend."
Tricky. Whaet's he like?"
His name was Cobb. Her ennuciation of his family name explained the nuances of their status on the North Shore. His town on the water was for the very upper-class. I had lived on a dock in Gloucester Harbor for a summer. Cobb was Brahmin to my Yankee Irish. I wasn't impressed, but her description of him made Cobb sounded okay. A scupltor and metal worker. I had known her previous husband. Not a keeper.
"So you're going to New York to steal another woman's man?"
"Yes."
"Then count me in." I always had a soft spot for romance.
"I thought so. I'm having a good-bye party. We'll leave when all the beer is gone."
"Then you're behind the wheel." I liked my drink and looked forward to a late night ride on the freeway through the Valley towns viewed from the passenger seat.
"I wouldn't have it any other way." Everyone knew about my driving skills. At least she didn't call me 'Crash' like some others.
Slim and I spoke about Paris on the drive to her bungalow off Melrose. The summer of 1984 we had met at the Bains-Douches. The ex-model and I had gone back to my apartment on Ile St. Louis. We watched the Summer Olympics. Both of us tried something. Both of us had lovers. We were faithful to both of them. They weren't to us. By summer's end we were both alone.
"I'm glad nothing happened between us back then."
"Me too. I nee a friend more than an ex-lover."
"Or an ex-one-hight stand."
I was good to have a friend in Los Angeles, a city too easy to have none.
In my forties I had long come to appreciate the value of women as friends instead of lovers. Even in the City of Angels. Even with a woman in love.
The next morning I surfed with her brothers in Ventura. Joe and Pat were two of Slim's seven siblings and they had known the Pacific since they were children. Like Slim they were very tall and I called them the Malibu Watusi. The waves at Little Rincon were bigger, thicker, and colder than Bali. They were skilled bodysurfers. Not me.
"Watch out for the shore break," shouted Joe, as I ducked under the first close-out.
A wave thunked me to the sandy bottom and I crawled onto the beach, smote by the wave of Neptune's hand.
I scratched through the waves to the line-up to float like a log. I skied better than good, but I can't get it together for surfing. Something about paddling forward, standing up, and cutting down a waves was too much for my sense of equilibrium. I took off several times. Wipe-outs. The brothers didn't let me drown. After the session we drove away with the Pacific waving goodbye to two surfers and a kook..\
That evening Slim and I drove to the bon-voyage party in Hollywood at a movie star's bungalow.
The Hills above Malibu had been Slim's spiritual home since birth. Her youth too, except for the years in Hawaii and Paris and soon to be New York.
She was in a New York State.
I was in the same mood. The last leg of my global circumnavigation. 3000 miles across America. On the road with no Route 66 ahead.
Friends and family came to say good-bye. There was cases and cases of beer. I knew no one. I wanted to tell people about my adventures and mishaps in Bali and Sumatra. I held my piece. This was Slim's night. Her farewell. I was merely a passenger. I drank my fill and then some. Slim none. Well past midnight Slim swore to the gathering that she wasn't leaving forever and added, "Only a real long time."
I rose from a bench and raised my beer. "Don't worry, Slim will always be a Californian."
"Why?" asked her brother Joe.
"Because LIke LA no one born outside the five boroughs will ever be a New Yorker and I've been there almost twenty years, A New York friend met me in Bali. A surfer. "
I had lived in New York on and off since 1976. Richie Boy had said in Bali. "No matter how long you live in New York, you'll always be someone from somewhere else an even more so, since you're a Red Sox fan."
It was true. I had a Tony C teeshirt in my bag.
"I've been there over twenty years and I remain a New Englander."
My accent mixed Down East with the South Shore of Boston.
"After graduating from university in 1974 I had lived in a shack on a wooden pier jutting into Gloucester Harbor. It smelled of fish. Always. Nothing like that in New York."
"Cobb lives on the North Shore. In a cottage."
I envisioned his cottage. Twenty rooms. A tennis court and concrete swimming pool. A tall family with good teeth.
Cobb's last name. His people didn't speak to people from the South Shore, but to her friends Slim once more extolled the sculptor's virtue. Cobb once more sounded like a good guy and she loved him. I toasted her good luck.
Around 5am Slim kissed, embraced, and hugged the guests, then called her beau once more. I ha been rinking. Not Slim. I sat in the passenger seat and she got behind the wheel. THe California woman waved to friends and family. Five minutes later we were on the highway heading east.
Night traffic was sparse through the valley bright with neon streetlight, as the Interstate snaked out of the suburban heart of the Valley under the unstarry night. and I asked, "You mind if I sleep for a little?"
