13 Miles from Gilman, Illinois (And It Looks like Rain)

We were in pursuit of the Great American Dream, David and I. Well, David was, anyway. My role was, as always, more like Terry Gilliam chasing after John Cleese, madly clapping my coconut shells for David as he pursued his elusive grail. But as we raced across the flat brown land on the gently curving two-lane road—well in excess of the posted speed limit—it felt instead as though the country was moving around us, racing to deliver the prize directly to the comfort of our car, sparing us the trouble of actual pursuit.

I imagined a teenage girl on roller skates wheeling up to the window with the passing landscape, a jewel-encrusted goblet resting on her tray. Would you like some fries with your legendary artifact, sir? She popped her gum with a smile. I smiled back before the apparition drifted away into the painted backdrop of pastoral America that was sliding past the windows.

It might have been the grass, the landscape, maybe even the weather; whatever it was, I had the palpable sense that our youth lay behind us, a chapter completed, awaiting only the copyedit of adult reminiscence to provide meaning. Our future waited for us somewhere ahead, beyond the autumnal terrain, while our lives up to that very moment were entirely contained within the cabin of the car, each instant perfectly new, each passing mile of cracked state highway delineating a lifetime all its own.

All that being said, I paused in my reflections in order to balance the steering wheel between my knees to I open another can of Budweiser.

I wish we’d thought to bring the dope, I said, repeating a mantra I’d been practicing for over an hour.

Yeah, David agreed absently. And a coat; I’m freezing! He wiped a dribble of beer from his chin with his fingers and finished off the Doritos. The heater was all but kaput in my little red Opel, and the temperature was dropping rapidly under the gray October skies of east central Illinois.

Just a couple of hours earlier, we’d been warmly ensconced in my dorm room with Elliott and Janet, munching from a large grocery bag of popcorn that Elliott’s mom had sent over to school via a distant relative (whose actual relationship to Elliott remains a complete mystery to me) and sharing a pipe of Columbian that I’d brought back from Columbus. And yes, the four of us also shared more than a few minutes of hilarity over that particular play on words. We had more-or-less decided on Bruno’s Swiss Inn and Italian Deli for dinner and were passing the lazy Sunday afternoon telling tales until the restaurant opened. While David shared the story of his recent encounter with local law enforcement, Elliott was playing with my roommate’s deck of cards, artfully spinning the playing cards around the room. At intervals, each of us selected five of the scattered cards, absently wagering popcorn kernels against the resulting hands, rapt by David’s dramatic (and highly embellished) retelling of his arrest and brief incarceration. The stakes went up when David interrupted his story to bet my stereo against Janet’s virginity. I felt compelled to point out that it was a poor bet since the stereo still worked. Janet scowled and, giggling, threw a handful of popcorn at me.

The pipe came my way once more and I inspected it closely for the hundredth time. Elliott, a sculptor majoring, oddly, in Business Administration, had molded this as a dragon from clay. It was six inches long and glazed in green and bronze. The dragon’s lower jaw was longer than the upper and this served as the bowl, aromatic herb packed lovingly between rows of razor-sharp teeth, smoke curling up through the monster’s nostrils. The tip of the long, curved tail served as the mouthpiece. In use, tucked comfortably in the palm of my hand, it looked like Sherlock Holmes’s great meerschaum pipe from the old movies. If, that is, the pipe had somehow just dropped acid. I was not practiced at art appreciation, but I certainly appreciated that pipe.

(On the wall above my desk I’d pinned a Polaroid picture that Elliott had given me of another of his works, entitled Ouch. A simple face, projecting from the center of a flat slab of clay, was surrounded by a pair of hands, also projecting from the slab. The fingers of the hands were pulling the face apart. Ouch. Even the engineer in me could understand that.)

At some point, Janet, lounging on the floor at Elliott’s feet, her head on his knees, asked if she could have more popcorn. Elliott responded, Of course, and proceeded to empty the remaining contents of the bag over her head. She tilted her head back and attempted to catch as much popcorn in her upturned mouth as she could as it cascaded about her face. My careful study of Elliott’s work shifted to become an equally meticulous study of Janet’s open mouth and the popcorn kernels bouncing off of her perfect white teeth.

Some immeasurable—but short, I feel certain—time later, David and I fled the dorm, leaving behind our friends, our coats, my marijuana and our youth.

How exactly David and I ended up in my car, driving rapidly across the empty Midwestern landscape on the trail of the American Dream will always remain a mystery to me. What seems clearest, at least, is that Elliott and Janet wanted some time to themselves. Since they were already comfortably entwined on my carpet after a half-hearted and highly entertaining attempt to clean up the spilled popcorn, David announced that we should simply leave them there. It seemed the logical thing to do at the time.

