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Tucson, Arizona
My head was throbbing.
Hands felt numb.
The lamp wouldn't turn on at its base and so I got up slowly and traced my hand along the wall, feeling for a switch.
Everything about the room I was in was giving me the creeps; black frames on the bureau with pictures of family I hardly knew.
I gave up on the light and dry swallowed another Vicodin.
I missed my apartment in Los Angeles and I missed my mother and father back home.
I'd done nearly seven-hundred miles that day, some of the hardest riding I could possibly imagine. It wasn’t even about the distance. I'd left from Hollywood at six in the morning only to hit a heatwave in the groin of Arizona; that evening Tucson was on record for the hottest day it'd seen in the last five years.
Sixteen hours in the saddle.
I shook the medicine bottle in my hand and tossed it back into my sack.
I was normally a pretty happy drug addict, when I wasn't suffering from a migraine and heat exhaustion. But that night Tommy and Co. had managed to bring out the worst in me. I thought despair wasn't anything that could surprise me anymore, but fuck me, he just wouldn't let me sleep.
So by the time he had shut the lights off on me, in the guest room he had probably spent all day prepping, I was already five pills deep. That's enough to shut off your respiratory drive. I mean, one could only hope.
"These fucking headaches," I whispered to myself, starring up at the ceiling fan, massaging my temples. I tried looking out the window but Tucson at night was a new kind of dark. There was a bump in the hallway and so I threw the comforter over my head, where my body temperature instantly went up twenty degrees. When I thought I was safe I got up and stripped down to just my boxers, opening all the windows as far as they would go. I found a garbage pail and put it alongside the bed and spent a little while trying to make myself puke. It felt like my teeth were sweating. I thought about all the books I had read on travel but there was no beauty in any of this. Real travel is suffer.
In the morning Tommy cooked me breakfast. It was the least he could do for how hospitable he'd been.
Did you sleep well? he wanted to know.
I still had a stomach ache from the heat, still had a hot pain where I'd burned my forearm on the gas-tank-made-skillet by the sun. Still had a migraine. I had put some lotion on my severely sunburned hands earlier that morning, something I had found beneath the sink in their bathroom. It smelled too bad to put any on my neck, even though my neck needed it the most.
I slept very well, I lied.
Tommy poured me some more coffee and went off on his own accord, showing me pictures of when he was younger, a lanky kid at home in Jersey. I recognized some of the landscapes from pictures my own mother had, in a shoebox beneath their television. Is that my aunt Joanie? I asked, pointing to a pretty girl in a raincoat with many belts. Tommy said it was, picking it up and studying it closely. He then grunted and said, Must have been Mercury in retrograde.
I had the sudden urge to call my mom and send her a distress signal via touch tone. There were footsteps and Sue walked up to the table behind us, wiping the sleep from her eyes. "Morning guys," she said, reaching for Tommy's coffee. She took a sip and yawned, and he patted her fondly on the shin.
I tried to eat but couldn't stop thinking about what a night it had been, arriving just before eleven o’clock and yet still they'd insisted on dragging me out to dinner. "Isn't it kind of late?" I'd asked, still perched on my motorcycle in their driveway, still wearing my helmet, still confused by their reception. My clothes were matted and smelled of a varsity locker room. I was six hours late and half excepting a note on the door to help myself in, everybody was asleep already. I couldn't feel my ass if you slapped it with a cricket bat.
Don't be silly. We haven't seen you in years!
I told Tommy and Sue about standing in the sprinklers with all my clothes still on, while waiting in line at the pump at some small gas station just outside of Brawley. I told them about the sand dunes in Yuma, about having to stop every fifty miles to fill my helmet up with water and soak my clothes in dirty bathroom sinks. Riding on a day like that was like holding a blow dryer inches from your skin, if it wasn't for the wind I swear you'd smell your hair starting to burn.
Sue said, You are looking a little red.
In Gila Bend I had started coming apart at the seams. At every gas station I stopped in I would tuck my shirt into my pants and tuck the ice dispenser under my collar, holding the button down until either the machine ran dry or someone gave me the boot, and I'd walk back out to my motorcycle with a chest like Bronson's and my neck turning blue.
But twenty minutes on the road was all it took, and I’d be bone dry again.
"Benji!"
I turned in my chair and smiled at Bridgette, still in her pink and yellow pajamas. I was dying to know what must have been going through her mind when her mother told me she'd been abducted by aliens, casual as a smoke break when we'd all been out to dinner the night before.
