The Grand Tour (9 page)

He would have continued in this vein indefinitely, had someone not put a hand on his shoulder. Vance stood there, dressed in the same clothes he'd worn that day. He sat next to Richard and said, “She was a little young for you.”

“And married.”

Richard hung up the phone. They sat there for a little while longer, under the epileptic flicker of a Rolling Rock sign, until Vance finally put his arm on Richard's arm and led him up to bed.

The next day, the sky overhead was gray and mottled, a mirror image of the road underneath them. Vance had his elbow out the window, despite the chilliness of the air, and tapped his hand on the side of the car along with a rap song on the radio. Richard wasn't offended by the vulgarity or the constant stream of obscenities or the jittery curlicues of the musical arrangements, but the insistent emotional sameness of it was oppressive. No joy, no despair, no love or humor, just pissed-off boasting, dick jokes, school-yard taunts. On this, as with most things, of course, he knew his opinion was wholly unqualified; yet again, as with most things, he didn't let that stop him from airing it. “You really like this shit?”

“Jay-Z? I don't know, I guess so.”

Playing up the ignorant old-timer angle—which, being old and ignorant, was not hard to do—he said, “My jewels, my money, my bitches, my boats.”

“My boats?”

“Yachts?”

“It's not all that stuff. You should keep yourself open to new things.”

“That's where you're wrong. There's too much stuff in the world, too much crap. You should try to keep yourself closed off to as much of it as possible.” Richard reclined fatly in his seat, irritated by the kid's determined innocence and by the length of the pauses he took before he spoke and by his long, mournful face, its look of defeated hope. He said, “Besides, you're one to talk. When was the last time you did something new?”

“I'm doing something new right now.”

“What, driving me around?”

“Sure.”

“I mean something meaningful. Falling in love. Eating fifty hard-boiled eggs.”

In obvious reprisal, Vance changed the channel, cranking the volume on some horrible classic rock station playing a horrible classic rock song. Over a burbling sea of organs and mandolins, the lead singer wailed lyrics that seemed to be, horribly, about chess, admonishing the listener not to surround themselves with themselves. Richard yelled, “So, how long are you going to chauffeur me around, anyway?”

“That's up to you.”

“You ever been to San Francisco?”

“I've never been anywhere.”

“Why don't we say San Francisco. I'll get a rental there.”

“That's only tomorrow. I had kind of hoped—”

“I know, it's really too bad. But let's say San Francisco.”

They stopped for lunch at McDonald's, and, waiting in the drive-thru, Vance suggested they take a small highway west and get on the 101. He'd heard the 101 was incredible, he wanted to drive down the coast. It was a travel day, and lacking a good reason to say no, though that was his inclination, Richard grunted an assent into his leathery McDouble with cheese. All along the way, beefy clouds barreled overhead in what looked like time-lapse photography, but when they reached the ridgy shoreline where the highway met the 101, a giant wall of fog hung over the churning water, like some kind of cloud factory that cranked out the cumuli traveling inland.

The craggy splendor of the drive reminded Richard that he had once, decades earlier, taken the PCH from Carmel to Los Angeles. He remembered it being much the same as this: dramatic cliffs, crashing surf, salt-sprayed air, winding roads, old people driving RVs at eight miles an hour. The noncoastal sections of the drive were remote, and the little towns they passed—with their bait shops and flounder shacks and tie-dyed-kite stores and whimsical woodworking concerns—were already abandoned for the off-season. The only person they saw in downtown Waldport was a defiant seagull standing in the middle of the narrow road. When Vance got out of the car, it reluctantly walked away, like a dignified town elder with his hands clasped behind his back. Maybe it was the mayor, thought Richard.

It had been the summer of 1977 when they'd taken the PCH. A stranger had snapped a photo of Eileen (buckskin moccasins, baseball jersey, pigtails) and him (triangular bellbottoms, vest, shag helmet) smiling next to his old VW on an overlook. This photo had hung totemically by their front door in no fewer than five different apartments and houses they'd occupied. He had no real feeling about the image captured in the picture, but he had a vivid sense memory of the picture as the last thing he saw before exiting their home. Over the years, its continued presence had made him variously happy, sad, and finally irritated by Eileen's insistence on reminding him of better times. Like an addict—a love junkie—she was always trying to reclaim the high of those early days.