The motivation behind our decision to get in the car and start driving west, on the other hand, will never be truly known, even by the two of us. Likewise, David’s idea of the American Dream, which I could never really define, seems to have sprung fully formed from his fevered imagination. It did seem the high-minded sort of thing a young man of intellect should be doing when he found the time, though, so I embraced the concept immediately.

There was another, somewhat less intellectual, reason: David was due in court the following day. As a result, we were not only on a quest for the Great American Dream. We were also Fleeing the Country. Note the capital letters. We were on a mission.

Over a long weekend, while I was at home with my family, David decided that he needed a drink. Of course, the drinking age in Indiana was twenty-one, so he could’t buy anything to drink, not legally anyway. So he decided to steal it.

The end result was a night in jail and a summons to appear on charges of shoplifting and minor in possession. His parents were not happy.

David tried to explain his reasoning to them: The law was based on the assumption that, on average, a person twenty-one years of age or older had enough experience and had learned enough self-control to drink responsibly. He reasoned that, since we all mature at different rates, our readiness for the consumption of alcohol should, instead, be based on past experience. He had a well-documented, if clandestine, history of underage drinking and was therefore old enough to drink; Indiana’s blanket policy of denying him the right to buy alcohol was thus void.

Further, if he had purchased his whiskey rather than stealing it, he would have forced the seller, willing or no, to participate in his illegal actions. That was philosophically unacceptable to him. In his mind, he had no choice but to steal the pint of Jack Daniels. Q. E. D.

His parents were unmoved by the argument. Even I thought his conclusion seemed a bit self-serving. But I digress.

After some unchanging time we found ourselves faced with a choice: Chicago or Champaign-Urbana, a literal fork in the road. I’d like to say that we felt that our quest would best be served by turning toward Champaign, diving deeper into America’s heartland; that by passing through the smaller towns of central Illinois we would somehow gestalt the Truth about America, understand the secret heart of Americans, and realize manifest destiny in our own westward movement.

The truth was far more prosaic; if more immediately obvious to a pair of college guys on a mission they didn’t understand anyway: There was a major state university, much like the one we were currently fleeing, in Champaign-Urbana. There would be more dope there. And coeds, of course.

We were stretching our legs at the edge of a cornfield, among the last lonely and unharvested stalks standing alongside the narrow two-lane state highway, watching the clouds gathering in the west when David summed it up: It’s the right thing to do, Mike. Besides, it’s on the way to Peru.

♦ ♦ ♦

Do we have any more Doritos? I asked around my beer.

David rummaged around in the crackling plastic bags at his feet and came up with a box of Cracker Jacks.

No, but we’ve got these, he said with enthusiasm.

Great! Open ‘em up. Dibs on the prize.

David grunted with the effort of tearing the heavy cardboard and ended up splashing the dashboard with half the contents of the box. He giggled and handed me the box containing what remained of the Cracker Jacks.

The road rushed around a great flat curve, arcing across the brown, furrowed farmlands. The wind lifted a rogue cloud of dust from the fields and threw it against the windshield as David passed me another beer and attempted, unsuccessfully, to find something other than Paul Harvey on the radio.

Hey, Mikey, where in hell are we, anyway? he asked, idly twirling the knobs on the stereo.

Illinois, I replied.

He grunted. Still looks like hell to me, he said.

David gave up on the radio and grew quiet as he surveyed the gray land around us. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched his head swivel slowly from side to side, surveying the dismal, abandoned fields and the constant parade of faded and crumbling old barns, each with the obligatory promotion painted on the roof. The same entropic process that was inexorably grinding down the structures had been at work on the advertisements as well, the exhortation to Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco rendered in variously legible abstract artworks of peeling black and white and red paint. David insisted that these were the spoor of the Great American Dream, relics of the Dream’s passage at some time in the far distant past.

We passed a sign: GILMAN, ILL. 13 MI.

It looks like it’s gonna rain, David muttered gloomily, gazing westward.

And Now… The Rest of the Story… boomed Paul Harvey from the dashboard speakers, most likely gazing heavenward.

♦ ♦ ♦

From where I sit today, half a continent, half an ocean and more than two decades later, on the deck of a rental house on Kauai, watching the sun glint off the ocean and listening to the quiet roar and hiss it makes as it washes the beach, it’s impossible for me to make a connection with the two young men in that car, racing through Illinois for no apparent reason. Yet I know for a fact that I was driving that car, drinking that beer, sharing that quest. I can still hear the rattle of the plastic bags on the floor as David pawed through them, fruitlessly searching for more Doritos, and even here, with the warm sun on my skin, I can feel the ghost of a chill from the memory of the stale air in the car.

My wife is sitting beside me, reading Toni Morrison and most likely wondering what the hell I’m thinking, working on my laptop on a day like today. She didn’t know me when I was that young man, and I wonder if she could have loved him as she loves me.

