Week 2
I was on the road again. Not
zooming, not roaring, not flying over an endless expanse of black asphalt. No,
I was literally on the road, stuck in
Alabama, standing motionless, staring at the hole that was forming in my
once-white-now-dirt-colored Chuck Taylors. I tried not to feel the pale blue
eyes peeking out through the blinds of the gas station window burning a hole in
the back of my sweater. I tried not to feel the droplet of sweat crawling down
my neck. For a moment, I tried not feeling anything at all, but those piercing
eyes behind me told me that I needed to get out of this town. Quickly. I was
not welcome here. Slowly, tiredly, I wrenched my thumb up in the air once more.
Cars zoomed by, couples, truckers,
families of four neatly arranged like dolls in station wagons with chrome
wheels. Sometimes a face leered out the window to get a closer look at me, only
to recoil quickly. Finally, I made out an unusual sight through my dust-covered
glasses: a 1949 Hudson Commodore recklessly barreling towards me. The car slowed and came to a stop just a few
inches before my feet. Two young guys were in the front, and the one in the
passenger seat leaned out the window to say, “Hey kid, where you going?”
The driver chimed in, “Yeah kid,
where you going? And say, you wouldn’t happen to have any money on you, would
you?” His eyes had a crazy, unstable glint to them: you couldn’t tell if he was
about to scream or cry.
I mumbled, “Los Angeles. L.A., I
guess.”
“Shit!” the driver said. “We’re
headed up North. Frisco. That’s a hell of a distance. How about that money
though?”
“Dean, quit it,” the passenger
said. He appraised me with careful eyes. “Get in, kid. We’ll take you part of
the way.”
I looked back at the gas station,
and at the thick white man who leaned against the faded white siding, chewing
tobacco, staring at me fixedly. I slid in the back seat.
The passenger offered me an easy
smile as the car roared back to life. “I’m Sal. Don’t mind him—“ gesturing to
the man to his left, who had now turned his intense gaze to the road before
him, “he’s alright. What’s in L.A., anyways?”
“My mother,” I said quietly. Both
of them turned back to look at me. For a minute, there was silence. Then Sal
said, not taking his eyes of the road before him to look at me, “Your mother.
You’re going to see your mother. Dean, wouldn’t it be nice to go back? To the
very beginning, where we could rest? Isn’t that what we all want? I can almost
feel it. It’s peaceful. It’s kind of warm.”
Dean said nothing and tightened his
hands on the steering and stepped harder on the gas. “There’s nothing back
there. That’s not real. Only this, right now, this is real.” We sat in those
words for a moment until Dean relaxed and started to turn up the radio. The
dark, ragged mountains before us grew larger and larger, like claws reaching at
the setting sun.
What You Find Not Looking For Cowboys
ReplyDeleteI scrounge in my jeans pockets for the last couple of coins I have. The clerk is scowling at me through his handle-bar mustache, and I clumsily scatter the money across the counter. A nickel falls to the ground. The clerk swears and I try not to hear what he calls me.
As I start to bend down to pick up the coin, a woman’s hand beats me to it. A woman fully dressed in denim with her red curls tied up in a purple bandana hold out the coin to me, with a bemused smile.
“Here ya go kid. You be careful now,” she says with a drawl. She gets up from the ground slowly.
“Well that sight sure has made things better. Quite a specimen we have here,” the clerk says from behind the counter, with a soft whistle. “Say, why don’t you do that one again, little miss? I could do with a little show.” His mustache crooks up in the corner with a lewd smile.
The denim-clad woman stands still and stares at him. Her eyebrow twitches. “Excuse me, what did you just say to me?”
A lankier woman in a long white dress steps out from the chip aisle. “Louise, he ain’t worth it. He’s just your regular dumbass.”
The man straightened up, “Now I’ll say whatever I please and I’ll look at whatever I please and I’d say I’d like to get a closer look.”
Louise pulled out a revolver from the waistband of her jeans in a slick move like a studied cowboy. She walked slowly up to the counter, leaned over, and pressed the metal mouth of the gun up to his pink forehead. Holy shit, I think.
“Now, what did you say to me?” she said, voice unwavering.
Her companion nodded at me. “Kid, you better get out of here.” I looked at the ground as I quietly and slowly exited the store. I didn’t feel comfortable looking a woman in the eye for weeks.
See, when I finally made it out West, I never thought I could miss the South. How can you miss Jim Crow and separate bathrooms and wages you never touch and dirty looks wherever you go? How can you miss any of that?
ReplyDeleteI should be crazy happy. And mostly, I am. I've never felt so free in my life as I do out here in California. Being nobody is kind of liberating.
But being nobody can also be kind of empty. Back in Alabama, with my dad, at least everyone knew me. I had my cousins to hang out with, a church where I knew I could reliably get the daylights scared out of me every Sunday morning, real home-cooked food from my grandmother.
Here in Los Angeles I do have my mother, well, mostly, my mother's empty apartment. We're strangers. Everyone around us is either White or Chinese. Our food comes in plastic containers that we pull out of the freezer and stick into the oven. It comes out like the hospital food my grandfather ate before he died. We eat it straight out of the plastic trays.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to go back to the South and its Jim Crow ways. It just gets lonely out here in California where everyone walks fast, talks fast, smiles fast, and acts like you don't exist. Sometimes I just want to yell out for everyone to slow down, so that they might know I too exist.