"Not at all." Slim turned on the radio. A Mexican station from the desert played Selena's NO ME QUEDA MAS. Slim drove the Lark at 80 on I-15 up into the mountains. They were only shadows in the night.
"I thought we weren't in a hurry."
"You really want to go slow through this?"
I couldn't see anything.
"No, I guess not. Motor away."I laid my head against the glass and closed my eyes on LA to dream about lands south of the border. I hadn't been to Matzatlan since the winter of 1975.
Near dawn we were in the desert. The sun peeking over the east. The radio played Reba McEntire's THE HEART IF A LONELY HUNTER. Like me Slim like country-western. Los Angeles had been replaced by the Mojave. Only a few cars and trucks graced the highway heasding into the Mojave, a desert in the rain shadow of the southern Sierra Nevada mountains. Them behin us now just like LA. Just like Bali.
I woke with the near dawn. Sand, brushes, and rocks surrounded I-15. The flat Mojave stretching to every horizon.
"Where are we anyway?"
"South of Victorville."
You want to take over?"
"Looks safe enough." There were only a few cars on the highway outnumbered by tractor trailer trucks. We stopped at a truck stop and filled up the Studebaker.
"Damn, I hitchhiked in 1974. My friend and I ended up in Needles. It was 117 in the shade."
"It gets like that out here."
"Then I'll step on it."
I did just that and the Lark kept pace with her desire to be in New York with Cobb.
With one hand off the wheel I studied the map and asked, "You ever been to Zion Canyon?"
"No, but I've always wanted to go."
"Nothing stopping us."
I-15 ran straight to Las Vegas. Three hours at 65mph, then avoid the Sin City. Earlier on my trip I had spent two weeks in Bangkok. I had had my fill of sin for the year. Maybe two.
We drove straight through Vegas to the Moapa Paiute Travel Plaza in Crystal and gassed up on $1.14 a gallon regular. I thought about buying firewarks. I saw the look in Slim's eyes and got us both Coca-Colas as well as ice an a cooler. Slim bought foo. Tere wasn't much ahead. We arrived in Springale, Utah afore the sunset. We went to the Zion Canyon. There was nothing like the sandstone canyon back East.
Steep cliffs climbed into the heavens. I wanted to take a hike up the trail and Slim argued for moving on. I wanted the same. This was Mormon country. One of my relatives had fought in the Utah War. As far as I headrd from my aunt, he had nothing to do with the Meadow Mountain Massacre.
"We might never come this way again."
"You're right. A small hike on the canyon floor."
"Thanks."
We entered a narrow defile. A thin stream trickled through the stones. Slim took photos with her camera. I did the same.
The warm wind washed over the the time-worn sandstone like Georgia O'Keefe creating her paintings by hand. Meg looked at her watch. I turned to leave rather than have her say we had to go.
That night we stayed on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. The room had twin beds. It had been a long day and after dinner we walked out to the edge of the expanse.
"I was on the South Rim in 1972."
"A hippie?" I almost tol her the story about running into the boy who bullied me in grade school on the path up from the river. I don't know why I hadn't killed him then. I had been with Nick, who I had deserted in Berkeley later on that trip. He didn't know why I hadn't killed him either. Nick left the next year to study medicine in the Philipines, but he was from Staten Island and like people from Boston, he believed in revenge.
We started walking back to the car. I sploshed through the stream, not caring if my feet were wet. Like I was a horse with hooves.
"Yes, but I cut my hair in 1975 after some girl said my head looked like a thatched roof."
"Not an attractive look."
"You got that right."
We returned to the motel and fell fast asleep with the whisper of pine through the windows.
In the morning we continued east through the badlands and I posed of a giant stone imitating Rodin's 'The Thinker'.
"Don't show that to your beau."
"Not a chance."
We were friends, but most men hate their girlfriends' and wives' male friends.
This stretch was the home of weird rock formations.
They were everywhere.
At noon we approached the Vermillion Cliffs and stopped at a historical marker, stating that the Spanish explorer Francisco Coronado's expedition had come this way in the 1500s. GarcÃa López de Cárdenas ha unertakaken the trek to see the Grand Canyon. I wondered how they found water on this sun-tortured plain. We had plenty in a cooler
"I wonder what they did for water."
"Sucked stones until they reached the Colorado."
"Only an hour behind us."
"By car. By horse or on foot three days. We could be in New York in three days."
She got back behind the wheel. I sat with the map, plotting the route.
The Lark ran smooth and the road was smoother. Slim drove faster. The speed spurred by her love for Cobb.
