The three-decade-old leather seats were cracked and discolored with sun-bleached striations. The foam rubber headrest was crumbling where it stood most exposed to rolled-up-window temperatures. I’d sometimes find bits of it in my hair at night, like oversized novelty dandruff. I’d cut out the ceiling upholstery somewhere east of Omaha. Creeping, two–dimensional stalagmites of rust clawed in miniature rusty fingers at the metal panels of the old Volvo wagon. The air conditioning had been fucked since just outside of Gary. The left rear window since the late 90’s. A lurid and half-peeled Jane’s Addiction sticker would sometimes reflect a sharp beam of sun into my eyes at inopportune moments. Mountain-pass switchback roads, mostly.
Heading west, every color outside that $900 stack of Swedish steel burst like the Fourth of the July. It seemed like my life was earth-toned and the entire earth was life-toned. When I’d glance down to pull the water-warped road atlas from my drab shoulder bag on the passenger seat, it’s like the universe would snap from Imax, Blue-ray vivid to sepia-toned nostalgia and back, just with the dip of my gaze. I was wrapped in an ocean of beige-volvo boring, but everything that waited beyond this car was color-fast floral-print wonder. Heading west, I only listened to music that I liked a decade too late. I spent three days cycling through cassettes from bins at the Village Discount on Milwaukee. Alice in Chains. That band with the Bumble-Bee-Girl in their video.
Taped to the driver’s-side pillar was a Polaroid instant with the words “Soon Enuff” swirled in an elegant but exaggerated hand across the white beam at the bottom. The image was dark and yellowed and candle lit. On the back, a stamp and an address and a postal-code. When I was almost there, sitting in insufficient-infrastructure traffic, I’d flick it nervously. When no one answered the door at the apartment at the address on the back, I’d tape it to the door handle and trusted in God and adhesive and fate. But for now, I’d just try to stay awake on highway-hypnotic stretches of American dreams. I’d listen to dead men sing and wonder if their children ever listened to their music. Where do the people who work in those little highway towns really live, anyway?
“I’m sure there’s nothing about you I don’t already understand,” she’d said, leaning away from me against a flat black barroom wall, “and I’m sure you already think I’m wrong.” I laughed and she just stared at me, with something almost not quite unlike a smile on her face. She handed her empty glass to a passing bar-back and wiped her hand on her jeans. She pressed a folded napkin into my left pants pocket.
“It’s okay,” she confided just an inch from my ear, “I don’t like surprises.”
I’d dream about her sometimes. Heroic, absurd dreams about the things she must do between Saturday nights. As alluring and marvelous as the real girl was, the dream-girl was more so. Almost too much. A person I would watch and forget it was me watching. Someone who spiraled through the world, part pretty pin-wheel, part errant table-saw blade careening through a place narrow on either side. I was driving to her as much to demythologize the dreams as I was to reclaim some remembered reality.
I drove through the crushing fauna and the crowd of mountains to the shore. Everything natural looks more natural by the ocean. Anything built looks worn out. The people all feel in between, caught in the preternatural saline air that lends one the gravitas of geology and the malleability of the weather. I took my shoes off and left the car unlocked. I meandered over rough pavement and across the sea wall, eventually settling into the coarse sand with my back to the oceanic wind. Tomorrow I would call someone and find a place to stay. Tonight I’d sleep on the beach and try to let the cold keep me from oversized dreams.
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