I wonder, too, if that young man would know me. Would he recognize himself, balding and tired, doubting and cynical? Would he see himself in the lines of my face, the thoughts behind my eyes? That seems somehow important to me now: That the youth I once was would recognize me, know me for who I am, smile at the secrets that we share. Would he be content with where he—where we—ended up?

I can’t speak for that young man, we’re different people, and I’ve lost his voice, but I can hear him inside me, urging me to partner up with a David, cut loose, chill out. Take a goddamned chance. His self-assured brashness left me with my youth, so his urgings fall on if not yet deaf, then… uncertain ears. And while I don’t grieve for his passing, I sometimes wish we could talk. I think we’d have something to learn from one another.

More than anything else, I wonder what David would have been like. I wonder if the young man in me would recognize the young man in him. I’d like to think that we would still been friends.

♦ ♦ ♦

Somewhere along the line, once we had established that our quest would terminate with our actual exit of the United States, we discussed what our ultimate destination should be.

Hey, Mikey, if we’re gonna flee the country, we should choose a place with a beach, don’t you think? David asked. Or a place where we can get a boat, or work on one, anyway.

Oh, absolutely, I replied enthusiastically. That limits our choices to Canada, Central America or South America, seeing as how we are notably lacking an aircraft or the aforementioned boat.

True. But as I recall, they’re still shooting at one another throughout Central America, so that’d be right out, wouldn’t you say?

I’ve never been partial to bullet wounds, I agreed.

"All right, then, that leaves us with Canada or South America. Given that choice, which is warmer?" he asked.

That would be South America, for the most part, at any rate. I believe that Canada is fairly cold pretty much everywhere, most of the time.

So where are the beaches in South America? David asked. It seems to me that they must have quite a few.

Oh, they do, they do! Pick a coast: What’ll it be, Atlantic or Pacific?

Janet’s from the Pacific coast, right? he asked. I nodded, knowing he was considering Janet’s not inconsiderable physical charms. Gotta like those girls from the left coast.

Pacific coast it is then, I said firmly, taking a pull from my beer.

David smiled and said, with calm finality, Thus we are arrived at our conclusion: Which South American nation, south of the equator, has the longest beach on the Pacific Ocean?

Committing the most outrageous geographical error of my life, I replied, with gusto, Peru!

It would be days, long after the answer held any import, before I realized my mistake. For the record, the country with the longest Pacific coastline in South America, south of the equator, is Chile.

David, enormously ignorant of all things geographic, decided it. Peru it is, then! With a happy smile on his face, he drank deeply of his beer and belched with feeling.

♦ ♦ ♦

David, for his part, was very much in tune with our quest. As I said, I really didn’t get it. I knew that at the time, but I sincerely believe that he really was in search of the Great American Dream. As we drove, he would point out this dilapidated shed, that old unpainted farmhouse.

There! See it? The sorta yellow one with the dead orchard behind it? We’re way behind it now.

Forgetting, I’d ask, again and again it seemed, Behind what?

The Dream, you fool!

He became especially excited by certain old diners that we drove past from time to time. You remember them, the stainless steel and glass roadside restaurants with the round corners. They looked like railway dining cars stranded in dirt parking lots, crouched in the weeds and yearning for lost wheels and the motion that would make some kind of sense out of their streamlined construction. They were for the most part going to rust and, although still operating, were starting to take on the abandoned, faded look of an old and Mail-Pouch-tattooed shed.

On the outskirts of Champaign, the sun was setting. David had an epiphany. Hey, Mikey! Elliott’s from Champaign, he said matter-of-factly.

Our Elliott? I asked. He of the popcorn and dragon pipe? Lover of Janet?

The very one! I’ll bet we can find his house in the phone book.

And we did.

So it came to be that, in the growing dark not long after David’s visionary moment, we found ourselves on the front porch of a two-story brick and cedar suburban home, hands in our pockets and wondering what we would say when Elliott’s mother answered the door. I could see my breath in the cold air, smell cookies baking somewhere nearby. The door swung open and a wave of warmth washed over us. A vaguely familiar mom-looking woman stood in the door, a wary can-I-help-you look on her face.

David, with his usual confident aplomb, stepped up beside me. "We’ve come to see Ouch," he announced, his voice a stentorian FM-deejay. An ever-so-slightly-stoned deejay.

That, of course, may be redundant.

She relaxed then, and smiled at us; I realized then that she must have recognized us from her last visit to school. She looked past us, toward the car and asked, Where’s Elliott?

David and I stuttered out an answer, attempting to explain how we ended up on her front porch without her son, trying not to provide too many details, although the part about our search for the American Dream was revealed, I seem to recall. More from our behavior than our explanation, I suspect, she figured out the actual story and invited us in. The house was warm and smelled of home. And cookies.

