For reasons that escape me, I am obsessed with driving cross-country.

Whenever I tell people that I'm about to make the drive, the main response I get is a blank stare followed by a "Why the fuck would you do that?" I want to tell them something profound, but I'm not smart enough, so I usually just say something lame like, "Cuz."

The honest answer is that I don't know.

At the seminal age of 17, I read the seminal "On the Road." The book was "seminal" because it defined the Beat generation--a group of fringe artists and intellectuals who looked upon 1950s America as a tangled web of spiritual drabness and political hypocrisy. My age was "seminal" because I was jerking off roughly 4 times a day (not to be confused with roughly jerking off).

Page after page, I drank in the contrary cocktail of Buddhist teachings and libidinous yearnings that Kerouac mixed. With each succeeding chapter, the romantic image of the Zen vagabond - embodied in his alter ego, Sal Paradise -- forever emblazoned itself on my impressionable young mind.

By my senior year in high school, I hadn't been out of the country and had only been to a couple states. But, in my quintessential Sal Paradise fantasy, I was traveling far and wide having sex with runaway artists, Mexican fruit-pickers, college girls (before they had all apparently "gone wild"), and the random bejeweled society woman who suggestively gestures to me from across a crowded bar. I was heroically troubled by the fathomless depths of my soul AND I was sticking my penis into lots of orifices.

Although I was desperately unlaid at 17, I pictured myself make sweet love to exotic women, restlessly rolling out of bed at the crack of dawn, and thumbing down a deserted highway in faded Wranglers and a denim jacket like a Bruce Banner Buddhist* as the soundtrack of my life played the same lonely and percussive piano: "pling pling pling pling.... pling pling pling pling PLING .... plingpling.... pling pling pling pling PLING."

At each stop, I would find a mountaintop, "be" a pine tree, weave my soul into its knotty, twisting branches, and commune with God and Nature. Then I would shuffle my duffle onto a Greyhound bus to find more drunken opportunities to meet random women who would let me ravish their pee-holes.

As Kerouac coined it, it was the life of a "Dharma Bum." I would never stop living in the moment. I would never stop to judge or regret. I would just never stop. Real life would never catch up with me.

And it's a sweet deal...in my fantasy.

The realities of my jaunts across Route 66 were always a little different.

For me, the interplay between sex and spirit was more mundane: like getting blown by a bridge troll outside a dive bar in Truckee whose scalp may or may not have moved during oral and praying to God that she was post-chemo, not post-op; or my asshole declaring Jihad on my underpants after 3000 miles of junk food and promising Jesus that "I'll eat better!" if he just let's me get through the blowjob without sharting myself.

Despite the mediocre times and abundant diarrhea the open road has provided, the "Dharma Bum" fantasy persists like a heroin addiction. Sometimes I mercifully arrive at my final destination and ask myself why I put myself through that torture. And, sometimes, in the middle of the shittiest of trips, something happens that gives me faith in humanity and makes the addiction worth the price....

Take, for example, 2001:

It's late January and I borrow my mom's car in Virginia -- an old '88 Honda Civic I call "The Hoopty" -- in order to light out for Los Angeles and territory unknown.

At first, when I ask her if I can borrow "The Hoopty," she's resistant. I try to convince her that having a car in L.A. ENSURES that I will book numerous acting jobs. I subtly infer that, without a car, I will book nothing, stay poor, never marry a nice girl who will provide her with unaborted grandchildren, and ultimately die alone.

She gives me the car.

The first part of the trip is fun but ultimately uneventful: I meet my college roommate in Ashville, NC and listen to him brag about his life; I meet two girls in Memphis and try so desperately for a threesome that I end up alone in my hotel room, watching Stuart Scott's eye wander around the TV set until 4 in the morning; I see an ex in Dallas and pretend like I don't care that she seems so much happier without me; I watch a lardaceous shit-kicker in Amarillo stuff a 72 ounce steak down his gullet and then proceed to puke up that same amount directly outside my window seat at "The Big Texan"; I take a yoga class in Santa Fe and stare longingly at some of the most spiritually enlightened asses I've ever seen.