"Aliens like... Like illegal aliens?"
Tommy, eyeing the waitress suspiciously, leaned in close to me and whispered, "No, Benji. Like that which does not originate from Earth, aliens."
And turning back to Sue he said, "Honey? Are you sure you're okay talking about this?"
I didn't tell them about the real reason I'd been so late, about my little visit to the emergency room once I had reached Tucson and could finally let my shoulders down.
Or about the IVs and the ice packs and the cute young nurse who kept calling me her sweetheart, and kissed me on the cheek when nobody was looking.
"So you've thrown up— How many times by now?" the doctor had asked. But I was still too confused to answer him. It's a wonder how I had ever managed to find the hospital to begin with. And it's a wonder I wasn't thrown in jail when I finally did.
I'd driven my motorcycle straight into the waiting room.
“That was some bar we went to,” I told them, trying to participate.
Bridgette asked me about what it was like to live in Hollywood, if I’d seen this celebrity or that celebrity. I told her about working on set and eating lunch next to Milla Jovovich as if Milla Jovovich had known she was eating lunch next to me.
Do they buy their own groceries? she wanted to know.
I told her just about everyone bought their own groceries.
“You see them all the time when you’re out food shopping, depending on where you go. They’re kind of like wildlife, and Los Angeles is kind of like the zoo.”
A line from Eddie Griffin came to mind and I smirked into my mug.
Don’t fuck with me, and I won’t fuck with you.
That second night I fell asleep in record time, and dreamt of everything I had no desire to dream about.
I woke up at four in the morning with sweat puddled beneath me and my jaw locked, torn from the act of falling.
Another headache was scouting its prey from the shadows of my room.
The fan was on its highest setting and all I could think was,
Fuck. Me.
I couldn’t bear another one. I couldn’t bear the very thought of it.
My heart started racing and I heard my doctor’s voice, Prevention is key.
I took two Vicodin and tiptoed out to the freezer in the kitchen, pulling out the ice trays as gently as I could. It took me a good long while but I finally found a ziplock bag. A glass of water for the road. Two Advil on top, just because there happened to have been a bottle sitting around.
Twenty minutes later I was writhing on the floor with my head in the toilet, dizzy from how shallow I was breathing. Tears were running down my cheeks and mixing with the snot. I shoved another finger down my throat and heaved. Tommy knocked on the door to the bathroom but I turned the shower on and apologized over the sound of it, telling him I was an early riser. I was trying to remember how many pills I’d taken on top of the pills I’d taken already.
“Not a worry, Benji!” Tommy yelled, cheerfully. “I’ll get us some breakfast cooking!”
I listened to him walk off. I got angry at the pain, as I did sometimes.
I slammed my fist into my forehead repeatedly and I probably thought about killing myself.
There was no mercy.
There wasn’t so much a lull.
On the ride back to Los Angeles I took my time, sticking to the far right, taking exits just for the sake of it.
I felt no heat because it was dark and ominous and beautiful. In the desert on the shoulder I could barely see my hand in front of me, but I saw 10,000 stars burning brighter than a child’s eyes at their first touch of snow.
I spent nearly an hour lying on my back on a bench in a rest area just shy of Indio.
I felt born again.
And then it was morning.
I stopped on an overlook and took my helmet off. The air smelled clean and there were strangers wanting to make sure I wasn’t too tired. Children were in their car seats wiping the sleep from their eyes and my engine ticked in the distance.
There was a tiny, brisk breeze that made me shiver and so I laughed, smiling into the sun and thinking, This is hardly what I’d imagined.
Brooklyn, New York
Johnny called me up one Sunday morning and said the German would buy my CZ.
"Five-hundred cash, today," he said.
I asked him who the German was.
My mind flashed back to Seligman and a backpack too heavy for my own good. Johnny told me, The crazy one, and I asked, The peeping Tom with the strawberries in his teeth? No, the other crazy one, he said.
"I'll have to meet him someday," I replied.
"It doesn't have a title," Johnny reminded me a week later, when I was on my fire escape in Bed-Stuy, eating rice from the sushi joint I frequented below my apartment. “Plus Sarah just found out she’s pregnant again, so who knows when I’ll have the time to—”
I winced as the Shabbat sirens started going off, shoving a finger in my ear. I yelled back, "Does that really matter?!"
Johnny asked me which part, the title or the pregnancy.
