The End

Despite the accidents and his need for me to be on the street guiding him even if he only had to back up two feet, the weeks of driving the open roads inspired Lasky to contemplate a new career. We were somewhere in Idaho, possibly the prettiest state we had been through, when he broke a long silence by saying, “You know what? I’m thinking about getting my truckers license.”

It was as though someone flipped on the lights, yelled surprise, and a party started in my in my heart. It was the greatest thing I had ever heard in my life. Imagining Lasky kibitzing with the other guys in trucker school is the kind of thought that could help me through a drawn out battle with a disease. I told him I thought that he would make a great trucker. He didn’t say anything for a while. I knew great dreams of diesel pumps, all night diners, and bawdy waitresses swirled magnificently in his mind. I may have been imagining things, but I’m pretty sure I saw his left arm reach up toward the ceiling, grab a make believe cord, and yank down, letting his make believe horn wail, signaling to everyone on the road, maybe to everyone in the world, that Lasky was coming through.

We stopped at a god-awful casino on the border of Utah and Nevada. Lasky won forty-five dollars playing craps, which was just enough to cover the two of us at the all-you-can-eat buffet.

The food was pretty bad and we ate a lot of it. I knew what that meant.

Lasky would be deucing his way across Nevada.

I suppose I’ve put off addressing it long enough. Here are the some variations on “deucing” I was subjected to every few hours for two weeks:

- I have to deuce.
- I have to drop a deuce.
- I have to deuce it up. (This is my least favorite and it causes me pain to write it)
- The deuce is loose. (A close second to deucing it up)
- I have to turn two. (Baseball lingo for turning a double play. Lasky lingo for deucing)
- Deuces are wild. (This one increased noticeably after we left the casino)

Sometimes he’ll present them as equations:

Question – What’s does 400 - 398 =

Answer – A deuce.

And then there are rhymes:

Lasky: Want to make a truce?

James: What?

Lasky: I have to deuce.

But, it was the home stretch. I had made two thirds of the way across the country without choking the life out of this imbecile. I only had a few more deuces to go.

Nevada is the only state in the union that I hate more than Florida. I fell asleep just outside Reno and woke up in San Francisco. I can’t think of a better thing that can happen to a person.

I consider San Francisco to be the perfect American city. It’s the perfect size, the public transportation, the arts, the restaurants, lots of dog parks, educated people, clever bums; it’s got everything. You’ll hear complaints about it being too cold. But, what would you expect? Apes prefer warmer climates.

Lasky and I were in pretty mellow form for the two days we spent in San Fran. We had dim sum in Chinatown. Spent one afternoon hanging around the Berkley campus. We took pictures off the Golden Gate Bridge. When you’re driving cross-country, wherever you stop, you can let yourself feel like you’re something a little more romantic than just another tourist. But, when you see a picture of yourself smiling with Alcatraz in the background, the jig, I’m afraid, is up.

We hung out at the City Lights Book Store. I thumbed through the old Beat Generation books I used to carry around with me in my pockets when I was younger. They had a picture hanging of Bob Dylan, Robbie Robertson, and Alan Ginsberg talking, leaning against the wall out front in 1965. I don’t care much about it now, but at different times in my youth, I was obsessed with all three of those guys. I took the time to appreciate the picture as a nod to past versions of myself.

It was time to go. It was our fourteenth day on the road. I wanted to get back to LA. How often do you hear a man say that?

I was exhausted. Lasky could have kept going. If I had said let’s head up to check out the redwoods for a few days, he would have done it. There’s no denying that Lasky, retard that he may be, proved to be of stouter heart than me on this trip. Just about everything he does, says and thinks is wrong, but his spirit’s right. He wants to experience life and will go where the wind blows him to do it. I hope he gets his truckers license.

We took the 5 South to LA. It’s the fastest way from San Francisco, but not very scenic. I didn’t care. I’d seen enough.

There’s a stretch of the 5 that smells like cow shit. The smell lasts for miles. The strange thing was, I didn’t see any cows. The entire time I smelled shit, I didn’t see single cow. I knew they were out there, though. Up wind somewhere. On the other side of a hill, hundreds of them, standing around, staring at each other, casually deucing it up.

