A Road Trip
Searching For Signs Of Life
August, 1986.
My younger brother, Chris, has always been a card, a practical joker, and a raconteur.
Growing up, he was your typical pesky little brother. I’d be in my room, my only place of refuge in our tiny house, where I spent the majority of my teenage years drawing, reading, and listening to music, when suddenly, and without warning, Chris would throw open my bedroom door, barge in, and demand the “rent.” He wouldn’t leave me be until I wrote him a “check.”
Sometimes, I’d be “under arrest.” He’d come busting in, “Frank Surpicco! Cop!” He’d point his finger gun at me and cautiously circle round, the way you see cops do on television, then he’d grab me and slam me against my closet door as hard as a ten-year-old boy can, and make his arrest.
Once, he rolled fake marijuana joints, sneaked into my room, stuck them in my pencil holder, and then dragged our mother into my room to show her the evidence, so I’d get “busted.”
On second thought, maybe my brother wasn’t so typical.
When he was in high school, he became an ordained minister just for shits and giggles after he came across a mail-order ministerial program in the back pages of some magazine we had lying around the house.
And it was from some sketchy back page entity that Chris obtained his fake, out-of-state I.D. card. Now, keep in mind, this is the 80’s and I.D. cards and driver’s licenses didn’t have all the watermarks and chips and magnetic strips like they have now. There was no one size fits all, uniform identification across states. So, for exactly what purpose did my 17 year-old brother acquire a fake I.D.?
A fake I.D. would enable my brother to bet on the races at Hollywood Park.
Chris was probably about six years-old the first time he went to the track, an indelible experience that spurred a life long love of the horse races. Chris avidly followed every major thoroughbred race, he knew well the horses and the jockeys that rode them. He intensely studied The Racing Form and even hand-wrote his own “Chris’ Picks.”
Once he got his driver’s license, our mother actually allowed him to occasionally skip school and drive himself to the track. I kid you not. He’d pick up a copy of The Racing Form the night before, make his picks, and leave the house to get to Inglewood an hour before the first call.
For about two years, Chris totally got away with using his fake I.D. at the track, but would his phony I.D. pass muster in, say, Las Vegas? There was only one way to find out. We threw our bags in the back of my sunny yellow 1981 Toyota Corolla hatchback and off we went.
There was no need for a map — we’d accompanied our parents on the drive to Las Vegas every summer since I was eight — the only place we ever vacationed as a family. We knew the route by rote.
My car’s radio was set in this weird swiveling center console under the dash. It didn’t have a tape deck, so once we passed through Victorville and into the desert sprawl, radio reception was pretty spotty. We’d pick up the occasional music or talk-radio or sports station, and as soon as we lost reception, Chris would fiddle with the dial in search of another signal.
Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, Chris tuned into the kind of soft pop music station our parents often listened to at home and in the car. Before too long, we found ourselves singing and bopping along. It seemed we knew the lyrics the same way we knew the route to Las Vegas. These were songs we’d heard a million times growing up.
There’s one song in particular that I distinctly remember from our drive through the desert, “Don’t Sleep In The Subway” by Petula Clark. We only knew the chorus, which we sang, full-throated, as the wind whipped our hair through the open windows.
By the way, Chris was only carded once while we were in Las Vegas, by a skeptical cocktail waitress.