Tiny children with suits and side locks were running giant circles, yelling through a toy megaphone on the patio below me. I peeked over the railing and emptied what was left of my water bottle on their heads. In the killing humidity they threw their arms in the air and shouted for more, rejoicing from what the sky had brought.
"Fuckers," I said, shaking my head.
Johnny asked me what I was talking about and I said, My people.
The sirens finished with the last of their song, the elevators began stopping at every floor. I asked about old plates, registering out of state. Johnny laid out my best case scenario; I'd be redlining her at forty in the slow lane on 78, with half a gallon left by the time I hit green. I told him I'd have to think about it.
"I'll let the German know you'll be in touch," he said, hanging up.
"I mean, what do you want with a motorcycle you can't sell?" I shook my head, I couldn't have this conversation again. Motorcycles, of all the things I needed to bring up. "Now is there anything I should bring with me into the city when I come?"
I told my mom no, then yes, then asked her if she had an old iron lying around anywhere.
"Well can I borrow it?"
"Yes, but only if you call Johnny back and agree to sell that God forbidden thing."
There was a noise from the bathroom, my bathroom, a crash and the sound of Ethan cursing. I punted my bedroom door shut and locked it, safe again from the World's Worst Roommate.
"Don't you have anything you're sentimental about?" I asked her, stepping back out onto my fire escape.
"Yeah," she replied, shifting the phone on her shoulder. "The space I used to have in my garage."
I could hear her in the background, probably in the laundry room already, digging around for the last thing on earth I had yet to ask her for. My stomach grumbled. It wasn't but ten in the morning and yet I could taste my sweet ginger already. "Found it," she said. My mother loved me the way I loved sushi; she showered me with favors the span of every flavor.
"Well what if I could get it down into the basement somehow?"
"The same way you got it down from your apartment in Hollywood?"
Well played, mom.
“How do you even know about that?” I asked her, baffled as was usually the case by the things she knew. I had violent flashbacks of strewn about whiskey bottles, of Alicia with a cigarette in her mouth, of that motorcycle crashing down my staircase, with me on board.
“You called me the next morning, remember?”
I didn’t.
"Panicking because you were so hungover, and had that whole moving truck still to pack?”
I grunted.
“You should of left it in Los Angeles,” my mom said.
I sighed and told her, And I should have left myself, too.
“It’s a 175, ’76,” I told the man on the phone, Caller Unknown. “I bought it a couple years ago in Arizona, when I was riding my motorcycle across the country.” The man on the other end whistled and said, I’ll be dammed. “Yeah,” I replied. “And it’s been a pain in my ass ever since.”
“You know, I’ve always wanted to do that,” he said, almost like he was asking me.
I told him, It’s never too late, and he said, Unfortunately my wife would disagree.
And so we talked, and we talked, and we talked.
And I told him all about the motorcycle I had placed for sale in the local want ads, about what a sight it had made to the guy I was then, parked on a lawn by itself alongside old Route 66. I told him about the son of the owner whom I had met with in San Diego two months later and about how it had looked then, strapped down in the back of his pick up truck. A little less flashy, quite a bit more frowzy.
I told him about carrying it up the stairs and into my apartment, about how much you could accomplish when you were inherently complacent to the results. It had sat there leaning against my fireplace for months while the bird’s nest I’d pulled from the airbox sat on the mantle above it, and my cat went crazy for days.
“But it doesn’t run, huh?”
“Well, now that’s where all the fun comes in.”
I wasn’t trying to sell him on anything, because I didn’t want to sell it to begin with.
He asked about the title and I told him, You could get two for the price I’m asking. I just didn’t have the patience to.
“How’d you get it over here from California?”
“In a big box truck, that I drove.”
The man whistled again.
“You’ve been around the block some, huh?”
“It’s not as bad once you get into the mood some,” I replied.
The man laughed and I said, Let me guess. Unfortunately your wife would disagree.
Maddox finally called me back on the first of April.
He didn’t want it either.
“Well what about your girlfriend?” I asked him. “Your baby nephew? Your fourth grade math teacher? For Christ’s sake man, help me out here.”
“I wish there was something I could do,” he said, as if he actually owed me something.
I closed the window in our living room, brushed the ashes from our couch and then sat down. I wish Johnny would stop getting his wife pregnant and let me keep it stashed in his garage for another year, I said.
“And spend his every free minute trying to get it running again.”
Like any good friend would, Maddox agreed.
There were sirens in the distance, a prolonged wail that slowly grew in intensity and then a fire engine flew down Bedford in the wrong direction, and just like that, it was loud again.