Yellowstone

Yellowstone was more like it. Although, I did have a run in with an idiot the minute I got there that threatened to ruin my entire day. I was standing at Mammoth Hot Springs in the northwest corner of the park. The spring is a natural sculpture made from heat, water and limestone. The formation grows in perfect little terraces that reach up over a hundred feet. Imagine The Spanish Steps, but geothermal.

Or, you could go ahead and think of it as the protohuman standing next to me described it to her fat kids and her fat husband. “Look, they’re like stair-steps.” She wheezed. Not like stairs. Or steps. Stair-steps. The very next words out of her mouth were, “I’m starting to get hungry.” Yeah, no shit lady. No shit.

Just as I was beginning to calm down after, what I’ll forever refer to as, The Incident at Mammoth Springs, Lasky got into his fourth car accident of trip.

There are only a few places in Yellowstone where you can’t be killed in a matter of seconds. Everywhere else in that place and you’re dealing with, One False Move and You’re Being Airlifted to the Nearest Hospital level stakes. The roads are too narrow and there’s always a sheer drop of 500 feet on at least one side of you. Even regular cars shouldn’t be allowed on those roads, let alone our 16 foot truck/apartment. We weren’t driving for more than half a mile when our side view mirror connected with the side view mirror of a passing RV.

Now veterans of minor traffic accidents, we just kept driving. Lasky pulled off and we tried to hide the truck as best we could. If the RV came back, we didn’t see it. Down a mirror, we kept on going.

That night we stayed in the town of Gardiner, just outside the park on the Montana side. We had dinner in a bar and then played pool for drinks against two locals. We won two out of three. Lasky played well. Lucky for him.

One of the guys we were playing, Bill, said he could tell I was a “player” (little did he know I’ve probably only played ten times in the last ten years) and he gestured toward a kid sitting at the bar. If I wanted a game, he was the “big stick” in town, Bill said. Bill's IQ couldn't have been over 80.

The "big stick" was a white kid with dreadlocks down to the middle of is back. He had moved out to Yellowstone from Maine to work as a whitewater rafting guide. Every indication pointed toward him being a good natured hippie kid. He didn’t turn out to be.

I beat him the first game pretty easily, and was already disliking him, when he said I had gotten lucky. I told him he was probably right and we should play again. I beat him again. This time talking a little bit of shit as I sank the eight ball. What constitutes a good pool player in Montana is apparently different than in New Jersey.

He was looking up at the TV, watching a report on wide receiver Plaxico Burress who accidentally shot himself at a nightclub this season. Being from Manie he was a New England Patriots fan. Burress helped the Giants beat the Patriots in the Super bowl two years ago. The kid said something I couldn’t hear and I asked him repeat it. He nodded up to the television and said, “For a Patriots fan, that’s one nigger who shot himself a year too late.” I didn’t say anything. He asked if I wanted to play again. I said no thanks and left.

I guess dreads don't mean what they used to.

The Next morning we found a campsite for that night and then spent the day wandering around the park. We hiked up to a place called Riddle Lake. A ranger told us grizzly tracks had been spotted there recently. We went swimming. Lasky took 9,000 pictures.

Later that afternoon we went to old faithful, which is genuinely amazing but has a distinct Mt. Rushmore feel. Hundreds of people standing around looking up, waiting for it to erupt. There’s something depressing about being in “nature” and having to think about beating the traffic out of a place. But, it is what it is.

That night we built a fire and cooked steaks and elk burgers in a cast iron skillet. It was dark and hard to tell if the meat was cooked. If we were both dead from botulism in a few days, it would have be no ones fault but Lasky’s.

There were a lot of rules about getting rid of the food waste properly to avoid attracting bears. I set aside a few of the steak wrappers, planning to stick them in Lasky’s pockets as he slept. It could buy me enough time to get away if a bear stuck his head in our tent. But then I got too drunk and forgot about the whole thing.

I was expecting to see more wildlife at Yellowstone. But, I was picturing something like Jurassic Park. It wasn’t like that at all.

The animals weren’t a complete disappointment, though. In two days we saw a black bear, a moose, pronghorn antelope, coyotes, mule deer, and the stair-step lady.

We drove out the next morning through the Grand Tetons. If I had a knack for metaphors, I’d use one to describe them.

We were fourteen hours from San Francisco. I fell asleep. Lasky drove.

