Driven, p.12
Driven, page 12
Back in Montana, my van travels continued, uninhibited by my class schedule. I drove to San Francisco for a Grateful Dead show once, the van hanging in for twenty hours straight at speeds over eighty while I split driving shifts with friends, half of us asleep on the bed in back as the desert passed by, dark and barren. On my twenty-first birthday, I headed into the Canadian Rockies with Vanessa, my new best friend. We hunted down one of her childhood friends from New York City who had run away. By some miracle, we found her in a shack full of hippies at the base of a mountain known for its natural hot springs. I let Vanessa drive for a stretch on the way back, telling her to wake me at a certain gas station before we reached the border. I woke to her yelling fuck fuck fuck as she coasted into customs.
They pulled us over, pulled us out, and sequestered us in individual search rooms. When the customs agent asked me to empty my pockets, I looked down at the series of flaps, zippers, and pockets within pockets on my Liberty overalls and laughed (a bad move). Which one? I asked. My search came up clean but they found .05 ounces of marijuana in a film canister in the van—a birthday gift from my third college boyfriend, a kind-eyed guy with dreadlocks from Billings. I accepted the charges and drove us home.
Over the next year, I worked a restaurant job and went to school part time so that I could earn in-state tuition, which would save my folks some cash. I met Josh and, in the first days of 1996, drove us from Montana to Indiana through a record-breaking blizzard. We sometimes couldn’t see the road. I had my first dog by then, who rode in an olive-green easy chair I’d found near a dumpster. I’d unscrewed the legs so the chair sat flat on the van floor, making a perfect raised bed for the dog. The van got so cold on that adventure that my accelerator foot went numb in my wool-lined boots even with the heat on full blast. The dog drooled as we drove on, her saliva freezing into a stalagmite.
We made the trip over the great prairies to the Midwest once or twice a year in that van. She ran and ran and ran.
Josh borrowed her regularly once he realized how the open cargo space made loading up his band equipment easy. The floor of the van sat lower than a trunk or truck bed—heaven for a musician’s back. Josh had never owned a car—an odd thing for a kid from the West, but he was a city kid in Montana terms. His parents had divorced when he was eight, and his mom died suddenly when he was eighteen. His estranged father lived in the country with his new family, and his stepdad quickly remarried after his mother’s death. Josh was a bit of an orphan, and smart enough to know he could walk from class to the bars and back. He wouldn’t have driven at all if not for my van. As little as I knew about the mechanics of cars, he knew less. If a check engine light went off, I pulled over immediately while he’d drive on, immune, his brain tuned to melodies and lyrics.
In the spring of ’97, Josh and I drove the van to Las Vegas for my cousin Chad’s wedding. My mother and her siblings had taken up gambling and vacationing in the nineties. The eighties had been good to them, and they could now afford Caribbean cruises and Vegas trips. Chad, Aunt Bonnie’s only child, was born six months before Matthew. A quiet, grounded, kindhearted person, he grew up with my brother, the two of them spending long days in the woods during summer weeks at Betty’s house in Brown County.
My folks bought Matthew a plane ticket from Atlanta to Vegas for the wedding. My brother had been on an airplane only once or twice before then. From the moment Josh and I parked the Vanagon at the Flamingo Hilton and found my aunts, uncles, and cousins poolside, conversation revolved around the odds of Matthew showing up.
Did he have a ride to the airport? Had he called home recently? Did he have a phone? Had anyone heard?
Since he’d moved to Georgia, each Christmas became a cliffhanger: Would Matthew show? He always did, never on time, but that did nothing to diminish our joy and relief when he walked through the door. He was a kind of celebrity in our family, with a special ability to cause more happiness and concern than any other one of us.
My parents were off getting room keys and Josh had just handed me a giant drink with fruit in it when I saw him coming from yards away. He wore mirrored sunglasses, a snug-fitting Hawaiian shirt, cutoffs, and his trademark Converse high-tops. He carried only a black backpack, small enough for a kid. After everyone hugged him, I offered him the lounge chair next to mine. I was in my swimsuit already.
“Where’s your suitcase?” I said.