“Well I can’t talk long,” he interjected. “I’m teaching a workshop in Williamsburg at eight, if you’re not up to anything.”
I thought about it for a second and then said, Maybe next time.
I wasn’t up to anything, but that was the point.
“Hey, Maddox. Remember as a teenager how satisfying it was just to sit around all night and not accomplish jack shit? Do the Buddhists ever talk about where that vaguely suspicious appreciation for life goes when we age?”
Maddox laughed.
“My friend,” he said. “They would have nothing to talk about if they didn’t.”
There’s something about clutter that feels very much like Christmas to a young kid without friends to substitute.
Growing up, I remember my parent’s garage.
And I remember the two Honda’s my dad kept buried in the back corner, under a tarp, with cobwebs for gift wrap.
“One of them was Ed’s, I think,” my dad said, pausing for a moment. “Jesus, yeah... It was Ed’s. He must have dropped it off there one winter and then probably forgot all about it. Yeah. Yeah, I remember them.”
I took another sip from my coffee.
I didn’t say anything. I just teetered with my chair on two legs, sharing the recollection.
“You at your place?”
“I’m on my balcony, yeah.”
“And school’s going well?”
“Halfway there,” I replied.
I listened to Ethan through my closed balcony door, my closed bedroom door, from down our long hallway and through his own closed door, laughing at anime.
My dad wanted to know, So what are you asking about them for?
“The motorcycles?”
“Yeah.”
I thought about it for a second and then asked him, If you guys were so busy with work, why didn’t you just sell them?
My dad thought about it for a second and said, You don’t break up a marriage just because you haven’t fucked in a couple months, do you?
And I laughed pretty hard at that.
And there were sirens and car horns and subways rumbling beneath the ground.
And yet I could still remember Arizona, fresh as yesterday, in this headache I’d grown to love.
Hollywood, California
It was raining the next morning, the morning after Amanda had passed away.
I remember waking up early and staring out my window, still in bed, tracing my hand along the glass, along the windowsill, over my mattress and under my sheets, searching desperately for anything to help distract me from the pain. A sensational feeling from a sensational touch, because sometimes waking up after a death feels a lot like an argument you still believe you can win. And sometimes it feels a lot like you’ve been born again. And sometimes it feels like everything you’ve ever known has been a lie, so you say Fuck it, let’s just start over from scratch.
And so I plucked at my skin like a baby learning his grip, but there was nothing, really.
I got out of bed and cried in the shower, on the floor, until the water ran cold.
I was supposed to be in Torrance by nine.
I made a cup of instant coffee and sat hunched over on the couch in my living room, listening to the rain land, until eight-fifteen. Then I threw on my makeshift uniform and ran down to my motorcycle in a frenzy, because I was going to go through with it.
It’s what she would have wanted, I told myself. The 101 to the 110 to the 405. Closing my eyes and screaming into my helmet, swerving aimlessly and cutting lanes at 60 mph, aiming for puddles and coming apart from the road.
I pawed at my visor and pushed it to seventy and felt the pain of a thousand tiny pins as they pricked at my cold, bare hands, and I let loose from the throttle and brought my fist down like a hammer against my thigh, cursing at myself for how little I’d been through, and how quickly she’d gone.
There were drivers at the lights next to me who could see my shoulders bucking.
At the base I parked my bike and took my jacket off and then my shirt, wringing it out and then stretching it back into shape. I saw where the rigs were parked, the crews in parkas who were checking their gear out, complaining about the weather.
I came on a motorcycle, I told the man from dispatch. “I’m here for my ride along,” I said. He gave me a once-over and flashed his eyebrows, swiveling in his chair to share his face with some lady sitting behind him.
“You from Geffen?” he asked me, and I replied, Yes.
“And they didn’t mention to you anything about the rules we have, I’m assuming?”
I made a face and he made face and I said, “Look, I know you’re hinting at something, but I don’t know what.”
Another crew came walking up behind me, and he stood up and leaned heavy on his desk and handed them a radio over my shoulder.
“Be safe out there, guys,” he said, turning away, and when I rapped my knuckles he gave me a sharp look and said, “You’ve got ten minutes to shave, or you’re going to have to reschedule.”
At the 7/11 I started crying again, asking the cashier which aisle they kept the razors in.
He gave me a sad look and said, “Second aisle, on your left,” and I sprinted there and sprinted back, too panicked on time to remember to grab some shaving cream as well. I paid for the razors and the razors alone, I got back on my motorcycle and it was raining even harder by then. I thought about Jenny as I kicked the engine over, crying in her arms in my apartment the night before, my hands bloody, every image of myself shattered.