South Dakota 

I’ve started to think of Lasky as the Forest Gump of cross-country driving.  He just keeps drivinga and drivinga.  In the movie, Forest’s football coach yells a line when Forest scores a touchdown, runs through the marching band, and through the tunnel out of the stadium.  I’ve bastardized the line to suit Lasky and I think it whenever I jolt awake in the middle of the night to find him expressionlessly conquering dark country mile after dark country mile.  The line is: “He must be the dumbest son-of-a-bitch alive!  But he sure can drive without getting tired.”

Mount Rushmore is a tourist trap’s tourist trap.  I went through a period in my life when, for some reason, I was obsessed with Thomas Jefferson.  I probably read ten books in a row about him.  So, when I saw his huge head up there, I smiled a little.  But after watching the other tourists and seeing, a minimum of, fifteen red, white and blue fanny packs, it’s hard not to get cynical about a place.

Reading the various plaques explaining the history of the monument I was reminded of how people could become so stupid as to want a patriotic fanny pack in the first place.  Anyone familiar with the way American history text books are written would have recognized the vague language used to whitewash history and prevent people from developing critical-thinking skills. 

The plaques dedicated to Rushmore’s sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, were perfect examples of this educational strategy.  They all said ambiguous things like, “Borglum was outspoken about many issues” or “Borglum wrote and lectured on various topics.” 

Borglum was in the Klu-Klux-clan.  But we can’t have the dopey lady in the star spangled shorts reading that on her vacation, can we?

The real problem with Mount Rushmore, though, a problem that left revisionist history in a distant second, was Shit for Brains making me take upwards of six thousand pictures of him posing with the presidents.  He kept standing at different vantage points in the foreground of the monument and yelling unbelievable things to me like, “Now lets do some wistful ones!” or “Just line my nose up with Washington’s!”

He asked a simple-minded lady to take our picture.  She took the picture, looked at it and smiled.  “It looks pretty good.” She said.  It wasn't.  When Lasky looked at it he told her the composition was all wrong.  This was the first piece of art criticism this woman had ever heard that wasn’t from Simon, Randy or Paula.  She looked like she wanted to cry.  He gave her the camera back and told her to do it again. When he came back and stood next to me he muttered that the woman didn't know what she was doing.  I wanted to take the camera and smash it off his bald head.   

I consider photography to be a bullshit art form even when done at the highest level.  So, to me, the average jackass (Lasky) taking pictures of every damn thing with a digital camera is about as artistic as checking your email.  I have a joke I use; “Photographers are artists in the same way that race car drivers are athletes, we just can’t think of anything else to call them.”  I wrote that as a dig at an ex-girlfriend I never sufficiently got over, who I found out started dating a photographer.  But now, two years later, it works just as well as a dig at Lasky.  In writing, petulance is a gift that keeps on giving.

Another bungled attempt at picking up two girls found us sleeping in the truck again. 

Lasky’s face is starting to make me physically ill.

He played an old Bill Hicks album on his iPod as we fell asleep.  It was one of the albums Hicks recorded in the early 90’s just before he died.  He was ranting and raving about Billy Ray Cyrus, Jay Leno, and Arsenio Hall.  He called them demons let loose on the landscape to lower the standards.  “Who actually enjoys their work?” he barked.  “Where do those people come from?” 

I’m not sure where they come from.  But everyday of the year, I know where you can find a bunch of them.  Milling around the observation deck, staring up at those four giant faces.

Somewhere in Middle America 

I wanted to hang around Des Monies for a while because Jack Kerouac once said the prettiest girls in the world were from there.  Lasky was in a hurry to get to Omaha because Warren Buffet owns a furniture store there.  With friends like these, who needs to go to the zoo?

To be fair, I couldn’t exactly figure out how to get Des Moines to work.  It seemed like it was just highways and fast food joints.  Everyone I asked to direct us to the “cool part of town” seemed to be suffering from mad cow disease.  They would just flail their arms, scratch a body part and mutter something about the Perkins that was nearby.  Eventually, we went to the Perkins.

