Traveling Music: Day 1

The first in a series from the road

There is a big damn difference between real life on the road and #livingthedream.

There are the obvious things: in real life, shit breaks, tires blow, nights get chilly, gas prices get jacked, snowbirds in million-dollar resorts on wheels roll up and block your view with their 'Murica flag, every dude who's ever so much as driven a Big Wheel gallops full-tilt over to your campsite soon as you pull in, desperate to help you back in your camper which you could literally do in the dark in your sleep because at this late date folks let's be real this is not your first time backing anything up, gas stations run out of coffee, gas station bathrooms have locks that don't work and then there you are, trying to piddle while standing on one foot with the other one holding the door closed like some kind of flannel-wearing flamingo, there are flaws to the system, you know? It's not a perfect gig.

The bigger difference, though, is easy to miss, and it's simple: this isn't everyone's dream.

Most of our dreams could never, maybe should never, come true. That's part of their beauty, part of their charm; they defy logic. They wave off the laws of the workaday world. Above all, they're selective; in the dream of road life, it's all freedom and beauty, all landscapes and sunsets and blazing campfires. It's never damp wood and shit weather and the dog throwing up in your lap while you drive. It's never the jackass lumbering along in the fast lane, it's never the three-hour detour down a rutted road that leads over a river and through a field and a forest and terminates abruptly in a mud puddle dead end. It's never the night you decide to splurge on a hotel and the clerk is so high she gives you two keys to an occupied room and your ten-pound attack chihuahua launches herself at the snarling Doberman who answers the door. It's never the gas station bathroom with the broken lock and the highly specialized skill set needed to take a one-legged leak.

Road life is the inverse of a dream. Dreams are comforting; in some ways, that's their purpose. They provide us with an alternate reality, a world to which we can escape, an imagined someday into which we can cast ourselves, a time when things are better, when the discomfort of now has been resolved into a softer, more agreeable then, when whatever it is that troubles us about the present moment has been fixed, or escaped, because we've fled into a future that, of course, will never arrive.

The road is neither comfortable nor comforting. It offers no ease. There's a shocking physicality to it: the heels of my hands are calloused and rough, my knuckles are covered with scratches and nicks, my shins and knees are banged and dinged, I'm always needing my body again for something, there's always something to fix or lift. There is no escaping the current reality for another; there's no later, there's nothing back then. There is an almost piercing sense of the present. Just as I am always aware of my surroundings, my safety, I am always aware of the moment and what matters in it: what's urgent, what's impending, what needs doing, what's happening, what needs to happen, what could go wrong.

The road is nothing but now. It is incessantly, constantly now. It is this, nothing more.

For example, I'm in a Denny's in Barstow. It's well after midnight. My eyes are burning from a day on the road, from the florescent 24-hour diner lights, from the dry high desert air, from the pollution that gives rise to the blood orange sunsets of which California dreams are made. Zeke's sleeping in the Scamp in the parking lot; I'm in a booth in the corner, facing the window that faces the lot so that when a car pulls up to the Scamp, as it will, and kills its lights, as it will, and slows to a roll while the driver looks to see whether the Scamp would be easy to lift, which it won't, because I'll see this happen, and I'll walk outside, and the driver will see me coming, and they'll roll out of the lot and into the slanting street-lit shadows of a Barstow night. From where I sit, I can see every car that comes and goes, and the darkened vacancy signs of three abandoned motels, and the car wash across the street, and the buzzing half-lit name of an auto parts store next door.

But mostly what I see is the window itself, the red reflected flicker—AUT  P  TS—across a haggard woman's florescent face.

Here's an instance: a woman with whom I was semi-involved long distance had concocted a plan whereby I would swing through her town and she would hop up in the shotgun seat of my truck and we'd tear off into the sunset and she could leave her real life in a cloud of dust and be freed of the house and the kids, the work and the bills, the worries and the weight of the choices she'd made, the burden of everything she'd ever wanted and now wanted to flee, which was, even on the face of it, ridiculous.