Back at the base and in the bathroom, where I scraped away at my face in a panic, my chin and cheeks and jawline bleeding like they did back when I’d first started learning how to shave as a teenager in heat. A stocky guy was eyeing me up in the mirror, washing his hands a sink over as I nicked myself again, cursing under my breath. I asked him for a paper towel to hold up against my neck and laughed nervously when he handed one over to me, trying to play the whole thing off. I spent the last of my ten minutes locked in the stall farthest from the door, trying desperately to get my hands to stop shaking.
The bathroom stall reminded me of my bathroom at home, which reminded me of my apartment and so again of Jenny, sitting on the couch next to me, telling me everything was going to be alright.
We’d ended up going out to see a movie later that night.
I guess I was in shock, maybe.
It was a comedy but I didn’t laugh once. Jenny held my hand and all I kept thinking about was how embarrassed I’d felt with her seeing my place like that, broken glass on the floor, the corners reeking of cat piss. Interspersed with the constant reminders that Amanda was dead, of course. Paul Rudd was talking dirty to himself in the mirror.
Three years later and I can’t remember a single other scene.
They parked the rig in a lot outside of some grocery somewhere. I was sitting by myself in the back of the ambulance still dabbing at my neck with bits of tissue paper, while the crew I was riding with sat up front, talking about what a dick the captain who we had bumped into on our last call was.
The one in the passenger seat turned over his shoulder and said, “So not bad, kid.”
I kinda shrugged to myself and said thanks, knowing I hadn’t done much. For months of training, all anyone could think about was what their first call would be like. An hour later and I was already having a hard time trying to remember our patient’s face, or what they had called us for in the first place.
“You just need some more experience,” said the guy in the driver’s seat, looking at me through the rear-view mirror. “But you’ve already got the touch.”
When she’d first been diagnosed, almost a year to the day before she’d passed away, I was still living on the couch at Adam’s and Nick’s, still going for long walks by myself in the cemetery down at the end of our street, still grabbing coffees with a guy named Zoom Zoom late at night out front of the Starbucks on Gower. I was still composed almost entirely of sleepless nights and restless thoughts. I was still riddled with anxiety. And then suddenly Amanda was sick, but still an angel to me.
Ryan and Michelle plays in the rain
Bell Rock, Sedona
I said, Man, I don't think I can do this.
Carey looked down at me, smiling the way I expected his esoteric ass might; like a criminal who walked. I came from a place where it seemed almost disingenuous to be happy, and so far I was having a hard time buying into his act. That I had known him for hardly an hour by that point had little if anything to do with it.
I asked him, Aren't you scared right now?
He shook his head no and pointed out a branch for me to grab ahold of, and I did as I was told and was able to ascend another six inches higher. He whispered, Now don’t forget to thank the tree for its help.
I turned back around and said, Thank you for your help, tree.
I had come a long way from eating meat and supporting military intervention.
“But no, really. How are we going to do this?”
I wanted to know. I needed to know.
Carey laughed.
“The same way we’ve made it this far already. With harmony, between body and spirit.”
He slapped me on the shoulder as if to say, Try and keep up, kid.
It was a beautiful view, of course. I really didn’t have anything to complain about. I was young, still in my twenties, and living in a city I had spent the better part of my life only dreaming about. And when I needed to get away for a little while, I did. I had a motorcycle and the entire state of Arizona for a neighbor. And now I had Carey, too.
And so we climbed higher, and higher, and higher...
“So is this your first time visiting Sedona?”
“Actually, more like my sixth or seventh. In the last year, that is. You?”
“First time,” Carey said, laying down on his belly and giving me his hand. It took everything I had, but I made it over the hardest lip yet. He brushed his stomach off, pointing upwards and to the left. “That’s our best shot, I think.”
“First time to Arizona, too? Or just here.”
“Just here, surprisingly. And now I’m thinking I might never leave.”
I knew the feeling well.
Sedona was just about the most beautiful place I had ever seen before. I was still trying to get used to it, to be honest.
We made it another twenty feet higher, Carey telling me all about how his wife had recently left him, and how he had since dedicated himself to clearing his chakras out and winning her back. In the past month alone he had quit his job and traveled some 2,000 miles, pursuing the type of knowledge that only traveling can bring.
