Where are all the people going?
Round and round till we reach the end.
One day leading to another,
Get up, go out, do it again.
- Do It Again, The Kinks (1984)¹

Our time at the Princeton seemed forever, endless hours of sensory assault. The booze came slow, so we ordered in massive quantities, to stay ahead of the bodies clamoring around us. “Five Amstels, please. Three Tanqueray and tonics… And a couple shots of Beam.” Better safe than sorry. Who knew when we’d get the next round.

Behind us the voices bellowed at the bartender, an incestuous orgy of summer rental types and kids whose folks owned vacation homes in town, all from the same suburbs, with the same Philly accents, blending into a grating wall of sound. “Three Miller Lites! Cold ones!” “I need a dirty martini! Extra olive juice!” “Do you have any jello shots? Jello shots! I said, ‘Do you have any jello shots?’” In every direction drunk twenty-somethings were yelling, spilling on each other, attempting to dance and falling in the puddles of beer on the floor around the bar. The place felt like a convention for the problem-drinking spawn of every doctor, lawyer and stockbroker in Southeastern Pennsylvania. When I blinked it wasn’t hard to imagine we were caught in a version of “Why Don’t We Sing This Song All Together” from Their Satanic Majesty’s Request – that mindless seven minute acid anthem filled with background noises from clubs where with the right ears you’d hear these nagging, idiot voices barking “Bourbon and soda” and “They’re naked and they dance” over and over as Keith and Brian Jones noodled on sitars, terribly. Why are we here again? Oh, that’s right… We can’t hang out in the house.

“How about ordering me a sea breeze?” A sweaty girl with a horrible sunburn knocked over one of our beers and fell against the bar between Harris and me.

“Excuse me?”

“It’s vodka… annnn’ orange juice and something else.” She fixed her skirt on her hips and flung her dyed blonde hair over her shoulder. “Like a screwdriver.”

“But different.” I could see the gears turning in Harris’s head. She’s awful, yes. Double chinned and sloppy. Still, maybe she has friends… The only question was whether he could tolerate the toil in getting to that issue.

“You’re Gavin’s buddy… From over on 20th street.” The girl teetered sideways trying to light a cigarette. “You went to F&M, right? I visited Carter Mayhern there once. He took us to this frat party… It was awesome.”

“No, I think–”

“You went to high school at Shipley. With Chad Mallory, right?”

“I–didn’t, uh–”

“How’s that girl who fell down the stairs Chad’s house? I saw her fall, you know…” There was no point in Harris correcting her about his identity. If you were in that bar and you looked a certain way, it was assumed you had at most two degrees of separation from everyone else in the place. The notion Harris was a stranger – hadn’t grown up in or around Philly – would only confuse the girl. “She was sooo fucked up. Like, retarded. Katie Carson said she shit in the bathtub. How foul is that?”

“Here. You can have this spot.” Harris pulled back from the bar and offered the girl his space.

“Fuck!” As she angled into the opening a passing drunk bumped into Harris, shoving him into her, pushing her cigarette hand into the bar. “I just bummed this smoke.”

“You ever been to Margate?” Bennett pointed at me. “I have friends staying there. Cool chicks.”

“That’s near Atlantic City.”

“Exactly.”

“So is Gavin’s place going tonight after the bars close?” The girl stared at her hands, fumbling to re-attach the halves of a broken cigarette, oblivious to Bennett’s comment. “The scene here is sooo ‘D.’”²

“I sure hope so.” I stuck two beers under my shirt and threw a tip on the bar.

“Cool. I’m getting Kerry and Meredith we’re bringing our whole house over. Jenny Lawson’s visiting with friends. You know Jenny? She went to Friends School with Chrissy Hughes and–” Her monologue faded into the background noise as Harris, Bennett and I slipped into the crowd and headed for the door.

Margate’s dead North out of Avalon, and we took the main drag, an agonizing route where you can never break the twenty-five to forty-five mile per hour speed limits. Cops sit everywhere, waiting to nail drunks, from kids like us to the loaded fifty-somethings zipping to and from the divorcee pick-up scene at the Windrift Hotel in their Jaguar convertibles. Still, the road’s long and straight. If you watch the speedometer and the lights, between Avalon and A.C., there’s little chance of trouble, and almost no chance of getting lost. Unless you’re us.

“Shit. I forgot the fucking papers.” We were already in Margate, close enough to see the lights of the casinos ahead, when Bennett started barking.

“You have dope?” Harris turned down the music.

“Not rolling papers, you ass. The papers with the girls’ phone numbers on them. Where we have to go. I left the number and the address back in my car.”

“We’ll call information.”

“It’s not my friends’ place. It’s a friend of hers. What the hell’s her name… Mary? No… Is it Lynn? No… Michele? No…” I could see where this was going, and it wasn’t good. The only way to escape – avoid being called to some pointless duty in a futile quest – was to play dead. Not literally dead, of course. Just the drunken equivalent of it. I quietly laid down across the back seats. Keep your eyes closed. They’ll think you’re passed out.

They did, and after a little while I actually fell asleep. The last thing I recall of the night was the glare of passing cars on the main strip in Margate and the sound of static, feedback and bits and piece of music and talk as Harris flipped the dial on the radio. “I’m cowboy/On a steel horse I ride– And the Lord he taketh away!– Panama! Pan-a-mahh-ahh-ahh-ohh-ohh-ohh-ohh– I would do anything for love/Ohhh I would do anything for love… But I won’t do that…”

What? What won’t you do? For God’s sake, say it already.

The next thing I remember was Bennett slapping me on the back sometime around sunrise. “Hey, hey. Get up. I need one of those beers. A real one. Not any of the light shit.” I reached in the cooler and pulled out a can of Budweiser. That’s when I saw the sign on the bridge ahead.

“TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES”

“What the fuck are we doing in Trenton?”

“I missed some a couple turns.”

“A couple turns? Really? And we wound up in Trenton? You realize this isn’t the beach…”

“You don’t like Trenton?” Bennett cracked the beer open and threw an ephedrine tablet in his mouth. “They make shit here.”

“I’m familiar with Tren–”

“All kinds of shit! Way more than they make at the beach!”

This was a strange moment, an oddly vivid memory. None of the elements were remarkable on their own. But taken together, collected, the images of Bennett slamming the beer can in the cup-holder and waving his hand across that dank, squalid horizon just as the sun was coming up, like an explorer in awe of a new continent… That was a picture I knew I’d never forget. A snapshot condensing it all – the vice, disorder and confusion, the myth of escape in movement.

“Where are we headed?”

“Martin’s house.”

“Martin’s? Why?”

“We’re picking him up. He’s coming with us.”

“Where?”

“Graduation. Back at college.”

Graduation? The word hit me between the eyes. Shit… I have to be at my brother’s high school graduation tomorrow afternoon.

“Why?”

“It was his idea.” Bennett pointed to Harris, half asleep in the passenger’s seat.

“I can’t do that. I have to be somewhere on Sunday. In a suit.”

“You should have thought about that last night. I’ve been driving for hours. Do you know how many jug handle intersections there are in this state? I didn’t drive in circles for six hours for nothing. No, we’re finishing this. We’re going to graduation, and you’re coming with us.”

Son of a bitch, he’s lost his mind. The ephedrine had him, I could see it in his face. In his wrinkled snarling grin, the way he sucked down half a cigarette in a single drag, how he turned up the radio and slammed out the drumbeat to the song on the wheel, screaming the lyrics. “Spanish lady come to me/She lays on me this rose/It rainbow spirals round and round/It trembles and explodes… Ha ha… Yeah!… Comin,’ comin,’ comin’ around.” T-shirts… jogging shoes… crumpled cans and sandwich wrappers… I scanned the back of the car. Where are the seatbelts in this thing?

It was six-thirty, maybe seven when we reached Martin’s family’s home outside Princeton. His father was on the steps, laughing to himself, sipping a coffee. “Wow. You boys made it. I’ll go inside and get Martin.”

“When did you call Martin?” I grabbed a smoke from Bennett.

“I think it was around four, before we really got lost.”

Most parents would have gotten angry about a call at four in the morning. Not Martin’s. His dad was older, wiser, knew these were our “in-between years,” that lost weekend between twenty-two and twenty-seven. No use trying to stop us, no sense in getting worried.

That and there’d been precedent. He’d gotten a call like ours before. A couple months earlier a few of us had decided to make prank phone calls after a long night out. Bennett opened a college yearbook, picked the name of a random, peripheral college friend and started leaving an identical ominous message on the answering machines of people we knew from school. One of the calls was to Martin’s parents’ home, where Martin had been living for a few months between apartments. His father answered.

“Hello, Mr. Lennard? Can you please relay a message to Martin? Randy Fallow is dead.” CLICK.

“He’ll never take that seriously.” I thought the prank was absurd at the time.

“Oh yes he will. It’s all in the terseness. If I tried to explain how he died or why I was calling he’d know it was a joke, but I hung up quickly, making it seem urgent.”

Bennett was right. Martin called several of our friends the next day, perplexed. “Did you hear Randy Fallow died? Is that true? Somebody called and left a message with my dad in the middle of the night.”

Sucker.

“Drive fast.” Bennett handed the keys to Martin as soon as he came out of house. “We’re late.”

“For what?”

“Graduation.”

