DAY 15: SOUNDTRACK MOMENTS

DAY 15
Destination: New Orleans, LA to Meridian, MS
Date: 7.22.97 (Tuesday)
Mileage: 21,900 to 22,103 (203 miles)
Bar(s): Greenbriar Lounge
Imbibed: 2 Screwdrivers

TODAY'S ENTRY IS FROM YET ANOTHER JOURNAL. I started this one almost 2 years after I took off on this strange journey, in yet another attempt to recapture the clarity.

On Day 15 I wandered across the street from my smelly room at the Holiday Inn [which had been recommended to me by Professor Tiger back in Tyler on Day 9], into a palce called Greenbriar Lounge. Which appeared to be the disowned sibling to the Howard Johnson's it shared a common wall with. Close enough to Interstate 20 to hear the rumble of the big rigs on parade. Next door to Applebees's. The kinda place you pass a thousand times driving across America, but never stop at.

Well, I stopped.

When the Tuesday night house band broke into — "duh-duh-duh-DUH, duh-duh-duh-DUH, duh-duh-duh-DUH Macarena..." it was almost too much to stomach.

I hate that fucking song.

Let's just say I wasn't counting on transcendence.

But then something amazing happened. A slight shift in perspective, attributable to what I'm not sure. Maybe it was the music? Or maybe it was th sight o big-boned color coordinating local girls from the secretarial pool over at the local Coca-Cola plant gamely keeping up to the goofy dance they saw on MTV. It could've even been the sight of the small group of guys they're with — with their Nascar T-shirts, Levi knockoffs and Lynard Skynard hair — standing off on the sidelines watchign with goofy smiles.

Something about the whole scene suddenly struck me as...graceful. And remember, I hate this song. But I caught myself feeling like I was watching bad off-Broadway. In a musical about "the blue collar experience in the Deep South."

I was mesmerized.

The room was dark and it reminded me of a small truck stop comedy club that had failed. Fairly crowded for a Tuesday night.

Those damn Tuesday nights.

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Several years ago I came up with this concept I call the Soundtrack Moment.

I'm convinced that one day — if it hasn't already happened — everyone with an Internet connection will become convinced that they're living a life worth exploring in a movie. Sometimes you can even experience memorable moments in your life and one day look back at them as if they were pivotal scenes from the movie of your life.

And the Soundtrack Moment is the song that's playing during that scene. A real life moment that you're forever transported back to every time you hear that song for the next 50 years.

One of my earliest, if not first, soundtrack moments occurred when I was 4 or 5. Tom Jones was on the radio and I was in the backseat of a car rolling through Alhambra, CA. As I sang along innocently — "Pussycat, pussycat, I love you, yessss...I...dooo..." — my Aunt Carol suddenly turned around and started laughing at me. I'm sure she thought it was cute, but I remember crawling up on the floor of backseat completely embarrassed.

The wound was finally healed about 30 years later when I got a magazine assignment to join Tom Jones on the road in Springfield, Massachusetts — the town where my maternal grandfather showed up 60+ years earlier from California on his motorcycle (with sidecar) and swept my grandmother off her feet. (Mr. Jones belted out "What's New Pussycat" to the locals at the Three County Fair and introduced me to cognac at our post-concert meal that last until 4 in the morning.)

What are some of YOUR most vivid Soundtrack Moments?

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But the soundtrack moment — the snapshot I'll remember — occurred during the next song. And it completely took me by surprise.

I was sitting just off the dance floor. Jotting down notes in my journal, when the band broke into a song I didn't recognize at first. There were four of them in Union Jack. The 2 guitar players didn't look much younger than Bob Dylan. The keyboard player and the drummer, they were more Jakob Dylan. The tall thin dude tickling the faux ivories had the kind of voice and hair that screamed Styx or Journey. The drummer wore the sort of colorful short-sleeve shirt you'd see on a slacker in Silverlake. And the way the light was hitting him back there on the drums reminded me of Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise.

He was taking lead on the old Van Morrison tune. It wasn't long before I recognized it as 'Tupelo Honey.' And this guy was pouring his fucking heart out and soul into it. Eyes closed. Howling at the moon. In a smoky room next to the interstate. At a bar next to the Howard Johnson's, where everyone but me seemed to be talking. Oblivious to the musical bloodletting occurring under the dim lights.

"Sheeeeeeee's sweeeeeeeeeet like Tupelo honey...she's an angel..."

Are you people deaf and blind?! The man's guts are spilling onto the stage and nobody seemed to give a damn.

THIS is the essence of music. Not the impersonal stadium concerts. Not the groupies. Not the MTV videos. THIS was it. Singing at a little bar in Mississippi on a Tuesday night. Because it's something you just HAVE to do.

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I wasn't exactly conscious of it at the time. But I suppose maybe the reason I was so moved by this random guy singing in a bar was because I saw a little of me in there. The dreamer, toiling on the fringes of success. With a break here, a little more hard work there, he might actually be onto something. But for now he's convinced himself that it really IS about the work, as corny and cliche as it sounds. If you're doing what you're passionate about, does it matter if you toil in obscurity? Broke...but unbroken.

Hell yes! That's what P. would say, anyway. Unbroken doesn't feed the kids.

If there's one area that I could see breaking us up it's the money philosophy. More than the fidelity question. More than the "lifestyle differences," as she puts it.

The money thing could definitely be the deal breaker.

We come from 2 completely opposite perspectives on this. P's family always had money, or at least the appearance of money. Her dad built a very successful sign business. He satisfied his fascination with cars by getting a new Mercedes or Corvette or Porsche just about every year. My dad put nearly 300,000 miles on his orange-and-white Pinto. P's family had vacation homes at the Jersey Shore and Florida. We had a camper.

P's dad has made sure his little girl's been taken care of. I've been pretty much on my own since I was 18. Sink or swim. Run up the credit card and pray for a little Hollywood redemption. I don't want you to get the wrong impression. P's not spoiled by any means. She never had a nice car and she's a loyal, tireless worker. It's just that her dad's made sure she doesn't have to worry about money.

But she worries anyway.

Maybe because she dates a guy whose family was on food stamps for a time growing up. My dad's always had a decent job, thanks to his degree from Cal State L.A. in accounting. And he was always good about paying child support on time. But my mom's 2nd husband, [Sgt. Stepdad], he worked in construction. It wasn't always steady work. Plus, he left my mom 4 or 5 times in 10 years, so I grew up with yo-yo family economics. We always had a roof over our head and food on the table. But I know my mom went through hell sometimes to keep it all together.

So how's that effect my relationship 25 years later?

Well, now I see money as being an unnecessary component on the road to happiness. Sure, it helps. It helps you go places, see things, buy cool stuff. Whatever.

But it's not NECESSARY in making me happy, content. I've been on the brink of poverty and felt happy. At peace with the fact that I was rich in friendship and wealthy with love. Drunk with wisdom. Blissful in the warm glow of my memories of seeing the world. All that bullshit that sounds corny if you've never actually experienced it. I have. So I know I can be happy with little or no money.

And I think that worries P. No, I KNOW it does.

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After the band stopped playing I introduced myself to the drummer and told him how much I enjoyed his Van Morrison cover. His name was Nickie and he had a wife and two kids back home in Louisiana. He told me it was rough being out on the road away from his family. His wife had been in a band with him before they had kids, so it was doubly tough.

