DRIVING… ME CRAZY?
It takes about 35 hours to drive from where I used to live in Central Florida to Los Angeles. A straight through drive would require a pair of eye propping toothpicks, something to wedge behind your lower back and quite a few mondo Red Bull / 5-Hour Energy / En-doze / black coffee / Rockstar cocktails, which I really do not recommend unless you are keen on exploding your heart ventricles like a shaken bottle of Coke filled with Alka-Selzer tabs and tossed into an active volcano.
It’s been almost two decades but there was a time when I made that trek a couple of times a year. That was back in the stone-age before cell phones and navigation systems when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and I still had hair… well some. Based on my level of fatigue, I used to stop for the night once or twice on those long drives but it was never an easy process. Nowadays you could make a couple of clicks on your smarty-ass phone to find hotel locations, vacancies and TripAdvisor reviews but back when I was on the road finding a decent place to stop was more of a blindfolded dart game.
I tried to stay in clean safe reasonably priced motels but the more tired or isolated I got, the more questionable some of my choices became. In Amarillo Texas, the Roadway Inn was so close to the noisy highway, it should have been named ‘Inn The Roadway’. The decor of the Gallop New Mexico Quality Inn showed a distinct lack of quality that could best be described as Early American Dumpster Dive featuring a mattress that was somewhere near ‘wet sponge’ on the firmness scale. The Blue Fountain Inn was neither blue nor had a functioning fountain; if they were choosing a name based on their most prominent feature it should have been called The Curry Reek Inn
Based on appearances, I might have been the only one not cooking up meth in their room at the Blyth California desert edge Comfort Inn. Although nowhere near Memphis, my Knight’s Inn room looked like a brothel designed by Elvis with purple velour bedspreads and curtains, thick red shag carpets and large dark brown exposed faux wood beams. The dingy-white painted cinder block concrete masonry walls of the southern Louisiana Days Inn I stayed at gave the room a lovely minimum security prison cell feel and the long-ignored Tucson Arizona Holiday Inn felt like a bad trip in a pukey green time-machine to a fictitious family-fun fabulous fifties era.
35 hours is a long time to sit in a car alone. Odd things float through your brain on lengthy lonely drives like that. You have time to sort the priorities of your life, solve the world’s woes and make massive to-do lists for when you actually get the hell out from behind the wheel. In that era, cross-country road trips made you feel disconnected from the rest of the world. It was a strange head-trippy mix of independence and loneliness peppered with waves of confidence-building resourcefulness and blinding fear. The only real difficult part was the second quarter of the trip when it felt like I had been driving since the dawn of mankind yet I was not even halfway there.
But overall I found the open road addicting. The quiet forced time alone compelled me to confront thoughts that normally stay hidden in the dingy shadows of my brain’s limbic system. Out in the desolate expanses of the west with my hands on the wheel and eyes on the road, my brain would travel much faster and farther than the car. As the nondescript scenery would race by my windows, I’d contemplate my life and dissect my every decision. Like an ant in outer space, my importance in the universe felt minimal and my very existence unknown to everyone and anything for miles and miles and miles.
My world is different now. I have a wife that I do not like being away from for prolonged periods of time (although she sometimes initially seems happy to get rid of me for a few days of peace and quiet once in a while, luckily she too does not like me away too long). Also work-wise these days does not allow me the luxury of time to just sit in a car and drive for days on end. I wonder though, even if I did, with smartphones, laptops, satellite radio and dashboard navigation systems, things are different. For better or worse, we are all more connected which changes that feeling of just being out there on your own.
Back one summer night in the mid-1980s I was driving straight through the night from Houston To Tucson. At 2:00 am I was in dire need of a bathroom break and a cup of joe to go but everything I passed was closed. Eventually I saw a glowing light off in the distance that as I got closer engulfed the night sky in a blinding brightness surrounding a busy New Mexico truck stop.
As I walked in the door, the bright overhead florescent lights blinded me and caused me to squint. Like in the movies when a sheriff walks into an old time saloon, the place briefly went silent as I felt all eyes in the place turn towards me. Truth is, I am not sure that part really happened. It was late and my brain was still out in the car in driving mode. But what I do know is as my eyes adapted, things slowly came into focus and I realized I was standing among a large crowd of people that all looked like grungy biker versions of the pig-face people from the Twilight Zone episode Beauty Is In The Eye Of The Beholder.
I tried to remain calm and not look at anyone in their twisty snouty faces because I sensed just like on the Twilight Zone, I looked as disturbing to the pig face people as they did to me. After very quickly emptying my bladder, I slipped between two swiney featured freaks sitting at the counter and got my coffee. The hair on my neck was standing and my fingers twitched with nervous energy as the pig-headed waitress filled the waxy cardboard cup with a tar-like sludgy coffee that might have been brewed 140 years earlier on an open fire by a thirsty member of the traveling Donner party after a big humany meal.
At that point I did not really need the coffee to get my heart racing, but with cup finally in hand, I tossed way too much money on the counter and mumbled keep the change. Before there was any trouble, I bolted out the door into the dark desert night and sped away from there as fast as I could.
Nowadays I would have been able to snap a picture of the piggy people on my phone as proof that really happened as I remember it. But back then the world was different and all I have is my perception and memory. Sometimes those things are the same as reality and truth while other times they differ. But is that really such a bad thing?
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