Cures for Hunger (31 page)

He'd finally realized that leniency would get him nowhere. Only his rage could keep me in line. I didn't think he was wrong, but I preferred freedom.

Sleet was falling as I picked up the license plates for the Dodge. I drove to my father's house and parked the SUV. Frosts had burned the grass yellow, and the unlit windows reflected the large wet pines along the property. I knew his schedule, but he sometimes returned unexpectedly to drop off hefty bags of dog food or the like. He was restless, his days filled with errands that seemed like excuses for him to prowl the streets in his truck. Maybe he felt the same need for movement that I
did. I knew that he'd tried to appeal to me, to tell the stories I loved, but as with Dickie, I'd been looking for an excuse.

I hadn't packed anything yet. I was afraid he'd go downstairs and see my bags. In fifteen minutes, a classmate would be there to take me to the Dodge.

I got out, swung myself over the black iron gate, and ran through the door and down to my room. I rushed, throwing everything into a duffel. I sprinted back out, pitched it over the gate, and followed. I shoved it behind my seat and sat, pretending to read.

My classmate's white Toyota pulled into the lane. When he stopped, I shuttled the duffel from my vehicle to his. I tossed the keys on the floorboard and took the new plates, and I slid into his car. He did a quick three-point turn and sped away. The tires made a rushing sound over the wet asphalt, large half-frozen raindrops striking the windshield. Soon we were on the highway, the downpour slackening unevenly, falling in hard pulses against us.

 

 

An hour later, I crossed the border, retracing the windy path of my mother's migration six years before. The rush-hour ranks advanced cautiously, the parade of taillights made garish by the icy downpour. In my rearview, endless headlights appeared crystalline behind the same rain. The motor buzzed like the remote-control car my father sent when I lived in the trailer park. Each time I gained speed, I feared it might explode.

After midnight, I pulled into a rest stop on I-90, in eastern Washington. I folded the backseat and curled up in my blankets, my feet in the hatchback and my clothes serving as a mattress. The engine idled, fans beating hot air through the vents. I'd never been happier.

To avoid the cold, I cut south on I-15 through Idaho and into Utah, before turning east on I-70. I taped a notebook to the dash, and as I drove, I wrote the sloping deserts and arid plateaus, the Rockies and their companionship with a sky wider and greater than my faith in anything. It lifted peaks into its light, making new monuments of them each hour, then abandoned them into the dark, which—I told myself as I tried to sleep,
staring up at snowy, starlit crags through the hatchback window—was why mountains at night are a lonely thing to see.

As the motor's vibrations cradled me, I tried to envision my life. I saw the red lines of highways on the map, stretched between cities like threads of torn cloth. I imagined a book that could hold it all together, plains and mountain ranges, dust-drab towns beyond interstates, and somewhere on the far edges, the valley in British Columbia and those nights in Virginia when I snuck out and stalked the highway, trying to fathom where I belonged on this threadbare continent. Everyone I knew should see the world though my eyes, every friend, every girl I'd ever liked: frost glittering on dry plains at sunrise, or the highway carving through rolling hills with the perfect geometry of longing. It seemed a sin to witness it all in solitude, a reason to believe in an ever-present god.

But loneliness was the trial of this landscape, my life at last like Steinbeck's novels. The interstate opened onto a solitary earth, the quiet destruction of worn-out homes, thousands of miles of violent alchemy melting away a broken people, distilling them to a few resilient loners.

The writer's life was said to be chaotic and destructive and adventurous, and I felt that by choosing this over and over again, so much of who I was would become acceptable.

 

 

The message came through my brother: my father's anger, that I'd insulted him, that he never wanted to speak to me again, that I should expect nothing else from him.

I tried not to think about it. The farther I got from his life, the clearer I was about mine. But the way I'd left had been extreme, a reminder for him of my mother's betrayal. I wasn't even sure why I'd done it—to be free or just to prove I could? When I tried to decide if he deserved it, I thought of how he had broken our family. Everything he'd built in his life seemed temporary—hopeless, even—like a few sandbags set against a dark, incoming deluge.