She led us into the living room, where Ouch held a place of honor on the wall over the fireplace. With a flourish, Elliott’s mother drew our attention to the sculpture and pronounced: "Gentlemen, Ouch."

We laughed then, sensing in Elliott’s mother a kindred spirit, playing with us and inviting us to join her. We made proper obeisance to the slab of clay over the mantle, bowing and scraping, catching at imaginary fez as they slid from our heads and giggling like children. Elliott’s mom laughed along with us, helping to adjust our fantastical headwear, joining in our stream-of-consciousness riffs as though she had known us intimately for years, as though she had been with us as we drove the long road from school, as though she was sharing in our quest.

But she was still, in the end, someone’s mother, so she took us to her kitchen and made us soup.

♦ ♦ ♦

From the warmth of Elliott’s mother’s kitchen, we made a phone call.

Hey, Elliott, it’s us. You’ll never guess where we are, I said.

You incredible assholes! You were supposed to take us to dinner tonight; all we’ve got left in the dorm is stale Cap’n Crunch! he hissed. And that Neanderthal roommate of yours threw us out!

I tried to imagine the look on Bob’s face when he walked in our room and found Elliott and Janet doing God-knows-what on the rug. I already suspected that sex for them was some sort of athletic—and perhaps even spectator—event anyway. I laughed out loud at the image of Bob’s bible-thumper values colliding with Janet’s left-coast sexual gymnastics. She probably asked him to join them.

We sorta… well, we might’ve, accidentally, without any specific intent, mind you… just sorta-kinda…

Hello, Elliott. Elliott’s mother on the extension said calmly over our stammering.

Mom? There was a pause. Where are you?

I’m at home, Elliott, feeding Campbell’s soup to your friends.

While I had already sensed that Elliott’s mother was somewhat more free-spirited than most, I never imagined that anyone’s mother would have suffered to hear her son utter the string of invective that spewed, literally spewed, from Elliott’s mouth when he realized where David and I had ended up. We waited him out, David and I embarrassed, Elliott’s mother with a serene Buddha smile on her face.

When he had finally spun down, his mother quietly explained the situation to him. I was amazed at her absolutely complete grasp of the events that had led to our presence in her kitchen. Once again, it seemed as though she had been riding along with us. She knew us, somehow, and she knew how best to tell the story to her son.

♦ ♦ ♦

The issue of Elliott’s mother has troubled me for years. For one thing, I know that she told me her name, and I know Elliott told me her name—many times, I’m sure—and yet I know I didn’t remember it five minutes after I learned it. I’ve always been bad with names, but for as much as the woman impressed me with her understanding and fellow traveler nature, I forgot her name the instant I left her house; in my mind, she was always Elliott’s mom. For another thing, whenever I would think about her over the years, I inevitably found myself comparing her to my mother. I love my mother, of course, always have. But the need to make the comparison was always there. And it’s not as though my mother suffered in the assessment, it’s only that Elliott’s mother seemed like so much fun. I think now that moms really can’t be fun, at least not all the time; they can be only loving and responsible. That is, ultimately, their job. Sometimes that makes the fun part impossible.

I have also wondered what my life would have been like had I grown up with her as my mother. I can only imagine that I would have ended up as a sculptor majoring in Business Administration.

Regardless, I remain frankly amazed with the accepting, generous way she invited two obviously drunken lunatics into her home, friends of her son or not. I’d like to think that my mother would have done the same. In any case, I felt sure that Elliott’s family would remember the story for years to come.

I suppose you have to find your immortality somewhere.

♦ ♦ ♦

The ride back to school was far more subdued than the outbound leg. And warmer: Elliott’s mother had supplied us with coats and gloves and a thermos of hot coffee. How she convinced us to return to school was—there is no other explanation—Magic. I don’t think at the time we really caught on to what she was doing. She simply fed us soup and tea and gradually got us sobered up. She got us talking about our families and our schoolwork and listened to our stories as though she were truly interested in them. And us.

And it was magic. She put us under her spell and, as the hours passed, it became obvious that we would return to school. David would go to court and plead guilty and pay his fine. We would take cookies and other necessary supplies to Elliott. It was just that simple: She had this stuff that Elliott needed and we now had a new mission, one that would take us east again, back to our America, back to our lives.

If there was no quest for the Great American Dream, well, maybe our lives were still a part of a dream, albeit a smaller one, but one that we could pursue with some satisfaction for a while. Maybe there would be fewer rusting diners and dilapidated farms in that version. At the time, certainly, I thought David was past his obsession with the larger American Dream and our plans to flee the country. Thinking about it now, I wonder if he was just waiting, even then, to be shed of the few remaining connections that still bound him to his life. I don’t think I realized how few there were. And I wonder if he knew, during that long, quiet ride in the dark, just how quickly—and how painfully—he would be shed of them.