“A spiritual advisor in Phoenix told me that my Sacral region is a mess, my second chakra. And here I was this entire time, wasting time with my first. That had been my first mistake, looking back on it now.”
He held one hand just above his navel and the other just below his genitals, and I nodded in response.
“It’s where desire originates from, our sense of pleasure, our sexuality...”
“Oh,” I replied. Well I guess that makes sense.
“And so the first thing I need to do is make peace with the fact that she left me.”
I asked him how all of that had been going so far, and he made a face as if to say, Some days you’re the tire, some days you’re the toad.
When we had made it about halfway up Carey took his pack off and hid it behind a bush, tucking it into a tiny recess there. My pack weighed more than I did and I had been carrying it with me the entire time, because motorcycles don’t have trunks. He ensured me it would be safe there, and when I hesitated he said, Don’t worry, only mountain climbers take this approach.
So that was why people kept beating us to the top. I had simply thought that there must have been an elevator somewhere I wasn’t yet privy too. I had parked my motorcycle and started climbing in the direction most immediate to it, without so much as even trying to scope a trail out. Carey had stumbled upon me a couple minutes later, still very much at the bottom, struggling already. His confidence had become my dilemma.
So we’re on the wrong path then? I asked him.
Not necessarily, he said. Just a slightly harder one.
Harder as in you needed ropes and harnesses and chocks and helmets, the knowledge to tie knots appropriately and the strength to support your own weight in trying positions, all of which we had none. Carey had a bottle of water and I had my leather jacket tied around my waste, with a pack of cigarettes in the pocket.
I looked down and saw my motorcycle as a tiny speck in the distance, squinting to try and see if anybody had stolen my helmet yet.
“We’ll be alright,” Carey said, and surprisingly enough, I realized we would.
I reminded myself to just breathe.
Carey made a short dash up a steep crag that seemed nearly vertical in appearance, and I nearly tripped in the scree that rained down on me. He did a convenient muscle-up over the next lip and looked back to make sure I was keeping up. I took a knee, spitting the dust out of my mouth.
“You’re going to have to help me with this one too,” I said, wiping the sweat from my brow.
There was a rusted piton Carey jumped to try and get ahold of with his bare hands, because it seemed like the only option we had left. We had been pacing the same twenty feet of ledge for the last ten minutes or so, had tried a wide array of grips but none were promising enough to entrust our lives to. The ledge was just wide enough to stand on, too narrow to catch us should we fall. I was still having a hard time wrapping my head around how we had made it this far in the first place.
Carey frowned, staring up at it. I wasn’t exactly sure what he would’ve done with the piton even had he been able to reach it. It was rusted and sharp looking and I’m pretty sure requiring a rope of some sort. We had half a bottle of water left, three cigarettes and a camera, but definitely no rope. I had checked. We had been on the mountain for three hours, by that point.
“Listen,” he said, taking a telltale breath. “Don’t panic, but I think the only way out of here is up.”
I tried retracing our steps but couldn’t, agreeing with him.
Like two kittens stuck in a tree, we had raced to the highest limb without the slightest idea on how to get down back down again. You can’t crawl in reverse, was our real problem.
“So what’s the plan?”Carey said worse comes to worse, they would just have to helicopter us out of there. He said they did it all the time, hikers were always getting stuck up on Bell Rock. I said, I thought this was your first time here? and he said, Well, I’ve heard stories.
And so we spent another couple of minutes like that, palming the flat rock and rejoicing in the fact that we weren’t at risk for hypothermia just yet.
Surprisingly, I was the one who thought we should go for it.
“Carey, what about just following this ledge out a little further?”
There was a reason we hadn’t made such an attempt already, but I was cold and hungry and over it.
Carey raised his eyebrows at me and said, You sure?
Yeah, I said. So long as I can remember to keep my mouth shut and not sneeze, I should be fine.
Carey smiled in approval and slapped my arm again, telling me to follow his lead.
“Just stay calm,” he said. “And remember, don’t look down.”
I pressed my forehead up against the rock, sidestepping my way along as the ledge weaned itself narrower and narrower, to a point where my heels were nearly even with the lip.
We were a couple hundred feet up. I was awfully sure I was going to have a heart attack.
My hands shook as I traced them from one pinch to the next, having to crimp my fingers in some spots.
We made it a couple yards out before Carey stopped, looking over his shoulder at me. He nodded, tellingly. We had reached the bees.
“We’re here with you, bees,” is how he went about it.
They darted from their hive and pinged off his chest, Carey simply repeating himself, I’m here with you, bees. I’m here with you.
