333 Miles (5 page)

Alex tried to sound calm: “Okay, I knew we
would have to deal with this at some point, so I just have to say,
I really think you are focusing too much on the negative here.”

Gary: “The negative? The negative? What is
the positive? You are out of your mind. This is a very bad
situation. Just turn the car around.”

Alex: “It is cool. Nothing is fucked here. We
are just normal Americans trying to have a good time. Everything
will work out fine. Just watch.”

Gary: “What the fuck are you talking about?
What does this have to do with being American? This has to do with
me being married. Turn the car around at the next exit.”

Alex: “Okay, but let’s think about this for a
moment first. Just hear me out. Listen, this was the only way I
could get you to come with us. And you know that is true. I only
told Blair that Mike was getting married for you – so you could
enjoy this weekend with us. We are going to have a great time and
when we get back, we can just wait a week or so and then just tell
her that the engagement broke off cuz, like, um . . . I don’t know
. . . maybe Mike fucked the stripper we got him or something. Maybe
he even caught a disease or something. It will be cool.”

Mike, who had not planned on further
participation in this conversation, chimed in at this point: “Hey,
Alex – usually I don’t care what kind of shit you pull, but I don’t
want to come off like the asshole to my friend’s wife. Did you
think of that in your little scenario?”

Alex: “Okay, sorry buddy. You’re right. And I
don’t have all the details worked out right now, but it will be
okay. No strippers. I am the asshole here; you don’t have to
be.”

Mike: “And I don’t want any diseases
either.”

This elicited a chuckle from Roger, who up
until now was also pretending to ignore the whole situation and was
instead trying to get updated football lines on his cell phone.

Alex: “You’re right, Chief. Bad story.”

Mike: “I mean, at least not without really
getting laid.”

Everyone turned toward Mike, equal parts
confused and disappointed.

Gary got them back on topic: “Just get off
the next exit and take me back. We aren’t fucking moving
anyway.”

Roger suddenly realized he had a vested
interest in the outcome: “Dudes, I got a double shift covered on a
Saturday for this, so someone better still be taking me to
Vegas.”

Alex: “See, The Rodge is the voice of reason.
Fantastic. Okay, Gary, how about this - we get to Barstow, you call
Blair and tell her that I made the whole thing up and you had no
idea until then. But at that point there is really no way you can
come back. And I am the asshole.”

Gary: “So, what, the topic just didn’t come
up for two hours?”

Alex thought for only a moment: “Right,
because I told you and Roger not to mention anything until we got
to Vegas because Mike told me he didn’t want the trip to be
considered a bachelor party because he didn’t want strippers
because his fiancé would be pissed and he wouldn’t go if it was a
bachelor party. Therefore, he would only go if you and Roger didn’t
know about the engagement until the second night of the trip.”

Gary: “But there is no engagement?”

Alex: “This is true, but if I lied to you and
Roger separately then no one’s the wiser and no one is talking
about any engagements. We are all just going to Vegas. But then
somehow you caught on to my ruse and immediately call Blair.
However, by then we are in Barstow and everyone else still wants to
go and there is nothing you can reasonably do. I am the only
asshole. We go to Vegas and have a blast.”

Gary: “She is going to be pissed and is going
to make me get on a bus and get my ass back to San Diego no matter
what you douche-bags are doing.”

Alex: “I don’t think so, Gary. I don’t know
too much about married chicks, but the one thing I know about women
is they all want to seem “cooler” than other girls. If the word got
out that she made you come back on a Greyhound from Barstow, she
would appear as a bitch and decidedly un-cool. She won’t want
that.”

Gary thought about this for a moment: “You
are a clever asshole sometimes. You don’t care that my wife hates
you?”

Alex switched from his sales voice to his
compassionate voice: “I do care, G-Balls. I like Blair and I am
happy for the two of you. But the truth of the matter is, I have
seen you in person maybe twice in the last year anyway, so I don’t
think this is going to, like, fuck up the great situation we have
now or anything.”

Gary knew that it was a problem that he very
rarely saw friends who didn’t also have kids anymore. “I’m still
pissed,” he said, but the conviction in his voice was gone.

