333 Miles (15 page)

Interlude Nine

Gary (25)

August 13
^th
, 1999 was a beautiful
day at Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego. The sun was out, it was
seventy-two degrees, and the Padres were about to begin a
double-header with the Giants. Gary’s boss had given him sixth-row
seats behind first base. He and Roger were trying to find said
seats, each carrying the maximum allowed sale of two large
beers.

They found row F and headed inward. The
ticket Roger held was for seat nine, while the ticket in Gary’s
pocket was seat eight. Even so, Roger led the way and sat in seat
eight while Gary made himself and his beers comfortable in seat
nine. It would prove to be a crucial detail.

The Village People were scheduled to perform
after both games were over. Before game one, the Construction
Worker came out to sing the national anthem. He stepped up to the
microphone stationed near home plate and took off his yellow
hard-hat, placing it over his heart. Gary and Roger rolled their
eyes at each other, but both refrained from making any derogatory
comments. In the end, they both admitted the guy did a pretty good
job, though they were soon to be disappointed by the Military Man
who came up five feet short on his attempt at the ceremonial first
pitch.

Roger: “That was fucking weak. They should
have gone with the Indian Chief.”

Gary: “I don’t know. That cowboy looks like
he is hiding a pretty good fastball behind that mustache.”

Either may have been more effective than the
Padres starting pitcher. In the first inning, he walked the first
two Giants hitters and then fell behind Barry Bonds three and one.
The next pitch was a fastball. He was not the first and would not
be the last pitcher to make the mistake of throwing Bonds a pitch
over the middle of the plate. Bonds hitched his right elbow in,
lightly lifted his right leg, and then almost unnoticeably opened
his right hip and extended his arms in front of him in one fluid
motion.

Roger was inserting a Kodiak at the time of
contact, but the implication from the crack of the bat was
unmistakable. He was able to look up in time to see the ball
sailing out toward the right center field seats. It landed in the
twelfth row. Shortly after the ball completed its flight path,
Bonds slowly began to circle the bases. It was, for any baseball
fan, truly a thing of beauty, almost a religious experience.

Gary, despite his appreciation for the
talent, was a Padres fan and was not happy. “Retards. Why would you
let Barry beat you in that situation?” he asked no one in
particular.

Roger answered. “Oooohhh, I don’t know, but
it is helping my over.”

The over came in easily, with the Padres
ultimately losing 12-4. Roger was happy and, as it turned out, Gary
would have something to be happy about as well. In the top of the
third inning two young women carrying Mike’s Hard Lemonades bounced
down the aisle giddily. They turned into row F and made themselves
at home in seats ten and eleven.

In seat ten was Blair Davis. She wore a green
Marc Jacobs sundress with leather Gucci sandals she got at an
outlet shop for ninety dollars. Her long brown hair flowed out of a
pink Giants cap which clashed terribly with the sundress. Gary
thought she was gorgeous. It was not until the fifth inning, and
another large beer later, that he worked up the courage to start
talking to her. By now, the Giants were already ahead 6-1 so he was
conciliatory and asked her how she became a Giants fan.

Blair explained her family was from Larkspur,
across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, and she had grown
up in a family of Giants fans. While accurate, the truth was she
never cared for baseball whatsoever until, when she was twelve,
Will Clark burst on to the scene as the Giants first baseman. Blair
developed a huge crush on Mr. Clark, becoming a lifelong Giants fan
in the process. She still remembered the day her family went to the
game at Candlestick Park and she first saw Will. Her dad, who was a
VP at Wells Fargo, had scored very good tickets and the family was
seated four rows behind the Giants’ dugout. Clark came to bat in
the bottom of the first inning and the crowd erupted in cheers
because he had hit a game-winning home run the night before. Of
course he had a cute face, but it was something about the way he
waved his bat around and wiggled his ass in the batter’s box that
really caught Blair’s attention. A girl sitting across the field
behind third base felt similarly. She was a blond in her early
twenties wearing jean shorts and a white tank top that tightly
gripped a pair of very large boobs. This girl stood up, yelled “Go
Will,” and held up a sign that read,

I’d Take the Pill

For a Thrill

With Will!!!