When I leave Sante Fe on the afternoon of January 26th, I start to get careless.

I'm on Route 25 heading south on a two-lane, gusty highway. The speed limit is 75 mph and the road is mind-numbingly straight. It's a plumb-line through the state of New Mexico that eventually right angles at the bottom into Arizona. Past Albuquerque, I-25 is at once barren and beautiful. Racing dirt gulleys on either side of the road lift the asphalt up like a berm, artificially and arbitrarily dividing the single most beautiful stretch of desert in the western hemisphere. .On either side of the interstate the bisected desert is peppered with desolate trailer towns set off in the distance.

The Department of Highway Safety is warning me of "high gusts" at this point in the road. "Descansos" mark the edge of the freeway like morbid mileposts. Each little frayed, green wreath shivers on it's wooden cross and tells the story of a fatality in scratched and fading Spanish. I wonder briefly if they only denote the deaths of Hispanics.

I see a flurry of descansos at one point and briefly imagine a liquored up immigrant holding a bottle of Mescal, listening to Tejano music, carrying a truckload of lawn mowing Mexicans in his pickup truck. He leans down to change the tape, the sombrero falls over his eyes, and "Oh shit, mang!" - landscapers and garden shears fly everywhere.

Stephen King is telling the story of his car accident on my CD player. A blind curve in Maine and King almost dies from it. The story is harrowing and mesmerizing.

The outside world is so silent, I feel like I'm in a vacuum. All I hear is King and the sweep of easy wind against the windows. I see a flock of black birds fly across the horizon due south. I'm going 80 now and it feels like they are moving in slow motion.

There is almost no traffic at all. I put The Hoopty into cruise and lift my right foot up onto the dash. I steer with a lazy hook of my left index finger. The sky is oppressive, threatening snow. I see a red stripe slicing across its white canopy and realize that dusk is coming. The road rises and dips; sometimes gusts randomly buffet the glass, making the car suddenly sway. It's not scary because it doesn't feel real. My beta waves have been soothed into submission and I am in full theta mode now, going 90. I feel like a Beat poet on electric Kool-aid, shuttling through a rift in space and time. The road morphs into a sort of Zen rollercoaster. At one point, I notice I am drooling like a retard.

Stephen is in immense pain now on the CD and is being MEDEVAC'd to a different location. His life, as he knows it, is over.

Maine is far away from this desolate desert.

I notice a black Ford pickup ahead and I settle the Hoopty in behind it at 87 mph - synchronized cruise control. The traffic thins and snowflakes start to fall. They drift flirtatiously towards the car and face-plant into crystalline designs on my windshield. I flick a knob, and the wiper blade screeches across the dry glass, brushing off the gossamer flakes.

Red lights are suddenly flashing in front of me. The pickup is slowing. My feet slide back down to the floor; my hands instinctively grip the wheel. A pulse of adrenaline refocuses my eyes and I see that I'm safely behind the pickup as I ease onto the brake.

I am not, however, safely behind the low, unlit, and previously unnoticed gooseneck trailer attached to the pickup. I am actually within five feet of it.

I can't stop. I straighten my back. Impulsively, I jerk into the left lane. The gulley on the side of the road approaches fast. I pull right and the car starts to lose control. I straighten it out by turning left just before I, I ...

...flip my fucking car over!

I am now upside down and moving. The glass is slowly breaking piecemeal from all of the windows as I scuttle and spark along the interstate on my hood. Stephen King continues intoning as if nothing has changed.

Around me, it sounds like Artic glaciers cracking in the summer sun. I am flying along the ground. In a moment of distilled and bemused clarity, I notice how ironical it is that my hands are still on the wheel attempting to steer. I feel the roof slowly caving in and the shards furiously spitting into the car - into my scalp, into my jacket. I lift my arms up over my face to protect myself from the onslaught of nano-glass and silicon dust.

