MIDNIGHT DISTANCE
TRAVEL JUNKIES Zoli Rozen |
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ADAPT AND THE WORLD WON'T SWALLOW YOU WHOLE.
We left before midnight to avoid the traffic. Nothing in the rearview but the silhouette of mountains lost in the dark. No hands waving goodbye. Leaving New York was easy.
Nate worked mornings so he slept while I drove through the night. Pennsylvania is a long, straight line across two hundred miles of desolate highway into Ohio and the only way I survived it was with strong, truck-stop coffee and cigarettes.
Another three hours I pulled over to the side of the road on Interstate 70 and watched the sun come up. Beautiful against the wide Ohio sky.
"Where are we?" Nate asked, barely awake in the passenger's seat.
I lit another cigarette and pointed to the orange glow in the distance. "That's Columbus." The tobacco smoke danced in swift steps from side to side before it was whisked away through the window by the cold morning wind.
We've already spent a hundred dollars on gas.
"How long have you been driving?" Nate yawned.
"I don't know--seven, maybe eight hours."
He stretched his arms and his legs the best he could in our small car. "You want me to drive?" he asked.
"No," I said.
"No?"
The sun was up.
"I can go another hundred miles."
I pulled back onto the highway. Nate sat quietly with the top of his forehead pressed against the window and stared north as we rolled in and out of small towns, our two lane highway merging into a single lane and bringing us from ninety miles and hour down to thirty-five in the blink of an eye. That's where the cops wait for tourists like us. Waiting to catch us speeding and unaware. But before you know it the lanes open up again and all there is, is distance and another small nondescript town behind you.
"You think this is going to work?" said Nate.
Is this going to work ? I thought about all of the failures, fortunes and disappointments that got me on the road in the first place. I have no idea if this is going to work. Nothing else worked. All of the promising opportunities in my past led me to nowhere, left me scrambling for direction wondering if anything would ever work out for me again. This trip is all I had left. One last chance. There was nothing else. No more plan Bs or safety nets. I took a deep breath before I answered. "It has to."
Nate reached into the backseat. "I almost forgot," he said, slipping his hand into the pocket of his coat and retrieving the red lipstick I asked him to take from Angela's make-up case.
" Now you can tell me what it's for," he said.
I pulled over again and got out of the car. "You'll see," I told him.
I used the lipstick carefully to write on the silver paint of our four door rental. Nate nodded approvingly when he realized what I was writing. Before we moved on I went into the trunk where there were several small bags of clothes, a couple of backpacks and a big cardboard box with fifty copies of my book packed inside. I took two copies from the top and threw them into the backseat. We pressed on.
The plan was simple. Or at least not entirely impossible. Maybe a little flawed, but imagined well. It all came back to the same idea; I was tired of waiting for something to happen. Tired of working odd jobs to make a living. To afford the things that mattered. To write and to travel. I was a bartender. Sometimes a waiter. An editor. A construction worker. Dog walker. House sitter. Ghostwriter. Substitute teacher. Some weeks I didn't know what I was. Or who I was. Or what I wanted. But there in the car on the road in America I had only two options; be the driver or be the passenger. Take control or just go along for the ride.
Indiana's highway stretched out forever and Nate was anxious to drive it. He wasn't happy staring out the window anymore. Every few minutes he asked me if I was still all right to drive. Being behind the wheel is a different experience than being a passenger. You go from a careful observer to an active participant. Suddenly you have a sense of control over where it is you're going, even if it is imagined and especially if you're driving fast. I wasn't ready to give that up. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But that's not the way it works when you're on the road with someone else who craves control. I pulled over at the next gas station to fill up the tank and hand over the keys.
Nate had been working in New York City for his father's company since he graduated college five years ago. He studied literature but ended up a suit and tie man selling industrial strength adhesives to factories around the world. On a good day he was proud to help out with the family business, content with a good living and the security it provided. He found solace on his lunch breaks reading obscure literature but had no one to talk to about the thoughts they inspired. On a bad day Nate woke up already hating having his life mapped out for him. Hated the blandness of a life with no surprises left. Angela even had a date set her in her mind for a wedding they never discussed. It was the same thing every day with slight variables on the weekends. So it made sense to see his eagerness come through as he rushed around the car in the middle of Indiana and jumped behind the wheel. He adjusted the mirrors, the seat, and put a Tool CD into the stereo. Turned it up loud. Smiling. In control. And now I was the passenger.
The trip was as much for him as it was for me. He had the security and future most of us only hoped for and he gave it all up (at least for now) to go back on the road. He was a distance junky too. Always searching. Never enough.
