Taking a Drive

We got a TripTik from AAA and charted our route from Marin County to Memphis, Tennessee, with a stop in Los Angeles, starting down the Pacific Coast Highway. This was before GPS. You had to walk into a AAA office and ask for something called a TripTik, which was essentially a customized map booklet. Someone behind the counter would ask you a few questions, then highlight your route with a marker and fold the pages into this spiral-bound itinerary that felt official.

Driving without GPS was always an adventure. I remember family road trips where my dad would deviate from the map, and suddenly we’d be trying to find our way back through dark frontage roads and strange little towns in the middle of nowhere. There was always the possibility of getting lost, which made travel feel more adventureious somehow, less predetermined.

I’m 19 now. My girlfriend is 27 and already divorced. She jokes about robbing the cradle. I never find it very funny.

In college, if I needed to get somewhere, I had to print out MapQuest directions from my laptop. The pages would get me from Point A to Point B, but God help me if I had to improvise beyond that. I’d call my dad, who knew Los Angeles by instinct, knew every street name and freeway interchange. His advice was often something like, “Drive toward the water.”

Hey, Dad, I’m on a highway. I don’t know where the water is. I’m not a salmon swimming upstream. I don’t have some biological compass pointing me toward the Pacific.

I’ve probably driven from Los Angeles to Marin County along “the” 5 hundreds of times. (Look at how LA I am with my definite article use in front of the interstate name. God, I’m so LA!) I know every sad Denny’s along the route, every gas station glowing alone off the exit ramps. Andersen’s Pea Soup in Buellton, which I always stop at but never actually eat at. I did buy one of their mugs once, though. It sits now in the IYKYK section of my cupboard.

There was the time our car broke down in Gorman, just past the Grapevine. I remember my mother on the phone somehow convincing a rental-car employee to drive fifty miles out of his way to come get us, lest we end up like characters in Oliver Stone’s U Turn.

Cut to Virgil:

“You and me — gonna open up the finest sporting goods store in that city ever did see. Get us a place on the North Shore by the lake. Season Brewers tickets. Just you and me, Grace.”

My sister Noelle and I used to laugh at that line, at the modesty of it, as though season tickets and a sporting goods store in Milwaukee represented the pinnacle of human ambition. But the older I get, the less ridiculous it sounds.

There was one night at CalArts when I left around 3 a.m. to drive home in the dark. It was foggy and I could barely see ten feet ahead of me. I romanticized the whole thing as though I were trapped inside a Sam Shepard play.

Vince in Buried Child:

“I was gonna run last night. I was gonna run and keep right on running. I drove all night. Clear to the Iowa border. The old man’s two bucks sitting right on the seat beside me. It never stopped raining the whole time. Never stopped once. I could see myself in the windshield. My face. My eyes. I studied my face. Studied everything about it. As though I was looking at another man. As though I could see his whole race behind him. Like a mummy’s face. I saw him dead and alive at the same time. In the same breath. In the windshield, I watched him breathe as though he was frozen in time. And every breath marked him. Marked him forever without him knowing. And then his face changed. His face became his father’s face. Same bones. Same eyes. Same nose. Same breath. And his father’s face changed to his Grandfather’s face. And it went on like that. Changing. Clear on back to faces I’d never seen before but still recognized. Still recognized the bones underneath. The eyes. The breath. The mouth. I followed my family clear into Iowa. Every last one. Straight into the Corn Belt and further. Straight back as far as they’d take me. Then it all dissolved. Everything dissolved.”

I can still recite the entire monologue by heart.

Last summer I drove from Arizona to California with a GPS calmly telling me where to go the entire time. No decisions necessary. Just obey the little voice. The voice could have told me to drive into a cornfield and I would have listened. You must obey the GPS voice, after all.

During COVID, I drove across the country twice, westbound with my friend Stevens, eastbound alone. At one point we got caught in rain so heavy we could barely see the road. A truck came flying up behind us, laying on the horn, and Stevens started having a panic attack while I sat there texting a girl I was talking to at the time, unconcerned by the possibility that we might die. Later he told me my lack of panic actually calmed him down.

On the drive back east, I stopped at a motel in Youngstown, Ohio sometime around 2 or 3 in the morning. Youngstown is the quintessential symbol of American decline, one of those Rust Belt cities hollowed out by deindustrialization and decades of political abandonment. It’s sad the way much of America is sad. There was blood on the shower curtain in my room.

The next morning I woke up gasping for air. Someone in the room next door was cooking meth, and the fumes were seeping through the walls.

This summer I want to drive again. I want to take the 5 north by myself. I want to see all the familiar places I’ve memorized over the years, the truck stops, the diners, the exits whose names I know better than the names of people I went to school with. I want the strange loneliness of the road again. The feeling that, even now, I could still get lost. Maybe I’ll even turn my GPS off and go off memory.