“Right here.” He unzipped the Jansport to show me what he’d packed, proud of how little he needed: one apple, underwear, a toothbrush, plus the dog-eared paperback And I Don’t Want to Live This Life—a book about Nancy Spungen, girlfriend of Sid Vicious, who was found stabbed to death in their room at the Chelsea Hotel in 1978. It was one of Matthew’s favorite love stories.
“Good book,” I said. We could always talk books and music. I was kind of thrilled that out of all our family, Matthew chose to sit by me.
A security guard approached and demanded Matthew’s room key. Matthew didn’t have one, and the guard wouldn’t accept mine even though we were staying in the same room with two queen beds.
“Every guest needs a key,” the guard said. “Or they have to leave the premises.”
“Our parents are getting his now,” I said.
The guard called for backup on his walkie-talkie, and a crowd began to form. He launched one question after another, talking over Matthew’s answers: Where’s your swimsuit?
Didn’t bring one.
Where do you live?
Georgia.
Why are you here?
A wedding.
Where’s your luggage?
Here.
Open it up.
“You don’t have to—” our Aunt Lisa said. I could tell she was scared about what might be inside.
Matthew smiled a thank-you to her and unzipped his backpack. The slim contents only irritated the guard, who returned to questions about the room key.
It finally sank in that he’d profiled Matthew as a bit of street trash washed up at their pool for some free casino drinks, a drug deal, or worse. Discovering he was attached to our family didn’t help. They wanted him out.
Aunt Lisa removed her Amber Vision shades and stepped between the guard and Matthew.
“This,” she said, “is discrimination. You, of all people, should know something about that.” She pointed to his nametag—Carl. We all knew she was talking about his light brown skin and kinky hair. He was clearly biracial, or “mixed” as they’d say back home.
“I’m an office-holding Republican—clerk of Boone County, Indiana—and, Carl, the Flamingo Hilton CEO is going to hear about this incident.”
“It’s okay,” Matthew said. “He’s just doing his job.” He smiled, calm in his role as suspect.
Soon my folks arrived with the room keys and cleared things up.
“That was so wrong,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
Matthew closed his eyes in the sun, holding the daiquiri Mom brought him and looking a bit like Hunter S. Thompson.
“That?” he said. “Shit. He didn’t even cuff me.”
Our father had a way of being in the world similar to Matthew. He’d grown up poor, quiet, good-looking, more interested in Kerouac and Kesey than sports or church. Good with the ladies. His aloof demeanor got his nose broken nine times in high school. For Matthew, the Vegas incident was a chance for his family to witness his persecution.
“Why not swim?” I said. “It’s hot.”
While I enjoyed the trappings of the fine life, Vegas held all the appeal of a shopping mall to me. Everything a shiny, plastic, hollow bauble. A place without choice or consequence.
“I got a new tattoo I can’t get wet,” Matthew said. “On my meat. Two lightning bolts. Don’t tell Mom.”
I’d always hated that word my family used for male genitalia: meat. So coarse. It made me cringe.
This news was his version of an ace up the sleeve, I guess. And I didn’t tell Mom. I knew he’d do that himself in his own good time.
In the summer of ’97, I got the wild idea to spend a couple months hiking a section of the Appalachian Trail. It would be my last summer before college graduation, and Grandma Betty had set aside several hundred dollars for each grandchild to take a trip. Our cousin Chad had gone to Guam and for reasons I can’t recall. I was the second grandchild to propose a trip, and she granted me the funds.
While I loved driving above and beyond most anything else, some natural shift was happening. Josh drank a lot. Mom drank a lot. Matthew was a mess of booze and tattoos and bizarre stories my family treated like jokes. All the while diabetes continued erasing my father. Not long before my Appalachian Trail idea hit, a pack of generic cigarettes and a fast food fish sandwich downed on a long road trip inspired me to become a vegetarian, quit smoking again, and start running (all at the same time). My kin, ill versed in self-care, offered wary support.
I was already too serious for my family, too driven, “a stick-in-the-mud” as my brother had put it. Now here I was, going off-script in pursuit of health and happiness.
Josh and I drove the van from Montana to Georgia, where I would start my walk in the woods at the southernmost trailhead in Springer Mountain, only an hour or so from where Matthew lived in Athens. We visited him for a couple days. I don’t recall much from that time other than the bars we went to, my brother’s stunned reverence over my latest adventure, and his new girlfriend, Krista with the red pigtails, whom we all hoped he might marry.