Blair did not know exactly what this meant,
but she had a feeling she agreed. Her dad, Jim, also noticed the
sign. He did know what it meant and spent much of the game admiring
its owner.

By 1999, J. T. Snow was the Giants’ first
baseman, but Blair was not interested in him at the moment. Like
her first feelings for Will Clark, she had an instant crush on the
person seated next to her in seat nine.

Gary remembered advice Alex had told him
about how to pick up girls: always say something somewhat negative
about them, but avoid actually being mean. At first Gary thought
this was ridiculous, but after years of going out with Alex and
seeing him repeat this procedure with tremendous success, he had
learned to try to replicate it wherever possible.

“Are all Giants fans so color-coordinated?”
he asked.

“What do you mean?” Blair wanted to know.

“Nothing, just the hat with the dress. It
kind of looks like what a gay frog would wear to a wedding,” was
his reply. Somehow, he was never as good at this as Alex and
immediately regretted the comment, wondering how something so
stupid had come out of his mouth. He took another large sip of beer
and averted his eyes back toward the game.

Blair thought this was a pretty stupid thing
to say as well, but somehow she found herself a little bit more
interested in continuing to talk to him anyway. Still, she was not
about to let him get the upper hand in the conversation.
“Interesting observation,” she replied, adding, “It must take a gay
Padres fan to notice such a thing. You know, queer eye for the
yuppie baseball fan or something like that.”

There was a brief awkward pause and then they
both started laughing. Nearly twelve hours later, he kissed her
goodnight outside of The Shack bar in La Jolla and programmed her
number into his Motorola StarTAC phone.

Both had the very alive feeling you get when
you meet someone you like and know that you will see them again.
For Blair, it was the first time she had this sensation since
meeting her last boyfriend, who ultimately turned out to be married
in another state. She had a feeling that Gary, unlike that scumbag,
was at heart a really good guy. Gary was pretty sure he was going
to get laid sometime in the next few weeks.

Gary hopped in a cab heading toward
University City and Blair began the half-mile walk to her apartment
in La Jolla. As they moved in different directions, neither fully
appreciated that their lives had just merged onto the same path,
that their future joys and pains would be shared, or that new life
would be created as a result.

Chapter Sixteen

ZZYZX

8:05 p.m.

“
Man looks in the abyss, there's nothing
staring back at him. At that moment, man finds his character. And
that is what keeps him out of the abyss.”

– Lou Mannheim,
Wall Street

After the events of the previous hour, the
BMW was now content to push forward at a more conservative
seventy-seven miles per hour. Inside, a complete analysis of the
encounter with the police had been concluded and the silence was
broken only by the broadcast of the Stanford game, which Roger had
lobbied for successfully.

With Stanford, a three-and-a-half-point
underdog, now covering the spread by ten and a half points, and a
fresh Kodiak resting in his lip, Roger was pleased with the world
and his place in it. He could imagine nowhere he would rather be
than cruising through the desert with his best friends. He pressed
his forehead against the window to get a better look outside and
was surprised at how cold the glass was against his skin, but this
also was pleasing. In the desert, it was noticeably dark. Night was
omnipresent. The view out the window revealed a world of blackness
with no visible horizon. In contrast, by craning his neck upwards,
Roger could see a sky filled with more stars than he could hope to
comprehend. Though it was windy outside, the BMW muted everything
from the external environment. The world appeared perfectly still
from inside the car, as if frozen in time. Strangely, there were no
other vehicles within a quarter of a mile in either direction. As
if to take advantage of the clearing, a tumbleweed nearly the size
of a small car blew across the freeway just two hundred feet in
front of the oncoming BMW, but no one noticed it.

Roger leaned back and used the back of his
hand to wipe away the steam his forehead had imparted on the
window. When he was done, he saw the iconic street sign for Zzyzx
Road fly by.

