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Wednesday, July 25, 2007

What do ya know about America?

America lives in the heart of every man who wishes to work out his destiny as he chooses. –Woodrow Wilson

An olive skin man stepped out the office door and lit a cigarette in the drizzling rain.

“I thought you were my brother,” he said, looking at the shiny pipes of my bike.

I cut the engine and stepped off the two-wheeler.

“My brother, he rides a motorbike like yours. He s’posed to come see us today. Look at that, you’ve got my kids coming to the window looking for their uncle.”

Through the glass of the innkeeper’s quarters six child eyes stared disappointingly at the man who wasn’t their uncle.

“Where are you coming from?” he asked. “Looks like you’ve traveled a long ways.”

He took a seat on the curb. I crouched beside him and we engaged in the same conversation I’d had a thousand times with a thousand other innkeepers in forty-some states.

The inns were all different but all the same. The innkeepers too.

In Idaho, an old white woman had bragged to me that her state was the only one without Indian operated motels. “They’re taking over my industry,” she’d barked. “84% of the motels in America are run by east Indians.”

There was no telling where she’d gotten her statistic but from my experience 84% seemed low.

“Have you been through Oklahoma City?” asked the innkeeper between puffs on his cigarette.

The smoke rings curled above my head in the damp evening. “I have,” I told him.

“That’s where I’m from.”

I looked at him curiously.

“I ran a motel there after I moved from India. My wife made us move back east. She wanted to raise the kids here.” He paused. “So tell me, what do you know now about America?”

The office creaked open and a black-haired, three-foot child ran out barefoot. “Daddy! Daddy, come here.”

The child grabbed her father’s hand and led him inside as he flicked his cigarette to the wet concrete.

A thunderbolt cracked the sky, giving way to a thousand raindrops dancing on the on the cement.

I sat getting bathed in the rain. I was in upstate New York, just six states away from completing the bulge of the American continent. I was soaked through. Saturated. Unable to absorb any more. I was meeting the people it seemed I’d met so many times before: the Indian innkeeper living behind the office with his family, the truck driver who’d spent four years in the Army, the musician who’d dropped out of college, the unhappy office employee, the excited twenty-something blonde engaged to be married…

I reclined on the sidewalk and closed my eyes. I was tired. Tired of being a stranger everywhere I went; shaking a dozen hands a day, knowing that in twenty-four hours I’d be shaking a dozen others in a different town, having forgotten the names and faces that went along with those of yesterday.

With my clothes and hair drenched clean in fresh rain—my sweat washed out of them—I opened my eyes to the northeastern surroundings. On the adjacent highway cars sped by—a little more quickly and a little more recklessly than they did in the Midwest. The landscape had changed too—the hills steeper, the trees taller, the grass a darker green.

As I walked to my motel room a man shouted from the parking lot, “Ah you the one with motohcycle? Not much of a day fa ridin’ ay?”

I shook my head. The people spoke differently here—more quicky and with sharper pronunciations of r’s and o’s.

There were still things to observe. Ahead of me were just two weeks: Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. It would’ve been easy to shut down, lose focus, and worry about the future. After all, I had no plans for what I’d do at the end of this country. And after all this, I knew so little about the nation.

Lunch and an Interview

Bud dropped two grease-soaked paper bags on our table then flopped open a steno pad, sat down and began his questions.

From the bags he withdrew two cheeseburgers and two orders of fries, placed one of each in front of me and continued our interview.

“By the way, this burger joint, Five Guys, you ever heard of it?”

I had. It was a growing chain that had started near my mother’s neighborhood in Virginia.

“I take any excuse to eat here,” he said. “Otherwise I feel like this food will kill me. Know what I mean?”

I nodded.

He continued with his questions, pausing between bites of his french fries to jot notes on his pad

Bud was a columnist with a Hartford newspaper. He’d insisted on meeting me at the Connecticut border and riding with me through the state. He’d taken a photo of me in front of the Welcome to Connecticut sign. He’d shown me the thriving small towns on the outskirts of Hartford; places that in other states would’ve been suburban housing developments and shopping malls. He’d even bought my lunch.

He asked about places I stayed, people I’d met, jobs I’d done, and roads I ridden. He asked about my story-telling performances and how I booked venues. Then he asked more difficult questions.

“How do you see yourself?” he asked.

It was clear he’d never seen anything like me and didn’t know what to make of it.

I told him I saw myself as a torchbearer—someone carrying on the traditions of a working story-teller, following in the footsteps of Woody Guthrie and Louis l’Amour, John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac.

“What will you do after the 48th state?” He said.

I hadn’t asked myself this question and didn’t know quite what to say. I told him I had nothing to go back to, that everything I owned was strapped to the bike, and that no one awaited my return. All I knew was that I was to be an author. And that meant pursuing no other trade, earning just enough of a living to keep myself free.

“One more question,” he said. “What have you learned about our nation?”

I told him about the millionaires I’d met, the homeless shelters I’d stayed in, the racism I’d seen, the poverty, the wealth, the opportunity, and the heartbreaking tales of the underprivileged. But really, what did I know? It was a whirlwind of tales and experiences, painted with my imperfect brush, obscured by my weak memory, and biased by the leanings I’ll never know I have. I started off on this trip with questions and they were only answered by more questions—the onion that unpeels only to reveal infinite layers, each seemingly the last, each more potent in taste and smell.

I shook his hand as we left the table and couldn’t help but think of all the other hands I’d shaken in all the towns across this country.

Here I am, Homeless in Providence

In the dim light of the bar a few college drunks watched the Red Sox game on a flat screen TV. In the background a gray haired man with manicured sideburns sang Bob Seger’s “Turn the Page” from a Karaoke machine.