"She's been cool about it so far," Nickie told me with a slight Cajun drawl. "Because this band we got now, Union Jack, I feel good about it. I wanna see where we can take this. Then again, I don't know how long I can keep playing places like this when I've got a family back home."

Behind Nickie, the Macarena Girls were at it again. This time they were 2-stepping to a Garth Brooks song on the jukebox.

"The problem is," Nickie said swigging from his Budweiser, "I ain't cut out for the 9-to-5 life."

Amen, brother.

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DAY 13: CROCODILE TEARS

DAY 13
Destination: Houston, TX to Lake Charles, LA
Date: 7.20.97 (Sunday)
Mileage: 21,512 to 21,660 (148 miles)
Bar(s): Harrah's Casino bar
Imbibed: 3 Screwdrivers

IT WAS ALL TOO FITTING THAT ON DAY 13 I GOT lucky in Louisiana. No, not the horny barfly throwing herself at me variety of lucky. I was seduced by a casino I spotted next to I-10 and ended up getting lucky to the tune of about $400, thanks to a sweet run at a few crowded blackjack tables. Plus I may have given away another couple hundred bucks in chips to a drunk Vietnam vet who got choked up when he began talking about his wife.

I’m a sucker for a good love story.

I left Houston that morning with no plan, no destination. Just keep driving east on I-10 until something catches our eye.

It was close to 8 when I rolled into the parking lot at the Harrah’s casino, which seemed like a good idea since I’d already won a cool $400 bucks on Day 1 in Vegas. If I was the church-going type, strolling into a casino on a Sunday night may have been sacrilegious. But my new religion was my clarity. And I very clearly was intent on winning some money.

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“Who dat? Crocodile Dundee?”

The old codger at the opposite end of the blackjack table — 3^rd base to my 1^st base — was laughing his ass like he’d just told the funniest joke in the world. Of course, physically I looked nothing like Paul Hogan. It was all about the hat — the Billabong Australian outback lid that was great for combating morning hair, bed head and most any other scalp related challenge. I’d purchased the thing one day last month when I was shopping for road trip necessities on Melrose with Ernie and Shaun.

A few weeks later, some redneck used car salesman from Houston was giving me shit for it.

Jimmy Cano was his name and I’m still not sure if he was a con man or a sensitive soul madly in love with his wife. We crossed paths and forged a bond in the middle of a great run at 21. Anyone who’s ever played blackjack knows how easy it is to suddenly feel like the strangers at your table are your best friends if the cards are being friendly. Throw in free drinks and the mood can be electric when the dealer keeps busting and the gamblers watch their stacks of chips keep growing.

“C’mon, Crocodile! Double them 9s! DOUBLE THEM 9s!”

We were playing from a 6-deck shoe, so there was a little time to chat when the dealer had to shuffle. That’s when I found out Jimmy had his own used car lot in Houston. He had raspy buzzsaw voice like my maternal grandfather, Jack, the closest thing my family’s ever had to a barfly and a notorious brawler — most likely the result of having that freakishly raspy voice. Jimmy Cano didn’t seem like much a brawler. The one brawl he did tell me about was with his wife, a long-haired Cherokee Indian. And it wasn’t much of a brawl.

“She flattened me with one punch,” Jimmy C. told me as the dealer straightened the 6 decks against the plastic shoe. “Knocked me out cold. And I deserved it, too.”

Jimmy got drunk and cheated on his wife. When his guilt — and a few cocktails — got him to confess, the only woman he’s ever loved decked him.

“And I ain’t gon’ a tomcattin’ since,” Jimmy said before breaking into a big, Cajun cackle.

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I was on fire for a while there, hitting every double-down and split pairs. At first, Jimmy was killing it too. But when his fortunes turned and he confessed to being out of cash, I tossed him a $25 chip to get his mojo flowing again.

The problem was, he'd walk away and try his luck at another table, only to return 10 or 15 minutes later with a fistful of nothing. My mojo was still flowing and I was feeling good about my life, so I'd toss him another $25 chip. No reason to disrupt the flow by being greedy. I was happy with my life, happy to be on the road, happy to be winning at a casino again.

So when Jimmy came around with his big, sad eyes after another blackjack asskicking, I was only too happy to toss him another chip.

This happened several times over the course of a few hours. But I didn't care. I was winning. And Jimmy was sharing his hard-earned wisdom.

"You want my take on love, Crocodile?" Jimmy asked, wiping the free casino beer from his salt-and-pepper moustache. "Here it is: Find you a good woman, then treat her with respect."

"But you went out and..."

"I know, I know!" he interrupted, that buzzsaw voice adding to the gravitas of the moment. "I'm tellin' ya this so's you can learn from my mistakes. Treat your woman as good as you'd treat your mama."

Jimmy studied the dealer's 7 of hearts and stared down the 2 cards in his hand. As if they'd somehow changed since he last eyeballed them 5 seconds ago.

"And when you get the urge to start thinkin' with the little head 'stead 'a the big head," Jimmy continued, "find you a cold shower — maybe even give it a good tug. And just remember, your wife is the queen of your world. And your marriage will only be as good as you treat the queen."

Jimmy Cano diddled his middle finger twice across the green felt, indicating he wanted another card. The dealer slid him an 8. Jimmy snorted and flipped over his cards — a 9 and a 5.

Jimmy had busted again.

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DAY 12: REMISSION CONTROL IN HOUSTON

DAY 12
Destination: Austin, TX to Houston, TX
Date: 7.19.97 (Saturday)
Mileage: 21,342 to 21,512 (170 miles)
Bar(s): "B" Bistro
Imbibed: 2 Dos Equis

THE SMILING WOMAN YOU SEE HERE IS NAMED CATHY Plant. I hope Cathy's cool with me posting her photo here on my blog. If she's not and she angrily comes after me with a pack of lawyers I will be happy. Because it would mean Cathy is still alive.

For years after I returned from this adventure, I would literally think about some aspect of it every single day. A face. A conversation. A story. Something would inevitably pop into my head on a daily basis. And Cathy was one of those people who I'd periodically think about.

I wonder how that bartender in Houston is doing?

I met Cathy at the Houston bistro bar where I showed up for a meal and a few beers. Cathy was my smiling bartender, softening the blow from the oppressive heat I was dealing with. (Another night of mist machines, which I'd never seen until this trip.) It was surprisingly slow for a Saturday night, so she had a little time to chat.

Turns out Cathy was recovering from a bout of cancer. Breast cancer I believe it was. Her hair was just growing back from the chemo and she was remarkably upbeat and positive. Even after telling me how her boyfriend broke up with her a week after her diagnosis.

"He said he couldn't handle it," I remember Cathy telling me. "Just as well. I needed to be strong and positive. I didn't need that kind of energy around me."

I tried to find Cathy on Facebook today. All I came up with was a couple of neglected profiles with little activity and no profile photo. Plus a girl in England who most definitely isn't who we're looking for.

Hope you're alive and well out there, Cathy.

I wonder how long it would take to use the power of the internet — calling on all the social media big hitters and all my FB friends with a Texas connection — to find out if our Cathy Plant is still alive and blooming in Houston?