I said to her, That's ridiculous.

Why? she wailed. It'll be great. I'll look so cute in the shotgun seat. I'll make a playlist. Cowgirl, take me away, she sang.

You'll hate it, I said. It's messy. It's heavy. It's hard.

She wheedled. She batted her lashes. She laughed.

I said I'd stop by sometime on my way through town.

A few months, a few thousand miles later, I did; I stopped by. I hopped out of the truck. I opened the door of the Scamp and watched as she stepped inside and made that godawful girl-squealing sound.

Then she looked around, bewildered. "But, like," she said. "Where do you keep your stuff?"

"It's all in here," I said. "I’ve got everything I need." I locked up the Scamp, helped her into the truck, went around to the driver’s side and got behind the wheel. She sat there in silence. Then she burst out, "I just couldn't—I mean—how can—how do you—"

Finally, she looked at me, wide-eyed as a little girl.

"I have four walk-in closets," she said. "Full of things. I don't even know what's in them. I don't even know what I have." She laughed a strangely fragile laugh. “But I need it all.”

I put the truck in gear, and rumbled slowly down the quiet street lined with vast houses with manicured lawns, and took her to dinner, and made her laugh, and dropped her off a few hours later at her vast house with its manicured lawn and four walk-in closets crammed with things she couldn't possibly part with and didn't even know she had.

You got room in the truck? Front or back seat or bed? In a bin or a box or a bag? Which one, under which one, wedged between what and what? That's what I thought. Put it back.

I can't stand stuff.

What bothers me about stuff is its presence. Its sheer physical sprawl. The materiality of stuff: the density and mass, the gravity, the fucking weight, stuff is heavy, stuff takes up space. The thingness of stuff, that's what really pisses me off. There is stuff everywhere. There is so much goddamn stuff. It has no sense of scale. It cannot be smallerized or squashed, it takes up all the space it needs and then there it fucking is, grinning, spreading out in all directions, on the floor, the table, the counter, the top of the toilet, the back of the couch. It accrues and accrues. It gathers when you're not looking. It expands geometrically to fill all available space.

Real life, on the road, is an economy of scale. It's a life designed to fit in small spaces. It's compact and it's light; there's no dead weight. There isn't room for extra stuff, superfluous stuff, stuff that doesn't fit right. Stuff weighs you down, slows your roll, lowers your gas mileage. I have crossed a six-lane freeway on a Friday at rush hour in Houston for the sole purpose of tightening my tonneau cover because it was catching a teeny-tiny bit of wind and dropping my mileage by .35 mpg and I'll be damned if I'm going to haul more goddamn stuff. Stuff is heavy. Stuff creates drag.

Many of my internal conversations run roughly thus: Do you need it? Where you gonna put it? In the Scamp? Where's it gonna fit? That cupboard's full. Nope, that one's for the other thing. Not there, either—it's perfectly packed, don't fuck it up. You got room in the truck? You sure? Front or back seat or bed? In a bin or a box or a bag? Which one, under which one, wedged between what and what? That's what I thought. Put it back. I told you you didn't need it. You don't need any more stuff.

I ran across this passage in an essay by Todd Boss the other day, published by Oldster, an excellent newsletter on this site: "When you’re unburdened by material concerns, it’s easier to be present to the world around you. Maybe this is why travel enchants —not because everyplace is more attractive than the place you’ve left behind, but because you’ve left behind more than a place. You’ve left behind the burdens and clutter, the stack of bills waiting to be paid. There’s no lawn to mow, no roof to patch, no driveway to shovel, no storage to manage. As long as you stay away, you’re living the extraordinary luxury of less."

There's a sharp truth to that phrase, "the luxury of less."

There was a time in my life when I woke up in five-star hotels, drowning in plush beds bigger than my current home, jolted from a shallow sleep by the dinging of a silver bell rung by someone I did not know who tiptoed in and gently set down a silver tray with a silver pot of tea and a silver pitcher of cream and a silver sugar bowl and spoon and tiptoed out.