I had never spewed so many curse words in a single go.
“Relax,” Carey said.
“I’m trying,” I replied.
I shuffled another step, closing my mouth, closing my eyes, too. I felt them hitting me like a pellet gun, I cringed with a steady groan in the back of my throat and Carey said, Just keep going kid, you’re almost there. I heard the buzzing loud in my ear like a rumble strip as if I was strapped to the undercarriage. I was convinced the first one to sting me would send me tumbling over the edge, but miraculously, none of them did.
When it was safe to breathe Carey hugged me. I hugged him back, smiling in disbelief. He hugged me a little too long and I subtly dipped out of it, looking back in awe on the pass we had just made.
“I can’t even believe it,” I said.
Carey winked and said, You don’t need other people to hold you up anymore, as if he had known me my entire life.
I slapped him five and said, Hell yeah, and slowly we ascended further on up into the heavens.
We met a man who I would later go on to call the Jew on the mountain. We found him sitting cross-legged on a peninsula of rock jutting out into the ethereal absolute. He told us he had quit his day job and moved to Sedona six years ago to the date, after a local travel agency had shown it to him on VHS and hustled him into booking a trip out there. It was the best thing that ever happened to me, he said. I asked him what it was he had been writing about in his journal there before we so rudely interrupted him, and he told me it was just his theories on the inner workings of cosmic fog and its relation to clandestine governmental time travel.
Carey whispered, Okay, time to go, and I waved goodbye to the Jew on the mountain.
We ran with the energy of kids up a slope as smooth as glass and then slid back down it on our stomachs, only because we were having that much fun. We climbed a little further, and then we made it to the top.
A couple gave us a curious look and the woman said, You came that way? A man in a white suit was conducting a ceremony of some sorts and a young girl was doing Pilates on a patch of smooth rock behind him.
A walk through the car wash couldn’t have wiped the smile from my face.
We had a three-hundred-and-sixty degree view from the top, I could have probably seen home and the Hollywood sign had the clouds not been in my way.
Carey handed me his camera and asked if I wouldn’t mind taking a picture of him. I turned around to put some distance between us and when I turned back again he was standing there stark naked, his clothes resting in a pile on the ground next to him.
I asked him if he was feeling alright and he said, Kid, I’ve never felt better.
“Out here, this is the only way to do it,” he said.
I raised the camera to my face and said, Say Sedona.
Rio Vista, Cali. Part II
Back in my tent and since I was up now, I emptied my rucksack out and dug around for the postcard I had buried there. I would write my mom a Mother’s Day card, and get it to her by Mother’s Day. I would read some. I would draw some more lines on my map to remind myself of how little progress I was making. I would make it as comfy as possible while my food sat there and got cold, because they had bathed it in cheese and I didn’t eat dairy.
“Fuck,” I said, staring down at my map, convinced I had fucked up somewhere. But I hadn’t. Sixteen miles since Tuesday. Our country looks smaller on paper. I flipped the map over and wrote some of that day’s happenings in the margins, because I was out of paper and didn’t want to forget anything.
The note to my mother was short but sweet. I wrote what most people probably wrote. I went back to it and added, Sorry your son is such an ungrateful, helpless bastard, but then crossed it out and wrote, I love you so much I had to write it twice! instead.
I sealed the envelope, and then the water hit me like a big wave.
Whoever was behind it, well they had pretty good aim. I got it right in the mouth at first, my cheeks puffing out and I had to fight against drowning the way I used to clench my teeth against the wind as a kid, hanging my head out the window going sixty miles an hour down the Garden State Parkway.
I didn’t know what was happening, of course.
I was calm enough to think, Well, this isn’t rain, but panicked enough to scream.
I screamed, and another stream hit me from the West. A couple more seconds and I would be getting it from every direction, simultaneously.
Still in my tent, everything around me was in the process of ruin. I could only see if I blinked rapidly, but even then I couldn’t blink fast enough and the water would sting my eyes, blinding me. I fell forwards onto all fours, mashing the burrito with my left hand and tearing my map with my right one.
I grabbed my knife and swore murder, but then thought the better of it and dropped it again. What happened to my tarp, I thought, but then remembered my fateful mistake; throwing it off after the guys had come around calling for me, wanting to see the moon through the vent instead. Wanting to be comfy.
The tent was taking on water by then, I still didn’t even know what was happening. My sleeping bag was soaked through and through, my clothes were matted to my skin. The map was ruined, so were my books and the card to my mother.