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DAY 11: WEIRD AUSTIN

DAY 11
Destination: Dallas, TX to Austin, TX
Date: 7.18.97 (Friday)
Mileage: 21,142 to 21,342 (200 miles)
Bar(s): Iron Cactus, Treasure Island, Shakespeare's, Pete's Piano Bar & Bob Popular
Imbibed: 5 vodka/cranberries

IT WAS 13 YEARS AGO TODAY WHEN I FIRST SET FOOT IN Austin. A town I knew next to nothing about until I got clued in by my new friends in Dallas, who gave me the lowdown the previous evening on Day 10 in Big D. They gave the place the kind of rave reviews that can be tough to live up to. Tom told me I had to check out Hippie Hollow. Mary recommended Barton Springs. Her roommate Susie — all 3 of them for that matter — insisted I HAD to check out 6th Street.

"If you're writing about barhopping in America, you've GOTTA spend a night on 6th Street," I still remember Tom telling me. "There's more bars on 6th Street than anywhere in the country."

Tom and the girls kept telling me how much fun I was gonna have on 6th Street. Especially on a Friday night. "There is nowhere in the country like 6th Street during the weekend," Tom had insisted.

So expectations were running high when I rolled into Austin 13 years ago today.

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You want irony? Here's some irony: Of the 5 bars that I had a drink at 13 years ago, all but one of them is still open and thriving. Can you guess which one tanked? That's right. Bob Popular wasn't so popular.

Nor was this Bob. By the time the bars shut down at 2 a.m., I'd barely spoken to anyone at the 5 bars I went to. Instead of initiating conversation, I wrote notes in my journal and observed the raucous hordes, almost none of whom seemed interested in initiating conversation with the strange guy in the Aussie outback hat writing in his journal. I barely got eye contact at Bob Popular, for crying out loud. Then again, the place was almost empty.

Here's a little more irony for you: 13 years after showing up on 6th Street as an Austin newcomer, I'm now an Austin resident. Doing laps at 3 a.m. down 6th Street on Saturday nights as I drive my cab and have funny, interesting conversations with all the drunks leaving the same bars I was ignored at 13 years ago. In fact, just last night I had a conversation with one of them about how the name BOB has become POPULAR the last couple years. I kid you not.

One final chunk of irony: Yesterday I also picked up a carload of UT students at 24th and Pearl. During the 10-minute drive downtown I told them the following story about what happened AFTER the bars closed during my first night ever in Austin.

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So the bars are closed. I've barely spoken to anybody all night. The streets are full of happy drunks. And I'm on my mountain bike when I ride up to a couple girls and ask them where the closest cheap motel is. Within 5 minutes, the shorter girl with chopped chestnut hair is offering to let me crash on her couch.

"My friend and I are going to a party right now though," she tells me. "But here's my key. You can take a shower and sleep on my couch. We'll be home after the party."

That's right. A complete stranger — a female complete stranger, no less — offered me the key to her apartment within 5 minutes of meeting me on 6th Street at 2 in the morning. And there didn't seem to be any sexual underpinnings to the offer either. The whole thing felt strangely chaste and shockingly magnanimous.

So I ride my bike back to her apartment — which may or may not have been on Duval, one block over from my new Austin home — and take a shower. I resist, as always, the impulse to snoop around. I do, however, notice a big, fat boa guarding the snake terrarium in her bedroom.

But my focus is on the pet rat in the cage near my bed — i.e., the couch — in the living room. The rat is running on the metal wheel. Running and running, sprinting for its life as if it knows there's a hungry snake in the next room.

I spend minutes just staring at that rat and the spinning wheel. I think about all my friends back home at their office jobs. And I think how damn lucky I am to have a job that doesn't feel like that rat running for its life in that cage.

About an hour later the girl and her friend come home from their after-party. They find me in the fetal position on the couch, hoping my new friend supplies me with a blanket and pillow. She hooks me up and I bed down for the night as the girl tells me she's gonna walk her friend to her car.

When my generous host comes back a few minutes later, she walks in the door and I immediately realize that she is completely topless. She innocently tells me that she had borrowed her friend's shirt tonight and she just wanted to return it.

Of course, instantly I'm thinking — "Am I about to get lucky here?"

Uhh...no. The Bob Unpopular theme continues. Topless Girl tells me she has a boyfriend. She's also stripper — when she's not studying forensic medicine at UT. Topless Girl stands in the middle of the living room talking to me as if she's wearing a turtleneck in Aspen. And I'm doing my best not to stare at what are a very, very fine set of boobs.

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What I failed to tell that taxi full of UT students last night — I dropped them off at 7th and Trinity just after the bare boobs confession and a "...and THAT was my introduction to Keep Austin Weird" send-off — was that within a few minutes Topless Girl had gone into her bedroom and put on a T-shirt. She said she was calling her boyfriend. I took that to be my cue to hit the hay.

From her bedroom stereo I could hear the muffled brilliance of Jeff Buckley's Grace — one of my all-time favorite albums — as I attempted to doze off out in the living room.

Before too long, Topless Girl came out of her room and went into the kitchen for some water. The light was still on so I hadn't come close to falling asleep yet.

"Can you believe that about Jeff Buckley?" I spoke up from the couch. "Doesn't that suck?"

"What are you talking about?" Topless Girl asked as she poured herself some water.

"You haven't heard what happened?" I asked her. "It was a month and a half ago."

"What? What was a month and a half ago?"

"Jeff Buckley is dead."

Topless Girl gasped as she clutched her chest and put a hand over her mouth. Her eyes were wide and wounded.

"He drowned," I told her as gently and respectfully as I could, while wondering how the hell she couldn't have heard about this. "Walked into the Mississippi River and never came out."

Topless Girl's face slowly deflated with grief.

"He was in Memphis to record his follow-up to Grace and he walked into the river with all his clothes on while Zeppelin's 'Whole Lotta Love' was blasting from his boombox on the shore."

By now Topless Girl was clearly crestfallen.

"I just found my copy of Grace TODAY," she said, her eyes already wet with tears. "It had been lost for months. This is the first time I've played this CD since I found it."

And with that, Topless Girl shuffled off into her bedroom and cried herself to sleep as Jeff Buckley wafted hauntingly from the next room.

"Well maybe there's a God above, but all I've ever learned from love
was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you..."

Meanwhile I tossed and turned next to the rat in the cage, wide-eyed and restless on the couch. Feeling like a schmuck. My relationship with Jeff Buckley's music forever changed.

I'm pretty sure I didn't sleep a wink that night.

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DAY 9: HIGH SCHOOL REUNION

DAY 9
Destination: El Reno, OK to Tyler, TX
Date: 7.16.97 (Wednesday)
Mileage: 20,715 to 21,042 (327 miles)
Bar(s): Holiday Inn lobby bar, Applebee's
Imbibed: 2 Screwdrivers, 1 Miller Genuine Draft

ONE OF THE THINGS I LOVED MOST ABOUT THIS CRAZY adventure was the chance to hang out with old friends in new surroundings. It started immediately too, when I spent some time gambling for a few hours in Vegas on Day 2 with Carver, my L.A. screenwriter friend and fellow blackjack junkie. Over the next 3+ months I would go on to hang out with a wide assortment of people I have great fondness for all across the country.