I say to myself: I am going to die. I am going to die. I am going to die. I am going to die. I am going to die.

The car is hit while it's upside down by some unseen force and it starts spinning. More glass crunches as gravity and torque join forces in an attempt to corkscrew the Honda into the asphalt. As the roof inverts more and more, the felt fabric underneath the dome just barely touches the top of my skull like a gentle pat on the head from a gloved iron fist.

And like that, it's over.

For a moment, I sit there, my forearms crossed over my face, my fingers stretched out in futile "jazz hands." I am squeezing my eyes shut, waiting for the inevitable impact of another collision. Here it comes...

Silence.

All I hear is Stephen King's lispy and laconic New England drawl. There's only another 20 or so minutes left on his 6-CD "Memoirs" that I started in Memphis. I make a mental note to finish it later.

I unbuckle myself, twist, and crawl out to confirm my existence with witnesses. A father-and-son pair stares at me like I am a ghost. The black pick-up has just barely avoided plunging into the gulley, and the driver stands outside of it, arms folded, tucking a wad of Skoal inside his lower lip.

The father and son are asking me if I'm okay. I tell them, "I'm fine," and faux-casually, "this sucks."

The father says, "I've never seen anything like it. You flipped over the FRONT of your car, not the side. You went over your hood. It's a miracle that you just walked away like that. You're so lucky!"

I'm not feeling fucking lucky. I get on the phone with my insurance company right away. I duck my head down through the open door to inspect the interior and grab what I can. King is talking about how he has to walk with a cane now because of his car accident. My belongings are mostly shredded. My clothes, my jacket, my loose bills are road kill.

When the Los Lunas patrol cop comes, he takes one look at my New York license, hears that I'm an actor, and decides to write me up a "reckless driving" ticket. He goes over to the flannel-laden guy in the pickup and they talk in a quiet sidebar and then laugh uproariously. I try to chat to the cop as well, but he doesn't want to josh around with me.

I tell him the jacket I'm wearing is an "official cop jacket" from Evenhand, a film I did about Texas cops. I may as well have told him that I love the smell of baby cunt on my fingers. I suspect it would have been met with less derision and disgust.

The snow is picking up now. I remove all of my luggage from the car, bring it over to the shoulder of the road, and neatly file it together to overcompensate for the mess that is my life.

The Ford XLT drives off, unscratched. The sun is bending beneath the desert horizon. The snowstorm is becoming a blizzard. I stand by my luggage, arms folded, like a protective father. The cop car begins to pull away.

Suddenly, something in my brain clicks into gear.

I chase after the police car and yell through the window, "What about me and all my stuff!?" The cop brakes, sighs audibly, and tells me he can bring me to the station, "But," he warns, "that's it!"

I don't sit up front. I sit in the "criminal area" in the back, crammed against my Samsonites, as the officer transports me to the Las Lunas precinct. My cell phone is now completely dead and the only charger I have is a car charger, which is with the Hoopty's corpse on its way to the tow yard.

Once inside the precinct, I ask the officer if I can use their phone to make a couple of calls. He says, "Sure, if it's a local call."

I bristle with anger instantaneously.

"What? Why would I be making a local call in fucking Los Lunas? Are you kidding me?"

"You use language like that with me again, and I'm locking you up for the entire weekend."

Having consulted with cops for my movie, I know that they generally loathe people, so I shut up. I do, however, flare my nostrils and give him the hairy eyeball. He laughs right into my face.

The cop walks over to a sergeant at the far end of the hallway and they look at me, whisper like O.C. chicks, and giggle in unison. He then tells me to clear my stuff from the "precinct corridor." I check my Irish white trash temper. Inspired by Stephen King, I try to make his head explode with my "Carrie"-like, and as yet unused, telekinetic powers.

Nothing.

I swallow my bile and demur, "Where am I supposed to put it, sir?"

"Not my problem."

"Isn't your job to protect and serve? How can you look yourself in the mirror treating someone like this?"