I thought about her desire to be with someone. I had just circled the globe. I had seen millions of people. None of them had been for me.
"You really are in love."
Yes."
"I wish I could say the same."
One day you might be able to."
"Maybe, but for now I'm in love with the road."
The evening sky turned purple, as we arrived in Kayenta, Arizona, capitol of the Navaho nation. The windblown town looked like Mars a hundred years after a failed terra-forming experiment. Slim wanted to stop at the hotel. I said that we could get a room nearer Monument Valley.
"It'll be great to wake there in the morning."
We drove on and darkness dropped across the desert like a black stone. Not a single light in sight otehr than the stars.
"Are you sure there's room up ahead?"
"Monument Valley is a destination. The motel there has to have rooms."
I was wrong. Every room booked for the night. I telephoned every motel within fifty miles. No luck.
We returned to Kayenta for gas and food. Slim was not happy. She got out at the pump and called Cobb from a phone booth. We barely spoke during our meal at a motel diner.
"So what's the plan?"
"We sleep in the car."
"Where?"
"Out in the desert or we keep driving until we find a motel."
"I'm done driving."
"Okay." I paid for our meals.
Slim handed me the keys.
"Find us someplace."
I drove out into the valley and pulled off the road onto hard-packed sand.
"Do you think this is safe?"
"Safe as anywhere else." Even I was spooked by the high desert darkness.
"Please don't ask if I think we're the only ones out there? I'm not in the mood for a talk about ETs."
"Sure." I hadn't seen any aliens since New York.
Slim folded down the driver's seat. There was only one blanket. She wasn't sharing it with me. Without the sun the temperature dropped into the 50s.
"Thanks for this." Slim broke her silence.
"You think I wanted this? I'm coming for Asia. It's hot. There are motels everywhere. Here there's none."
"Fuck you."
She pulled up the blanket and I shivered to sleep. I woke in the middle of the night and got out of the Studebaker. I needed to pee.
Overhead a billion stars traversed the heaven. At 6000 feet high the constellations were so close. I tried to pick up severeal. There were too many stars to count and I returned to the car, happy to be alive. Slim was dead asleep. I tried to do the same, but nights were cold in the desert and I shivered to exhaustion.
The Valley was even more desolate with the dawn. I got out. Surrounded by tri-colored buttes of sanstone and shale. Slim got out and surveyed the landscape for longer than a minute.
"You were right. This is spectacular."
They had been the background of countless westerns. She breathed deeply. We were hundreds of miles away from America, in the heart of the Navaho nation. Slim smile at me and walked to the passenger's side.
"I hope you learned a lesson last night."
"Actually three. Listen to you, stop driving out here before sunset, and that it gets really cold out here at night." "You're up."
"You ready to go?"
"Yes." She was still rightfully pissed. I had been a man thinking I knew everything and that had meant no motel bed. Even I was angry at me. I started the Lark and drove through Monument Valley. Slim shot photos through the open winow. The ay was heating up. The Studebaker ha no AC. I made good time on 163. No other cars. No lights. We were both hungry. I was no longer cold.
Gigantic buttes accompanied our path to the San Juan River.
We ate breakfast at Mexican Hat.
Slim was not talkative and went to the telephone to call Cobb.
She returned with a smile.
"All good?"
"It will be," Meg explained how she was stealing Cobb away from a wicked girlfriend.
"My money's on you."
"Then start driving like you were in love."
"Yes, M'am."
I hit 100 on 191 and we joined 161 and headed east towards the Rockies. outside Bluff a Mercedes had been totaled in a broad valley of pastures. Not a tree in sight. There was no sign of what he had hit with the front end. I stopped to ask, if the driver needed help.
"No, the tow truck is coming." He was a middle aged man with a cowboy hat.
"Good luck,"wished Slim. We were on the clock.
A half-mile down the road Slim asked, "How you think that happened?"
"Certainly not another by hitting another car, so I'm guessing driver error." Nothing else made any sense.
"It's not like he ran into a tree. Please try not to do the same."
Slim loved her Lark, although not as much as Cobb.
"You got it." I hadn't had an accident in over ten years.
And that had been in Paris. Slim had heard about it and said, "You saved some young girl from an aggressive man at Le Palace. You punched him. He and his friends were outside on Rue Montmatre. A designer friend of yours drove you away in a BMW. At a very slow speed. You asked him to go fasterd. He drove slow. But right to the elysees. The White House of France."
"Butz saved me from a beating. They were mafia from the Sentier."