Simple Justice

David’s day in court was a non-event. We arrived at school just after dawn on what promised to be a sunny Monday morning, and stopped at the dorm long enough to brush our teeth, change our shirts and eat breakfast. Then we drove to the county courthouse. The building, a massive colonial in red brick, squatted heavily on a crabgrass-infested lawn. This late in the year, the maple trees were leafless, their bare branches scratching with gray fingers against the deep cobalt of the early morning sky and shedding regretfully the last few of their helicopter seedpods.

The old courthouse was filled with shadows and smelled of mildew, of brittle and yellowing paper packed too tightly into mildewed cardboard boxes. The corridors were silent and nearly empty. The few people we passed seemed as dreary and worn out as courthouse itself, moving in weary, unhurried shuffles. The high ceilings echoed our footsteps back to us as we searched the building for someone who could tell us what to do. A tired policeman dozing by the phone banks directed us to an unlikely corner in a deserted back corner of the third floor, where we found an ornate door labeled simply, Clerk, which opened on an airless tomb of an office. The room was filled with stacked piles of paper and recycled manila file folders surrounding a colossal antique oak desk which was probably worth more at auction than the annual salary of the clerk who sat behind it. That worthy, an ancient and shrunken man nearly hidden behind the immense desk, looked dusty, as though he hadn’t moved since the courthouse was built.

All appearances to the contrary, he was alive. I heard the chair—or the clerk, it was difficult to tell which—creak as he turned to face us.

Can I help you? he asked, his voice a distant croak.

David stepped up to the desk. I’m trying to find out where I’m supposed to be.

Defendant or complainant? He asked in a rusty, rote monotone voice from behind the desk, responding to the implied query he’d undoubtedly heard many thousands of times before. I briefly imagined that parade of lost and confused lawbreakers—alleged lawbreakers, I reminded myself—and immediately sympathized with the dusty, tired old man.

Defendant, David replied.

The chair (or its occupant) squealed again, turned to a pile of file folders on the right side of the desk.

Name? he asked, his body poised before the column of paper as though preparing to pounce.

Before David could answer, the heavy door behind us flew open and an attractive, energetic young woman rushed in; I wondered how much energy it would take to make that particular door move so quickly. The woman obviously had such energy: Compared to everyone else I had seen in the building, her skin had a lifelike glow, as though her internal thermostat was set thirty degrees higher than the rest of the courthouse; there was a restless charge to everything about her. I swear I could smell the ozone.

Rosen, David said, in response to the clerk’s question, even as the door began to swing closed again.

The young woman, her attention shifting instantly from the clerk to David, tracking on the voice, asked, Rosen?

David turned to face her. Yeah, David Rosen.

You’re one of mine. Can I have the file please, Ezra?

Still more creaking of chair and old bones. A wizened, almost skeletal hand plunged into the right-hand pile of files, emerged clutching one of the well-used manila folders, and extended it toward the young woman.

Thank you, Ezra. She placed her briefcase on the floor and took the offered folder. Flipped it open, turned to face David.

All right then, Mr. Rosen. I’m Susan Kay, Assistant District Attorney. You don’t have to talk to me, but maybe we can work this out together before we face the judge. I’m assuming this fellow, she gestured at me with the file folder, smiling. "I’m assuming that he is not your legal counsel?"

Who, Mike? David looked at me. I looked at David. Then we looked at Ms. Kay and broke up laughing. She had to be fresh out of law school, not much older than David and I, but she had a confident, competent attitude that demanded my attention. David’s too, from what I could see.

I thought not. Anyway, shoplifting and minor in possession of alcohol, is that right?

Yes, ma’am. David answered, straight-faced for a change.

Another smile. Call me Sue. The clerk, ignored, made a face.

Yes, m… Er, Sue. A ten-dollar bottle of Jack Daniels. Black-label.

Well, at least I can’t argue with your taste. Did you do it?

David’s face looked pained, indecisive. I, uh, I… He turned to me for help.

Should he answer that question? In front of you, I mean? I asked.

Maybe you are his attorney, after all, Sue said, smiling. I found myself hoping that she would do that some more: Her smile was lovely. Let me rephrase that. How about this: For a fifty-dollar fine and time served, would you be willing to plead guilty? Just to get it over with, I mean. She flashed another smile, this one for me, and I found myself blushing.

I could see David relax. Absolutely. You got fifty bucks on you? he asked, glancing at me.

No, but a quick run to the magic money machine should fix that.

Sounds like we’ve got a deal then, she said with finality. Thank you for your cooperation. Ezra, you have anything else for me?

The wrinkled brown mess behind the desk spoke: Not this morning, Ms. Kay. I expect to have the new arraignment schedule put together this afternoon, however.