I nursed a Jack and Coke and stared at the reflective red, white and blue of the motorcycle helmet I balanced on my knee.

“This must be your song,” a man yelled in my ear. He swept the hair from his bloodshot eyes and screamed the lyrics, “Here I am, on the road again. Here I am, up on the stage. There I go, playing the star again. There I go, turn the page.”

He took the barstool beside me, balanced his beer on his folded knee, and reached out to shake hands. “What you’re doing is terrific,” he shouted. “Absolutely amazing!”

He waved a hand at the bartender and ordered me a drink.

“I just got fired. So I’m taking my unemployment checks and moving west with my girlfriend,” he said. “You seem like you are the west. Like a real cowboy. I wanna be like that.”

He wiped the cigarette ashes from his jeans and continued. “I was a chemist. Can you believe it!” he cursed and shook his head. “What a waste. I’m almost thirty-five years old.”

The beer fell from his knee and splashed to the shadows of the floor. He cursed again and frantically dropped on all fours to clear the glass.

I looked once more to the doorway but no one entered. I’d been waiting two hours for someone who’d promised me a couch for the night. As the bartender announced last call it was clear they weren’t returning.

Walking onto the Providence street, looking around at the tall buildings glimmering in the rain and shining in the streetlights, I wondered where I’d take refuge for the night.

Just then a blonde came running after me, her tattooed arms flailing and her small body shaking with the effervescence that fueled her quick speech. “Hey,” she yelled. “What’s your name? You need to come to my party this weekend. Will you be in Massachusetts? That’s where I live. Here. Take this,” she handed me a slip of paper with an address. “Show up on Saturday afternoon. I’ll see you there.” She gave me a hug and ran back inside.

I walked into the night of a new town, knowing no one, having nowhere to go, and thinking only of the famous Rhode Island mansions that I would see in Newport the following day; places like The Breakers, the famous Vanderbilt mansion with its thirty-six unoccupied bedrooms, each like a dream to me in my homeless Providence night.

The Home Team

On the corner of Yawkey Way they moved like sharks circling bloody prey. “Who needs tickets?” one screamed, hoisting a fistful of the paper stubs in the air. Another one jammed his white fist into his jeans, eyed a handful of cash then waved his tickets into the air.

Throngs circled the two scalpers—old men with horseshoes of gray hair, teenagers in red and blue shirts, fathers with one hand clutching sons. Like Wall Street brokers the scalpers began the transactions. “How much? Depends on what you want to spend! I got box seats, nosebleeds, club level. Whattaya want?”

“Got seats for sixty. For forty. Hundred bucks a piece. Whattaya want? Whattaya want?”

Cash and tickets swapped hands, vendor to customer and back again. The scalpers were in their element, eskimos in the snow, litigators in the courtroom, preachers on their pulpits.

“Hey, check out this guy,” shouted the scalper in front of me. “Where ya comin’ from?”

He turned to the scalper behind him. “Get a load of this guy. All the way from Texas.”

The other scalper pushed his way through the gaggle to look at my helmet and shake my hand. “Give him face value,” he said to his friend. “You come up all this way, we’ll hook you up.” He handed me a ticket. “You enjoy Fenway man. Best ballpark in the country.”

Here for the Party

“Quit smoking, what the hell would you want to do that for?” The twenty-two year old lit his cigarette and slapped a mosquito off his tattooed shoulder.

The girl across from him just shrugged and stared into the fire glowing orange in the dark night. “Well I’ve gotten clean from everything else. Meth. Heroine. I quit drinking ten months—” then she shrieked, “Oh my God!”

A plastic chair flew across the patio smashing against the grill.

On the other side of the backyard a broad-shouldered man stood with the glow of a torch lamp illuminating his face.

“You got a problem with the coastguard?” he shouted. “You think just because you were a marine you’re better than me.”

The twenty-two year old tossed his cigarette into the fire and ran toward the action. The marine had charged the chair-throwing coastguardsman and the two grappled as they fell into the pool.

“You see what people do here in Mass.?” said the Asian kid beside me. “We fight about the coastguard and the marines,” he laughed. “My brother will break it up.”

His ‘brother’ was really his foster brother. And the girl who was planning to quit smoking was his foster sister, Nikki—the tattooed blonde who’d ran out of the Providence bar to invite me to this party. Why she’d done it I’ll never know. That curiosity had brought me here. The only explanation I got was of Nikki and her siblings.

“We all moved here when we were little kids,” Nikki told me. “We’re all grown up and we still live with mom.”

‘We’ included eleven foster kids of different races, now all over the age of twenty and still living together as one family. They were tattooed and pierced. They worked as DJs and masonry workers. Two of them attended community college. Three or four of them had been in and out of rehab for crack and heroine. Before going to bed, the ‘mother,’ a heavy white woman of about fifty, came out on the patio and smoked a joint with some of the partiers.

When she returned to the backdoor it was only to see what all the noise was about.

“Hey!” she shouted, clanking a metal serving spoon against a frying pan. The backyard went quiet as everyone stared at her round silhouette in the lit doorway. “If you can’t play nice, you need to leave the party!”

The coastguardsman climbed from the pool, his t-shirt and jeans dripping with water as he walked for the door.

“The both of you are real suckers,” shouted a deep voice from the dark yard. “You’re both patsies for the government. And now you fight over who’s the bigger idiot.”

Again the yard went quite.

“Well it was good meeting you, Woodrow,” the coastguardsman said, shaking my hand as he made his exit.

“You too,” I said and stared into the dancing purple flames of the campfire. I would spend the night in a tent in the backyard, eat breakfast with ‘the family’ in the morning, and travel on to my final three states.

I was heading into the final week. After that, no map would lead me further.

Nothing made sense. That was all I knew.