On their first trips to Vegas, this sign was
always pointed out as some kind of important landmark. Once, on a
previous trip, they exited the freeway here to see what this
mysterious road was all about. Had they researched it, they would
have learned that the name was coined in 1944 by Curtis Howe
Springer who claimed it to be the last word in the English
language. Mr. Springer opened a health spa and sold bottled water
from nearby springs to desert travelers, but was eventually
arrested for misuse of the land and alleged food and drug
violations. As of 2006, the land surrounding Zzyzx was under
control of the Bureau of Land Management, who allowed California
State University to manage it and conduct desert studies. But as
far as the guys in the BMW knew, there was nothing of interest on
Zzyzx Road. In fact, the paved portion ended fairly quickly before
an unpromising dirt road took its place. It was all kind of a tease
unless you were the type of person who wanted to leave the
conventional route and venture alone into the unknown vastness of
the desert.

On this night, there was no comment made
about the strangely named street. It too moved into the past.

Interlude Ten

Roger (26)

In the summer of 2000, Roger worked two jobs.
Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, he bartended at Moose
Mcgillicutty’s in Pacific Beach, and Thursdays and Sundays he
worked as a valet, parking cars for The Chart House in Del Mar.
Monday and Tuesday were his days off, used primarily for surfing,
golfing, sleeping and going to the Indian casinos. Between the two
jobs, he was pulling in about $1,400 a week, very little of which
was reported to the Internal Revenue Service. He lived with a
roommate in a simple two-bedroom apartment in Pacific Beach and
tended to date the kind of girls who were not expensive to date.
Therefore, he had plenty of money for whatever he wanted to do. Due
to Alex’s relentless prodding, he even opened checking and savings
accounts at Wells Fargo and managed to sock away $5,000.

Roger felt relatively wealthy, but he noticed
his new friend Wayne, a fellow parking valet, was really rolling in
cash. In the last month, Wayne had taken his girlfriend on vacation
to Australia, bought a Rolex, and bragged of winning three grand on
a single straight bet on a recent Padres game. Wayne also took
Roger and one of the other guys to dinner and drinks at Dakota
Grill downtown and picked up the tab. It was that night, after
several cocktails, that Roger learned where the cash was coming
from. Apparently, the trip to Australia was arranged by one of the
customers from The Chart House. On the last day of the trip, Wayne
was instructed to meet a man at the beach who gave him a stuffed
koala bear to take back to San Diego. Inside the cute and fuzzy
bear were five kilograms of pure cocaine.

For taking the return trip with the koala,
Wayne was paid $15,000 plus his expenses for the trip. Wayne told
Roger he could arrange for him to take the same trip next month and
would cover his valet shifts. Then Wayne would go again the
following month. He pointed out that his boss in the arrangement
preferred to have a rotation rather than just one person. Wayne was
very convincing about how easy the whole thing was, and about how
nice the cash was. Additionally, he pointed out that Roger could
probably talk Andrea, one of the bartenders, into taking the trip
with him. Roger had a crush on Andrea all summer but couldn’t get
past the simple flirting stage. Wayne painted an enticing picture
of the two of them enjoying the Sydney beaches, which he assured
Roger were even more appealing than those in San Diego.

The whole idea was very tempting. Roger told
Wayne he would probably do it but wanted a day to think about it.
As fortune would have it, Roger was scheduled to play golf the next
day with Gary. He brought up the idea during the sixth hole of the
Torrey Pines North course, a downhill par three with an unbeatable
view of the Pacific.

Gary, who already had his ball teed up,
suddenly lost interest in golf and the beauty of the surroundings.
He stepped away from the tee-box and offered his opinion.

Gary: “Roger, no fucking way. Do not do this
under any circumstances.”

Roger: “It sounds pretty easy.”

Gary: “It doesn’t matter. You do not want to
be a drug dealer. This could fuck up your whole life. Listen to me.
Do not do it.”

That was the end of the conversation for the
moment. Gary, flustered, duck-hooked his six iron into the brush
and ended up with a triple-bogey. Roger stuck the green and made
par to take three skins and six dollars.