My Heart Is an Idiot: Essays (37 page)

*

Gradually my eyes adjusted to the darkness. There were five boys in the back with me—Danny and a red-haired friend of his, lying with their legs out, propped on their elbows, passing a handheld video game back and forth and fiddling with their cell phones; two younger boys, eight or nine years old, sitting cross-legged, sipping red straws from Burger King soda cups, watching me with wide eyes; and one giant, oversized boy with buzz-cut hair who looked between all of them in age, eleven or twelve, but was by far the largest of the bunch, hunched closest to the front, facing me, gazing with fierce concentration at a small plastic toy held inches from his face.

“What you got there?” I called out to him, over the country song’s rock-and-roll ruckus.

He made no response, but one of the younger kids leaned toward me and hollered, “It’s a game. You got to get all the marbles in the right place to win. Can’t nobody do it, though!”

I nodded and sat back. I was wedged between Danny and his friend and a stack of a dozen hard, black plastic cases, long and flat, the kind that might house electric guitars. “Your dad a musician?” I asked Danny, but he was playing his video game and didn’t seem to hear me, and the two younger kids stared at me without a response.

I looked out the back windows. Darkness had fallen, and all I could see was the glare of headlights behind us, red taillights in the eastbound lanes. I wondered how Anna was faring, stuck in the hot cab of our pickup. It occurred to me that I should’ve pulled farther onto the shoulder—each passing truck, I was sure, was rocking the whole vehicle. I checked my phone to see if I had service yet, and saw that my battery had all but drained itself, searching for a signal.

Up front, Miller Time turned his head and shouted, “All right, you boys ready for some more of this?” Danny winced and shook his head with an embarrassed smile, but the two youngest boys faced forward with looks of delight. I had no idea what to expect.

Miller Time rolled down his window, and as the hot, singed desert air whipped inside the van, he took off his hat, leaned his head outside, and stood, so that his whole upper body was flapping in the breeze, silhouetted against the sky’s dark-red, post-sunset glow. We pulled up alongside the cab of an eighteen-wheeler in the right lane, and he shouted, “Hey there, look at my titties!” and lifted his shirt, showing off his lean, hairless chest. He pumped a fist, asking the trucker to tug on his horn, and when the trucker responded with two short, bellowing blasts, he gave a wild, victorious whoop and dropped back into his seat, laughing so hard his whole body shook. “That was a good one,” he called back to us. “Come on, let’s do another!”

Some truckers honked their horn; others didn’t. But it was undeniably hilarious, the surprised, amused looks on the truckers’ faces, and the joy that Miller Time seemed to take from springing himself on them. I wished Anna was with me to see it. The woman piloting our van—Miller Time’s wife? girlfriend?—played gamely along, speeding to catch up to each semi and then falling in right alongside them until he flashed them his chest, before she pounded the gas and we zoomed away. “I wanna try,” said the youngest kid, steadying himself on his feet and working his way up front.

“You crazy?” shouted Miller Time with a laugh. “You’d fly right out the window!”

Finally, he sat back, rolled his window up, popped his cap back on, and turned his attention to the radio dial. The country station was fading, and he switched it to a metal station and began singing along to a metal tune he didn’t seem to actually know, shouting nonsense lyrics and thrashing his head. Danny and his friend exchanged bemused, worried glances. When the song ended, he found a hip-hop station and started rapping along, making up the words, and waving his hands in the air. This, apparently, was what it took to finally win over Danny and his friend. They broke out in big, goofy smiles and laughed out loud. All the while, the oversized kid with the buzz cut never took his eyes off his marble puzzle, sullen as a swan in winter.

I appreciated the guy’s good-natured clowning, but it felt like we were passing a number of exits without getting off the highway. Granted, they’d all looked completely barren, not a gas station in sight, but every mile we drove west was another mile I’d have to hitch back, and I was getting worried about leaving Anna alone for so long in the middle of nowhere. I felt eager to resume the conversation with her about our joint future, which felt, each moment, to be slipping further away.

“Where you guys headed?” I called out to Danny, over the thumping beat.

“Home,” he said.

“Where’s that?”

“Downey.”

This, I knew, was a blue-collar suburb of L.A., though I couldn’t have pointed it out on a map. “Where you coming from?”

“Oh, just out in the desert,” he said.

“Hiking?”

“Nah. Shootin’.”