Alex: “I know. Look, I am sorry. Really. I
just wanted all of us to go to Vegas and have a good time together.
I mean, for me, personally, these days it is kind of a bummer. Five
years ago all you had to do was send out an email with the subject
“Vegas” and within thirty minutes eight guys had booked flights.
Now I am lucky if I can get The Rodge to come with me.”

Roger: “What is that supposed to mean?”

Alex: “Sorry, dude. You know I love charging
Vegas with you. I just mean that it doesn’t take much for you to
want to go to Nevada, which is a good thing. Look, the point is
just that we never get to do anything as the four of us anymore. I
know it was fucked up to lie to your wife and I know you were going
to buy new steak knives and all that this weekend, so I am sorry.
But how about if we move on and have a great weekend?”

Gary: “Jesus, man. You are a fucking dickhead
sometimes. Total fucking dickhead.” He paused. “Fine, let’s go. But
I am still pissed. Are you paying for dinner?”

Alex: “Absolutely. N9NE at the Palms
tomorrow. Steaks and martinis are on me.”

Gary: “Fucking dickhead.”

Roger, now content that the trip was still
on, lost interest in the conversation and made a statement: “Okay,
if we are all still friends, I am going to pass out now. One of us
was up all night having sex.”

Mike (with more than a tinge of jealousy):
“You are not still killing it with the hostess are you?”

Roger: “No, no. It’s one of the regulars. She
is like forty and just got divorced. Crazy in bed. Fucking
brilliant.”

With that Roger slouched into the corner of
the car and pulled out a Viejas Indian Casino hat and pulled it
down over his face. He lifted an empty twenty-ounce bottle of Coke
until it disappeared under the cap, spit into it, and issued his
parting words for the moment: “Okay, you double-headed-dildos, I’ll
see you later. Wake me up when the Stanford game comes on the
radio.”

Interlude Two

Roger (5)

Most of what Roger Kemp remembered from his
childhood about his father, Jack Kemp, was him arguing with his
mother in the kitchen or behind a closed door in the bedroom. The
house they lived in, just outside of Sacramento, California, only
had two bedrooms and a small living room, so there were not many
alternatives.

If the discussion was in the kitchen, then
Jack usually had at least four empty Budweisers in front of him,
though never more than six. Roger didn’t think about this until
much later. In his twenties, and now a bartender by profession,
Roger had the opportunity to observe firsthand many people’s
drinking habits. Most people either didn’t drink at all, only had
one or two drinks, or kept drinking as long and as much as the
situation allowed. It was very rare for someone to actually just
have four to six drinks, but that was his dad’s routine.

Anyway, Jack did his arguing with his wife
much like he did his drinking, frequently but never too out of
control. So he and Sheryl, Roger’s mom, never seemed to reach the
breaking point because both would raise their voices but never
quite yell and there was never any physical violence. It was as if
they preferred slow torture.

There were a fair amount of good times in the
Kemp household as well. In fact, the week before the day that would
spell the end of the marriage, the three of them enjoyed a lovely
vacation to Tahoe where five-year-old Roger played in the lake and
got sick eating too many tacos.

But in the end, things unraveled very
quickly, for two reasons. Jack was a typical scumbag guy, and Roger
never slept well as a kid or an adult. So, on a Saturday night in
March of 1979, Roger woke up and went into the kitchen to get some
apple juice. He remembered to bring his cup with him from the
bedroom and felt he was well prepared. He was not well prepared for
what he saw next. His baby sitter, Jessica, who was a student at
the local community college, was bent over the kitchen table and
his daddy was behind her. They were both naked. Roger had no idea
why, but he knew this was a bad thing and was not something he was
supposed to see. To this day, the most vivid part of the memory was
the hideous orange and red wallpaper in the kitchen. He was
eternally grateful to that wallpaper for muting out the rest of the
vision in his mind.

No longer interested in apple juice, Roger
ran back to his room and wished his mother was there, but she was
visiting his grandparents in Arizona. Roger began to wonder if he
should mention this to his mother at all. In the end, he didn’t
have to because Jack told her what happened when she returned.
Sheryl Kemp could put up with a lot of things, but for whatever
reason, infidelity was not one of them. She filed for divorce the
next week.