“Only a year or so.”

The next stop – hours later – was our old school. More specifically, a bar just off campus. After a couple bloody marys I nearly throttled Harris in the pinball room. “Why the fuck are we here?”

“I was really drunk and Bennett kept pushing me for a destination. He can be so… insistent.”

I looked across the room and saw Bennett pounding on the side of a cigarette machine, snarling under his breath. “Motherf– Give me the goddamn matches!” He slammed the side of the thing and jammed his hand into the delivery slot.

“He’s fucking insane. He hasn’t slept in thirty-six hours.”

“That’s unfair.”

“Unfair?”

“Thirty, tops.”

“Driving back here, really? You thought this was a better idea than say… driving back to Avalon?”

“We know the seniors graduating. It’ll be fun.”

Indeed. We knew them all too well. And they knew us. After three or four hours in the bar we headed up the street, to the home of a bunch of seniors next door to my old college apartment. These were good friends. Quality people, comrades. The minute they saw us they greeted us with the usual hello – grabbing us by the collars, chugging beers in our faces and smashing the cups off the sides of our heads. I’m getting old for this. Truth was, I’d never liked chugging beers, hated the tradition all through college. And this was a gang effort. There were ten of them on us at once. We’d each have to slam three sixteen ounce glasses before we even entered the party. Half of me was ready to dart for my apartment next door. Then I remembered… You don’t live here anymore. You aren’t going anywhere.

I collapsed around ten, or maybe it was midnight. Tough to tell in those moments, but I know it wasn’t late. Somebody’d baked the Christ out of me, one of those awful nauseating highs from strong, aggressive dope. The kind where your heart races and you feel like you need to go outside and run, breathe real air. Until you realize you’re far too liquored to move. The types of bakings filled with wild, narcissistic delusions – analyzing facial expressions, trying to hear what people across the room are saying, imagining everyone’s talking about you. Look at him, over there, on the couch… He’s lost it. He’s making a fool of himself. Let’s stop what we’re doing and stare at him, discuss him.

As if they’d ever be sober enough to notice. As if you’d ever be interesting enough.

I laid down on the sofa and closed my eyes, but sleep was impossible. The place was packed and the sound of drunks screaming all around me was deafening. This was the end for them, a last hurrah before they wandered into the job market or grad school or took time off to “find themselves” traveling through Europe or working as bartenders in ski towns out West. I knew those final days well. My own weren’t far behind. Hell, the music they were shouting over was the exact same stuff I remembered. “Dead president’s corpse in the driver’s car/The engine runs on glue and tar/Come on along, not goin’ very far/To the East to meet the Czar… Despite all the computations/You could just dance to a rock ‘n ‘ roll station/And it was alright…” Decades pass and I doubt that soundtrack ever changes.

These are the spaces where the mind splinters from reality, starts running a dialogue in your head. Some of it’s like a therapy session, sitting with a shrink. Some of it’s an interview, as if you’re a talk show host. But you’re not quizzing any common guest. This one’s faceless and formless, but it’s also omniscient, and the subject matter is you. Where you’re going, what’s Next. I suppose it’s just a chemical reaction, the brain keeping itself busy under the weight of exhaustion and poisoning. Still, it has its revelations. This is probably where older generations whacked on something like peyote imagined they were talking to “God.”

I always figured it would be different, better than this… purgatory. Things are slowing down, and I see where they’re headed. I’m being shunted into a career – a box – and I just want to keep going, moving, if that makes any sense… Absorbing things as I pass, soaking up ideas, thinking about what I want to think about. I don’t want to be shackled in the “maintenance” side of it all, navigating a system, however much it pays. It just seems so inane, senseless.

Of course it’s inane. You think you’re the first person to reach that conclusion? You think the people in office buildings pushing papers around, making calls and masturbating their Blackberries don’t know that? We process, implement procedures. Who asks why? It’s just what you do… How you pay for shit.

I don’t want to live like that.

No one’s making you do anything. You shoved yourself in a box. You didn’t want to work to find anything better than a default career like law and now you’re stuck with it. And let’s face it, even if they gave you a mulligan… Even if they gave you a chance to re-think your decisions, you’d just waste the time. What’s that old line? “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life…”

Animal House? How hackneyed is that?

Does it fit?

I’m not… fat.

I woke up the next morning confused, staring around the room and wondering where I was. It was all so impossibly familiar. I looked out the side window and saw my old college apartment next door, opened the shades on the front window and saw the street I drove up to class every morning of my senior year. Fuck. Maybe it was all just a dream. I passed out and imagined the whole thing – law school, the beach, the horrible drive here. I figured I’d just go next door, open the side door, walk past my roommates asleep on the sectional couches under the huge American flag stolen from a Burger King covering one wall of the living room and the posters of Len Bias, Phil Lesh and Curt Cobain on the others. I’d pass the filthy bar in the front room, skirt upstairs, stop the compact disc player in the stereo from skipping over a scratch in the middle of “Dead Flowers,” get undressed, stand under the shower and forget every moment of this awful, wretched nightmare.

Too bad I had it backwards. Too bad that was all a dream.

“Get ready.” Bennett appeared out of the kitchen. “We have to go.”

“What?”

“Just get up.” He clicked a lighter at his cigarette but all that came were sparks. “Shit. You have a lighter?”

“A don’t think–”

“This fucking lighter… I tried to get a light from the stove but it’s disconnected. Won’t get hot. Who disconnects a stove? Who? Why? Why would someone do that?”

“Have you slept yet?”

“I just want a light, that’s all I want. Is that too much to fucking ask?”

“Maybe… What time is it?”

“Seven, but we have to leave. You have to be at a family reunion, right?”

“A graduation, but I have time. My parents’ house is only an hour and a half from here.”

“So? Your car’s in Avalon.”

Son of a motherfucking, cocksucking– My first reaction was to scream, with very good reason. Avalon was four hours away, in almost the exact opposite direction from where I needed to be. As the roads went on the map, the points between my home, my college and Avalon made a perfect monstrous triangle, five hundred miles of highway I’d have to suffer through for the next eight hours, just to stagger in the door to my folks’ place, throw on a suit, run back out and sweat through a graduation ceremony.

I caught myself before the meltdown started. Stop. Breathe… There’s no use in flying off the handle. Anger here was pointless, frustration imbecilic. Yes, I was physically close to home. But that didn’t mean anything. That was just location, a geographic quirk. And at that stage in my life, after a year in law school – being in a building full of people, breathing their air, walking amongst them and feeling like an alien – I should have remembered… Proximity has nothing to do with how close a person is to what’s around him. On paper I was a short jaunt from home. Using the measures that matter, I might as well have been in Vancouver.

* * *

That’s kind of how I felt standing outside, those five or so years later, shoveling lox into my face by that dumpster. There was Jeffrey, the partner, staring. And there was me. Both of us in suits, ties, lace-up shoes and black dress socks. Same look, same office, same firm. Same building, floor and job and yet a universe apart. At least as far as I could see.

That’s probably why I never actually ran away from the job on any of those awful Mondays. Why I’d walk down the street, dreaming of where I’d go while subconsciously looking for diversions. Buy a paper at the news stand, pick up a soda at the drug store or, in this case, some lox at the local deli. Occupy the mind, until the urge to flee passes. I didn’t admit it in those moments, but I knew, from all those years of running, from all those mindless odysseys… Escape wasn’t in movement or distance. Escape was in having direction.

And what really drove me nuts, the meanest part of it, was knowing that as far apart as we were, if I stayed in my present straits, Jeffrey was my future. Not exactly, of course, but in some fashion. His kind were legion in the law – viral, a mass of magnets with a black hole’s gravity. The more I focused on bolting with no destination in mind, the more I’d run in circles, pulled slowly into that dense vortex at the heart of firms and corporate suites everywhere. Those armies of frowning glances, shrugged shoulders and Monday morning nods. “How you doing?” “Fine.” “How are you?” “Same old, same old.” I’d see variations of Jeffrey everywhere, in every face, and then, one day, I’d wake up and see him in the mirror.

Would I recognize him, talk to him? Perhaps he’d talk to me, surprise me.

What are you giving me the stink-eye for? It’s not my fault you’re me. I’m just the default setting. If you really wanted to be more than me you’d have avoided me long ago, gotten as far from me as possible. Obviously, you weren’t so sure about that.
It’s not that simple.

Yes it is. You make decisions or circumstances make them for you.

Fuck you. What do you know?

What do I know? You think I was always like this? You think we’re all congenital “grey suits”? The majority of us wanted this life? You think you’re the only one who had dreams? The only one who hears “Instant Karma” on the radio on the ride into work and suddenly wants to slam the gas pedal, smash the car through the toll booth arm, throw your briefcase out the window on the way across the bridge, call the jackass you work for, wish him terminal hemorrhoids and just keep rolling until you hit whatever coast you’re facing? That none of us feel trapped, like we had to have been born for better? You think you’re the only person who roams this drywall maze with “This is all there is? This is my life?” repeating in his head? That the rest of us enjoy spending our time massaging and maneuvering around sociopaths? That we wouldn’t love to grab the MontBlanc pen from the fat little fingers of every unfounded ego, delusional narcissist, psychopath, degenerate and greedhead who dictates the direction of this industry and shove it up his ass, sideways? You think we’re not thinking what you’re thinking – that minor contingent of virulent assholes has ruined what might have been an enjoyable career for the rest of us? That we don’t know that? That it never bothered us as much as it bothers you? ‘Cause if you do… Well, I’m not surprised you’ve been running in circles all these years. You’re an idiot.