On this day 13 years ago I paid a visit to my old friend Victor in his new hometown of Tyler, Tex-ass. Victor was one of my favorite classmates during our high school years in Covina, our smog and strip mall mired hometown 22 miles east of downtown L.A. Most of the guys we hung out with played basketball together, gave each other a lot of shit, got drunk on beer and Boone's Farm most weekends and were mildly obsessed with Jackson Browne. Victor was one of a handful of black kids at our school, which made him about as suburban whitebread as the rest of us.

I called him a few days ago to find out what HE remembered about my visit 13 summers ago.

"Let's see...we got twisted, then drove out to my dad's house," Victor said before uncorking that booming laugh of his. We love that laugh. One of the greatest laughs ever. Right up there with Santa Fe Edmund from Day 5. "Then we had a nice dinner at my friends' house. That couple from the bar down at..."

"Hold on, dude." I had to interrupt. "First of all, we didn't exactly get twisted. And second of all, that was 6 years ago. Not 13."

"Oh," he laughed again. It doesn't take much to get him going. "Okay."

"Remember? This was Day 9 of my 100 days of barhopping trip? I showed up at the end of the day from Oklahoma and you were still working at the Holiday Inn."

"That's right," Victor said. "I got you a free room."

"No, dude, it wasn't free," I pointed out. "Almost though. And I was more than happy to take that big 10% friends and family discount. Thanks for that. I appreciate it."

"You're welcome, dude," Victor chuckled. "You're welcome."

"Don't you remember? You were still on the clock. But you said the hotel bar was serving up free drinks for the next hour or so. And so, in the course of my research, I decided to jump all over that shit."

"That's right, dude," Victor laughed some more. "You got pretty toasted."

"No, dude, I did NOT get toasted," I corrected him for the 13,000th time during our friendship. "I didn't get toasted at all. I had a couple cocktails at the bar and talked to this old guy sitting next to me. He'd been a professor at Auburn but now he worked for Union 76. He was an oil guy. And when I told him what I was doing, he said he'd done the very same thing when he was at Oxford 40 years ago — 100 pubs in 100 days. And I was all pissed, thinking: 'Great. So much for my original fucking idea!' Remember that?!"

"Don't recall it, chief," Victor said before busting into his biggest bellylaugh yet.

"C'mon! I was sitting at the bar with this this guy watching CNN reporting live on how Gianni Versace just got murdered in Miami."

"I remember Versace dying."

"Yeah, and they were saying he was killed by a thin white guy from Southern California traveling the country alone."

"Sounds like you, dude," Victor noted.

"Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight," I confirmed as Victor erupted into more fits of unabashed laughter. "And don't think people weren't looking at me funny after that."

"People have been lookin' at you funny for years, dude," Victor noted before cracking up, not the first time he'd laughed hard and long at his own joke.

"What else do you remember about that visit?" I asked.

"I remember going to the pool with you."

"That was the next day," I pointed out. "At the local park, right? I think I did a few swan dives off the diving board for you while you checked out all the girls and worked on your tan."

"Oh, is that how it went down, chief?" Victor chuckled.

"That's how I remember it. And do you remember the bar we went to that night?"

"Oh, yeah, dude," Victor said with total confidence. "We went to that dark bar..."

"No, dude, we sat at the well-lit bar at Applebee's next door to the Holiday Inn. You know, the place you worked?"

"Riiiiiiiiiiiiight," Victor agreed while managing to simultaneously laugh his ass off.

"We talked about relationships and your marriage and you getting divorced and moving back in with your mom. And then, in the middle of our conversation, a Jackson Browne song suddenly came on."

"That's right!" Victor said, the fog finally lifting.

"And it wasn't even 'Doctor In My Eyes' or 'Somebody's Baby' or 'Running On Empty,'" I reminded him. "It was one of his songs you don't usually hear on the radio."

"Indeed!" Victor recalled excitedly. "They were playing 'The Pretender' on the jukebox."

"Actually," I said, not wanting to rain on his parade, "I don't think it was a jukebox. It was more like the restaurant stereo. And I thought the song was 'Your Bright Baby Blues.'"

"No, dude," Victor pointed out — quite possibly incorrectly, "it was 'The Pretender.'"

"No," I countered, "'The Pretender' was the song that was playing the morning after I lost my virginity. I'm pretty sure it was 'Your Bright Baby Blues.' Or was it 'The Road and the Sky?' Anyway...it was pretty damn cool how that song just popped up from out of nowhere. A little Jackson moment for us."

"Indeed."

"That was a nice pit stop. I loved my one night stand in Tyler. Day 9 was excellent."

"Oh, yeah, dude," Victor agreed. "That was some good times. Good times, indeed. I remember it well."

"Yeah," I said, wringing out every last drop of sarcasm I could. "Clearly."

With that, we both broke into great rolling waves of laughter. Just like we did 30+ years ago. Back when I was schooling his ass on the basketball courts at Charter Oak.

I can just hear Victor laughing his big head off right now all the way out in Tyler —

"Dream on, chief!"

Still dreamin', dude.

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DAY 8: THE SCENT OF SYNCHRONICITY

DAY 8
Destination: El Reno, OK to Norman, OK
Date: 7.15.97 (Tuesday)
Mileage: 20,663 to 20,715 (52 miles)
Bar(s): Cyber Hall
Imbibed: 2 caffe mochas

WE'RE TAKING A NEW APPROACH TO RE-TELLING MY story. There were 3 pieces of road trip documentation that originally inspired this blog project: the Road Trip Journal in which I kept a fairly precise who/what/where/how many log; the Pocket-Sized Notebook where I jotted notes and thoughts from many a barstool; and the sketch-pad-turned-scrapbook I've yet to share on this site, featuring everything from ticket stubs to contact info to musings on love from many of the people I crossed paths with.

Unfortunately, all 3 of these things are packed away somewhere in a box in Sister Jill's jam packed garage back in Temecula. And if I wasn't 1500 miles away in Austin, I'd zip over there ASAP and dig up each of the dog-eared touchstones from the road. My recent 2-week stay in SoCal left very little time to sift through a couple dozen boxes and bags. I won't go into the details, but the clock was ticking as I quickly rooted through 49 years worth of my stuff. Even though I KNOW they're hiding in there somewhere, I never did unearth those 3 key artifacts to help me retell this story.

What I did, however, manage to dig up and send back home with me to Austin included a bunch of b&w photos from the trip, contact sheets, a few more notebooks, rough draft pages and a half dozen Hi-8 video tapes. But what I'm most excited about diving into is the 50 1-hour microcassettes that have recordings of everything from barstool chats with strangers to random observations while I'm driving to recaps from the previous night's wanderlusting.

Today's entry gave me a good taste of what this is gonna be like.

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"Astrology isn't good or bad. It's about intensity. And it's all about what you get out of it."

Listening to my taped conversation with John the Mechanic for the 1st time in over a decade, I'm transported back to what was a turning point in this crazy road trip. It was during my 1-night pit stop in Norman, Oklahoma that my mind truly cracked open to new ideas. New possibilities. New notions of reality.

On this warm July evening in Oklahoma, my trip felt like it had taken a turn towards the mystical. As if I was on a journey bigger than myself.

"Astrology is like the weatherman predicting that a tornado is coming. He doesn't know if it's gonna hit this building or that building. But he knows it's coming."