I laid back in the seat and stared out at the faded yellows and browns that formed the backdrop of Interstate 70 with a dull morning sun in the distance above a blue midwesterm sky. My eyes red and swollen. I fought to stay awake. I must have dozed off because I had a dream I woke up and I was forty wearing a basic color suit and a novelty tie -- I was sitting at a desk staring into a computer screen recording data for a company whose name I didn't know. Everything was dark. Charcoal colored. No window in the office. No pictures on my desk. No hope left at all. I stood up on my chair and shouted but emitted no sound. I screamed again but still there was nothing. Nothing . Silence, until I fell off the chair and woke up in the car. The music was loud. Nate was relaxed and driving. I thanked God I saw the highway again.
I made my first call as soon as we were through Indianapolis. I had a list of bookstores scattered across America. The first city was Denver. When a young woman (with a soft voice) answered I asked her if they had a copy of A Consequence of Ordinary. . When she came back and said "Sorry, we don't," I asked if I could order one. I gave them the name "Theodore Paz" and used an addresses I put together using a simple road atlas. They never asked any questions. I crossed Denver off the list and called a store in Phoenix. Then Albuquerque. Flagstaff. Los Angeles. Santa Fe. Dallas. Columbus. Little Rock. Boulder. San Francisco. Crossing them off the list as soon as I was off the phone. Nate was laughing.
"What?" I said.
"You use a different accent every time."
"I don't want anyone to..." I started to explain but stopped when I realized how absurd it sounded out loud.
"You're really doing this," said Nate.
"I'm really doing this."
THIS . A great chance of no consequence that sent a shiver through my body like a cold electric shock. I was panicking. Again.
We coasted through four hundred miles of Indiana and Illinois, taking turns driving after every tank of gas. This was America's wilderness, open space for cruise control and countless billboards reading "God Loves You." And to think, I had all that doubt .
I used the ATM at a truck-stop in Granite near the border of Missouri to check my balance. Three hundred and sixteen dollars in checking. Nothing in savings. Gas was over four dollars a gallon everywhere we stopped, seventy dollars a day for each of us. Forty a night for our motels. Another ten a day for food if we were careful about what we ate. But we weren't. That's at least seven hundred a week and doesn't even consider variables like oil changes and breakdowns. We put in another fifty to fill up our tank. This was going to be interesting.
Into St. Louis in the late afternoon we saw the Gateway Arch from a bridge and decided to see it for ourselves. The sidewalks and streets were crowded with men and women on their way home from work. A multitude of dark suits and colorful dresses, sedans, coupes, SUVs.
A man pulled up beside us at a stoplight, pointing to the red lipstick on the side of our car.
"What's A Consequence of Ordinary ?" he asked me through his window.
"It's my novel," I told him.
A quick apathetic nod and he was gone before I had a chance to reach for a copy of the novel in the backseat.
Missouri's famous Arch kept our attention. For thirty minutes we stood there and stared up at it until we were too hungry to think of anything else but dinner. There was a small diner on the way back to the interstate and if it was open it was good enough for us.
"What are you going to do if this doesn't work out?" Nate asked me as we entered the diner.
He was beginning to worry. A lot of people were. But I knew the consequences. I knew that America's bars, restaurants and coffee shops would have no one taking orders, no one mixing drinks or filling water glasses or cleaning tables if every artist realized their dream. Take a walk around New York City. Your next waiter is an amazing musician. The bartender just finished a novel and your busboy has a story you won't believe. I know what was waiting for me if this didn't work. So it had to work. It has to work.
Our twenty-something brunette waitress with a light Midwestern accent and a warm smile seated us in a booth in the back. She was quick with small talk before she even took our drink order. "Where you boys from?"
"New York," I said.
"We're on the road to sell my friend here's novel," Nate told her. She was either interested or feigned it well. And surprise (surprise), as it turned out she was an art student with dreams of painting the next great series of American masterpieces. She said she wanted to be the next Kincaid and Nate had to feign a cough to suppress his laughter.
"What's yer book about?" she asked me.
I hate that question.
"It's about life," Nate explained. "About art students who have to work at diners until they make it big."
She smiled, as if she had just then been let in on an inside joke.
I reached for my wallet to hand her a card; a picture of the book cover with my name, website and email address. Nothing fancy.
"Hold on," Nate said. "I'm sure that--" He paused to look up at her from our booth.
"Colleen," she said.
"I'm sure that Colleen would rather see the book than your business card, wouldn't you, Colleen?"
"Of course," she said.