Whatever. Your kind buy into the whole façade.

How else do you survive in this? Should we all get up every morning and deal with the big, nasty questions squarely? “What’s the point of the papers I’ll create and phone calls I’ll make today?” “What’s it giving or taking from anything in the world that matters?” “Why do I even care? Why don’t I just stuff my letters with random nonsense? ‘Dear Counsel: Regarding Maggie’s Farm – Res judicata, res ipsa loquitor, orange stars, green clovers, Judas Priest, Jerry Lewis AND TWINS! Yours in Jesus, Mr. Sparkle.’ Who’d even notice? Nobody’d care if they did. They’d chalk it up to bad software, throw it in a bin and bill ten minutes of time for “analyzing” the thing. Nothing matters in a hundred years, that’s true, and nothing most of us do here matters next week, tomorrow or even this afternoon. We all know that… But where’s that thinking going to get anybody? Unless you’re born a Rockefeller, you’re playing The Game. And part of getting through it’s pretending the shit’s important, real… I’m not apologizing for the lies that keep me sane. How else does anyone wake up on a Monday?

Well–

‘Well’ nothing. This isn’t a debate. You don’t want to be me? Do something about it. Otherwise, shut the fuck up.

I, uh–

And lose the gold cufflinks. They make you look like a pimp.
———-
¹ When the Kinks were on their game, there were few bands better.
² ‘D’ – (adj.) Ex-sorority girl lingo for “desperate.”

“What’s going on here?” I half-whispered, throwing my bag on the floor in front of Harris and Bennett.

“Oh, God. I thought you’d been in an accident.” Harris tried to kiss me. “We were worried sick about you.”

“Proud to have you here.” Bennett gave me a hug and shoved the shot glass in my face.

“Why is this place so… segregated.”

“Segregated?” As Bennett screamed the rest of the room went deadly silent. “You calling me a racist?”

“You ass…”

“I’m no racist! Take it back!”

“Enough.” Harris grabbed Bennett’s arm.

“Why are those people blasting Hootie and the Blowfish?” I whispered in Harris’s ear.

“They’re on Australian time.” As Bennett spoke I glanced over his shoulder and saw the rest of room going through the motions of their game in a distracted fashion, half playing and laughing conspicuously, half listening to Bennett and watching us out of the corners of their eyes.

“It’s complicated.” Harris grabbed his drink and opened the sliding door to the deck. “We should go outside.”

Once the door was closed behind us, Harris got straight to the facts. “I invited you guys a few weeks ago, and at that time I thought I had a place with just high school buddies. Turns out one of my friends couldn’t get enough bodies so he solicited some from his office. The people in there answered.”

“Okay. But there’s a weird vibe I’m getting–”

“Hey ladies!” Bennett leaned over the railing as a group of girls passed on the sidewalk below, the shore breeze whipping the wrap skirts around their bikini bottoms in the air. “We’re having a party. Want to come up?”

“Dude, those chicks are like, fifteen.”

“How do you know that?”

“It’s a plumpness thing.”

“You mean perkiness.”

“No I don’t.” I meant “plumpness,” exactly. A woman can be perky at 17, 35 or 50. “Plump,” however, when speaking of asses – that’s a different thing. There’s a taut, but well-filled quality to a young girl’s ass that only seems to be present from tenth grade through their earliest twenties. If you’re a student of the ass, you know what I’m talking about, but you’d never be able to explain it. It’s like being able to tell the model of a car from its tail lights in the distance. A young girl’s ass has a bounce all its own, a ripeness that fades later when it’s been hardened with aerobics or flattened by years in a chair. I know that bounce when I see it. All men do. And I knew that Bennett was screaming at jailbait.

“We have really good air conditioning!” He kept at it anyway. “And gin!”

“You want to get us arrested for offering booze to minors?” Harris put his hand over Bennett’s mouth. “Remember what I told you about the lady next door?”

“‘We have really good air conditioning’? ‘Free gin’? Why not offer them candy? Maybe ask them to your see the inside of your van.”

“Finish the story, Harris.” Bennett ignored me and lit a cigarette.

“Anyway, I had this buddy, Josh, who was supposed to be staying here all the time. He quit his job a few months before and said he was writing screenplays. He was going to stay here all summer, every day.”

“Good man.”

“Not exactly. Josh didn’t write shit. He just got fucked up around the clock, acting like a huge dick all the time. The second weekend we have the place we’re just hanging out and then the people in the living room show up. They’re a little different than I expected and it’s a little awkward, but no huge problem. I figured they needed some time to get their shit unpacked and get settled, so me and another friend, Caleb, head out for the night.”

“The turkey sandwich thing is fantastic…” Bennett started giggling. “I love that.”

“You want to tell the story?” Harris snapped.

“Sorry. Sorry.”

“So Caleb and I wind up spending the night over at The Rockin’ Chair. We come back at like two or something and these people are sitting in the house, stone fucking silent. I say ‘Hello’ and everyone just stares at me, not saying a word, and I’m thinking, ‘What happened? This can’t be good.’ The tall dude in there – the one who looks like Larry Bird – pulls me aside and starts giving me a rash of shit. ‘Your friend Josh needs to learn manners.’ ‘He’s a fucking asshole.’ Blah, blah, blah…’ I finally get sick of it and ask the guy what his problem is.

‘My problem? My problem is your friend had a prostitute come to the house while you were out. A prostitute!’ I just stood there and listened and acted dumb. What could I say? ‘Oh, sorry about Josh… He gets so crazy with those prostitutes… I hope she didn’t leave any crabs on the toilet seat this time?’”

“Fuck you.”

“I’m serious. I guess while Caleb and I were out Josh got super loaded on this watermelon he’d been soaking in rum and decided to order a hooker from Atlantic City. These people are just hanging out in the living room getting unpacked and a hooker shows up.”

“A real, honest prostitute?”

“You ever heard of any fraudulent ones?”

“Go on…”

“She was a pro – straight out of one of the casinos. Huge implants, leather mini-skirt… the whole deal. She even had some bouncer with her for protection, this huge dude who looked like a fat Mike Tyson. They walk into the house in front of everybody and Josh goes in the back room with the chick and fucks her. He’s in there with her for like an hour and then she walks out, arranges herself in the bathroom, says goodbye to everyone and leaves.”

“Where was the Tyson guy?”

“He sat in the kitchen the whole time, freaking everyone out.”

“‘That was a pound of fucking turkey…’” Bennett was talking to himself and laughing in the background. “‘You owe me a pound of turkey!’”

“Can I tell this story, Bennett?”

“Sorry. I just… Sorry.”

“Anyway, these people were seriously angry. I guess somebody’s girlfriend left – insisted on getting a hotel room somewhere else for the night. I thought they were going to ask for their rent money back. The Larry Bird guy was seriously shouting at me.”

As I stood on the deck listening to the story I observed the crowd inside the house, casually, of course, pretending to laugh or be turning toward the sliding door to light a cigarette away from the breeze. There couldn’t have been a worse audience for the scene Harris was describing. I’m not one to pigeonhole a person straight off from appearance. Generally, so far as I’ve observed, the hippie, goth, metal-head or “Crazy drunk frat boy!” types aren’t half as interesting as the guy in the frayed button down and khaki shorts. If you’re advertising you’re compensating and if you’re compensating you’re not much fun. That said, in some rare instances a person is so clearly the embodiment of the image he telecasts on the surface that yes, you can judge the book by the cover.

The people in the house were these sorts. They weren’t Young Republicans or Jesus fanatics, nothing that extreme. Just a little cleaner than the average shore rental crowd. A bit less libertine and a bit more “certain” about some of life’s parameters than a person ought to be in his twenties. And yes, the badges told a lot. The men had more creases than a rack of pants at your local dry-cleaner, everything on them seeming to have come fresh out of the plastic from Macy’s, with spotless white sneakers. The women were attractive and exceedingly feminine, but not in a sexual fashion. More in a deferential posture. A few hints of curves here and there, but nothing you’d be pressed to chase. Not bad types, of course. These were good, decent types – a missionary sex crowd all the way. The last people on Earth who belonged in that house.

“Where’s this Josh guy?”

“We had to throw him out. He’s staying with some other friends over near the bay.”

“Your housemates were that mad about the hooker?”

“Actually, that was a minor part of it.” Harris walked over to the edge of the deck and looked down, as if he was searching for people below. “Josh got all fucked up the next night and almost put the old lady in the hospital.”

“The old lady?”

“This old hag next door who always complains about the noise. She started screaming about the music being too loud. Josh went inside, got the watermelon, went out on the deck and chucked it at her.”

“That’s three stories down.”

“No shit. Thing missed her by a foot. The thing exploded everywhere, covering her in pits and rinds and pulp. She started screaming and freaking out and called the police. The landlord called and said if he saw Josh in the house he’d throw all of us out.”

“We can’t stay here. You realize that.” I peeked through the sliding glass door at the crowd inside. As soon as my eyes fixed on the group, two of the women quickly turned their heads away from us, back to their game.