Again, I worked the circuit of couches and guest bedrooms and odd jobs: construction, demolition, roofing, landscaping, washing dishes. My
mother had left Dickie and was seeing someone new, a thin, bald man with a Wyatt Earp mustache and such a kind demeanor I could hardly believe she'd chosen him.

The poet Henry Taylor gave a reading at the high school. He'd won something called the Pulitzer Prize, but I didn't expect much, his talk casual, his first poem prefaced with a concern for grammar. It described a horse eating grass through barbed wire, when it was spooked—by what wasn't clear—and ran along the fence, barbs gouging its neck, tearing chunks from its throat. Hearing the rhythms, I wanted to jump up and shout, to tell the horse to stop, to command Taylor to keep reading, to feel the tremendous urge for life that the horse did in the final seconds of its destruction, as it “gave up breathing while the dripping wire / hummed like a bowstring in the splintered air.”

Mumbling the lines over and over, I left school and drove to the restaurant where I washed dishes. How was it done? Passing racks of dishes, I had to restrain my hand from knocking them to the floor.

The line cook with the greasy ponytail annoyed me, but I told him about the poem so I could snag half an English cucumber.

“You wanna be a writer, huh?” he said, his front tooth chipped at a nicotine-stained angle.

“Yeah.”

“Well, you should read Kerouac.”

“Whatever,” I said. Worn-out hippies were always telling me to read Kerouac. No one who didn't look as if he'd scorched his neurons and had his skull sooted up with cobwebs had recommended him. But I nodded, devouring a plum tomato in two bites. Once, in a textbook, I'd read an excerpt from Magellan's voyages, a paragraph devoted to how, starving, the crew sustained themselves with fruits and vegetables and meats entirely new to them. For me: leek soup, arugula salad, the hard ends of French bread.

“Hey,” the line cook said, “go easy on the Gouda.”

“Yeah, okay.” I snuck half a boiled potato from the counter and ate it in the walk-in fridge, garnished with dark olives from a plastic tub.

The next morning, I asked my English teacher if I should check out
On the Road.

“You?” she said. “No, you should definitely not check out
On the Road.
The last thing you need is
On the Road.
”

So I went to the library and got
On the Road
and
Dharma Bums.

That weekend, I read both books, sitting on the couch at a friend's house, on the front porch, under the tree, on the picnic table, moving often as if to make myself inconspicuous. I'd have stepped into the pages: wandering, nights of camaraderie and the courting of women; the sense of innocence and hope and longing for experience. Even in their misdemeanors, the characters remained pure. They lived in the undeniable flow of life.

But what startled me above all was the working-class world from which Kerouac came, the French Canadian family in Lowell, Massachusetts, and how he'd freed himself. There was something of the observer in him, a lack of connection, a rootless quality that denied him strength. I couldn't help but think of my father's disconnected life, the emptiness into which he pulled others. And yet I knew that because of him I loved Kerouac. He'd lived wilder things, a more desperate life driven by a greater longing than anything Kerouac described—a desire I sensed when he spoke of his past, but whose source I didn't understand. No matter how I tried to forget him, I knew that his stories had first fed my imagination and made me want to travel, and that, when I myself had escaped him on the road, these stories had returned to me, ghosting my wanderings.

 

 

As soon as I finished both of Kerouac's books, I rushed through
Pride and Prejudice.
I'd grudgingly taken it from my English teacher for extra credit, but it surprised me. Unlike so many other characters in novels, Elizabeth Bennet seemed fully formed. Her rebellion emerged fluidly from the mechanisms of her society. I imagined meeting her, but her family would probably have hired me to dig a ditch, nothing more. An excruciating loneliness gripped my balls. Kerouac, too, I realized, would have dreamed of her—would have loved her fiercely, though eventually, unable to find his place, he'd have left, or she'd have kicked him out.

As I read in the library, Charlotte joined me and pushed a college guide across the table.