"I warned you. You're in jail for the weekend if you say one more thing like that."

The bile barometer rises in my throat.

"Can I get a ride to a hotel?"

"No, but the homeless shelter is about a mile down the road. You can walk to it."

I look at him, expecting to see a glint of humanity. Maybe I am the guy who hated him in high school. Maybe I am the "golden boy," and this stout Chicano feels like he needs to teach me a life lesson. He won't hold my gaze for more than the requisite second it takes him to recognize my face as the face of a man he despises.

To this day, I pray to Beelzebub that he gets rectal cancer.

I take my bags and step outside the precinct into the growing blizzard. Another officer comes walking by and I decide to dream big.

"Excuse me, sir?"

"Yes."

"Could you give me a lift?"

"Where?"

"...Albuquerque."

"That's kinda far."

"I know it is. I don't know what else to do."

He measures my worth for a moment.

"I'll have to ask my captain."

I walk back into the precinct with a mandate and a motive. This captain WILL allow it. He will! As the new cop relates my predicament, I steadily look at the captain. No expression. I pluck a piece of glass from my skull.

I hear a second hand tick across a clock face.

With a curt nod, the captain concedes.

The new cop and I make our way out of the precinct door. The earlier cop and his sergeant buddy see us leaving.

Cop #1: "Where the fuck are you going?"

Cop #2: "Albuquerque."

Cop #1: "No fucking way!"

Cop #2: "Captain said I could. Take it up with him if you have a problem."

With that, we push through the exit. I want to quickly turn and give a "hahafuckyou" look, but I am afraid that I will be turned into a pillar of salt.

Cop #2 drops me off at a Motel Six on the outskirts of Albuquerque and wishes me luck. I enter the lobby and realize I have no wallet. I vaguely remember leaving it on the flatbed of the tow truck. It has (or had) $400 in cash inside. I am finally and officially fucked!

I stand at the reception area, trying to finagle a way to stay the night there. No luck. Suddenly, the janitor comes by and informs the female night manager that a trucker had an emergency call and there's an empty and paid-for room.

He asks her if it's okay that I take it.

I walk in; the bed has been slept in. There is the definite wide imprint of trucker ass and an errant pube on the polyester sheets, but I lay myself down and sink into it like it is precious silk from Xanadu.

Minutes later, the janitor knocks on my door. I open it to find him with a can of 7-up, a Chef Boyardee microwaveable Soup, and a Snickers bar. I hoarsely say thanks and nod with pursed lips, trying not to cry at the simple beauty of the gesture.

I eat and pick shards from my scalp as I watch "Entertainment Tonight." It is the best Snickers bar I've ever had in my life.

The next morning, the janitor agrees to drive me to the tow yard, forty minutes away. There is an old man there who looks like Rip Van Winkle, and he hands me my wallet. I am dumbfounded; miraculously, it still has the $400 in it.

The janitor drives me back as I charge my phone in his car. I call my girlfriend, Julie Lipper (of the enormously wealthy and criminally frivolous Lipper Financial family), while driving with him. Julie expresses the modicum of concern commensurate for a spoiled JAP, and books me on a first class flight from Albuquerque to LAX.

I get a chance to know the janitor before he drops me off back at the motel. He is a decent guy with simple dreams. He wants his son to graduate high school and he loves fishing. I briefly wonder why he lives in a desert if he likes fishing, but decide to shut my smart alecky Yankee trap for once. I insist that he takes $300 of the cash and tell him to keep the car and to keep in touch. He won't.

That night, I drive an $80,000 Mercedes on my way to dinner at Mr. Chow's in Beverly Hills. Denzel Washington is there as well as Adam Sandler. I reach into my wallet to pay and find the card for "Motel Six" with the janitor's name scrawled in blue ink on it.

In that glitzy, star-studded restaurant, I finally stop and take a second to look at myself. I feel like a fraud and an asshole. And I decide, Motel 6 card in hand, that my relationship with my millionairess is over.

Somewhere in my trance, Julie says "that's okay" and drops down her black American Express card.