Great, thanks, I’ll come by about three, then. Gentlemen, I will see you in court in about twenty minutes. If you’re wondering, and I’m sure you are, you’ll find the courtroom behind the big doors at the top of the front stairs on the second floor. She gifted us with another brilliant smile and rushed out as rapidly as she’d arrived.

We followed more slowly. Mentally, I felt a bit winded from the exchange. The woman was a blur of action, energy in motion. I decided that I wanted to be like her.

In the hallway, I said, Okay, I’ll run down to the machine, get some cash. I’ll meet you in the courtroom as soon as I get back.

Uh huh, David agreed distractedly, watching the rapidly retreating—and terrifically long, I might add—legs of Ms. Kay, wonderfully visible below her just-a-wee-bit-shorter-than-business-length skirt. They were awfully nice legs. David followed her with some determination while I managed to somehow navigate my way out of the building for a trip to the automated teller machine on Wabash Avenue.

By the time I got to back to the courthouse, David’s appearance before the judge was over. He was waiting for me at the top of the stairs talking quietly with Sue, a sheaf of papers in his hand and what I could swear was an embarrassed grin on her face. As I started up the stairs, they shook hands and Sue turned to disappear behind the tall doors of the courtroom. David watched her go.

David? I asked as I approached. When he didn’t respond, I touched his elbow and repeated myself. David? What’s up, pardner?

Oh, hey, he responded, finally acknowledging my presence. All we gotta do is take these papers and the cash back to Methuselah on the third floor and we’re outta here.

We retraced our steps to the clerk’s office upstairs. As far as I could tell, the clerk had not moved at all while we were gone. I wondered if he slept right there—if he slept at all—that is—in the chair behind his imposing desk. He accepted the papers from David and glanced quickly through them. He folded one page to the front of the stack and laid it on a clear area of the desk.

Sign here please, skeletal finger pointing. David signed. More paper flipping. And here. David signed again.

The clerk—I couldn’t call him Ezra, even in my mind—reviewed the papers again, sighed as though deeply disappointed in their contents but said only, Fifty dollars, please.

I handed him two crisp twenties from the machine and a last, rumpled and slightly soggy ten from my pocket. I watched him count it, twice. He filled out a receipt for the fifty bucks, stapled it to one of the pages David had brought from court and handed it to David, dismissing us both with a wave of his hand.

The entire transaction took all of five minutes. And we were out of there, David now a bona fide, genuine, officially recognized miscreant; a scofflaw, a man with a record. I’d never seen him happier. He danced down the courthouse steps and across the lawn, Elliott’s coat flapping around him as he spun around, kicking his feet and singing some nonsense about old men, beautiful women and running from the law. I joined in with the song, adding a verse of my own, and we laughed all the way back to school.

End Times

Life at school was no different from before our precipitous plunge into road philosophy and abortive international flight, at least for me. David, on the other hand, developed a distant gaze and mysterious demeanor. It did go well with his dark good looks, however. He wasn’t unfriendly, not really; he just wasn’t entirely, well, there—mentally or physically—all the time. I suppose that the mental departure wasn’t all that unusual for him, after all. What was strange, however, was that he would disappear for hours at a time on some evenings, for an entire night on others, beginning that very night. In the beginning, I assumed a woman was involved, but he, uncharacteristically, admitted to nothing. Sometimes he borrowed my car for those missing hours, but not often.

It became a joke with us, as we walked the campus. That one! I would yell, pointing to the woman across the quad in tight jeans and sweater. Is that her? I would ask, sotto voce, when we passed a serious woman marching off to class, her eyes to the ground, books clutched to her breast. Once, in a moment of enlightenment, I thought I had it all figured out.

It’s a professor, isn’t it? I said triumphantly. "You don’t have to say who, but it is a professor, that’s why you won’t tell me, isn’t it?"

David said nothing, an impenetrable grin on his face.

In another new development, my roommate was no longer speaking to me. The only thing he said to me on my return was, I can’t believe you let those people… Here on the floor… Red-faced, he spluttered into silence, confirming my guess as to what took place after David and I had fled into that October afternoon.

Other than the occasional glare he gave me whenever we were in the same room, the change was almost pleasant. It was definitely quieter: I hadn’t realized how much of my time he had filled with his constant criticism of my lifestyle, along with his regular and repetitive lectures on the horrors of hell—where I was almost certainly headed—until he stopped. Somehow, I didn’t think that we’d be roommates the following semester, a prospect that did not break my heart.

Elliott, for his part, held no grudge. The goodies from home, which we delivered with just the proper amount of over-acted self-abasement and abject apology, cleared up any lingering animosity he felt toward us for visiting his mom without him. We didn’t escape the off-hand sarcasm, but that was normal for him.

Janet seemed to have no feelings one way or the other for our abandoning her to Elliot’s stale Cap’n Crunch. Or whatever else he might have had for her in our absence. That wasn’t new, either. Janet was the most tranquil person I’d ever known.