“Hell, Missy,” he said. “You’re going to walk across the damn country on purpose and I don’t walk farther than my mailbox unless I have to.” He had color in his cheeks and a healthy bit of weight to him. (Like my father and me, he ran on the slim side, forgetting to eat when life got chaotic.)
In a single photo from the Athens leg of that trip, Josh and Matthew stand beside each other with the Vanagon in the background. Her sliding door is open, showing off the curtains, the easy chair, the bed in back. Matthew wears a fat tie from the seventies and a short-sleeve button-down. (He and Krista were on their way to a wedding, and she’d found that tie for him.) His tattooed knuckles wrap around the spine of a book Krista gave him: Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, which he carried around as a catalyst for jokes more than anything. Josh sports horn-rims and a Unabomber beard. Wild garlic blooms in the yard behind them.
The next morning, Josh dropped me at the trailhead with my pack and I tried not to think about him driving my van all the way back to Montana.
I walked for two months straight, through magnolia blooms and torrential rains and mountains haunted by feral pigs. I walked through stress fractures, lost toenails, and bruised hipbones. Then I walked some more, finishing up somewhere in Virginia.
Back home after my return, Josh had put on a layer of weight that would remain for the length of our marriage, and the van started to fill with blue smoke every now and then. The oil light on the dash lit up. I added a quart and kept driving. I checked the coolant and added water instead of antifreeze because the German engineers had put a wave icon and the word water on the tank. Clouds of blue smoke erupted from the Vanagon’s hindquarters, as regular as Old Faithful. I’d add another quart and keep on going. After few months of this, a cop pulled me over to point out the trail of smoke I’d left on the interstate.
“Blue means engine trouble,” he said. I’d never before had a car with engine trouble. I always sold them before I had to deal with that. He let me off with a warning and told me to see a mechanic. I did.
Blown head gasket. Cylinder wear. Partial rebuild.
“But I kept putting oil in when the light went off,” I told the mechanic, as if I could erase the damage with reason.
“The oil light?”
“Yeah, on the dash.”
“That’s not an oil level light, honey. That’s oil pressure. You see that light go off and you’d better cut the engine right away. Low oil pressure means your engine is failing. It’s got nothing to do with how much oil is in the engine. Hell, I’m surprised you didn’t blow the main seal adding all that oil.”
He let me go before my chin tremble gave way to tears of shame. The kind that belonged to a child, not a road warrior. Not me.
Dad bailed me out on the rebuild. I went two months in the middle of winter with no vehicle. Josh and I would walk to the grocery store, him with his army duffle and me wearing my Appalachian Trail pack. We’d load up all the dog food, potatoes, and bread we could carry and walk the mile and a half home.
I drove the van more gently when she came back, heeded all warning lights, and only filled the oil after consulting the dipstick. Still, I had no business driving that vehicle. Matthew had been right—she was more than I deserved.
Twelve
The Planes
Georgia: February 1999
To get anywhere from Missoula, you have to take two planes. The first is always a small plane (the kind with two seats on each side of the aisle), which delivers you to one of the nearby hubs: Minneapolis, Salt Lake, sometimes Denver. The second plane is, almost always, a Boeing 737, larger, with three seats on each side. It was on the second flight, the 737, in February of 1999 that Josh asked me to page the flight attendant and request an ice pick so he could stab himself in the eardrum to relieve the pressure.
His drama surprised me. I was usually the sensitive, moody one, and he played the good-natured steady. We were more than three years into our relationship by then, and I had begun to realize that my mate did not travel well.
My parents had bought us the plane tickets so we could fly to Indiana and drive with them down to Athens for Matthew’s wedding. Only months ago, he’d fallen in love with Corey Parks—the woman we knew only as the bass player for Nashville Pussy. Just before Christmas he announced that they would marry.
I wouldn’t have missed my brother’s wedding if I’d had to walk there—a wedding that turned out to be a grand act of theater involving some of our family’s most brazen enabling, if it was anything at all.
In Athens, we packed into my parents’ hotel suite, waiting for Matthew and Corey to show up. My folks had met her for the first time the month before, but I had not yet had the pleasure.