I gathered myself together and climbed out of my tent, looked around but there was only a shadowy figure standing on the cusp of the campsite limits. There were no hoses, no firemen, not a single engine company. Only sprinklers, and the ranger who stood there with his thumbs hooked in his pockets, laughing at me.
It was freezing outside. I grabbed the tarp off the ground and wrapped myself up in it, shivering. I was so fucked and desperate looking. I walked over to him and said, “Couldn’t you have just asked me to pay?”
He rocked from heel to toe like he had finally accomplished something great in life.
“Couldn’t you have just paid me up front, like you were supposed to?”
I walked over to where he was standing because the sprinklers were still on, the fuck.
“I’m going to have fucking pneumonia because of this.”
“Yeah, well...”
In the station he handed me a blanket, and pointed to a spot on the floor next to the bathroom.
“I piss like a racehorse,” he said. “Just to warn you.”
I asked him if he wouldn’t mind shutting the door when he went, then, as I was forever scarred to the sounds of fluid under pressure.
“Learned you a good lesson though, didn’t you.”
Yeah, I said. Next time, I’ll look for the sprinklers first.
Rio Vista, Cali. Part I
They were both wearing NASCAR shirts, the two of them, as their wives smiled and looked concerned. I glanced around at their campers, the bonfire, the dead, patchy grass. The first thing to cross my mind was how little we must have had in common. They waved me over, slurring their words and looking amused.
“Not from around here, huh?”
I told them I was from Los Angeles. Heading home to Pennsylvania, by way of San Francisco.
“On foot?”
“More or less.”
Their wives locked eyes with each other and I said, No, it’s not like that.
“I’m fine, I’ve got money. I mean- Well I didn’t mean it like that. I’m not homeless, is what I mean.”
“Yeah,” the man turning the corn chirped. “He’s just looking for some adventure! You’re just looking for some adventure, right?”
“Just looking for some adventure,” I replied.
We talked for a little while longer and then I retired back to my tent, back to the field behind the brush behind the only pitch tucked away and hidden from the rest, furthest from the entrance and the rangers who slept there. I would do everything I could to keep my thirty bucks, and sleeping there was everything. I zippered my tent shut and kneaded the ground out, padding myself against what couldn’t be moved. I had promised myself to be up and out of there by sunrise. I shut my eyes and laid my head down and laughed to myself, and said, Who’s kidding who.
My hair stood on end when I first heard them calling for me, at just a little past midnight. I bolted upright and grabbed my knife. I held my breath and listened for footsteps, so I could gauge how close they were to finding me.
“Buddy! Oh, buddyyyy!”
Why did they have to keep saying it like that?
Relax, I told myself. It’s probably just the rangers looking to chase you out of here.
I slipped the knife back into my boot and continued just sitting there, hoping they wouldn’t find me. A couple minutes passed by. Just give up on it, I muttered. Leave me alone, already.
“Buddddyyyy, we know you’re back there!”
Mind you, I was a couple hundred miles from anybody I knew, in a town I had never heard of before. It was dark outside, it was cold. I had no phone. I had last been camping sixteen years ago, and this wasn’t turning out to be the cakewalk I had thought it to be. Camping by myself scared the fuck out of me. And now I had a bunch of voices I didn’t recognize, ready to call me out on it.
A minute later, and it sounded like they were right on top of me. I thought about my bed in my apartment in Hollywood and unzipped the tent slowly.
Who’s there, I said, shielding my eyes from their flashlights.
I was still half asleep, I was shaking I was so damn scared. I heard laughter and the two bright spots grew closer. They must have seen how frightened I was, because when they got close enough they shined the flashlights back on themselves. They suddenly seemed awfully guilty about the entire thing.
Christ, it’s you guys, I said.
“Well, who’d you think it was?”
I shrugged and smiled, feeling like an idiot. I accepted their plate of food graciously.
“Beans, rice, sausage, it’s all in there,” Jerry said, the burrito hanging off of the plate on both sides.
“It got cold outside and the ladies got to feeling kinda bad for you, I guess,” said the other one, whose name I couldn’t remember. They offered me a beer but I politely declined.
“Well, sleep tight there.”
“Yeah, you watch yourself out in that brush there.”
I couldn’t thank them enough. I told them as much, and that I would swing by on my way out tomorrow to thank their wives in person.
I got caught up in a thorn bush on the way back to my tent. The night was surely dragging itself out, and the fun was only just beginning.
Leaving Los Angeles. August, 2014