“You forgot the turkey sandwich!” Bennett slammed his glass down on the wooden railing.

“Right, right. Sorry. The Larry Bird guy was screaming at me and just as I think he’s done and I can walk away, he tells me we have to replace his lunch meat.”

“What?”

“I had to go out and buy him a pound of turkey at the Wawa.”

“Why?”

“I guess when the bouncer showed up he asked them if he could make a sandwich. Nobody said anything so he went into the refrigerator, brought out all the cold cuts and made himself a hoagie.”

“A hoagie? Not a sandwich?”

“Maybe it was a ‘submarine.’”

“Who keeps hoagie buns in the house?”

“The people in there.”

“The whole idea of subs is that people make them for you. You can make your own sandwich, but you can’t make your own hoagie.”

“That’s what I said.” Bennett chimed in. “It’s creepy.”

“All I know is I had to go to the store and wait in line to get that guy a bottle of mustard and a pound of turkey. You ever had to do something like that? It’s fucking demeaning.”

Not exactly that, but in a general sense, yes. Yes I had and yes it is. We’ve all been there – standing in a scene that seems so innocuous on the surface, wondering, Do any of these people around me know why I’m here? You look and smell and sound just like everybody else, and technically you are. Except for the back story, that left-handed motive cleaving you from the rest. You start looking around at all the bodies in the lines next to yours, guessing why they’re there. What’s their back story? Stopping by to pick up some milk and eggs for an early morning breakfast? Gatorade to kill a hangover? Or did a bouncer eat all of their cold cuts too?

No. You’re probably not like them, at least at that moment. Their movements are deliberate, considered. They’re following plans, with narratives and aims. You? You’re just reacting – to hazy idiot decisions and all their fetid fallout… On a jagged, random path that shifts like the bouncing line on a seismograph. Sure, it always comes back to the baseline, but after a while that pin-balling up and down can start to get old. I knew what Harris meant when used the word “demeaning.” It’s those lucid little moments where you can’t help thinking, I need to find a track. Get some different hobbies.

Say what you will about the jorts crowd. They don’t suffer much existential angst.

“Let’s go then.” I opened the sliding door and started for the stairs. “We need to hit The Princeton, now.”

“You know, it would be nice if you could close that window!” The minute we started up the sidewalk the old lady from next door stood up from a deck chair and started barking at Harris. “I can hear everything that’s going on up there!”

“No you can’t.”

“Yes I– I–”

“I don’t think so. I think you’re just saying that.”

“I– I–”

“Have a nice night.”

“Nice move, Harris.”

“Not really. I saw someone use that trick at work last week. Screws people up for a second. They don’t know what to say.”

We were half way up the block when the question finally hit me. “Why didn’t you make Josh go buy the turkey?”

“He was passed out, and he’d have refused anyway. There would have been a fight.”

“So you had to deal with his mess.”

“And that bouncer…” Bennett shook his head.

“What?” Harris pressed.

“He used a whole jar of mustard on one sub?”

To be continued…

Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.
- Steven Wright

The lights appeared out of nowhere, at first a glow in the distance. It was odd to have them show like that – suddenly, in the middle of an empty road, no clue where they came from, no idea where they were going. All we’d seen were trees – walls of pines and firs. And now there were these beams, splintering through the snow on the back window, creeping on us slowly, like a cop reading our plates, lying back just far enough to obscure the frame of his vehicle while he phoned us in to the station. Run me a check on a Volvo 240, late-eighties model, Jersey plates, license alpha diamond monkey, two two seven…

“What the fuck is that guy’s problem?” Martin turned and looked out the back window.

“Don’t turn around.” I snapped. “It looks suspicious.”

“Where’d that car come from?” Chris kept a death grip on the wheel – squinting, always squinting. “Did we pass an intersection?”

“I don’t remember any. Just those carve outs… rest stop type things.”

“That’s where cops hide, Stu.”

“You’re paranoid.” Martin sniffed at Chris. “If that was a cop, they’d have been on us already. They don’t trail you. They pull out, hit the sirens and nail you. You ever had a cop sit on your tail? No. They go for it, right out of the chute.”

“Not if they’re waiting for some reason to bust you.” As Chris argued with Martin I could see the car behind us accelerating quickly, the glow of its headlights filling ours as brightly as the mid day sun. “And he’s coming up hard now.”

“Put that joint out.” Stu barked from the back.

“Not in the fucking ashtray.” Chris grabbed my arm.

“Where?”

“In a soda can or something.”

“Eat it.” Stu snapped. “We don’t have time.”

“It’s not a fucking cop.” Martin folded his arms over his chest. “We’re not even over the fucking speed limit.”

“Who the fuck else would ride us like that?” Chris adjusted the mirror to knock the reflection of the high beams off his face.

“A drunk trying to keep pace.”

“Keep pace?”

“Stick with traffic – follow the lights in front of him.” Martin huffed. “Works like a laser site on a gun.”

“There’s no empty soda can, here.” I’d been running my hand underneath the passenger seat, checking every inch of carpet only to come up empty.

“Just eat the roach, you fucking pansy.”

“Fuck off, Stu.”

“It goes out on your tongue. You don’t feel shit.”

“Why the fuck do I have to eat it? We already have a sack and bowl in the car!”

“Those are my problem. The joint’s yours now–”

“It’s your shit.” I cut Stu off, sensing a “lesson” on the way – some point of dope etiquette supporting the argument that the person holding when law enforcement is spotted has the duty of hiding the evidence. That was true as a matter of practical common sense, but I figured Stu had some heavier, cultural explanation, and I had no patience for the preaching.

“You didn’t let me finish.”

“What?”

“I was going to say, ‘And you’re a fucking cramp’.”

“Jesus Christ.” Martin handed up the empty Jagermeister bottle. “Just put it out in the cap…”

“Then eat it.” I turned and saw Stu elbow Martin.

“What’s so funny?” I caught Stu’s eye.

“What are you talking about?”

“You just elbowed Martin and laughed. I saw you.”

“You’re fucking paranoid.” Martin dropped the bottle in my lap.

“What the fuck is that doing here?” As Chris started hollering I noticed the lights behind us beginning to move into the oncoming traffic lane to our left. “You didn’t throw the bottle away?”

“Wasn’t my job.”

“That’s not a fucking excuse, Martin.”

“If you tell me, ‘Hey, Martin, make sure you throw that bottle away,’ I’m happy to do so. Nobody did that.”

“Don’t give him that bottle.” Stu protested. “Make him eat it raw.”

The lights were getting closer, easing into the opposite lane. Watching them start to pull up next to us, as if to hit the sirens and order our car to the side of the road, the debate in my head grew frantic, splintered and confused – a litany of mangled musings. If I put it out in the bottle and the cops search the car they can find it and arrest us. If they pull us over and for some reason search us, they’ll find it on me and I’ll get popped for possession. But wait… Wait just a second… Are these really cops? Probably not. But what if they are? I could just wait until they pulled us over and know for sure. Right, but why take any risk at all? “Fuck it.” I shoved the roach in my mouth. It burned for half a second and tasted like charcoal, barely sliding down the parched flesh of my throat. Look at the upside. At a minimum, you won’t have to listen to Stu calling you a pussy for the rest of the night.

“Somebody has to tell you to throw away an empty liquor bottle?” Chris was still barking at Martin.

“I assumed somebody else threw it away. There are three other people here. Why is that my job? Because I’m the ‘responsible’ one?”
As the cat fight in the car continued, I started to make out the shape of the vehicle next to us. “Hey, assholes – look left!” The car went silent as we realized it wasn’t the police at all. It was Randal – if anything, at that moment, the absolute polar opposite of every notion of “law enforcement.” He’d headed out ten minutes before we did, again taking an alternate route he claimed was faster. Somehow, some way he wound up reconnecting with ours, behind us, all but certainly as a result of getting lost on the first road and driving in circles for twenty minutes.

“Ha ha! Fuck you!” Otto rolled down the passenger window and screamed out of the car, flipping us off as Randal pulled out of the oncoming traffic lane and back into ours, barely yards ahead of our front bumper.

“I’ll kill that little shithead.” Chris accelerated behind them.

“Did I tell you it wasn’t the cops? No-o-o-body listens to Martin.”

“No.” I grabbed Chris’s arm as he tried to shift the car to a higher gear. “You can’t even see the fucking road.”

“I’m fine.”

“You just saw a cow a few miles back and a man jumping a divider.”

“It was a stick figure.”

“You weren’t on the debate team in high school, were you Chris?”

“Fuck you, Stu. You want me to drop your ass off right here?”

“You realize there’s no divider on this road.” I didn’t want to steal Chris’s confidence, but someone had to the end the argument. The combination of the bickering and the horrible Samples album playing on the car stereo was driving me insane. Either was tolerable alone, but working in concert they might as well have been the sound collected by a parabolic mic aimed at a saw mill.
Chris stared forward as Randal’s car rocketed down the road, turning into a set of blurry red lights two or three football fields ahead, then suddenly turning, crossing over a lane and vanishing behind a blind of trees.

“Where the fuck did he just go?” I watched as Randal’s car disappeared up what looked like an old logging road.

“I think that’s the way to a state park, like twenty miles West.” Martin turned on the center ceiling light and checked his watch.

“Or is that East? Which way are we going?”

“Why is he heading that way?”