“Yeah? What do you hunt out here?”

“Nah! Shootin’!”

He gestured toward the black cases I was leaning against. “Wanna see?” Without waiting for my response, he crawled around me and popped the lid on one. Inside was an enormous black machine gun, maybe the biggest gun I’d ever seen, like something out of
Die Hard
. “Pretty sweet, right?”

“Yeah. Wow.” I felt stupid for having imagined that they were all musical instruments.

“It’s my dad’s. He was in the Marines,” he said, by way of explanation. “Now he’s a fireman.” He shifted the cases around, lifting each lid to reveal an astounding, frightening array of automatic weapons, one after another. Growing up in Michigan, I’d seen my share of hunting rifles and shotguns, but never this kind of Desert Storm arsenal. “Hey,” he said, “let me show you mine.” All of a sudden the music went silent and his dad’s voice boomed from the front.

“Danny, what the hell are you doing? Don’t mess with those while we’re driving, you know better than that!” Chastised, Danny hustled back to his seat on the floor next to his friend. “You see that?” Miller Time said to his girl, incredulous, speaking loud enough for all of us to hear. She shrugged, and after a moment, the music came back on.

Danny’s friend, the red-haired kid, eyed me and said, “Hey, were you in prison?”

“Me?” I said. “No. Maybe a night or two in jail.” If my neck tattoos made me seem like that much of a badass, I thought, I’d have to get the actual ink done. “What made you think that?” I asked.

“Danny told me,” he said. He held up his phone, and grinned. “We’ve been texting.”

“You guys have service?” I pulled out my phone but it was still out of range.

“Yeah, I thought that’s what you told my dad,” explained Danny. “When we picked you up. You said you were locked up. Or just got out or something.”

I understood the confusion. “Oh, no, I was talking about Ai Weiwei. This guy.” I tapped my neck, and explained how the Chinese authorities had often harassed him for his political muckraking.

“That your friend?” asked the red-haired kid.

“Well, I don’t know him personally. But I admire his work, I suppose.”

“My dad’s in prison,” the kid said. “But Danny’s dad takes me shootin’.”

“Hey, hang on a minute,” I said. After half an hour on the road, we’d finally reached civilization, signs for fast-food joints and a truck stop cropping up along the shoulder, and it looked like at last my phone had reception. I tried dialing Anna, doubting she’d even have service, but her phone started to ring, rather than going straight to voice mail, and I felt hopeful that I might get through. Then the ringing stopped and the line went quiet.

“Anna!” I said. “Are you there? Can you hear me? You doing all right?” But as I waited for a response, my phone made a
bloop
and cut out, powering down on its own, out of juice. “Damn,” I said. I could’ve asked Danny or his friend to use their phone, if I’d known Anna’s number by heart.

“Your wife’s stuck back there, huh?” said Danny.

“Yeah,” I said, and experimented with the words: “My wife.” It gave me a little charge, like touching a nine-volt battery to the tongue.

Some old, melancholy country song filled the van, and we coasted into the right-hand lane, approaching an exit. I realized that there was only one thing to do, and that was to say
fuck it
, take a chance, roll the dice, and move with Anna to London. We could even get separate places at first, so that we could date for a while like normal people, before moving in with each other. It would be hard to leave all my friends and family in Michigan behind, but after years and years of fighting to find the perfect girl, why give up on something just because it required sacrifice? If things didn’t work out, I could always come home again, and if they did work out, well, maybe one day I’d be able to convince Anna that we should move back to the U.S. It was thrilling beyond measure and at the same time a little bit heartbreaking to imagine myself, a few weeks later, getting dropped off by my dad at the airport in Detroit, hugging him goodbye, and telling him, “All right then, I’ll see you when I see you.”

Our van curved off at the Indio exit, slow-rolled a stop sign, and swung into the lot of a Roadside 76 station. I hopped out, offering my profuse thanks.

“It’s nothing,” said Miller Time. “We never leave a man behind in the desert. Hey, you want anything from Jack in the Box?”

“No thanks, I’m good. But seriously, you guys, thanks again.”

I closed the side doors behind me, and Miller Time, his woman, all five boys, and their Nakatomi Plaza–worthy stash of weapons rolled away in the van. Over the roar of the exhaust and the music’s receding din, I could hear Miller Time whooping it up, “Giddyap! Giddyap!
C’mon, git!
” And then they were gone, as quickly as they’d appeared.

