In the American West

an essay for Ann

http://girlfromthenorthcountry.wordpress.com/

That morning we woke early–although later than we meant to–and checked out of the motel. It was a terrible motel, really: our room's only decoration was a paper plate thumb-tacked above the bed. The paranoid man from next door stared out his window at me with his wide, bloodshot eyes while I sat in the car waiting for Richie to take a picture of the El Rancho Motel sign. The man had taped a paper American flag to his window and its corners were beginning to curl and yellow. I sat in the car with the sun too warm on my legs and wondered about the man's patriotism. If I was a middle-aged black man and addicted to drugs or sick with some disease or both and lived in some motel forty years past its prime, I’m not sure I would clip and tape up flags. But I don’t tape up flags now.

We left Barstow and drove through more desert until, suddenly, we were in the city. Los Angeles is insulated by fat, yellow layers of suburbs. We drove past town after town a wide gray interstate choked with cars. Our trip down Rt. 66 seemed over already somehow, over because we were a thousand years removed from the narrow red ribbon of Oklahoma and the squint-eyed desert of Arizona and all the other places where we could somehow see the past flash past our open windows. Instead we were in some repeating Scooby Doo chase scene of big box stores and restaurant chains. And there were palm trees. Palm trees are never real to me. I can hardly understand that people plant palm trees in their yards like I’ve planted maple trees to grow and become part of the land familiar. Palm trees belong in someone’s movie fantasy scene. Here in California they grow in fat clumps alongside shopping centers like those "what’s wrong with this picture" game in Highlights magazines.

We planned to eat at our first chain restaurant of the trip, to ease back into modernity with a stop at the world’s first McDonalds. Richie was maybe dreaming of a Big Mac, but mostly I just wanted one of those huge, too-sweet diet Cokes I buy on shame-filled and frequent morning McDonalds runs. We had to drive around a while only to discover it was only a museum. Dusty bits of McDonalds paraphernalia–first burger flipper, first Happy Meal box, the toys we both remembered playing with as children–were cluttered together behind glass. The museum is also the national headquarters of Pollo Loco, a Mexican-American fried chicken chain. Latina girls in baby blue poplin shirts typed fast and chattered into their headsets on one side of the building while we wandered down the aisles of the museum on the other. The bathroom was horrible: loose toilet seats and long streamers of finger-dampened papertowels hanging from the roll. There was a Mexican brand of dish soap sitting under the empty hand-soap dispenser. As we left the building, a homeless man was talking to the girl at the reception desk. I think he wanted something to eat, something from McDonalds. A girl was eating Cup O’Soup at her desk.

In the parking lot we met the young Italian couple from earlier in the trip. We met them in Oklahoma and several times after. We lost one another in Texas. They’d taken a side trip to Las Vegas while we were lingering across Arizona. But we found them, getting out of their beige Japanese car and squinting into the sun. We exchanged addresses while catching up on one another’s travels. Richie and I didn’t have addresses, not proper ones, so we wrote his older brother’s. The girl was beautiful in the way that European girls always seem to be, with careless hair and immaculately tousled clothes. Her English was shy.

We drove on to San Bernadino where we stopped for Mexican food at a little spot that bore the familiar red and blue sign marking Rt. 66 landmarks. The place had been there since the fifties or so and remains a family business. Our booth was covered with cracking brown Naugahyde. A busboy massaged the shoulders of an elderly woman as she took orders from a nearby table. I think she called him grandson, in Spanish. The employees shouted back and forth to one another in loud staccato voices, like the exchange of playful slaps. Our pony-tailed waiter talked to us about motorcycles and Rt. 66 and the restaurant’s planned remodel. We ate and ate. And, then, I ate some more. I decided I could never eat Dallas’ mediocre Tex-Mex again in good conscience after so much amazing Mexican food. I sweated and coughed and swore and wiped my eyes over the salsa.

We sweated through more suburbs, including San Dimas. In San Dimas we stopped to stare at the city limits sign and shout "We! Are! Wyld Stallyns!" and stage conversations about So-crates like in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Our list of attractions promised us ice cream, but we never found any. We did find, however, that California seems to invite one pop culture reference after another.

Los Angeles was a peculiar sense of deja-vu. Maybe I’m the only person in the world who’s never wanted to go to California, but I’ve never liked the idea of hard plastic breasts and 75 degree winters and Lego pad lawns maintained by quick men in neon tee shirts. I’ve seen it all before, haven’t I? On tv and movies and things? Haven’t we all been to our imagined California a dozen times over?