“It’s the scenic route?”

“Good luck finding his way back.” Chris snickered.

“He’ll be fine.” Martin turned off the overhead lamp. “Randal’s good with directions.”

“Are you kidding me? I headed for the shore with him last year and we wound up in Perth Amboy. He just picks a road and keeps driving.”

“It works.” Martin leaned in and grabbed a lighter from the center console. “Sooner or later get where you’re going.”

“How profound.” Stu laughed.

“It is, you cynical fuck.” A little dramatic, maybe pedantic, but I understood what Martin was saying, or at least the spirit of what he seemed to be trying to explain. Randal knew where he was going. It wasn’t as the crow would fly, but he had a direction, generally speaking. Your starting point’s a magnet, a deep-rooted memory, lower than instinct or intuition, buried in the medulla. You can go linear – efficient – the shortest distance between the poles. Or you can take the scenic route. Just point the wheel in the direction you think is right and keep tacking on that course until you spot something that looks familiar. Most folks would say it’s idiocy to drive through a state park in the dead of winter. Others would say that’s when you see the best foliage.

“Excuse me, Thoreau.”

You mean ‘Frost,’ asshole… Frost did roads. Thoreau did ponds. I wanted to say it, but why? Stu was a physics major and it was just a technicality, at least in that moment.

“By the way, did you eat that roach?”

“Yes.”

“You really ate the thing? Put it out on your tongue and everything?”

“Yes, Stu. You satisfied?”

“You fucking tool…”

“What?”

“Could you be any more gullible?”

* * *

“So this is why you never eat with anyone in the office?” Jeffrey raised an eyelid, Belushi-style. “You’d rather eat cold cuts in an alleyway?” It was an awful, awkward moment. His question was pointed, and I knew Jeffrey didn’t care much for my attitude. It wasn’t that we’d fought, butted heads or gotten into one of those “cold war” stare-downs colleagues have with each other in law offices every day. No, our problem was quite the opposite. Jeffrey thought me a snob. And I could never defend myself against his allegations. Look, man. It isn’t that I don’t reach out to you because I think I’m better than you. I just don’t want to burn the one hour a day I have free hanging out with people whose only connection to me is thirty feet of drywall dividers, industrial carpeting and a shared secretary. You’re one of those guys who wears blue shirts with white collars, and pocket squares. You hang on the females in the office, abusing the fact that they have no choice but to talk to you. That’s all cool with me. You get your jollies however you want… But we’re not alike, and I’m nervous around you, like anything I say might cause an argument, seem too seditious for your comfort. I guess the thing is, Jeffrey, this firm, this place, this job – this is where you stopped. Me, I’m not so sure. But I am sure I don’t want you to know that.

“Iff– fiff…”

“What?”

“Ifff– Ifff…” I gulped hard, shoving a slug of the lox almost big enough to choke me down my throat.

“Are you alright?”

“I was trying to say ‘It’s fish.’”

“Fish?”

“Yes, fish.” I searched for a joke to make but nothing came, so I took the simple literal course. “Smoked salmon, cured with salt. It’s good, a Jewish delicacy.”

Jeffrey just stared.

“Good for you as well.” I was stuttering, looking for a sensible response. “High in omega three.” A better grade of protein, Jeffrey. I needed the fuel for the trip. I was going, leaving – on my way to join the circus. You want to do that sometimes, don’t you? Somewhere, on some basic level you barely remember you have… You can’t seriously want this, the life of a flesh and plasma computer – worked to obsolescence, depreciated to zero then shipped off to West Palm Beach for the inevitable “recycling.” There were a thousand things I wanted to say and couldn’t. Just like every other day I walked into the firm. You know those urges, the ones we all have and never talk about. The ones where you want to jump up from the desk and shout, “Stop!” Bring the whole place to a halt, freezing the wheels in motion. Make everybody pause at one immediate moment, consider their positions, ages and stations – what they’re doing, where they’re going.

What’s your plan, Mary? Paralegal for life? And what’s your aim, Bob? ‘Of-counsel’ until you have enough saved for a shore place? Is that it? Anyone crazy enough to think they had something bigger in their veins? Or do you all think that’s just wildly arrogant, the ramblings of a madman? You don’t have to actually do it, you know. I realize we all can’t run, flail at our nagging passions. You just have to keep the desire in your head, even if it’s only subconscious. Avoid the Stockholm Syndrome and complacency that bring you to thinking ‘This job isn’t so bad.’ Always remember that yes, if you could you’d leave, and if someday you’re lucky enough to – if the phone should ring and someone tell you the pharmaceutical company you own 10,000 shares in just found the cure for cancer or a long lost uncle just left you a fortune – you’ll drop what you’re doing right there and walk straight out the door. Never tell them why. Never say a word. Throw your Blackberry in the nearest fountain and never look back.

Who’s still alive inside? Raise a hand.

If you had that kind of power, if you could stop a floor of white collar employees dead and bring them to those considerations well, hell, somebody in charge would have to kill you. Men in black suits would walk you to the car the way Michael Corleone had his lieutenants execute Sal Tessio in The Godfather. “We can’t have this. If the people we need to do what we need them to do and believe what we need them to believe start realizing they have options the whole thing turns to shit. It’s just business, you understand.”

Ever consider, Jeffrey, that if everyone started thinking about their lives the way they ought to the “wage subsidy for overeducated white kids” economy – the armies of consultants and lawyers and stockbrokers – would crash on its face?¹

No. I couldn’t say that. Jeffery’d stopped and I was still running, and they don’t make translators to cover the dissonance between those points on the curve. You used to think about taking off, Jeffrey, but you buried that a long time ago, didn’t you? It’s alright. I’m sure you have your reasons. I wish I could shake the urge. For some reason or another, however, I seem to be stuck with it.

* * *

The last real “road trip” I recalled prior to that day was a hellish odyssey in the summer between my second and third years of law school. It started in a bar called “The Princeton,” a dingy shore club in Avalon. The place was always crowded, packed with beer drunk yuppies, mostly kids from Philly whose families had places at the beach or people like us – seasonal renters and their freeloading friends. I’d call it a pick-up scene except for one little problem. It wasn’t. The Princeton was all about drinking. You could meet a woman there, sure, but she was just as likely to vomit and pass out on the deck furniture in a puddle of her own urine as fuck.

And drink we did. Tanqueray and tonics and Beam shooters, one round after another – boozing with a purpose. Trying to get numb, to deal with very strange scene.

I’d rolled into town around seven, after a horrid five hour drive, most of it spent idling in bumper to bumper traffic on Route 47, a back road snaking through the pine barrens of Southern Jersey. It was a two hour trip on the map, but this was late May, start of the beach season. In any other circumstance I’d have lost my mind entirely, but coming from where I was, five hours wasn’t bad. I knew the drill. I’d brought newspapers to read in the dead-stopped stretches, along with a cooler, sandwiches and two packs of smokes.

Harris was renting a place in Avalon and he’d invited Bennett and I to spend the weekend. He told us his housemates were friends from high school and technically that was accurate. The only problem was, they weren’t his only housemates. The tension in the place was palpable the minute I walked in the door. On one side of the main room were Harris and Bennett, drinking and laughing, watching a videotape of Dolomite on the television next to the fireplace, backs turned away from everybody else. On the other were a group of a people who looked like a missionary group, the males in jorts and sneakers, the women with that female serial killer hair – a cross between Dana Plato’s Diff’rent Strokes cut and a shortened version of Mel Gibson’s mullet in Braveheart.

The room was split in two and I could tell in an instant there was no blending the groups. It wasn’t so much the hair, or that “the others” were playing quarters with Coors Light and howling with glee like it was freshman year in the dorm all over again. It was the jorts. They’re a sign, a badge – an irreducible statement saying everything and anything about a person that ought to be unspoken, buried and never disclosed. It’s one thing to wear cut-offs, like Bob Weir used to sport on stage (though never as short as his). Maybe you’re a hippie throwback, a biker or a guy with a Freddie Mercury moustache spending the weekend in Provincetown. But jorts? Those things are tailored and crafted, and for what? For whom? The man who’d really like to wear denim on the beach but can’t abide frayed hems? A lot of people would say making fun of jorts is snobby, picking on Red State attire or less “fashion forward” sorts. I don’t think so. Jorts aren’t a geographic thing. They’re as wrong in St. Louis as they are in Boston or Georgetown, and they aren’t a passive mistake. Jorts are a crime of intent. Somebody looked at them, took in their full aesthetic glory and decided he wanted a pair. “I like those ‘mini-jeans’ over there, but I was wondering…. Do you have them with pleats?”

To be continued…
———-
¹Yeah, greed fuels the engine of industry, but the gears are greased with ignorance.

“What the hell are you doing?” As the car screeched to a halt I held the bottle in the air, turning its nose toward me to hedge against the G-force that would otherwise slam the liquor through its neck, spraying the stuff all over the windshield and dashboard. “Do you know how sticky this shit is?!”

“The stop sign’s hidden behind that overgrown tree.” Chris turned down the stereo, looked around, then accelerated toward the bridge. “They need to prune that shit… It’s an accident waiting to happen.”

“I saw it fine.”

“Of course you did.” He rubbed his eyes and focused on the road. “It’s easier from your angle.” The explanation was nonsense, but I didn’t bother to press. Never question the driver… Just be happy it’s not you.