We tol tories of our youth. Slim about her childhood in Hawaii. Mine was in New England. We probably both wanted to trade those years to each other.
Before noon we stopped at the Ananazi cliffside ruins. Six hundred years ago this site had supported over two thousand inhabitants, but the city had been abandoned a century before Coronado's expedition. Now there were only tourists.
"Where they all go?"
"No one knows. There are no native legends about the tribe. Modern historian theorize that there was a long drought and the people migrated to a river."
After an hour we were ready to go and Slim wanted to drive.
"I'm hearing something in the engine."
"I don't hear a thing."
"It's not your car.
Heading into the Rockies it became more obvious something was wrong with the Hawk's carburetor. A mechanic fixed it in Durango. Slim called Cobb. They spoke on the phone for a long time.
"I wish we were on the highway."
"We'll be on one as soon as we're out of the mountains."
"Tomorrow?"
"Yes."
My trip around the world was nearing its end after circumnavigating the Earth. My great-grandaunt Bert had done it as a child of eight on a whaling ship. It had take her father two years. So far OI had been gone only six months. Only another 1900 miles to go.
Slim found a mechanic who had a carborator for a Studebaker. A miracle. We walked to a nearby hotel on the main street. The evening air reminded me of John Denver's ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH. I couldn't remember the words. the night in Durango.
The next day we crossed the Continental Divide. Rivers flowed to the Atlantic from here. We passed old mines. I thought about swimming in a crystal clear mountain stream, but a sign warned of toxic chemicals from the mine tailings.
We passed through Telluride, a city on the Roof of America.
Mining had been its life blood.
Now the quaint town had struck gold with tourists.
We wewren't them and kept going.
We reached I-80 outside of Vail. Slim was ready to make time and we were in the Great Plains within the hour. Everything from here on in was downhill.
People honked at us. They loved seeing the Studebaker. We waved back.
Slim's foot remained heavy on the accelerator.
"No stops."
"What about food and gas?"
"That's all we need." Slim was living strictly on love.
I fought to take the back roads.
Slim was having none of it.
"You want to see more of the country? Hitchhike."
"I've done it before."
"You want to do it today?"
"No."
I wanted to be in New York too.
We listened to radio and she asked about my trip to the Orient. I told her about London, Paris, Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Bali.
"All around the world." I took a photo of a drive-in. No one went to them anymore.
"My fourth time."
"You think you will ever settle down?"
"I guess this is just my way of settling down."
"The Wanderer?"
"I guess so."
"You know women only love drifters in the movies."
"I know that too well and women in New York only want someone rich and there's nothing wrong with that."
"So you're wandering the world to find love?"
"I haven't even thought about it." Loneliness was a friend, but not a good friend.
We drove in silence. Truck stops were the only civilization off the Interstates.
Long-distance trucks filled the paring lot. The kings of the road in the dinrer were exhausted by their long hauls. They drank black coffee in a stupor.
We crossed the Mississippi and dipped our feet in the Father of All Waters for good luck.
In South Bend, Indiana Slim mentioned a detour to the Studebaker Museum.
I was a little angry at her. My lack of love was my story. I convinced her to skip the museum and instead we swam in Lake Michigan.
The Ojibwa considered Mishigami as the great water. They had no word for the ocean.
We had no reason to stop in Detroit and continued across Ontario to Niagara Falls.
The Studebaker's front tire developed a slow leak. We stopped at a gas station and the mechanic told us to wait in the diner. Slim entered first.
The patrons had never seen someone as tall as her and their eyes followed her every steps of her flip-flops slapping against the floor on her way to the Ladies room. We slept that night in a hotel on the Canadian side of the Falls.
Twin beds.
New York lay across the river. We had run out of states.
"Sorry about what I said about you're not being lovable."
"I'm sorry we didn't stop at the museum."
"One day you will fall in love."
"And I'm glad you are in love. Better one of us than neither of us."
"We wouldn't be here, if I wasn't."
"Thanks."
The Lark had admirably performed its job.
By noon we crossed the Catskills.
New York was less than one hundred miles away.
We arrived in Soho at sunset.
I retrieved my bag from the trunk.
"Happy?"
"I will be soon."
Cobb met us at the restaurant Lucky Strike. He took one look at me and figured the worst. He was wrong. Slim and I were just friends.
I thanked Slim for the ride and left the restaurant for my apartment on East Tenth Street.
My key turned the lock.
I sat in my living room and shuffled through six months of mail.
None
of it was important and I turned on the TV.
I was alone, but sometimes this apartment was home and tonight was one of them.
Even if the road seemed more home for a drifter without love.