Nate looked back to me with an inflated sense of satisfaction. For a moment we just sat there while Colleen stood over us, smiling awkwardly.
"Well?" said Nate.
"Oh, right," I said. "I'll get the book ..."
As I was leaving I heard Nate say "He's new at this."
Colleen laughed.
When I came back to the table Nate was staring through the window at the Missouri sky. "She wants to buy it," Nate said.
"You think she's really going to buy my book?" I asked him.
He shook his head disappointedly. "Why are you so surprised by that?"
Colleen was back. She set a cup of coffee down in front of each of us. "Is that it?" she asked, pointing at the book in my hands.
"It is," I said.
"May I?"
"Of course--" I handed it to her.
She took a good look at the cover before flipping through the pages. As much as I tried not to, I couldn't help but stare, curiously, anxious to see even the slightest reaction in her face. It felt like the world slowed to a near stop. I could hear the silverware clinking and clanking against the dishes in the diner. Nate stirred sugar into his coffee in slow motion, other waitresses were taking orders.
"I can't wait to read it!" she said. "I'll take it!"
Nate sipped his coffee, hiding a smirk behind his cup.
It was amazing (to me). She bought the book, our drinks and Nate's apple pie. She even wrote her phone number on the back of the check and made sure Nate was the one who saw it first.
Outside, the sky slowly trickled away, shedding its pieces of the evening light for darker and darker shades of Missouri night. No stars over St. Louis. I couldn't help but think about New York. About my apartment. My desk near the window. All the people who probably didn't even know I was gone.
A week before we left I got my fortieth rejection letter for my new novel, from a list I put together of only forty publishing houses. Alex and the Moon Go Dancing never got the chance to leave my desk. The letter (number forty) was written on the same thin paper as all the others, in the same bold, black ink:
I didn't read the rest. I knew how it went. I'd read it thirty nine times already. And I know that the fortieth shouldn't matter any more than my first but it did. It's hard to focus on your art when the bills are piling up. When you have a college diploma and no health insurance. No retirement fund. I don't own any property or stocks, bonds or portfolios. When my friends brag about their futures I stay quiet. Always uncertain. There's no security in writing stories for a living.
We found a cheap motel just off the highway buzzing with bright neon lights and the letters "V" and "Y" burned out in VACANCY. It started raining as we went out to bring our bags in from the trunk. Most of my clothes were soaked. Once I had everything inside I realized that Nate was still out there in the rain. Standing by the car with his head up and his eyes closed. Lipstick puddles by the back tires.
Later we spent an hour looking over our maps and decided to leave early the next morning. Nate was asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. He looked content. Balanced. I was jealous. I couldn't sleep, at least not as easily, drifting in and out of consciousness listening to a chorus of sounds; the cold Missouri rain beating down on the hotel's metal awning, Nate's heavy breathing, our neighbor's television blaring through the thin walls and the buzzing of the bright neon sign outside our window. I was nervous. Anxious. Other things. Scared. I was a disillusioned fool waiting for something to happen for too long. Now I know enough. I've seen enough. I know that nothing comes easy and that you have to go after anything that means anything to you at all. I've adapted out from under my naïve understanding of the way the world works. The way it's always worked. So I will write a catchy query letter. Update my website. New business cards. And book signings. Lots of book signings. At least a part of it has to be about the business of selling my art. And now I know what they want. They want to think my book will sell a million copies. Maybe make a movie. And T-shirts. Action figures. The works. This way I'm on the road. It's my way. I had to get my book on the shelves. Sell more copies. Finish the next one. I never want to be a bartender again.
In the morning we got back on the road, the breeze carrying the scent of last night's rain. I used Angela's lipstick to re-write the book title on both sides of the car as we filled up the tank. A man at the gas station told us the bookstore was in a plaza only twenty minutes up the Interstate.
We found the plaza and parked. We went straight to the customer service desk where a teenage boy with red freckles and braces leaned against the wall.
"Fiction?" I asked.
"Upstairs on the right," he said.
We took the escalator up. "What exactly are we doing?" Nate asked.
"I'm not sure yet," I told him.
Fiction and Literature . Right where the kid said it'd be. Home field. I walked through the aisles following the letters in the alphabetized order of authors until I got to the Rs. My book wasn't there. Nothing between Rollands and Santiago. Ordering the book didn't work.
"So that's why you've been ordering your books all over the place," Nate said.
"That's why."
"If you're not here to pick it up ... they put the book on the shelves?"
"They used to."
"So, now what?"
"Now we go to the next one."
"Kansas City?" he asked.
"Kansas City," I said.