We were the only people in the restaurant under 95 years old.  I got the biscuits and gravy.  Lasky got the whole grain pancakes, which he feared would eventually make him “deuce like a wild man.” (One of Lasky’s most revolting little quirks is that he always refers to shitting as deucing.  More on the later) 

Watching the little old ladies dole change out onto the tables to pay for their coffees and side orders of cottage cheese, I couldn’t help but wonder if any of them had been one of the world class pretty girls that caught Jack’s eye so many years before.  It didn’t hurt to believe that they were.  I also wondered if they were as disappointed with Des Moines’s new generation of women as we were.  I didn’t see one under forty years old who weighed less than 200 pounds.  But what can you?  Things change. 

We sped across the Iowa countryside.  Now it was pretty.  Lasky’s iPod pumped Levon Helm’s earthy vocals out over the cornfields.  The music seemed at home there, even if Lasky and I didn’t. 

Like most New York Jews and New Jersey Jew lovers, we shared a certain mistrust for “middle Americans” that ranged from subtle to crippling.  They were the bible thumpers.  The ones who voted for G.W.  The ones who watched television.  The unwashed masses.  If we were gay and wanted to get married, though, we could have stopped right there in Iowa and done it.  New York and New Jersey are still working on it.  And as far as being unwashed goes, Lasky and I hadn’t showered for days. 

It had nothing to do with Warren Buffet’s furniture store, but Omaha turned out to be a great town.  They had the cool downtown we couldn’t find in Des Moines with restaurants, shops and wine bar that looked like it should have been in Soho. 

The first thing we saw was a guy standing on the corner wearing a cowboy hat, playing country songs on the guitar.  He was wearing an Obama t-shirt.  We watched him suspiciously.  Deep down, wondering if he liked Obama or was illiterate and thought Obama said Omaha.  There was no way to know for sure. 

We ate at a cool little BBQ place and Lasky didn’t mention deucing the entire meal.  The evening was off to a good start.  We spent the night barhopping and walking around the city.  We stopped into a place to watch a jazz band that I thought was good but Lasky said wasn’t.  He knows more about music than I do. 

We were good and drunk by the end of the night when last call rolled around. We didn’t have a place to stay so we either had to find some girls to go home with or sleep in the truck.  We played darts and eyed a group of girls who may have been eyeing us too.  After beating Lasky soundly three games in a row, he mustered the stupidity to go over to the girls.  I don’t know what he said to them, but it didn’t work.  They nodded politely and looked down at their drinks in unison.  I didn’t say a word to them.  That didn’t work either.  We slept in the truck. 

We cleared some of the boxes in the trailer and laid down moving blankets to sleep on.  I used a stack of t-shirts as a pillow.  It wasn’t nearly as bad as it sounds.                           

Chicago

We finally found the perfect place to park for a few days while we explored Chicago when Lasky locked the keys in the truck.  He looked like he wanted to cry.  I knew he was upset enough so I just called him a mindless gorilla and went off by myself, leaving him to think about what he had done and wait for AAA.

I stopped into one of the countless little bars that surround Wrigley.  I was drinking a beer and thumbing through an Isaac Asimov essay about population densities in U.S. cities, enjoying myself thoroughly, as usual, until someone started talking to me.  The guy next to me, ignoring the fact that I was reading, as people can always be relied upon to do, asked me how I was doing.  I said not bad.  He asked me if I had heard about the perfect game.  I said no.  He segued immediately into a story about his cousin who had just died, whom he claimed had once been the tallest woman in America.  Morons find me wherever I go.                  

I got back to the truck a few hours later and Lasky was sitting on the ground still waiting for AAA.  He didn’t look like he was having a very good time but I gave him my patented “you reap what you sow” look, and he knew better than to say a word. 

He had talked to a comedian he knew from LA who lived in Chicago and was performing that night.  He told her we would check out her show and get drinks after.  He told me she was cute and talented.  I assumed she would be neither. 

The show was in the backroom of a bar.  The other comedians were average but girl we were there to see turned out to be good.  She talked about rappers who rhyme the same word with itself and how it upsets her.  It upsets me too, so she was preaching to the converted.  She then fell into a character called Homonym-C who rapped in this flawed way.  It could have been terrible, but it wasn’t.  She did it in a clever way and the crowd loved it.  I saw Lasky smiling, bobbing his head to rap.  I knew he had no idea what a homonym was and I wasn’t about to tell him.  He had had a tough enough day, so I did the right thing at let him continue to believe he was enjoying himself.