“Why’d you turn down the music?”

“Excuse me?”

“Why’d you turn down the music? That didn’t cause you to miss the sign.”

“I don’t know. It just seemed the proper thing to do.” Chris was partly right, and partly wrong. His reaction didn’t “seem” anything. He’d turned down the music out of fear… A fight-or-flight response – one of those senseless idiot tics we default to in an awkward or heated exchange, like darting your eyes around the room or saying “Excuse me?” when someone asks a question you don’t want to answer. He was buying himself a moment, to gird for police, ponder what he’d say if a patrol car pulled out of an alleyway and clicked on the sirens. “Can’t be too careful, considering…”

“I understand… Better safe than sorry.” I pulled the lever below my seat and slammed it back. “Here, it’s your shot.”

“Hey! What the fuck?” Martin barked from the backseat. “You just knocked the fucking bowl all over me.”

“We should smoke this anyway.” Stu held a joint in the air. “That thing’s all clogged.”

“Can you wait until we get there?” Chris snapped back.

“Why?” Stu flicked his lighter.

“So we’ll be able to speak to these chicks, for a few minutes at least.”

Chris had a point. Outside a Phish show perhaps, nobody’s ever gotten lucky based on the fact that he was really, really stoned. When you’re loaded you’re happy – a charming rogue of sorts. Whacked on hallucinogens you’re an explorer – strong enough to give up “control,” check out your inner wiring. That and you’re helpless, playing to the “Florence Nightingale” gene so many women hold. Stoned, on the other hand… Well, stoned is a different story. Blazed out of their gourds, most people are dull – deep in thought below, retarded on the surface. In the typical social setting, “hyper-baked” is rarely engaging or witty, and never charismatic. You’re slow and silly and chitchat seems impossible. And though you’d probably like to think otherwise, believe it, brother – there’s no such thing as “small-talk,” particularly with women. A smart one – the kind you really want to fuck – isn’t making idiot chatter. She’s testing you, kicking the tires… Seeing how fast you can shift from one subject to another. How well you’d relate to disparate varieties of people. Out-of-our-skulls high, most of us fail that exam.

In many ways, baking before you go out is deciding to not even attempt picking up women. You might make an effort, and you might even think you have a chance. And yes, on any given night, anyone can strike it lucky. But generally, globally, getting high is the last thing on the planet you want to do to land a chick. Think of all the stoner characters in movies or TV… Slater from Dazed N’ Confused? Spicoli? Do you recall these characters having girlfriends? Sure they’re ridiculous stereotypes, but they weren’t crafted out of thin air.

“You are such a fucking cramp.” Stu wouldn’t let it go.

“Humor me, will you?” Chris was getting whiny. “Just this once… I’d like to try to maybe, just maybe, get laid.”

“By getting all fucked up on Jager?”

“You think I’d do it sober?”

“You don’t have to hit it, Chris.” I tried to “split the baby” to end the dispute.

“If we light that, I’ll wind up out of my tree.”

That was always the problem with baking. When you’re bored, you want to be baked. Until there’s something better to do, when you suddenly don’t want to be baked anymore. Problem is, by then it’s too late. And nobody ever gets “just a little high.” It comes on sneaky, slow and lethal. There’s nothing to do, nowhere to be. No looming deadlines or people to see. You take a few hits. Then you take a few more. Then you start thinking, I should have a few more, just to make sure I’ve had enough. Every “few more” leads to another “few more”… Forty minutes later you’re watching an infomercial for “The Garden Weasel,” wondering if there’s ice cream in the freezer and it hits you – Shit, I’m retarded… a goddamn mongoloid. And there’s no way out. All you can do is deal with it.

Add a bottle of liquor to the mix and you’re cooked. From immigrant miners drowning the misery in Seagram’s and Lucky Strikes to hippies cannon-balling joints with rotgut wine to the modern day “Masters of the Universe” chasing Churchills with Johnny Walker Blue, smoke and liquor have been our national speedball since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Cigarettes, cigars, dope – they all taste better with whiskey. And the more you have of one, the more you want of the other. The “joint and shots” mixture is a crippling, incessant cycle. The tar burns the throat. The shot kills the burn. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Three or four in, you start feeling niiice – pleasant, careless and clueless. Seven or eight in you’re numb – lucid and coherent, but not really there. Ten or twelve in you’re Gone – bigger than your being, immortal and impervious, all knowing and all seeing. That’s the peak, of course, the ledge before the drop. Anything more than that that and you’re fried, blathering and staggering, in that helpless, wretched state where you find yourself picking up a candle instead of the bottle and filling the shot glass with melted wax. And then, suddenly – SWAK! – Here come the spins… Ohhhh… The whole room is moving… So fast… So dizzy… I feel like I ate bad fish… Somebody, please, stop it. Cry all you like. Bury your head in the couch. The more you close your eyes, the faster the revolutions.

“Shit, Chris.” Stu snapped from the back. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“What?”

“Let me know if you’re going to take a fucking turn that fast.”

“That’s not my fault. The road did it.”

“I just poured a shot on my forehead… It’s in my fucking hair!”

“So what? It’s just sugar and alcohol.”

“Exactly. This shit’s going to harden.”

By the halfway point, the whole car stunk like licorice-y cough-syrup, like a jelly bean on wheels, everything inside soaked in that awful Nazi liquor. I remember wondering, Why? Why is this so difficult? The plan wasn’t complicated. The route was two roads, rural and mostly free of police. Chris would stand on the gas and I’d do the bartending. If all went to plan we’d be on _____________’s campus in an hour and some change, faster than Randal, basking in our victory, hitting on this “Amy” girl and her friends.

Everything was in our favor. We had the easier liquor, the faster car and Randal’s team had Otto, the worst drinker of the bunch. Otto was young for his year, and he looked like he was fifteen, with a round baby-face and gangly, tenth grade posture. A cross between Ralphie from A Christmas Story and Michael Anthony Hall’s character in Weird Science, only loud, aggressive, with a dwarf’s liver and the “drinking maturity” of a cheerleader on senior week… The sort who got blasted on four gin and tonics at sorority cocktails and knocked over the hors d’oeuvres table.

I figured Otto would hold Randal back, get sick on the ride or force them to pull over to piss. Still, we couldn’t take a chance. Thirty miles from _____________ I threw the shot-glass out the window. “Why’d you do that?” Chris shouted.

“Excuse me?”

“The shot glass… Why’d you throw it away?”

“It’s bad luck.” That wasn’t really true. The simple fact is, you can’t serve shots in a Volvo, particularly on an old rural highway. I felt like a stewardess on a Tilt-A-Whirl, spilling more than I was pouring. With those rigid church pew seats and that stiff, taut suspension… The car rolled like a tank, but we felt every turn, bump and groove in the road. BANG! The frame would slam and shudder with the slightest divot in the blacktop.

“Bad luck? What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You don’t want to get pulled over with something like that. It’s paraphernalia… Sends all the wrong signals.”

I had the right idea about getting rid of the shot glass. Once we started swigging it the Jager went faster, and whether it was consequence or coincidence, the trip went smoother. We knocked off the bottle with time to spare and pulled into Amy’s place ten minutes ahead of Randal, who’d taken a back route that looked faster on paper but was filled with traffic lights.

Amy was cute, and she had cute friends and a cute place – large enough that we could technically crash in the living room, small enough to invite the suggestion that a few of us would rather stay in beds. We were buzzed, happy, our team had won the bet and everything was going to plan, except for one nasty problem – Otto. He was shitfaced, plastered – out of his mind… Chugging wine he found in the girls’ refrigerator, stumbling about the home and “soft-molesting” the women – hugging them, putting his arms around their shoulders and petting their backs and arms. “I really liiiiike eeeeyyooouuu. Yooouuu’ve got a graaay place heeere. You nee sommmm-uhhh help cleaning anything up?” Otto could be awful in his cups – the sort who’d get in close and hang on attractive females, working that pathetic “friend” angle to cop some cheap, desperate feels.

“What the fuck happened to him?” I grabbed Randal in kitchen as we watched Otto guzzle from a bottle and fall sideways through a pair of French doors.

“Izzz alright.” He pulled himself on a table holding a fish tank, sending a ripple of water toppling over the front. “I juss loss my footing.”

“Don’t pull on that!” A pixie in a headband darted across the room and braced the table to stop the tank from shaking and tipping under Otto’s weight. “They’re extremely sensitive fish! They get scared and don’t eat and then they die.”

“He baked himself silly on the ride, I guess.” Randal cracked a Yeungling. “He was in the back, holding the sack.”

“Your friend’s awfully drunk, and uh… ripe.” I could hear one of Amy’s roommates commenting to Chris. It was true. I’d noticed Otto’s stench the minute he took off his jacket in the kitchen. For a small man, he smelled something terrible – one of those pungent, putrid body odors, as though his pH were askew or he was badly, fungally diseased. And it seemed to come out of nowhere, when there was no good reason for a person to reek as he did. It was the middle of a frigid January and Otto stunk like he’d just come in from a three hour soccer practice. Back at the house that wouldn’t be a problem. He’d blend with the surroundings. But here, now? This was a chick pad. These girls owned a vacuum cleaner. They washed their dishes and burned scented candles. Otto stuck out like a soiled sweat-sock in a basket of freshly cleaned sheets.