I couldn't wait to get back to the car. To recharge. Drive highway miles. Disappointment drains the body, mind and senses of essential elements. There were still thousands of miles to attend to. We pressed on.
We stayed on I-70 West headed for Kansas. Cool cobalt skies were dripping marshmallow white clouds after the storm. It was like I could see a million miles ahead of me if I just squinted my eyes right.
We took turns with the stereo playing bands like Meryl Lammers, Ratboy, Juneteenth, and Tool. We talked about our lives back home, our girlfriends, jobs, everything that probably wouldn't be there when we got back. Nate said he was going to start writing his own novel. That he would quit his job, Everything he worked so hard for, his savings, his future, his relationships, his raises - it was all up in the air now. And falling. Quickly.
"Are you crazy?" I accused him. "Keep your job. You've seen what I have to do for this book. Is that really what you want?"
He thought it over for a moment. "Yes," he said, smiling. "Yes it is."
Four hours later we found signs for Kansas City between more billboards about salvation, damnation, recreation and drug abuse.
We stopped for gas and I asked the attendant how to get to the Brookville shopping center. He looked off in the distance for a second, pointed East and didn't say another word about it. That was his direction. We followed it to a series of strip malls, one of which was Brookville.
Nate parked the car.
"If you don't mind I'm going to run in myself," I told him. "I'll be a minute."
Nate just nodded.
I walked across the parking lot under the sun and searched for some sort of comfort but there was none. Seeing my book on the bookstore shelf meant everything to me. Everything . I just wanted to see it. Then I would know. A stranger could walk by and see my cover art or maybe read the title, stop, pick it up, love it and pass it along to someone else. Eventually there had to be somebody who was drawn to the words " A Consequence of Ordinary " under a row of non-descript figures with instructions on how to tie a tie and they'd be able to relate. No one wants to be ordinary. But here we are regardless. I tried to tell the story the best I could. Of how some of us don't have the rest of our lives planned out at eighteen. Or twenty-one. Or even twenty-seven. I don't need an agent. I need an audience.
Fiction and Literature . A through R. Please . I skimmed through the authors and the titles. Please . Plea -- it wasn't there. Rollands and Santiago were there but there was no room between them for me. My hands were shaking. A disillusioned fool again. I could have done this from home. I already spent more than two hundred dollars to drive all the way to a store I could have just as easily called from New York. I could have kept my job. But it was the nature of being a distance junky. The addiction. Knowing my book was there would have meant nothing if I couldn't see it for myself. And as much as I defended the trip to my family and friends as a plot to sell my book, the truth was that I would have gone anyway. Just to get away. To be on the highway. To feel alive again.
Even the sky was a few shades darker when I walked outside. Another storm coming from the north. We pressed on, West, and listened to loud music and commented every time we saw lightning POP and reach out like fingers in the distance. I felt better about what happened at the bookstore once we were about fifty miles away. I had some time to take it all in and looked forward to the chance to try again in Boulder, Colorado.
In Kansas - you never run out of sky to follow - I called Susan Alvarez. She's the event planner at the bookstore in Tucson, Arizona where I had arranged a book signing in five days. Her enthusiasm continued to give me hope. She didn't know that back home I'm struggling to make ends meet, that this road trip was my last hoorah before I had to surrender to the first suit and tie (nine to five) job that came along. All Susan Alvarez knew about me and my book was the review she read in a New York magazine.
The Rockies sneak up on you. Suddenly open plains become a majestic snow-capped mountain range.
"Maybe we should skip the bookstore today," Nate suggested as we drove past Denver, on route 36 West toward Boulder. "We should take the night off, find a place to shoot some pool. We can go in the morning before we leave for Arizona."
"I'd rather get it over with," I told him. "It's fine."
There was a sign for the bookstore on the highway. Must've been a big attraction. I tried to calm myself with cigarettes but thought the worst regardless. What's it all worth in the end? Why am I doing this? Why am I really doing this? I thought about my father, how when I was seven I wrote him a poem in school for Father's Day. How he hugged me when I finished reading it. He was so drunk he probably didn't know why I was even there or why I was reading to him from an oversized piece of green construction paper. But something happened. Something moved him. My father never hugged anyone. Definitely not me. And all from "Roses are red, violets are blue, trees are strong and so are you." If I would have known at seven how desperate and alone he was in his thoughts, I'd have written something every day until he got better. Until he got well. That was our last Father's Day. So when someone asks me (or when I ask myself) why I want to be a writer I usually just say "What else would be I be?" but really I'm thinking of him, of writing to him, maybe even thinking that in some strange way I can still save him. That maybe he's still listening. That I can still save whatever's left of him in me.