“Have you looked yet?” she asked.

She and I had hung out at a party and become close, though she refused to be anything other than a friend, maybe wise to my life's heedless trajectory. She'd been insisting for a week that I apply to at least one college.

“Just pick one. Everyone else has applied.”

“Nah,” I said and told her about Kerouac riding on the roofs of trains or living alone in a fire tower on a mountain for months, writing books.

She rolled her eyes. “Just apply. You don't have to go, but you'll have the choice.”

She had long auburn hair and a classical profile, and she seemed far too good for me in the same way Elizabeth did. Rebel or not, Elizabeth would have wanted a man with at least some education. I hated the idea of it, a sort of narrow cast that would force me to write and think like everyone else, but I leafed through the guide.

“Okay, this one,” I said finally. It was the strangest I could find, the most individualistic, a school in Vermont called Marlboro College.

For the application essay, I described my upbringing, my bank-robber father and occultist mother, exaggerating maybe a little. But I had no intention of going. Nothing I did could expend my energy. At times, it felt like bliss, exuberance filling my lungs so as to crack my ribs. At others, it was a virus in the blood, demanding movement and expression. The speed of my scribbling transformed words into hieroglyphs. I jotted on scraps that cluttered my car, which I now had to push-start, its alternator dead.

After classes let out, I opened its door and pushed from the side, gaining momentum, then jumped in, threw it into gear, and popped the clutch. The engine revved and sputtered, and I sped out of the lot. I drove fast, the windows down, and as I climbed a long incline, a gust blew through and carried out several scraps. The anxiety of loss startled me. I felt it in a way I never had with people. I wanted to stop and search the roadside weeds, but the car might stall and I'd be stuck. Foot pressing
the gas, I drove on, grieving lost verse, as if I finally understood that the people and places in those words were gone.

 

 

The need, the desire, the disease—whatever it was that made me keep moving was unrelenting. Clear mornings, the sight of distant mountains filled me with such longing that I drove past school, wandered from town to town, or hiked. By graduation, I'd realized its alienating power.

I was living on a river in a dome tent that I'd dug from my mother's horse trailer and that my brother, my father, and I had camped in, its canvas now a Rorschach of mildew. The land belonged to friends of my mother's, the riverbank remote. I bathed naked and scrubbed at clothes filthy from construction.

My mismatched transcripts had added up, and I'd been accepted to college and even offered funding. Classes began in two months, but going seemed impossible. I didn't have enough money for the small amount not covered by financial aid, and I was in trouble with the local police, who'd fined me for driving without an inspection sticker, then without a muffler, and finally for missing my court date. My brother had told my father about college and sent me a message, saying that my father wanted to pay my way back for a visit. Though I hated my job, I didn't want to give in to him.

I opened my car door and sat. The clothes I wore had dried on a tree branch and were as stiff and coarse as animal hides. I didn't know where to go from here. I hated the idea of college, but what else was there?

I stared at the sky, the sun flashing through leaves. I punched the windshield and it split. The irreversible damage brought out my fury, and I kicked the side-view mirror off and beat on the door. I took a plastic jug with some gas in it and splashed it on the tent and lit it. I pitched much of what I owned inside. Not waiting for it to finish burning, I turned the car on. The engine backfired, sounding like a lowrider. I raced along the tractor path through the woods, half a mile to a long gravel driveway, and finally to a county road and then the interstate. I accelerated until the car shook, vibrations clapping in my ears. After an hour, the engine boomed, and I drifted to the shoulder.

When a tow truck arrived, I just signed the car over. With the sun in my eyes, I squinted off, trying to make a plan. The driver chuckled, the zipper on his overalls open to the black thatch of his beer gut, his clipboard propped against it as he wrote his name on the title.

I stuffed what I owned into my backpack and began hitchhiking to where a friend lived on a failed commune, a community built of landfill scraps, walls of mortared jars and pop bottles. But I knew the freeloading couldn't last. I'd done so much, and nothing had changed.