There was a time in my life when I watched the man to whom I was married slip money I'd made to butlers and waiters and bouncers and valets as he strode into restaurants and events and hotels, smiling gregariously and holding my wrist as if I was a flight risk, because I was.

I count those mornings and those nights, those places and those bills slipped into those hands to buy favor in that great moneyed farce, I think of that luxury, that excess, that obscene surplus that no one needs and no one should have and I didn't earn and I didn't want and I do not miss, I think of that time in my life when I was swept, captive and smiling, into a world I found abhorrent and from which I could not wait to escape, I think of that time as the most empty, the most lonely, the most corrupt and bereft of my life.

I keep remembering snippets of poems I wrote a lifetime ago, back when I was learning to write. A line from one of those poems popped into my head just now: "It comes down to this: I have unnamed my named things."

The poem was about objects; it was about the great delight I took in the objects I had, and the fact that I had very few, and the fact that those few things were all that I needed, and they were enough. It was a poem of details, a poem of facts: the tilted windowsill, the spider plant with its tentative shoot; the two-burner stove, the too-high cupboards, the cans of black beans and green beans on the lowest shelf, the only shelf I could reach, the only food I could afford, each can labeled with a sticker: 65¢.

I wasn't just learning how to write when I wrote that poem; I was learning how to live. I wrote it before I dragged everything out of that apartment, down the back stairs, out into the alley, crammed whatever would fit into the hand-me-down hatchback, and left town. Everyone said I'd regret dropping out of college; everyone assured me I would be sorry I’d walked away from the future that felt like an unwelcome fate.

I did not regret it. I regret that I got waylaid. I wish I hadn’t spent so long trying to live a sticks-and-bricks life, a life of stuff; I wish I’d spent less time staggering around under the weight of things. I'm still glad I left. I'm just sorry I came back.

---

There's an old story about a New York party at some billionaire's house. Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller were there. In a poem published years later, Vonnegut tells it like this:

I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel 
to know that our host only yesterday 
may have made more money 
than your novel ‘Catch-22’ 
has earned in its entire history?” 
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.” 
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?” 
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.” 

—The New Yorker, May 16, 2005

---

Barstow, California, 3:30 a.m. The people in the neighboring room and I have been trying to out-loud each for the past two hours. We have not knocked one one another’s doors. No one has called the desk. We’re sorting this out between ourselves like adults. It was late. They were hollering at each other. I turned my outlaw country up. They cranked the volume on their TV. I shoved the desk chair—it has wheels—across the linoleum floor and into my side of the particleboard wall over and over for a while. Then it was quiet, so I got some work done. They started arguing again. I dropped an indestructible metal cup on the floor a couple of times. They shoved their bed—also on wheels—into their side of the wall. I turned up the outlaw country, set the loudest Buddhist chime on my meditation app on repeat, and put my phone in the tub. The bathroom echoed and gonged, the outlaw country growled and wailed, they fought, I worked, Zeke watched with mild curiosity from her bed. Eventually they passed out, gave up, fell asleep.

Is this living the dream? No. This is real life; it is strangely, beautifully real.

For me, it meets a fundamental need to not live a dream. I have spent enough of my life escaping into other worlds, traveling into futures and pasts, slipping sideways into someone else's story, telling stories someone else wanted me to tell, getting caught up the current of lives that aren’t my own.

But maybe the people in the next room are living their dream. Maybe when the sun comes up in a couple of hours the young man who started his shift at Denny’s as I was leaving last night will seat them, and maybe he'll bring them pancakes, and maybe they'll kiss and make up over coffee, and maybe when they pull out of the lot and back onto the road they'll forget all about Barstow and the noisy motel neighbor who blasted music while they screamed, because they're on their way to something, together, heading into the future of their dreams.

I mean, who knows what strangers dream?