Roger’s dad ended up moving to New York by
the end of the year. From then on, Roger lived with his mom, and it
was just the two of them until he was in high school and his mom
remarried with a man who owned a medium-sized contracting business.
His stepdad, Howard, was also divorced, though Roger never heard
the story about why. He didn’t really care why, and was just glad
that his mom had found someone who made her happy and secure.
Howard was a good husband and a good father. There were rarely any
arguments and Roger was too old to have another babysitter to mess
things up, so everything seemed to work out.

Roger didn’t often think about fate or the
meaning of life, but one day when he was twenty, enjoying a Kodiak
after a few whiskeys, he realized that while society deemed his
parents’ marriage a failure, from his perspective it worked out
perfectly. If his dad had not married his mom, he wouldn’t exist.
If his parents had got along well enough to stay together, they
would have been moderately unhappy all of these years and his mom
would not have Howard, who truly did make her happy.

Chapter Seven

Work

4:27 p.m.

“
You see that building? I bought that
building ten years ago. My first real estate deal. Sold it two
years later, made an $800,000 profit. It was better than sex. At
the time I thought that was all the money in the world. Now it's a
day's pay.”

– Gordon Gekko,
Wall Street

Twenty minutes after Roger passed out in the
back seat, the mood in the car was better, though still somewhat
subdued. Traffic had thinned and Alex noted with satisfaction that
the needle on the speedometer was slowly creeping past the orange
80.

It turned out that during the disagreement,
traffic had cleared, and they had made decent progress. The group
was now just a few miles from Temecula, where Gary had almost
bought a house while he and Blair were engaged. Just five years
ago, they would have been able to afford a four-bedroom place in
Temecula with a pool in the back and a nice view of the hills.
Today, the same house would cost nearly $400,000 more. Blair
occasionally brought this up during arguments because she had been
the one who wanted to buy the house rather than waiting until they
could afford something closer to the city. Few things pissed Gary
off more, because he was the one who would have had to deal with
the ninety-minute commute every day. So while he occasionally
regretted missing out on some of the gains in the housing market
over the past few years, he knew that it was worth waiting because
he probably would have gone crazy and lost his marriage if they had
lived in Temecula. And financially they were still doing fine with
their current house.

Entering the city, a large sign declared
Temecula to be a place of “Old Traditions, New Opportunities.” As
they passed through the suburb, Gary noticed that while it still
seemed like a fairly nice place, the negatives of sprawl from Los
Angeles and San Diego were starting to show. There were occasional
patches of graffiti on the brick walls lining the freeway and a few
patches of shitty-looking townhouses and condos had appeared. The
graffiti on this particular stretch consisted of one XIV in huge
black letters and, to the right, in red, a rhetorical question,
“Bush, WTF?” He also noticed a new Del Taco, which he considered a
welcome addition to any neighborhood.

Alex broke the silence, or at least spoke
over Avril Lavine who was singing about stealing a skater boy from
a prissy chick. “Hey Mike,” he asked, making eye contact with him
in the rearview mirror, “how’s work going?”

Mike: “Fine. How about you?”

Alex: “Cool, man. They keep paying me anyway.
G-Balls?”

Gary turned back from staring out the window
and thinking about how much Del Taco he would eat if he did live in
Temecula: “Oh, its good. We have a big case and if it goes well and
then I work four more years of seventy-plus-hour weeks I may have a
good chance for Junior Partner.”

Neither Alex nor Mike had any idea if he was
being serious or sarcastic. They responded in unison: “Cool.”

Interlude Three

Alex (5)

Alex Reine’s family, which consisted of
father Edward, mother Cynthia, and older sister Samantha, moved a
lot when he was young. Edward was a project manager for a
consulting firm focused on complex computer programming. The
company’s primary client was the military. Most projects lasted
roughly two years. Then it was time to pack up and go. The family
owned a home in Florida, but Alex only lived in it for the first
year of his life. Normally, they resided in rented houses.