I've never been someone who completely buys into the idea of astrology. Nor am I someone who completely discounts it either. More than anything, my interest has been tweaked by the fact that so many of the qualities ascribed to the Gemini seem to fit me — not ALL of them from this summary, but maybe more than I'd care to admit.

I've just never completely grasped how my personality and character could be affected by where the sun and the planets were at the very moment I was born. How is that possible?

But then John the Mechanic started pointed out how all these other unseen forces can have a real, tangible effect on our lives. The cloud cover screwing up your radio signal. The moon pushing and pulling the tides. It's all energy. And astrology, as it was explained to me by John the Mechanic, is simply a bigger picture of the environment that can shape our experiences.

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...

"You've got intense weather on you. But, intensity means energy. And when you've got energy, you've got something you can work with. It's like cash flow for a business. If you've got cash flow, at least you can DO somethin'. You may be in debt, but if you don't have cash flow, if you don't have ENERGY, you can't do shit. You've got a lotta energy right now...Use it...It's a good time to push."

I explain to John the Mechanic that I haven't had to push. Things are coming my way. The stories are showing up in my lap. Today was a prime example of that. Every single day during my first week on the road I had some sort of mechanical issue with VanGo. Whether it was stalling on me as I tried to drive out of LA. Or making a disconcerting knocking noise from the engine after I attempted a valve adjustment in Flagstaff. Or breaking down in the rain on the outskirts of El Reno. Every day it's been SOMETHING.

Then today I stop at a cyber bar in Norman to tidy up the back of my van and grab something to drink. And who do I meet as I'm cleaning up my mess? A free-thinking, New Age mechanic eager to talk astrology, quantum physics and relationships. Not exactly the Okie bumpkin the typical LA snob might envision being the norm out here in middle America.

One of the beauties of traveling is blowing up the stereotypes perpetuated by fools who've never been anywhere.

The best part about my New Age Okie pit stop was that John the Mechanic owned his own foreign car garage — the ideal candidate to work on a beat old VW — and he was insisting on having a look under my hood tomorrow.

Can you say guardian angel?

"Part of it's your clarity...I'm not sayin' you're broadcasting, 'Hey, c'mere and talk to me!'...I believe in physics we don't understand, energy we don't see. And your clarity in here [pointing to his heart then his head] — see, we're more than physical bodies. There are people looking for you when you walk through this street. And it's partly your clarity that will attract them to you. Just trust your clarity."

For whatever reason, interesting people with stories that seem to reflect my own personal history keep appearing on my radar. And I'm doing nothing to make it happen other than showing up.

Then again, is it even possible to have clarity downing cocktails and beers every night?

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"What I'm encouraging you, though, is to stick with it. And your clarity. Because when some of this weather, some of this energy, gets rough, keep your clarity. Because there's something in there that you can use. And your clarity will get you through it."

It's interesting to me 13 years later that John the Mechanic was so adamant about me persevering and calling on my clarity. Because over the course of trying to write this book I completely LOST my clarity on what I was trying to write and what I wanted to say.

I felt I had too many stories, too many options. I became creatively hamstrung. I felt indebted to everyone who shared their story and I was worried how what I wrote would be received by P. and her family, my family, my friends, my editor, my publisher. I wrote from fear. Whatever clarity I possessed at this point in my adventure — and it was genuine and powerful at various points in my journey — somehow got lost in a cloud circumspection and 2nd guessing when it came time to write about it.

But John the Mechanic claimed it was my clarity, my energy, that made him strike up a conversation with me.

He'd already strolled past me and my red and white VW bus before walking into the cyber bar. But something told him to turn around and inquire about what I was doing. It was an hour or 2 before dusk when we started chatting. Before we knew it, we ended up talking until well past midnight. John the Mechanic even offered to let me crash in an empty bedroom at his place. (His roommate was out of town.)

It was almost 3 in the morning when I finally climbed into that empty bed and nodded off. But not before John the Mechanic decided we should bust out the acoustic guitars for a 1-song jam session of Dylan's "Knockin' On Heaven's Door."

"Sometimes, even when the car breaks down, it's that synchronistic time that puts me in town at the same time that other person is in town looking for me."

In the morning, John the Mechanic took me to his favorite diner and bought me breakfast. Then he insisted I follow him to his nearby foreign car garage, where I hung out talking love and relationships with a couple funny mechanics who worked at the place.

Meanwhile, John the Mechanic dove into my engine like Van Gogh dove into a painting. In less than an hour he fixed whatever had been broken, tightened whatever had been loosened and gave VanGo a tune-up — which John the Mechanic insisted on doing for free — that turned my pain-in-the-ass old clunker into a trouble free beast for the next 3 months.

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DAY 7: DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS

HERE'S ONE VERSION I WROTE ABOUT DAY 7 FOR THE book that never got finished. Part of the reason I was spinning my wheels on this project was because I'd write multiple versions of the same day, never feeling like I got it right. But after 13 years of letting this stuff languish, my attitude now is — "Screw it. Get it down and be done with it." So here we go:

DAY 7
Destination: Amarillo, TX to El Reno, OK
Date: 7.14.97 (Monday)
Mileage: 20,428 to 20,663 (235 miles)
Bar(s): Reno Cocktail Lounge
Imbibed: 2 1/2 Miller Genuine Drafts

There's a million things the road has taught me. One of the most important being this: Never underestimate the potential benefits of a bad break or unfortunate fork in the road.

One of my most memorable rendezvous with this philosophy occurred when I was 25. I was about a month into riding my mountain bike from L.A. to Boston when I encountered an out-of-service bank machine in a strange new town. This was back in the days before ATMs began multiplying like rabbits. I was in the midst of slogging through Kentucky, armed with a thin handbook from Bank of America that gave the location of every ATM in America that accepted my bank card.

And the only ATM in Bardstown, KY wasn't working.

Which was a serious problem. Due to the fact that I was penniless. With neither car nor credit card. If this had been the days of the scarlett letter, I surely would've had the loser's "L" tattooed on my forehead. Especially when I realized that the nearest acceptable ATM was more than 40 miles away in Louisville.

Turns out, that's where the pretty girl in line behind me — who looked like a young Jessica Lange — was living. She glanced at my bike, loaded down with enough gear to get me from coast to coast, and asked what I was doing. After hearing my sad story, Emily offered me a ride to an ATM up the road in Louisville — the town that spawned Muhammed Ali and Hunter Thompson, 2 of my all-time favorite wordsmiths.

By the next morning, I'd met Emily's mom and gone to dinner with her sister — both of whom were no doubt curious about the stranger Emily had brought home. We stayed up 'til 2 in the morning swapping life stories and I even spent the night at her 1-bedroom apartment.

All thanks to that busted ATM.

And, no, we didn't sleep together. Thanks for asking. But I did learn a thing or two about being patient through life's tiny nightmares.

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...

That's why I knew somehow today's 19th nervous breakdown would work out for the best. In another time, another place, I would've been PISSED about what happened.

Okay, for a while there I WAS pissed.

How many mechanical nightmares can a person have in one week?!

The bus ran better BEFORE I took it in for the pre-trip tune-up. Now that $1200 I spent on preventative maintenance in L.A. is turning out to be my worst investment since I gave a guitar player named "Shark" $100 bucks for a pyramid "opportunity" that evaporated as soon as I bought in.