“He’s going to fuck this up, Randal.” I watched Otto grab the fish-tending pixie, all but putting her in headlock, half to grope the girl, half to gain his balance. “Yerr a cool chick…” He gestured, spilling a puddle of wine on the floor around them. “Have some zinfandel… Izzz like white and red… at the same time.”

“I don’t like zinfandel.”

“Why?”

“Can you please let me go?” She squirmed out of his grip. “I have to check the filter.”

“He’ll pass out.” Randal brushed me off. “We’ll put him on a floor somewhere.”

“If he hasn’t fucked everything up by then.” The women in the house were “proper,” an Anne Taylor and “bob cut” crowd… The sorts who got high, drunk and fucked, but followed all the Methodist strictures on the surface. Image was important, and Otto was killing ours. He was an oaf and he smelled and there was no divorcing him from the group. Otto colored the lot of us, like a drop of ink in water.

A road trip’s a statement. The people you ride with are proxies, reflections of the self – the types you chose to sit with for however long the ride. You’re a unit, parts of a shared consciousness, as strong as your weakest link. Like it or not, Otto was us. And we were him. As far as Chris was getting with Amy or any of us with her friends, we’d only get as lucky as Otto would allow. College women are rigid pack animals. Where a man would ditch his friends for pussy in an instant, women consider the group, subjugating their wants to maintenance of the social fabric. I could see the conflicted look on Amy’s face as she and Chris talked. If I hook up with Chris, Otto will probably wind up spending the night here. My housemates will have to take care of him. They’ll hate me for it for weeks. They’ll ostracize me.

I knew that look, and the machinations in her head going on behind it. I’d seen the exchange dozens of times before and I’ve seen it dozens of times since. How many conversations go on every evening at bars all over the world where women who want to do nothing more than run off with the man they’re talking to don’t because they’re with a group of other females or chained to an “adversely-gifted” friend? God, I’d love to cut loose and go to some other place with this guy. But what’ll I do with Carol? He’s got a friend with him, but that guy’s clearly not interested in her. They never are. Just look at him… He’s folding cocktail napkins into origami swans to avoid making eye contact with her. Dammit, I hate this… Why doesn’t she do something about that lazy eye? Get that mole removed and have the gastric surgery already? I can’t count the instances where I’ve observed the phenomenon, barely fighting the urge to pull one of these women aside and drop the obvious science. Look, if you all really want equality – if you want to be treated exactly like men – you’ve got to stop serving everybody else. Put Carol and her goiter in a cab and go for your own.

But I know, true as that advice might be, it’s not my place, and it’d only get me slapped. You can’t sell logic like that to the average tribal creature. They get bent, offended – pissed at the strength of the argument. We’ve all got our allegiances, and I guess in the end, as damaging as most of them can be, it’s probably not a bad thing. Nobody wants a guy quoting Nietzsche sitting next to him as their plane makes an emergency landing.

“Son of a bitch! Chris! Chris! Get over here!” It was an hour or two after we arrived. I was standing in the living room, talking to one of Amy’s friends when I heard the screaming.

“What the–?” We looked at each other then darted, with everybody else, in the direction of the noise. In a bedroom off the hallway was Amy, standing in the doorway, pulling her hair and shouting. Chris was standing behind her, one hand on her shoulder, saying “I’m sorry” over and over. In middle of the room was Otto, splayed across a long Persian rug, moaning, drooling, covered in vomit.

“The rug’s destroyed.” Amy snapped at Chris. “And the bed cover’s ruined! Just smell it. It’s disgusting.”

The room stunk of peptic acid and half-digested whiskey. The once white comforter was smeared with the usual mixture of red and green food particles, mucus, saliva and bile, with a trail of the mixture running down the side of the bed, onto the floor and the rug, then up the side of Otto’s jeans and all over his shirt. You could see the streams of it under his nostrils and the smears of it on his cuffs, which he’d clearly used to wipe his face.

“I sooo sorry. I had the s-s-spins.” His voice was cracking between a grunt and a high pitched whine. “I — I… I juzzz wanted to sleep for a second.”

“Get out. Just get out.” Amy had no forgiveness in her heart, and I couldn’t blame her. Use all the cleaners, soaps and solvents you can find – that acrid stench of vomit is impossible to kill. Otto might as well have bludgeoned a skunk in her room. “You all have to go. Now.”

“I’ll clean it up.” Chris assured her.

“No. Just go.”

“Hey. Hey.” Stu tugged at my shirt from behind.

“What do you want?” I barked as he pulled me into the living room.

“You want to smoke this joint now?”

“Do you have any sense of timing?”

“You’d be a lot less of a douche if you baked more, you know that?”

“God, you stink like licorice.”

“Fuck you.”

“…With just a hint of Nyquil. Excellent bouquet.”

“You can’t blame this on me–” Chris was still pleading with Amy in the hall. “I didn’t know he’d do that.”

“Come on…” She sneered. “How many beers has he had?”

“None.” A voice came from the peanut gallery. “He was drinking bourbon.”

“Thanks, Randal.” Chris was fiddling with his cigarettes, realizing he was dead in the debate, if you could even call it that.

“Thanks for that clarification.”

“You bring two carloads of drunk people and a twelve year old with alcohol poisoning into my house and expect to crash here?” Amy kept rolling. “That was your plan?”

“We weren’t that drunk when we headed out.”

“What?”

“Forget it.” Chris waved off her question. No use in discussing the “race.” That’d only make things worse.

“You didn’t think about how you’d get home?”

“Not… specifically…”

Think about getting back? What the hell was she talking about? There’s no planning in these things. There’s angst and boredom and wheels, the adrenaline of Just Going. Plotting the return? If you’re going to do that, then why the hell leave? The point of the trip was forgetting, for however long you could, that there ever was a Start, or somewhere calling you back. That you could simply keep driving, as far the engine would go.

But that’s just a fiction of course, and a fragile one at that – far too flimsy for the scene. These women had serious problems – real, concrete issues. They had stomach acid stains in a fine Persian rug. And panicked, terrified fish. We’d revolted and repulsed them, abused their hospitality. Mostly by association, the wages of one bad apple… But that didn’t matter much. The night was a total loss. No use in getting profound, in trying to explain the “purpose.” It wasn’t a linear thing. You have to understand… There’s no start or finish, only back and forth – forward and further and faster, but always round and round, a horrible, hideous loop… That’d never make sense. She’d only think me mad, probably whacked on acid. And anyway, Amy was right. We had to return – to our house, basement and routine, the rubber room for our kind.

We were ten miles out of town when the car suddenly swerved and Chris slammed the brakes, jarring me from a daydream. “What the fuck was that? Are you alright?” I’d been watching the pines rolling by, staring at the mountains and thinking. What kind of animals were out there? Bears? Foxes? Coyotes? What was alive and conscious in this cruel frozen night? Roaming, hunting or fleeing in that endless carpet of trees?

“I hate when that happens.” Chris was furiously sucking a cigarette, squinting at the highway and checking the speedometer.

“What are you looking for?” I turned down the radio.

“I thought I saw a cow.”

“A what?”

“You heard me. From a farm or something, walking near the road.”

“In the middle of January?”

“Probably a deer. Your eyes ever play tricks on you like that? You know… You see a shadow and then it looks like a person or animal running across the road?”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s probably my contacts or something. I swore I saw a stick figure darting over a highway divider a few miles back. Happens a lot at night.”

“Right… Hey, ‘Licorice-head.’” I leaned back and slapped Stu’s leg. “Is there any of that joint left?”

“Oh, so now you want to hit it?”

“Yes. Yes I do.”

To be continued…

Harry: How far have we gone?
Lloyd: According to this map, about an inch and a half.
- Dumb and Dumber (1994)

“Can I ask why?” Jeffrey stopped in his tracks the minute we met eyes. The fish was in my hand, in the air, dangling above my lips. Thankfully I couldn’t answer. My mouth was already full, stuffed like a chipmunk’s with acorns.

You can always ask why, but that doesn’t mean I have an answer. We stood there for a moment, not saying a word, each of us taking in the scene. There was Jeffrey, a partner from my group, standing, staring, open cell phone in his hand. And there was me, behind the deli, next to a dumpster, peeling slabs of lox from a wax-paper package and shoveling them in my mouth. It wasn’t an ugly moment. He hadn’t caught me getting high with the bicycle couriers who openly smoked dope behind the buildings or stepping out of a massage parlor. This was just strange. It’s not everyday a person turns the corner on his way back from a client luncheon and runs into one of his employees in a suit, cufflinks and tie, gorging himself in a filthy alleyway like some vulture gnawing carrion. To all the common passers by, I might as well have been eating rancid meat from the trash, an overdressed wino, white collar crack-head or escapee from a local psyche ward… One of those wretches who stumbled around the blocks bleating about conspiracies and begging for change. But Jeffrey knew better. He knew I was sane – too sane, really, and this was something else… something odd, seditious and bizarre.

