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.