Rotten luck or fuck-up? You tell me.

My friend G.G. chimed in with a piece of unsolicited advice when I left L.A.: "Just don't make it 100 days, 100 mechanics." G.C. was all too aware of my endless automotive horror stories. But his innocuous little comment has been on my mind ever since I left California. All week long I'm thinking — that visit with the mechanic in Vegas, the conversation with the mechanic in Flagstaff, the phone call back to my guy back in L.A. — all pivotal moments that I SHOULDN'T be writing about because of what that bastard G.C. said.

Well, too bad. What happened today can't be avoided.

Today is the 14th day of the 7th month — on Day 7 of my trip. You'd think with all those 7s and multiples of 7 floating around — the day I drove past a town called Shamrock, Texas, no less — there would have been some GOOD luck in the air.

Not quite.

Then again, if you spend $1200 bucks to fix a rig you only paid a total of $2000 for, you'd think that rig has been serviced well enough to keep from breaking down every day.

Think again.

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Here's the scenario: We're on a semi-busy stretch of Oklahoma interstate an hour outside of Clinton, which is less than an hour past Carter. Closing in on 6 p.m. under charcoal gray skies. In the midst of a serious thunderstorm that's spitting raindrops the size of lougees. And I'm hunched over the VW's large pizza-sized steering wheel. My nose 6 inches from the windshield — which is fogging up nicely, since my defroster doesn't work.

Neither does my heater, for that matter. But that's not really an issue, seeing as how it's so fucking humid out here.

And then came the sputtering.

At 60 mph in a downpour, my bus suddenly starts lurching and popping, choking and wheezing. My muffler's farting firecrackers and now I'm doing 50...35...20. With a battalion of big rigs in the rearview barreling down on me through the rain.

Damn right I panicked. I'm either not vain enough, or too stupid, to deny it. But I'm a coward. I admit — I'm yella. In that spot, my hazards are flashing. My heart's jumping out of my chest. My fingers are locked in a death grip on my large pizza wheel. And I'm getting a grim visual of what it looks like when a speeding big rig swats a 25-year-old tin box-on-wheels across wet Oklahoma pavement.

I think the decapitation occurred on the 3rd roll.

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But somehow I made it. Guided by the spirits of Kerouac, Kuralt and any other fool crazy enough to dive into the belly of the beast, I was able to coax the tired old German lemonade wagon off the interstate.

A cluster of trees loomed a few miles on the horizon. I've been on the road enough to know that after endless rolling hills and corn fields, the tree cluster is heartland shorthand for a town with a gas station. Maybe even a motel.

I must've driven it 3, 4 miles like that — all stops and starts, lunging and gagging. Off the interstate. Down the bridge that crossed over I-40. Onto the long road to God knows where. Barely staying alive. In 1st or 2nd gear the whole way.

At one point the bus looked dead in the water. Miles of highway stretched behind us without a single car in sight. Ahead was a slight hill, the crest of which we barely made. As we reached the top and began rolling along a slight downhill grade, east towards the tree cluster, I felt my crapmobile about to burp its last breath.

Then I realized that if my machine were to stop dead right now, we'd be directly in front of the FORT RENO FEDERAL PENITENTURY.

More panic. There were now no other cars on the road. No inmates in the yard. No guards at the gate. The only sign of life was the guy stressing in the wet red-and-white hippie van from California. And I'm thinking — I break down in front of this place and they might turn an inmate or 2 loose on me. Just for kicks.

I'm not quite sure how — by the grace of God or me starting and re-starting the engine after it died every 5 seconds? — but we made it to the cluster of trees beyond the big house. Even got to a garage, where a greasy young guy with a small team of moles on his face said he couldn't even get to my ailing ride until tomorrow night.

That's how I found this here Budget Motel, which is over-priced even at $25 bucks a night. It's across the street from the big city-sized auto repair shop. A little hint to you travelers: If it's a mom and pop operation with "budget" in the name, you best lower your expectations. That way you won't react too harshly to conditions like those I'm coping with right now in room 1 — a musty over-sized rat hole with an old AC wall unit that seems to be coughing out the humid fumes of a high school locker room after football practice.

Then there's the dysfunctional fire alarm and that annoying BLOOP...BLOOP...BLOOP every 7.9 seconds. Sure, if a tragic fire sweeps through the place tonight I'll surely perish. But like some middle America McGyver, I yanked the Duracel coppertop from the back of the thing, detonating the buzzing time bomb. Saving me the disgrace of screaming into the streets at 3 a.m. like some homicidal maniac from the prison up the road.

When I checked in I was greeted by a mini newspaper advertising various local businesses. On the cover was a child's drawing of a park, with a sign that read:

"Welcome to El Reno — home of family values"

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I'd soon learn all about El Reno family values from a woman who shared some ugly secrets with me at a nearby bar. But first, I needed to check out my surroundings. The rain had stopped, so I took a quick spin on my mountain bike. Through the comatose little town that had me feeling like I was twilight zoning.

Hello?...Does anybody actually live here?

Downtown El Reno — with its frozen in time Mayberry vibe — was almost entirely empty. Shut down and silent by 7.

Determined to find someone who actually inhabited this place, I rode back towards my dingy motel and beyond. Looking for any sign of life besides the multi-moled mechanic and the Pakistani woman who checked me into the lowly Budget. I pedaled past solid red brick homes on curbless empty streets. I rode by teenagers hanging out in a damp parking lot next to the local rodeo arena.

A quick stop for dinner chow at the local Valu-Mart — a honey-I-shrunk-the-store version of Safeway — was like walking into a carnival freak show. A skinny toothless geezer with 1 foot and 4 toes in the grave shuffled by with just enough of a pulse to push a mini-shopping cart.

In the nearby cereal aisle I caught a glimpse of the old man's companion: a large woman in stained sky blue stretch pants that could stretch no more. Her dirty gray t-shirt looked like it may have been white once upon a time. I caught her looking at me like I was the X-Files freak.

But I was too busy debating whether to buy the Just Right or the Lucky Charms to care. Due to my dire circumstances today, I felt compelled to forgo the nutritional value and go with the product with the word "lucky" in the name. Plus, I love those marshmallow treats.

With dinner procured, I dropped off the goods at my room and kept riding. Past a beauty salon, an Auto Zone and a nearly empty junior college no bigger than your typical SoCal junior high school.

Then I figured out where everyone else in this town of 15,000 was. If they weren't in their homes or farmhouses or at the Valu-Mart or just hanging out in a dirt parking lot, chances are they're at the Wal-Mart out near I-40. There must've been 100 cars in that parking lot.

Meanwhile, back in the old downtown district, there were almost no cars. The place was a ghost town.

Who needs a quaint little downtown district when you can buy your clothes, shop for groceries AND eat McDonald's all at the massive one-stop Wal-Mart monster? Yet one more snapshot of America's idyllic past killed by the culture of convenience.

At least the Lucky Charms worked.

Because when I got back to the room, the weak-ass AC unit was unable to do much good fending off the killer humidity. So I decided to at least ACT like a man and take a look at my car's engine. Maybe the problem will be so obvious, even a mechanical idiot like me could figure it out.