*

“We don’t have gas cans here,” the ancient counter clerk told me, inside the Roadside 76 station, a half minute later. “You can try the Texaco, it’s a couple miles down the road.”

Fuck. That meant a lengthy walk, or else begging one ride to the next gas station, then another back the other direction, toward the spot where Anna was staked out waiting for me, twenty-five or thirty miles east. But an old woman who’d overheard the conversation said she thought she had a spare gas can in her trunk, and returned a minute later with an antique-looking one, healthy sized, painted green and made out of metal, sporting a John Deere logo. “You sure?” I asked her. I’d seen these go for fifty bucks at estate sales.

“Tell you what,” she said. “When you’re done with it, just drop it back here. Henry’ll get it to me. Right, Henry?”

The old clerk nodded. “Okay, Darlene.” I thanked her and she went on her way.

Outside I pumped three gallons in, and then started explaining my situation to anyone who pulled in for a fill-up, asking if they were headed east. But my luck had run dry: each of them edged cautiously away from me, as though I was one of those hustlers with complicated appeals for help you’ll come across in shady neighborhoods outside of baseball stadiums or floating around Greyhound stations late at night. They all seemed to be locals, with destinations close by, or at least claimed that was the case after taking stock of all the tattoos on my neck and my arms. The best bet, I guessed, was to cross the highway and work the entrance ramp for I-10 with my thumb out. I knew it could be a long wait. Few people stopped for hitchhikers at night; fewer still would want my old gas can spewing fumes inside their car. As I cast about for other motorists to accost, I saw, to my great astonishment and relief, that the Black Stallion had returned: the same black van that had stopped for me before was clattering back into the lot, its horn honking,
Shave-and-a-haircut, two bits
. Miller Time had his window rolled down, and he slapped the side of his door as they pulled up next to me. “Come on, Tumbleweed!” he called. “Hop in!”

He laughed, as his woman steered us over a bridge and down the eastbound entrance ramp for the interstate. “What’d ya think?” he said. “We was gonna leave you for the coyotes?” He hooted and hawed, his enjoyment of the joke nearly equal to my surprise and gratitude at the sheer depth of their generosity. I tried to tell him how much I appreciated them coming back for me and he cut me off. “Nah, we just had to get some food for the little guys and some drinks for me. Here, ya want one?” He passed me a tallboy of Budweiser, which somehow seemed funny to me, with his
Miller Time
ball cap and all. “I told you,” he went on. “We don’t leave
no one
behind.
Especially
out here in the desert.”

“Well, can I at least offer you a few bucks for gas?”

He waved his hand, slightly offended. “Just have a drink with me.”

I propped the gas can in the door well, far from the weapons cases and ammunition, settled into my spot way in the back, and we wound our way east along I-10 the way we’d come. The wild atmosphere of our westbound ride had been replaced with the quiet, focused intensity of mealtime. No one said a word; everyone was devouring their burgers and chicken sandwiches from Jack in the Box. Even the oversized kid with the buzz cut had given up on his marble game for the time being and double-fisted a burger and a chocolate shake. The radio was pumped up high, some classic rock and oldies station. I looked out the window at distant lights across the desert plains, nursing my Budweiser as the miles slid by.

Fifteen, twenty minutes later, all the boys had finished their food, crumpled up their bags, and, giggling, tossed them up front at Miller Time, who wearily chucked the first couple back our way, and then ignored the rest. “Now, here’s a tune,” he said, cranking up the volume so loud that the speakers were crackling. It was John Cougar Mellencamp singing:

Oh, ain’t that America? You and me …

Ain’t that America? Somethin’ to see …

This, from what I knew of it, was one of those songs, like Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.,” that had been written as a eulogy for the dying American Dream but had been so widely misinterpreted as an anthem of patriotism and working-class pride that its original intent had been usurped in the popular imagination. And, actually, when you really thought about it, the artists were wrong and the popular imagination was right, for how could you listen to Mellencamp sing the chorus and not feel stirred by a love for America, whatever its shortcomings might be? As the song went on, Miller Time lifted his voice to sing along, his can of Bud held aloft and swaying, like a candle at an arena rock show, and when the chorus returned he shouted, “Everybody now!” to press the boys in back—and me, too, I guess—to join in.