♦ ♦ ♦

Perhaps you think I’ve made too much of this trip. After all, it was nothing more than a now cliché road trip. It’s an American tradition. Hell, Steinbeck—in his seventies—went on the road with his dog. You’ve probably done it yourself.

For me, though, looking back, I see it as one of the last unplanned and adventurous events of my life. And, like so many others, David was in charge. He was a catalyst for outrageous behavior, the eye of lunatic hurricanes, and the manic tornados spinning off around him inevitably swept me out of my placid, earth-bound existence, up into the crazy jet stream that seemed constantly to swirl about him.

I remember waiting for the geriatric elevator on the first floor of the physics building, sometime during our sophomore year; one of the few elevators on campus in those days before the Americans with Disabilities Act. I watched the numbers above the door limp oh-so-slowly down from the fifth floor, listening to a Jethro Tull song in my head and tapping my foot. When the doors finally opened, a single croquet ball rolled out, jumping as it bumped over the sill, and spun to a stop at my feet. I looked up to see David standing in the center of the elevator car, a mallet propped jauntily on one shoulder and a rolling rack of croquet equipment resting beside him. He smiled broadly to see me.

Oh, capital! he exclaimed as he stepped out of the car, pulling the rack behind him. A proper adversary! Will you join me in a game of multi-level urban topology croquet, my good man?

Multi-level… I stammered, caught off-guard.

Croquet! Multi-level urban topology croquet! he nearly shouted, shaking his mallet pointedly in my direction. You really must pay better attention, young man.

Well, sure. It sounds like fun, I responded, catching just a whiff of the fresh lunacy he was about to unleash.

Well, you say that now, he whispered, leaning toward me conspiratorially. But wait till you see where we’ve placed the wickets, he said in a stage whisper.

The wickets? Why? The wild glint in his eye warned me to brace myself for the worst.

Why, Mikey, David said, a wait-for-it tone in his voice, "don’t you know that Something Wickets This Way Comes?"

I groaned loudly to the sound of his echoing laughter. But I did, in fact, join him in his riotous game of multi-level urban topology croquet, chasing the round wooden ball across classrooms, through offices, up and down the elevator, between the pipes in the basement and eventually out onto the roof of the building; the final wicket was strategically placed around a downspout opening in the low wall surrounding the edge. It turned out that the opening, and the downspout itself, was just large enough to accept a croquet ball. Our final shots ended up under a neatly trimmed evergreen on the lawn seven stories below us, the balls rattling so loudly in the metal pipes on the way down that we just had to drop several more.

I never did find out when he’d set up the croquet court. Or should I call it a croquet course?

As much as I enjoyed it, I never would have conceived of such a game, or spent the time to set it up if I had. I just wasn’t an instigator. Over the years since college, I’ve entertained any number of insane ideas, outrageous actions, absurd choices, some of which might have changed my life forever. But I nearly always chose the safer course, the predictable, mother-approved, four-out-of-five-dentists-surveyed-agree path that would keep me firmly on the uninspired, formulaic, straight-and-narrow.

After David was gone I just couldn’t seem to do it alone. And the mystery of why I could find so little lunacy in myself—without him to take point for me—has haunted me for years.

♦ ♦ ♦

Approaching that Thanksgiving of our junior year, life was easy. David’s journalism classes had never been much of a challenge for him, and well—how else can I say it?—Elliott was a business major, for Christ’s sake. Even my engineering classes were easy enough that semester—Fluid Mechanics and Thermodynamics were favorite subjects of mine. As for Janet, I really have no idea what she did when she wasn’t with us. She was just always around.

We spent a lot of time drinking and smoking in Horticulture Park, huddled together on a blanket under the trees. Elliott would have his arm around Janet, David acting out some insane fantasy on the brown grass for our appreciation. I was, as always, the sidekick. My job was to assist David in his performance, to provide prompting, when and as required, helping him maintain his momentum. I’d use the phrase Greek chorus, but I’m afraid that might give you the wrong idea.

When it grew too cold, we would adjourn to the basement of the dorm or the steam tunnels under the student union. These latter were particularly nice when it started snowing: We could reach more than half the buildings on campus without going outside.

One afternoon, returning late from class, I found David in my room, deeply involved in a discussion with Bob, the born-again roommate. As I walked in, David was asking, So all the Jews that died in the Nazi camps are rotting in hell right now, simply because they never accepted Jesus as their savior? His voice was dripping with skeptical anger.

Exactly, Bob answered, clearly in agreement with David’s statement but utterly oblivious to his tone. And quite obviously unaware that David was Jewish. At least I hoped so: I didn’t want to believe that, as big an asshole as Bob could be, he would be that callous. It’s very clear from Jesus’s Word—I could hear the capital letters—that anyone who dies without accepting Christ is damned! He was smiling, as though he’d just scored the winning touchdown.