Well, it was and I did. A small tube from one of the 2 carbs had come off. Even I could see that. I reattached it in 13 seconds and started the old boy up. Much to my surprise, the sputtering had ceased. I took the bus for a test run and discovered...YES!...we're back in business. With crossed fingers, legs and anything else we could find to cross. Praying that tomorrow everything will be alright.

But first a shower. Then it's off to learn the dirty little secret about El Reno family values at a half-empty cowboy bar across the interstate.

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The Reno Cocktail Lounge was nothing fancy. A simple shoebox of cinderblock next to the Red Carpet Inn. By the time I walked in just before 10, the rain had let up for good. There were only a few cars in the gravel parking lot, mostly American-made trucks. The spot was a few hundred yards south of I-40, where I nearly became a grilled big rig burger earlier today.

If the place had any windows, I sure didn't see 'em. The better to keep those secrets hidden.

Most of the light was provided by the greedy booze peddlers at Budweiser and Coors Light. On the parquet dance floor near the door, a frumpy bleach blonde with chutzpah and a home perm was lost in a seductive 2-step. Her partner was a nimble dude in khakis and a beeper. As I reached through my backpack for a pen, I caught the tail end of their conversation as they came off the dance floor.

"...That's 'cause I ain't been laid enough," she laughed loud enough to hear over the sad jukebox cowboy whining about how some girl's gonna miss him when he's gone. "I haven't had sex since 1989," added Ms. Bawdy Heat.

For someone who hadn't been laid in nearly a decade, she sure was jolly. As she waddled back to her friends a few tables away, the other 7 guys in the place tried to be discreet about watching her. Maybe tonight the drought would end — if it ever really existed.

Hell, with the limited entertainment options out here, you'd think folks would be fucking all the time.

Up at the bar, a thin, weary woman in black flip-flops and wheat-colored courduroy pants was talking to a tank-topped guy wearing a backwards 49ers cap. They were both smoking. Just like everyone else in here, including the unassuming bartender in stiff Lee jeans and a black cowboy hat.

I sat a few feet away at one of the chipped wooden tables just off the bar. Taking notes in the dark. Nursing the first of 3 Miller Genuine Drafts. In the middle of his gabfest with the 2-step dancing queen, the guy in the 49ers cap turned and noticed me writing. He leaned down towards me.

"You gettin' all that?"

I glanced up and saw that he wasn't much bigger than me. Still, I'm not the type to stop in a small town and start sniffing around for trouble. Too many years of movie violence and too many stories of random urban tragedy have left me skittish. Everyone back home kept saying I was in for at least 1 good barroom ass kicking. I've even been having dreams about being in an alley with faceless, gun-toting cretins who decide to fill my head with lead. P.'s had some dreams about me dying out here, too. So has my friend Carver.

Welcome to Tabloid Nation. Where the anxiety can't help but seep into the bloodstream, like a slow drip of paranoia.

That's why I responded as politely as I possibly could tonight.

"Excuse me?" I said like some highway Eddie Haskell.

"I said, you gettin' all this shit down? Can you hear okay? Should we speak up?"

The guy didn't seem drunk enough or mean enough to break a Bud bottle over my head. Still, you never know.

"Nah, man," I told him with benign indifference. "I'm not writin' about you guys. I can't hear you, anyway. Why? Is it good stuff?"

Then I thought: Is THIS what I'm gonna be dealing with for the next 93 days? Start taking notes in a bar and the guy next to you is liable to think you're spying on someone's cheating husband. I dread the wrath of the belligerent redneck who thinks writing stuff down over beers is for sissies. And forget about barstool poetry.

Bottom line is, it's damn near impossible to be inconspicuous jotting observations into a pocket-sized notebook in a bar — even if you are wearing cowboy boots in Oklahoma, like I was tonight.

Then again, if you can just avoid getting your ass kicked, scribbling ideas into a journal is a great way to meet people.

That's how I met the sad-eyed victim of love who was sitting next to the nosy 'Niner fan at the bar. The lady with the secrets.

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As soon as he took off for the men's room, the woman — we'll call her Amy since she never even told me her name — leaned over from her barstool and asked what I was writing.

"I'm, uh...actually, I..."

I didn't want the whole place to hear my strange story. So I motioned for her to join me.

"Have you got a minute?"

Amy grabbed her cocktail, picked up her cigarettes, then cautiously slid off her barstool and pulled up a chair across the table from me.

And that "minute" turned into about an hour.

Amy had a story that was country song sad. It didn't take long before she was telling me how one of her earliest memories is of seeing her father smack her mom around. She was maybe 3.

By the time she got to junior high, Amy's dad was into an entirely different form of abuse — incest.

Things didn't get much better once she was old enough to move out of the house. Amy's first 2 husbands used to hit her. Husband #3 never smacked her. All he did was walk out on her a week after her mom died of cancer in their home. Now, 3 years later, Amy works at a convenience store to support her 3 kids. A 4th kid — her oldest daughter — lives 2 towns over with her husband and baby girl.

Not yet 40, Amy is already a grandma. With 3 divorces under her belt — although that's still 2 fewer than her own mother had.

And I thought I had it bad.

"I can't believe I'm telling you all this," she kept saying.

I felt a little strange asking about her past. By the way she kept looking away or staring into her 7-and-7, I could tell she was uncomfortable. Understandable, given the topics we were discussing. But she could have stopped at any moment and said it was none of my damn business. But she never did.

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Amy told me how when she initially began blossoming into a woman, her relationship with dear old dad became a living nightmare. By the time she got to high school, about the only thing she was allowed to leave the house for were classes. When school was out, Amy was expected to come straight home.

"He was very protective," she said, her brown eyes darting around the bar like an abused mutt at the pound. "It was like he didn't want me to grow up. He didn't want me getting involved with boys or having any kind of fun."

No doubt the asshole was jealous. All this was a few years after daddy had begun molesting Amy, his oldest daughter. She had a younger sister, too, although Amy's not sure if dad was molesting her as well. They've never talked about it.

Yet I roll into town — only because my ride broke down here — and she's telling ME all this stuff. If you're inclined to think she was making it all up, all you needed to see were those wounded eyes. This, no doubt, was her truth. And she needed to share it. Even with a stranger. Maybe even ESPECIALLY with a stranger.

At 15 Amy met a boy at school. He was 17, "cute as hell" and eager to make Amy happy. Is it any wonder she fell for him? When Amy got pregnant, the only thing to do was get married.

"I think I was looking for any excuse to get out of the house," she muttered with her head down.

It didn't take long before Amy's teenage husband started cheating on her. She doesn't really blame him though.

"He was young," she said running her fingers through her coarse, straw-colored hair. "Young guys need to do that sort of thing."

Amy's nails were chewed down to the nub. She was thin, but her face was puffy. Almost like she'd been either sleeping or crying. Yet, you could see she must've been pretty in her day. And she still had the body — at least in clothes — of a wispy teenage girl.

By 20, Amy was on her 2nd husband. He ended up cheating on her too. Her 3rd husband was the only one who didn't fool around on her. But what a scumbag — telling her he wanted a divorce only days after Amy's mom died. This pillar of integrity is now living with HIS parents.