We ended up staying at her place that night.  I slept on her couch and her cat slept on my head.  I was thinking about the drive through Indiana.  It occurred to me that if we replaced all of the corn that grows in this country with broccoli, we’d be just about cancer free.  But what did I care?  Cancer doesn’t run in my family and I had cat hair in my mouth.  Lasky was on other couch snoring like an idiot.  We were leaving Chicago the next day.    

Perfection

If there’s a good thing about Lasky, it’s that he has a hard time falling asleep.  His various manias and existential fears may prevent him from enjoying a productive and fulfilling life, but they intersect perfectly to create a man who can drive all night.

When I woke up we were just outside Chicago.  Lasky had driven straight through the night without so much as a cup of coffee and we were still two hours late for the White Sox game we had been hoping to catch.

The White Sox ballpark is called U.S. Cellular Field, but it will always be The New Comiskey Park to me.

We raced up the tunnel and the crisp green, which always seems greener than should be possible, of the field came into view.   I quickly found the scoreboard to see how much of the game we had missed.  I turned to Lasky and said the bad news was it was already the 6^th.  The good news was Buehrle had a no-hitter going. 

By the time we made it to our seats we realized it wasn’t just a no-hitter. 

There had only been 17 perfect games in the history of baseball.  There was a guy sitting next to me who looked like, and gave off the disconcerting vibe of, an aging gang-banger.  We were on the south side of Chicago after all.  It was pure racial profiling on my part, but he seemed like the kind of guy who had spent more time in his life in jail than out.  Not afraid of anything or anyone.  As hard as they come.  He spent the 8^th and 9^th innings with his hands over his eyes, peeking out between his fingers like a kid cheating at something.   Every one there lived and died with each pitch. 

The first batter of the 9^th inning hit a homerun that didn’t turnout to be one because the center fielder wouldn’t let it be.  The last batter hit a ground ball to short.  Had I been that shortstop I would have been too scared to move.  I would have fallen down and started pissing in my pants.  Know thyself.  I’m not up to a challenge like that and never have been.  But, he was.  They all were.  He picked the grounder cleanly and threw a strike to first.  When you watch a perfect game at home the focus is on the pitcher by virtue of the camera work and historical bias.  Being there you realize Buehrle wasn’t the only one who was perfect that day.  They all were.

After the game we immediately headed to the north side of town, knowing that the anesthetizing effect of the perfect game would only keep the gang-bangers under control temporarily.

We found the perfect place to park the truck for a few days around the corner from Wrigley Field.  This was when the second accident happened.

The parking lot attendant/homeless crack addict was directing Lasky into a spot.  He was waving his hands, bringing us in confidently, but I could tell something was wrong.  He was focusing on the truck’s width, but completely ignoring it’s length and depth.  This was because, in my view, the attendant had the intellectual tools of pony and could only understand the universe one dimension at a time.  I thought about saying something to Lasky, but didn’t.  This was between them. 

A few seconds later we heard a metal on metal screech.  The back of the truck had scraped along a gate and scored a deep cut into the paint.  Lasky flew into a rage.  “Why the hell were you telling me to go?  This is going to come out of my pocket!” He screamed at the attendant, who didn’t seem to know exactly where he was.  “It’s not my fault.”  The attendant muttered.  Lasky stared at him in silence.  Once again, he had been bested. 

We got back in the truck to leave.  Lasky was as angry as I’ve seen him.  He started punching the steering wheel in uncontrollable frustration.  I leaned back and thought about Mark Buehrle, about that catch, and about perfection.  As he pulled out of the lot Lasky slammed his fist into the center of the steering wheel and in anguish wailed “THIS TRIP IS GOING TO COST ME THOUSANDS!!!” over the blaring horn.  I reclined my seat, watched two pigeons fight over a paper bag, and closed my eyes.  Things were looking up.                                                      

TRUCK PROBLEMS

The first full day of driving saw a flat tire and two accidents.  All three while Lasky was driving.  We were somewhere in Ohio at about 4 a.m. when the truck started shaking violently.  I don’t know much about cars and Lasky doesn’t know much about anything so we were able to convince each other that the road had ridges in the pavement and that was causing the shaking. 