We passed through Beverly Hills and Bel-Aire, and they were smaller and less fabulous than I expected from tv. Sometimes when I’m far away from someone I love I imagine them, I see them in my mind. In real life, they always prove to be less attractive than I imagined them, and their heads seem frightenly small when we meet again because for so long I’ve seen only their faces. All the famous places were like that. The bars and rock clubs I’d seen in magazines, everything.

There were beautiful old women in shoes with rundown heels waiting at bus stops, and boys with thin chests chasing one another down streets. They tilted their heads to look at the bright sky that shows between the buildings.

We got stuck in rush hour traffic and had to make a thousand phone calls to the friends we were meeting at Santa Monica Pier. In the meantime, I called my parents and my sisters and everyone I knew to say I was in LA and looking at the Beverly Hilton or the Hollywood sign or someone potentially famous idling their Mercedes in at the light next to me.

We finally made it to the road’s end in Santa Monica. We shouted and hugged each other hard. We made it, we screamed, we made it. We drove Rt. 66 from Chicago to LA. We did it. I don’t know what I was expecting to feel, but I didn’t feel it, whatever it was. I just wanted a cold drink on this hot, hot day and to go to the bathroom. We parked the car several blocks away.
I went to the worst toilet in the Western Hemisphere: no doors on stalls, no toilet paper, no soap, and a long line of women and girls tapping their sandaled feet on a floor that was wet with piss and sea water. Outside the air was wet with the salt and sweat and fishguts smell of the beach, and I was happy to breath it in.

We took pictures of the brass plaque marking the end of Rt. 66. It was small and forgotten. A friendly woman took our picture and welcomed us to LA. She actually said "Welcome to LA," as if it were really her town. She didn’t seem to appreciate what we had accomplished, as if we’d simply driven from Chicago because we were too poor or cheap or young to fly. Richie kept trying to explain to her in his high, excited voice what an amazing thing we’d done, what amazing things we’d seen.

That night we ate with friends in a fake ‘60s diner after wandering too long in the sun and through the sanitary carnival lights of the pier.

All of that was months ago. I’m in Dallas and Richie’s in Boston. I don’t know what I was looking for as we drove Rt. 66, some glimpse of America maybe. We had a burned cd we named "Rt. 66 Jukebox," and I’d insisted we include Simon and Garfunkle singing about going to look for America while counting cars on a turnpike. I was looking that America that’s more real that sentimental artwork or flag-waving partisan politics or bad foreign policy or re-runs of all my favorite sitcoms, the America I could use to suss out my identity, to give shape to my soul. I hoped I’d find clarity for a million things and maybe a sense of closure with Richie. Or, let’s be honest, I hoped we’d get back together and decide to love each other until we were too old to remember one another’s names, and our vacations and arguments and pets and children were as faint in our minds as the Golden Books we were read as children. None of these things happened, of course.

Today I was reading a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s miscellaneous writings and found this quote about a couple of travelers:

They rode through those five years in an open car with the sun on their foreheads and their hair flying. They waved to people they knew, but seldom stopped to ask for directions or check on fuel, for every morning there was a gorgeous new horizon and it was blissfully certain that they find each other at twilight. They missed collisions by inches, wavered on the edge of precipices, and skidded across tracks to the sound of the warning bell. Their friends tired of waiting for the smash and grew to accept them as sempiternal, forever new as Michael’s last idea or the gloss on Amanda’s hair. One could almost name the day when the car began to sputter and slow up: the moment that found them sitting in a Sea Food place on the water-front in Washington; Michael was opening his letters, his long legs thrust way under the table to make a footstool for Amanda’s little slippers. It was only May but they were already brown and glowing. Their clothes were few and sort of pink in general effect like the winter cruise advertisements.

I have no particular sense of myself in space, of the dimensions my body occupies. Most days I fancy myself the tallest person in the room, but other times I shut up like a telescope. Sometimes, with someone’s arm around my stooping shoulders, I’m sure I’m as small as I was at five years old. The picture I carry now of Rt. 66's ending and the endings that traveled with us is of me and Richie against the bright wash of sea and sky. He’s smaller even than he is, and I am smaller still. Two nearly indistinguishable blots of brown skin and hair and dusty clothes, one a little bigger than the other, lost in all that blue.

Fall 2005