Only on the road for a couple of days and already Nate and I were feeling the effects of the eighteen hundred miles we'd traveled. Half of America was behind us. We watched the sun go down and turn the Colorado mountains into silhouettes against the dark indigo sky.
The bookstore looked like all the others. The same architecture as the one in Kansas City. St. Louis. New York. They were all the same. Nate came in with me and it looked like they were ready to close up. There were two employees walking the floor, stocking loose books back onto the shelves. Another two waited by the registers for us to finish shopping so they could go home.
We went up the escalator and turned right. My heart beat wildly. We found the Fiction & Literature section, the Rs and we followed the names along the row. This store had more authors than the other two so it took a little longer -- but the result was still the same. Nothing.
"There are more stores," Nate assured me.
Deep breath. "I know."
"Maybe they send the books back if no one claims them?" he said.
"Maybe."
Theodore Paz once told me that the only difference between a successful author and one you've never heard of is luck. Maybe he was right. But even if he was, I wasn't going to let myself believe that. I'd given up too much to be wrong about this. There was a reason I was doing this and it wasn't based on chance. I had to keep telling myself that. Put my faith behind it and run with it.
"They're closing soon," Nate said.
I started laughing. Louder. Wildly.
"What is it?" he asked. "What the hell are you laughing at? Where are you going?"
"I've been going at it all wrong!" I shouted. "I'll be right back!"
It never used to be about the numbers. I never cared about the reward.
I sprinted to the car, grabbed three copies of my novel from the box in the trunk and walked quickly back to the store.
I wanted the bookstore to put my book on the shelf because I thought it would mean something. But it had nothing to do with the bookstore. It was about the people in the bookstore. The readers. I was after them.
Nate met me at the entrance. "What are you doing?"
"Adapting," I told him and he followed me back inside to the escalator. There were still a few people shopping. Scattered. A few on the first floor. A few on the second. No one saw me come in with the books.
One of the employees, an older teenage girl with heavy eye makeup was now stocking books onto the shelves near the Rs in the Fiction section. I turned away quickly when she saw me. I felt like a thief. I didn't know what the rule was for this sort of thing.
"What are you doing?" Nate whispered.
The girl looked at us through the corner of her eyes.
I pointed down at the books in my hand when I thought she wasn't looking, then moved my finger and pointed at the shelves. Nate smiled. "Got it," he said.
She stayed between the Rs and the Ts placing books on the shelf one at a time. I tried to watch her as carefully as I could without alarming her, waiting for her to go away so we could go on with our night in Colorado. When she finished stocking the books, she turned and walked away from our section. Nate moved in front of me and rushed to find where the books would go.
"I don't believe it," he said.
"What is it?"
" You're not going to believe it."
I held my books tightly under my arm and walked over.
Nate was right.
I didn't believe it.
A Consequence of Ordinary . On the shelf. In a bookstore. Eighteen hundred miles away from home.
"Can I help you look for something?" asked the teenage girl, suddenly standing behind us. I followed her eyes to the books under my arm.
"Well--" Nate began.
"Actually," I interrupted. "I was going to buy these as gifts," I said and handed her my three copies. "But I don't have enough to get them tonight."
I smiled politely.
She took my books and appeared genuinely relieved that she recognized them, and could put them away easily.
"I'm sorry," she said, "but we're closing and--"
"Don't worry about it," I told her. "We were just leaving."
I watched as she made room on the shelf for my books. Now there were four copies there. Three more than God of Small Things . I liked my chances.
Nate and I walked out and the second we passed through the front doors we both let out bursts of laughter.
"That was great!" he shouted.
It was a strange feeling. A mixture of disbelief and anticipation. I couldn't wait to do it again. And now I was excited about the book signing in Arizona too. The red rock canyons in Utah. Beyond that I wasn't sure.
It was nine hundred miles to Tucson and I'd be broke by the end of the week. But it didn't matter. This was what I had been waiting for, what I craved. A distance junky on a highway in the middle of the night. We pressed on. I got us back to the Interstate and we looked for a cheap motel and something to eat. In the morning we'd have to start early and do it all again.
And again.
Whether it was luck or not didn't matter. I wasn't going to stop. Not until it was done. They can reject my queries, I'll send more. They can tell me literary fiction won't sell, I'll sell it myself. I'm going to do this. On my own terms. Because any way I look at it, the alternative is waking up every morning and selecting a neck tie and sitting in traffic for a few hours trying desperately to get somewhere I don't want to be.
I'll take my chances on the road.CC