Amy told me all this without a trace of self-pity or anger. I suddenly felt guilty for bitching about my stupid little car problem. It wasn't until I got back here to my musty room that I realized how astonishingly similar Amy's story was to my own mom's: the mother of 4 kids from 3 husbands...dropped out of school to have her first child...molested when she was growing up...cared for her sick mom while she was dying of cancer.

Bizarre.

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DAY 6: AMARILLO TRIM

More random pages I wrote for the book that never got finished:

DAY 6
Destination: Santa Fe, NM to Amarillo, TX
Date: 7.13.97 (Sunday)
Mileage: 20,128 to 20,428 (300 miles)
Bar(s): Cassidy's
Imbibed: 1 screwdriver

The evening of barflying begins after I hang up with P. and Mom. Which had me feeling slightly guilty when I decided that tonight might be a good time to explore the phenomenon of the strip bar.

So I catch a ride with Dave the Cabbie. Dave gives me the dirty lowdown on Amarillo's strip bar scene. The best place, he tells me, is closed on Sundays. So we decide he'll take me to Cassidy's, the 2nd best place in town, according to Dave, who looks like he'd be familiar with such activity.

Dave, like me, is the owner of a big head. As in circumference, not ego. Unlike me, though, he wears glasses. Big ones. Got a bit of a Reverend Jim thing going, too. His nervous laugh has got me cracking up.

Dave says if I need a ride back later to my overpriced room at the Quality Inn I should call and request him.

Thanks, Dave. I feel safe now.

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My first waitress, Claudia, is in dark business slacks and a forgetable blouse. Like some frumpy single mom you'd expect to find down the hall in personnel — not delivering drinks at some skank bar.

She brings me a watered down screwdriver and sets her hand on my shoulder.

"Let me know if you need anything else."

There are 5 other guys in the place. Plus the emcee, who's getting a little too into it.

"C'mon, gentlemen, put your hands together and give a big
welcome to Kitten! The finest pussy in all the land..."

Less than 7 minutes later, Claudia is back. Checking to see if I was okay on drinks. Touching my shoulder.

Nobody touches you in L.A.

"You okay, sweetie?"

"I'm fine, thanks," I say looking up from my journal, which no doubt infuriates the dancers. Sorry, ladies.

I've never been totally comfortable sitting in a room with other men, starting at tits and asses and vaginas. Call me crazy, but the concept is a little strange. And I always feel like the women dancing despise me. I get the sense that they think I'm looking at them like just another piece of ass. So in their eyes, I'm just a wallet.

They'll love me when I'm handing out $20 bills like they're Altoids. But when I'm broke, I'm scum. Welcome to Humanity 101.

"Whatchou writin'?" Claudia asks, her bottle cap-shaped drink tray resting on her bosom under her folded arms. She's showing less skin than me.

"I'm writing a book, actually..."

I give her the whole story while a big brunette with pockmarks on her ass saves her beaver shot for the guy on the other side of the stage.

"Good for you," Claudia responds with obvious glee and a bit of pride. Imagine that, she must be thinking. A REAL writer. At MY table.

If she only knew.

"I'm a writer myself," Claudia tells me.

"Oh really?" I take the bait all too willingly. "What do you write?"

She bends down to get a direct shot into my ear.

"Well, I've never been published. Not yet. But I'm taking journalism at the local community college. Then I want to get a master's."

I think she missed a step in there somewhere.

"So what do you want to write?" I shout over ZZ Top's "Legs," the inspiration tune for a dodgy blonde I'm only too happy to ignore. "Fiction? Non-fiction? Magazine articles?"

"Erotica."

"Erotica?"

"That shit sells, man. Do you have any idea how big erotica is?"

"Well..."

I had no idea. Porn videos, yes. Cybersex, yes. But erotica?

"Sex sells, man. You know that."

"Yeah. For strip bars or porn flicks. Are people really reading erotica though?"

"Oh, yeah. Are you kidding? It's huge...HUGE."

"Huge?"

"Anne Rice? She gets into eroticism, along with the mysticism and vampire stuff. But I want to focus mainly on hardcore erotica."

Claudia didn't strike me as particularly sexy. But that last comment has me thinking of her doing naughty things.

"Hey, working here I got plenty to draw on."

No shit.

"I can't believe that stuff is such a huge seller," I say, trying to harness my skepticism. "What with all the dirty magazines and skank movies."

"Are you kidding? The business guy who watches porn flicks, he gets on a flight or he's having lunch, he can read erotica. The housewife, she's not into all the graphic stuff in the movies and the magazines. So she's reading erotica. I'm telling you, it's huge."

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Claudia goes on to give me some strip bar facts like this one: Most of the dancers hate men. (I KNEW it.)

"Oh, yeah. I'd say 80% of them are either lesbian or bi."

She points to the almost-sexy brunette onstage, a scowling package of attitude and truck stop toughness.

"See that one. She's married. Her husband's underage. And she's got a lesbian lover."

Hmm...Such a sweet innocent.

"That one over there..."

Claudia motions towards a wide-hipped, small-breasted blonde trying to hit up one of the regulars for a lap dance.

"She's a Sunday school teacher."

"C'mon! That sounds a little..."

"I'm serious."

"But today is..."

"Sunday. That's right. She may have been teaching this morning."

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Then there's Patty. The OTHER waitress. Patty looks young enough to be working at the DQ. She's cute, not beautiful, with short blonde mom hair — the cut preferred by women who don't want their babies yanking on their 'do all the time.

Patty's baby is a boy.

At work tonight she's dressed in black courduroy overalls. White t-shirt. White sox. Black shoes. Too innocent for this place.

She just moved here 2 months ago from Tyler, where I'm headed in 3 days to see my high school buddy Victor. Patty landed in Amarillo looking for a change of scenery. "Had a family crisis I needed to get away from" is how she put it.

It seems the father of her baby jumped off a pier. Broke his back, just like Santa Fe Edmund many years ago.

"It's tough," Patty says. "But I'm trying to get back on my feet."

.
..
...

The night ends in strangeness. While I wait outside the bar for Dave the Cabbie, a shy young thing offers to drive me back to my motel. In an instant we're trading life stories. The Shy Young Thing tells me her daddy was a trucker.

"Don't see him too much," she says.

This girl is about the most attractive female I've seen all night. It's close to 2 a.m. when she pulls up to pick up her friend, who I'm assuming is a dancer. Maybe not. Maybe she's one of the waitresses. She goes inside to tell her friend about me, the stranger they're gonna be driving home.

But I'm getting nervous waiting out here. It's kinda chilly. An eerie silence hangs thick in the air. The fact that there's about one car driving by every 5 minutes has got me jumpy. In L.A., when the streets are this empty, that's when you gotta worry.

Where the hell is Dave the Cabbie?!

My mind kicks into 2 a.m. mode. What are her intentions? Does she want to hook up? Do I want to hook up? She comes out to tell me it'll be another 5 or 10 minutes until her friend is ready to go.

She heads back inside. And I'm alone in an empty parking lot left pondering where the hell all this might be leading? Am really getting a ride back to my motel room from a couple girls I've just met at a strip joint in Amarillo? On a Sunday night, no less?

Then Dave pulls up. A decision must be made. I decide to go for the sure thing and play it safe.

A few minutes later, I'm back in my room at the Quality Inn.

Alone.

Wondering if I made the right decision.

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