Matthew knocked, and Mom opened up.
Corey stood long and lean as a rock ’n’ roll scarecrow. She neared six-five with her boots on—all limbs and eyeliner—part Amazon woman and part Rod Stewart. Tattoos marked her from neck to knuckle, same as my brother. From the gap between the top of her leather hip-huggers and the bottom of her skintight tank-top, giant eagle wings rose up, eclipsing her womb. Matthew had told me over the phone that they’d gotten matching Lynyrd Skynyrd tattoos on their forearms. I noticed them immediately: a pair of red hearts with lettered banners. Relationship birthmarks.
She ducked through the doorway, hugged my mother, and moved on to me. She hooked her arms under mine, pulling my head uncomfortably into her sternum. She smelled like cigarettes, makeup, and some sort of chemical (perhaps the Coleman lamp fluid she drank and regurgitated on stage to breathe fire).
She gave me a solid five minutes of her attention, feeling obligated, perhaps, to make nice with her beloved’s only sibling. She stared the whole time at some spot just above my head, creating the illusion of connection. Being near Corey felt like standing in the wings of an X-rated circus act—which no doubt heightened my brother’s affections for her. She was a living collector’s piece: rock memorabilia in the making.
Matthew and Corey cuddled up on a loveseat and fidgeted as we talked, chain wallets and boot buckles rattling. Clad from head to toe in black leather and denim, they looked misplaced in the burgundy and beige hotel room.
Uninterested in our mother’s agenda of ironing out details for tomorrow’s ceremony, Matthew pulled a list of baby names from his wallet—which scared even Mom, who wanted to be a grandmother more than she ever wanted to be a mother. Cisco topped the name list. Little Cisco, they said, as if she or he were a real child who existed in some rose-tinted future.
“But you guys aren’t actually pregnant, right?” Mom said.
“No. Just collecting names. For when.” Then they tongue-kissed in front of us.
Since the summer of ’86 when Matthew lost his virginity at age fourteen with our childhood friend Erron Star, I’d not known him to be without a girlfriend. Women were some kind of sweet spot where he felt most like himself. What cars were to me, perhaps.
That was the summer my father paid two vagrant men a small sum to reroof our house. Rog and Dewey came to work late each day and labored through the heat in highwater plaid pants and button-down shirts from the Salvation Army. I’d sit on the lawn or float in the pool, keeping a wide berth around the house because of the asphalt shingles they tossed to the ground without warning. Though Rog and Dewey took smoke breaks every hour or so, making small talk with me, it was Matthew they most enjoyed. He enjoyed them right back, adopting their curse words and dialect—the accent a hybrid of tooth loss, rural roots, and hard living.
One day, Matthew called up to the roof, “Guys. I got a dead possum.”
Their heads appeared over the soffit, all sweat and sunburn.
“Whatcha gonna do with it?”
“I don’t know. I’m busy, and it’s hot out.”
“We’ll take it.” Rog and Dewey climbed down the ladder and claimed the carcass.
Matthew and Dad deliberated over dinner about whether the men wanted the meat, the skin, or both. Matthew intended to give it to them all along, but offering directly would have been an insult.
Between Erron and Rog and Dewey, Matthew made some big decisions about what it meant to be a man that summer. Years later, Erron confessed he was the love of her life, a sentiment I heard about my brother from more women than I can count on both hands, though I remember them all. I studied them, trying to nail down what they had that I didn’t—the things that made them special. There was Jennifer Jones, who shared her name with a movie star. And Natalie the quiet punk rocker, who had spent most of her life in Germany before her father took a position at the nearby military base, Camp Atterbury. Then Justine, the redhead with the ferret who somehow talked Matthew into going to prom. Next, Kim—the girl I’d driven to the jail the summer of the Turd. And Jenny Irene, the one who’d lost her front teeth defending Matthew during the Vincennes Incident. The one who claimed he cooked her shrimp bisque using a Dutch oven on the roof of his boarding house during the dog days of summer. The only girl I know of that he impregnated—he became engaged to her, then moved all the way to Athens when she miscarried. In Georgia he met Krista, the sweet southern girl with pigtails and penciled-on eyebrows. And finally Corey. There were others in between, overlaps but never gaps.