David snorted and stood, walking toward me. "I need a big drink. Will you join me?" he asked, even as he reached for the doorknob and walked out.

Bob watched the door close and looked at me, his mouth hanging open in confusion. What did I say?

I repeated David’s snort and dumped my books and my coat on my desk.

You are a complete fool, I said by way of answer, and followed my friend out.

Necessarily, with the building tightly closed up against the weather, our illicit indoor activities were generally limited to the stealthy consumption of alcohol; smoking dope was right out, except when the resident assistant was gone, which was, fortunately for us, often. David, while still a depthless fount of maniacal ideas and activities, remained distant throughout the last of autumn. And he continued to disappear without explanation on a regular basis, once for an entire weekend.

I was beginning to worry that he’d graduated to something more professional than bourbon or grass. I began to check his arms—most discreetly, of course—for needle tracks whenever I could. I found nothing. And we didn’t discuss it.

♦ ♦ ♦

My memories of that time are a blur of motion to me now. Up early for Differential Equations, coffee and donut at the union, then off to Thermodynamics. Back to the dorm for lunch, maybe a drink with David or Elliott, once even with Janet, the time I found her alone, reading on Elliott’s bed. After that, back into the cold for my Fluids lab and a History class.

What I remember best from that semester, but in the least detail, are the evenings spent with my friends at Hort Park or in the tunnels, and the evenings I’d sit in Elliott and David’s room, playing my guitar. That was particularly nice because Janet would sit with me and sing along or rest her head on my shoulder, merely listening, as I played and David and Elliott argued about religion or philosophy. My memory might not be all that clear on the specifics, but my heart remembers.

I suppose at the time I had a premonition that life would never be like this again. Sitting there on David’s bed, though, with Janet’s head on my shoulder, warm, and in the company of good friends while the snow clicked against the window, I could let myself imagine that that was how life was supposed to be. All things considered, maybe that is in fact how it’s supposed to be. We just somehow manage to forget that, as we grow older. And we wonder what we’re missing. I know I do.

♦ ♦ ♦

Thanksgiving weekend was the starting gate for to the drive to finals. Tensions in the dorm and around campus grew as the weather grew colder and the snow began to fall. We set up an operations in David and Elliot’s dorm room, the three of us and four or five others. On the floor, in the center of the room, a fulltime euchre game ran while a pair of us studied at the desks and others slipped in and out to classes or study groups and the rest slept on the unmade beds. Every few hours, we’d switch places.

We saw very little of Janet during that time. I had always suspected she was not much of a student, and, in the absence of private time with Elliott, she simply disappeared. I would later find out she wasn’t a student at all.

The euchre/study camp endured for the better part of two weeks. A few of the players changed, but the core group, David and Elliott, Bones and Eric and I, stuck it out through finals week. At the end of that week, David and I executed a 72-hour push, living on nicotine, caffeine tablets and adrenalin. Between the two of us, we took six finals and wrote three papers during that period, finishing the trio of theses on my portable typewriter in the Laundromat at four o’clock in the morning of the third day.

After our last final, late in the morning of that last day, David and I adjourned to my room. It had an empty, unused feel to it when we arrived. I had spent less than three hours in the room over the previous two weeks and Bob had moved out completely in my absence. Funny thing: After all the shit he had heaped on me for my lifestyle and study habits, he was almost certainly failing out, so he had no plans to return to campus in January. Sometimes you win one, I guess, even when you aren’t trying.

Actually vibrating from caffeine and pure exhaustion, David and I split a pint of bourbon I had obtained from the graduate assistant who ran my Fluid Dynamics lab. We toasted our survival and Bob’s departure; we celebrated Janet’s beauty and Elliott’s good fortune in finding her. We revisited our favorite discussions and arguments. We got absolutely hammered. And then we passed out.

Almost precisely four hours later, we woke up, me on my bed, David on the floor next to Bob’s. He looked up at me and, glancing at the bed where he had fallen asleep, said, Help me. I’ve fallen out of my plane of existence! It wasn’t all that funny, but we were both still buzzing from the caffeine and very nearly stone cold sober after our nap. The resilience of youth. We went to dinner. And then we went home to our families for the semester break and Christmas.

♦ ♦ ♦

That evening, before I left the dorm to start the drive home, David gave me a tablet of robin’s egg speed; I have no idea where he got it. Just in case you get too tired on the road. Should put the edge back on, if you need to, he explained. I thanked him and stuck it in the bottom of my wallet, just in case I might need it.

That tab of amphetamine has remained in my wallet for all the years since. Whenever I get a new wallet, usually for Christmas or my birthday, I transfer the tiny blue pill to it. I dig it