I hold onto the card from my wallet and know that, for some reason that escapes me now, it's the only thing that matters.

I wish I could remember his name.

I did the drive cross-country again 5 years later as some sort of attempt at closure. This time I brought a friend.

She split the costs, which was great. She was hot, which was better. I won't go into the more salacious details of the trip because I'm a gentleman, but one time, when she was sucking my dick as I piloted the car through the Kansas cornfields along I-40, I made eye contact with a married couple in a large and children-packed SUV in the next lane. It had an "I brake for Jesus" bumper sticker next to the trailer hitch. In that brief exchange, we pitied each other.

Of course, there are moments I will never want to forget: wading in a river winding through the narrow slot canyons of Zion National Park, Utah, as the sun set on the sandstone; watching eerie digitized videos of girls on stone edifices puckering their lips and shooting streams of water onto actual little girls at Millennium Park in Chicago; drunkenly struggling through an hour-long standup set in Dallas, Texas, to a bunch of internet friends and one redneck in a ten-gallon cowboy hat who wanted to shoot me in the face because of all my "Brokeback Mountain" references.

But I think that will be the last time I make the drive. First of all, gas is motherfucking expensive. Second of all, it seems there's no escaping a near death experience of some kind. I didn't wreck this time, but there was no shortage of scary moments: the ubiquitous long-haul trucker falling asleep at the wheel and swerving off the road, random hail and snowstorms in Arizona, and, scariest of all, Asian drivers. At any moment during the trek, as easily as I flicked on the blinker and entered the highway, I could just as easily have ditched my companion and called Julie Lipper to fly me the fuck out of wherever on earth I was.

I didn't, though. I finished, and I'm not really sure what compelled me to.

For that matter, other than my self-deluded Kerouac pipe dream, I don't really know why I ever wanted to do it in the first place. Maybe it was Bullwinkle.

Bullwinkle lives in Eureka Springs, Arkansas with a man named Calvin Cotton. My friend knows him -- Calvin -- somehow and arranged for us to stay with him the night before our last full day of driving. We sailed down Route 66 for what seemed like an eternity until we were steeped in the pitch dark night of the Ozark Mountains. We rounded a bend in the mountain road and caught a glimpse of the lights of Eureka Springs. After a long, night-time drive through nothing, the town, nestled in the middle of nowhere, looked like a miniature version of a Swiss village.
At 2 in the morning, we had driven through a coat closet into Narnia.

Calvin is, for lack of a better word, a hippie. He wears tie-dyed shirts and has an immutable expression of bemusement on his sunburnt and weathered face. He looks like Kris Kringle after a summer on crystal meth. I quickly discovered that Calvin had a 25 year old cat and a pet squirrel named, not unironically, "Bullwinkle."**

Ever since I was a child, I wanted to catch a squirrel. I would chase them in circles around oak trees in my back yard in Virginia. The squirrels would claw and shimmy around the base of the trees until I gave up out of frustration.

In Arkansas I got to pet Bullwinkle on the top of his head with my index finger. He would close his eyes for a second each time I did it. I wondered what would happen during that ephemeral moment when the squirrel was stilled; maybe he had a flash of a squirrel daydream; maybe he contemplated his mortality. Each time, his eyes would pop back open and he would scurry away, seemingly terrified and vulnerable over the fact that, for the smallest moment in time, he had stopped moving.

* Bruce Banner is the famous alter-ego of The Hulk. In the TV series with "The Lonely Man" piano score, they called him "David Banner." The producers of the TV show thought Bruce was too gay a name so they changed it. Personally, I think the Hulk WAS gay. That's why he was always half-naked, wearing skintight purple pants, and chasing around dudes. I also think he had a very small penis, which would explain why he was so angry all the time.

** I don't know if Calvin named him after the moose "Bullwinkle" in a bout of pop culture irony or what. Being that he's from the Ozarks, I'm going with "no."

Posted by Bill Dawes at 9:00 AM

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