We drove for over forty miles cursing the state of Ohio for allowing the highways to be ridged in such a hazardous way.  What could the point or cause of these ridges even be, we wondered?  We agreed that Ohio sucked at maintaining it’s infrastructure before we pulled over and saw that one of the four rear tires was completely destroyed. We sat on the side of route 80 for three hours waiting for the repair truck.  Lasky talked about things.  I thought about different things. 

The first accident came three hours later about twenty miles from the Indiana border.  Fuck Face was pulling out of a gas station and tried to squeeze our 16-foot truck between two cars that were stopped at a red light.  A skilled driver in a Smart Car would have struggled to pull off what Lasky was trying to do.  As he inched toward the crevasse of space the bumper-to-bumper cars were creating, he asked me if I thought he “had it.”  I told him I believed in him.  He immediately hit one of the cars. 

The driver of the car was a toothless redneck in the Ohio tradition.  He stuck his head out of the window and yelled, “You stupid motherfucker!  You hit my car!”  He was right about everything. 

We pulled over behind him and the redneck shot out of his car and charged toward us, out of control like a bear running down hill.  Lasky got out to talk to him.  I stayed in the car to make sure that if anything bad happened, it didn’t happen to me. 

I wasn’t sure if the redneck was on crystal meth, but if he wasn’t, there was a clearly a time when crystal meth was an important part of his life.  Listening to him shout at Lasky with the window cracked and the doors locked, I could tell his brain was completely fried.  He could barely put a sentence together and he picked his nose seven times during the argument that I counted. 

The man’s mental disadvantages aside, he was still equipped to handle Lasky in a debate about his car.  “You know ha mut this gunta cos me?”  The hillbilly riddled.  “Least fo hunnit!”  Lasky’s response to this was tremendous.  “No way.  I know a guy who could buff that scratch out for fifty bucks.”  The backwoods junky thought about Lasky’s approach to the argument for half a second before figuring out a way to side step it.  “Well, I DON”T know that guy!”  The inbred Neanderthal reasoned deftly.  Lasky tried to think of response, but couldn’t.  He nodded to the man, acquiescing defeat.  If only his old classmate from The Dalton School on the upper east side could see him now. 

Lasky got back into the car after giving the man his insurance information.  That was when he told me he had declined the insurance through Penske and was using his own insurance.  He told me he doesn’t have collision so damaged he does to other cars is covered, but he’s liable for any damage he does to the $90,000 truck we were driving.  He asked me if I thought that was bad. 

If he saw me smile, he acted like he didn’t.

cross country

He was on his way from Boston to New Jersey to pick me up.   He had just sent me a text asking for the “addy” at my parents house.  We weren’t even on the road yet and Lasky was already making me furious.  I wouldn’t use the abbreviation “addy” if someone had a rifle pointed at my foot.  But that’s just what make’s Lasky and me different.  I’m perfect, and he’s a complete ape.

 I watched the moving truck bounce down the street I grew up on from my old bedroom window.  The truck was much too big.  I didn’t even have to see what was in the back to know it was too big.  Only an idiot would have rented a truck that size.

 Lasky got out of the truck and pointed at my neighbor’s bigger, nicer house and said, “Why couldn’t you live there?”  I hadn’t seen him in six days.  He seemed balder than I remembered.

“Come on let’s get out of here, these people are making me crazy!”  I said, hoping I wouldn’t have to introduce Lasky to my skittish mother.  “No way.”  Lasky said.  “I have to grab a quick shower.”  It was worse than I had feared.  My borderline agoraphobic mother would have Lasky parading around her sanctuary in a towel asking her if she thought he would be more attractive to women if he shaved his stomach.

I was about to introduce the two most annoying people in my life to one another.  “Mom, this is Lasky.  Lasky, this is my mom.”  I said, hating them both.  They feigned normalcy.  “Nice to meet you.” They may have said.  But it was all bullshit.  These were two wild animals, bent on saying stupid things and misreading social situations.  Watching them perform for one another sent my blood pressure through the roof.  “Lasky wants to use the shower, mom.”  I said, inflecting helplessness.  “That’s fine.” She lied.  I could see it in her face.  If a glass of poison had been nearby she would have drank it.  Lasky didn’t pick up on it because Lasky picks up on nothing. 

This was how the cross-country trip began.  With these two baboons acting like they were “meeting.”  They weren’t meeting.  Not even close.  Take my word for it.  Apes, I tell you.  Complete apes.