He was right. Sort of…

I hadn’t walked out for lox. I’d walked out to leave. It was a Monday and I’d snapped. You know those Mondays. Everyone knows them. Those mornings where a ten minute flurry of phone calls, faxes and emails turns a perfectly calm week to a shit rain of idiot paperwork… Those moments where you can actually feel your face turning purple as some Napoleon threatens you over the phone… I’d gone in hoping for Nothing – a boring, dead week, the best thing you can hope for in a law firm. By eleven I’d been peppered with five calls, four letters and a half a dozen emails. All annoyances – the usual pile of grating, niggling demands. “When can you get me this?” “When can you get me that?” “When can I expect this other thing?” From the incoherent threat letters of grammatically retarded plaintiffs’ lawyers to the tyranny of emails from management about the ten days of time sheets I still owed, every communication held that same selfish refrain… “Gimme, gimme, gimme… I want to take something from you to make my situation better. I’m going to sap your energy, drag your mind to a task the benefits me, my wallet, my bottom line. I want things, and I’m going to burn you and everything else around me like fuel to get them. I have car payments to make, tuitions, golf course minimums… My wife just ordered granite for all the bathrooms.”

I’d walked out the door to catch a cab, go home, put on a pair of shorts, a t-shirt and flip-flops, jump in my car and drive. No destination in mind; just step on the gas and run. Bolt from the box, from that crushing claustrophobia… Take off on the highway, through the cornfields and mountains and the desert. Never stop moving. Float around the country like a salty drifter in one of those old beer commercials – the grizzled sort stalking into dusty bars with “Big Log” or “Midnight Rider” playing in the background. Get space, air, breathe. Live like a fucking American, like goddamned human.

I stepped out the front door and looked up the street for a cab. The firm was on a slow corner, so I decided to walk a few blocks, closer to City Hall. Then I saw the sign in window of the deli. “Nova Lox, $22.00 pound.” Hmmm. Few foods on Earth beat quality kosher lox. Salt and raw, smoked salmon… Poor man’s sushi. I could easily eat a half pound alone – no bagels or onions or tomatoes, and none of that disgusting cream cheese heathens smear on the stuff. It was almost lunch, and there was no resisting hunger… or my chronic ADD. The decision came like instinct. A moment later I found myself in the deli, in line, waiting to order. Fuck it. My “escape” could wait a moment. I’d grab a quarter pound, appetizer size – something to eat on the run…

And really, let’s face it – Where was I going? I wasn’t going to get in the car and drive off for the Left Coast. I’d do what I did every time I lost my mind at the office – get a cab home and sit in the living room, taking my pulse, catching my breath and reasoning with myself. You have to go back. Everyone hates it. That’s why they call it work. The problem isn’t the job – it’s you. The rest of the world suffers through this shit and you’re going to have to as well.

Serenity now… Serenity now…

I’d tell myself the same thing every time, something I knew all too well, from so many doomed “escapes” – all those frenzied midnight runs and frantic, pointless road trips that had gone horribly, hideously wrong. All the times I’d thought the answer was in distance, speed and movement – a simple matter of placement, stumbling on a magic “elsewhere.” And all the times I’d learned… Running just to run is running in circles. Or running in place, maybe, depending on how look at it. Either way, you wind up at the same finish line.

* * *

The first “escape” fiasco I remember was in college, sophomore year. A bunch of us were sitting in a room in the fraternity house, bored and restless, facing another dead Thursday night. Same beer, dope and people – another keg party in the basement, repeating the tired drunken ritual we followed every night. Looking back now, that seems like Nirvana, a moment most of us would give a finger to have again. But then, there, as crazy as it sounds, the scene could get routine, like you were living in an endless loop of reruns. There was the same music – that constant hum of “Jessica” or “The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys” pouring out of the basement stereo.¹ The same beer – $30 kegs of Milwaukee’s Best, frequently warm or skunked. And all the same women – the ones you’d already tried and failed to hook up with, hooked up with and didn’t want to hook up with again or knew would never, ever, under any circumstances hook up with you. We needed something different, a totally new scene. That or a distraction, something to occupy the mind – a quest, challenge or competition of some kind.

“I know this chick named Amy. She goes to ________________.” My friend Chris yanked a cigarette out of his mouth, sat up from the couch and pressed the mute button on the television. “I sort of hooked up with her over Thanksgiving break at home. We should road trip there.”

“_____________ University?”

“No, the _______________ meat packing plant. I hear it’s a got a great tour. What other _________________ would I mean but the college?”

“That’s like two hours away.”

“No it’s not.” Chris reminded me I hadn’t majored in Geography. “It’s an hour, maybe an hour and quarter.”

“She have any friends?” My buddy Martin lifted his eyes from a magazine.

“She’s cute and she lives with a bunch of friends. They’re probably cute.” Chris picked up the cordless phone. “I’ll give her a call.”

Twenty minutes later eight of us were in the hallway, prepping for the trip. We had Chris driving half of us in his rickety old Volvo and another brother, Randal, taking the other half in his rusted, mid-80s Honda Accord.

“We need liquor for this.” Martin got straight to the important business. Most of us had been casually drinking beers. Stopping dead for any period of time would crater whatever thin buzzes we had. As any drinker can tell you – there’s no restarting a drunk. Break the steady flow of fuel – give the brain and liver a moment to regroup, build up a tolerance – and your buzz is shot for the night.

“Jagermeister.” Chris snapped.

“Not in my car.” Randal laughed. “We’ll have Beam.”

“I don’t give a fuck what you drink, but I’m not drinking that shit.”

“Jaegy? Your pussy hurt?” And so the battle was joined… There were two types in the fraternity – people who drank bourbon and the people who didn’t. Chris’ liver had the proof of a bar towel, but he never drank bourbon, and that was a sore spot with some. The house worshiped bourbon, viewed it like a sacrament. Jagermeister was a novelty item, the sort of thing you kept around for visitors, sorority girls or someone’s silly younger brother visiting from Villanova… A sugary, seventy proof buzz for people who couldn’t handle real whiskey. Randal was a purist. He wasn’t drinking fortified cough syrup on a road trip.

“Fuck you. I don’t have to justify my choice of sauce. I can go round for round with you anytime.”

“Okay.” Randal laughed. “Let’s make a bet…”

Fifteen minutes later we were parked outside the liquor store, waiting for an older fraternity brother to bring out bottles of Jagermeister and Beam. “So here’s how it works.” Chris spread a map across the hood of his car and showed Randal the route to _____________. “First car there – with the bottle finished – wins a handle of whatever they want.”²

“Wins a sack!” Stuart, a member of the house’s “Baking Contingent” screamed from the back of Chris’s car.

“Don’t start that shit.” I had to cut off that debate before it gained any traction. Every fraternity has a “Baking Contingent,” that group of members who smokes twice as much dope as everybody else and reduces every transaction, conversation or house meeting to a discussion of how they might procure cheap or free weed.³ It was bad enough I found myself in the Jagermeister car. The last thing I needed was to suffer through an argument over first prize.

“You have a shot glass, right?” Chris handed me the bottle and jumped in the driver’s seat.

“You sure this is cold? I’m not drinking this shit warm.”

“Frozen to the core.” He backed out of the parking space and put the car in gear. “We called ahead and had them put the bottles in the champagne chiller.”

“The champagne chiller?”

“You know. That whirlpool thing filled with cold water that– What the fuck are you doing?”

“I’m pouring a shot.”

“We’re on fucking Main Street.” Chris shoved my hand down and pointed across the road. “The police station is right over there.”

“I thought we were in a hurry.”

“You notice the windows in this car? You can’t hold the fucking bottle in the air like that, like you’re working in a lab or mixing shit in chemistry class. Pour that shit down low.”

“Fine, but you don’t have to knock the bottle out of my hand. This stuff’s black. It stains.”

“Hey. Hey.” Stuart leaned in between the front seats, holding a lit bowl in Chris’s face. “You guys want to hit this?”

“Shit, man.” Chris waved off the smoke. “Wait till we’re out of the center of fucking town.”

“I think that’s the post office right there, Chris.” Martin coughed from the back seat. “The police station’s on the other side of the street.”

“Thank you. Thanks for that clarification.”

“We should have made it so the winner gets a sack.” Stu whined to Martin. “Think about it. A sack’s worth fifty bucks. What’s a handle cost? Twenty bucks? How’s that worth the effort?”

“It’s not about the prize.” Chris adjusted the rear view mirror. “It’s the principle of the thing.”

“Look. I have to be honest.” We hadn’t even made the bridge out of town when I realized we had serious problems. “I have issues here. I don’t think I can do this.”

“Too late now…” Chris laughed and crushed a cigarette butt in the ashtray. “You’re in.”

“There’s no way I can pour shots like this. The potholes alone are killing me.”

“You sure you don’t want to hit this?” Stu’s bowl re-appeared in my face, this time from the from the window side of my seat, as though that little added distance – the two and half foot difference between him handing it to me from that angle and passing it up the middle – would somehow hide the transfer from Chris’s gaze.

“With what?” I had the bottle in one hand and a half full shot glass in the other. “My foot?”

“The car doesn’t have cup-holders?’

“For liquor bottles? Square liquor bottles?”

“So you don’t want to hit it?”

To be continued…
———-
¹ Low Spark and Brothers and Sisters being the last remaining tapes that hadn’t been stolen or destroyed.
² “Handle” – 1.75 liter bottle, named for the glass handle usually affixed to its side.
³ Officials in the house routinely won the Contingent’s vote on governance issues by earmarking initiatives with promises of free sacks for them.