Richard and Vance passed from Oregon into California on a homely little stretch of road, the border parallel with a red-barned gift shop. A new blue-and-yellow sign on the right welcomed them to California, and an old white-and-green one on the left effused
OREGON THANKS YOU, COME BACK SOON!
No, Richard thought, that was unlikely—he guessed that Oregon had seen the last of him. They drove on, regaining the coast just as the sun was dropping quickly into the sea. In the vicinity of Eureka, they began stopping at hotels, but each one was booked up solid—an infuriating development after having seen no more than a dozen people in nine hours of driving. It turned out every room in the area had been reserved months in advance for something called the Blackberry Arts Festival.

“You want to camp out?” said Vance as they drove away from the fourth place they'd tried.

“No.”

“I keep some gear in back. It could be pretty nice.”

“No.”

The next motel they encountered, ten miles south of town, was a dreary cluster of run-down stand-alone huts called Famous Ray's. Richard assumed the name was in honor of a locally famous murderer who had done his best work on the premises. At the front desk sat an old man bent to the newspaper, pencil in hand, a ragged Jumble with many letters tentatively written in and scratched out pinioned before him on the peeling linoleum.

“Name?”

“We need a room.”

“No reservation?”

“No.”

“You kidding?” the man scoffed, returning to his work. “It's the Blackberry Arts Festival.”

Ten minutes later, they cut off from the 101 and drove alongside the bay, curving around on a spit of land that looked out onto the Pacific and offered spectacular views of a nearby power plant. It was unlit and seemed abandoned, its white-blue domes glowing ghostly in the bright moonlight. Vance stopped the car along the shoulder and retrieved a brightly colored nylon tent from the trunk. Richard got out of the car and followed the kid down a gentle tree-lined slope to a scrubby area twenty or so feet from the water. He gingerly lowered himself onto a large rock just on the dry side of the lapping water and turned toward the land. He liked the sensation of having his back to the ocean, ignoring the majesty, not being humbled.

Vance squatted to pound in the tent pegs with a rubber hammer. Richard said, “This is the kind of place where people get murdered, you know.”

“It's beautiful here.”

“I'm not saying it's not beautiful. It's just a good murderin' spot. No decent murderer could resist killing someone here.”

Vance got the tent pitched and then set himself to building a fire, scurrying around and gathering little sticks and dry leaves. In spite of himself, Richard admired the kid's outdoors facility. Although he'd grown up in East Tennessee, spending much of his life near mountains and otherwise living close to or in the boondocks, he'd never been much for camping or nature. What had he been much for? he wondered sometimes. Drinking, being hungover, chasing skirt, getting in stupid fistfights, arguing with girlfriends and wives, trying to make amends, regretting things, all the while trying to put something meaningful on paper, and usually failing.

After eating rancid Vienna sausages and granola bars procured earlier at a mostly cleaned-out convenience mart, Richard and Vance sat around the quietly crackling fire. Richard pulled out the half-empty pint of Old Grand-Dad that he'd bought from an adjoining liquor store while Vance was using the convenience mart bathroom and couldn't stop him. Vance waved away the proffered bottle.

“Come on, have a drink,” said Richard.

“I told you, I don't drink.”

“If you can't have a nip of whiskey sitting in front of a fire by the ocean, I don't know what.”

“Fine.” Vance pressed the bottle to his pursed lips, tipped his head back, and made an unconvincing show of swallowing whiskey that probably never entered his mouth. “That's awful.”

“Everything good for you tastes bad.”

The water was insistent behind him, like a small child tapping on his back, and he twisted to see what it wanted. Far away, the lights of a fishing boat flashed. Crabbing, most likely, out for forty-eight hours at a time. That should have been his life: out there on all that black water, a world without end—no one to rub up against, hurt, or be hurt by. One wrong move, a towering wave or unsecured mainsail, and you'd be drifting to the ocean floor, completely erased from the world's record. It sounded fine to him, the proper order of things. He'd lived his life far too messily, and even as he'd moved into the desert, thinking it would burn everything down to its simplest essence, it hadn't worked—here he was, in the world again. He needed to push off shore in a leaky rowboat and never look back.

Vance sat cross-legged and was writing in a notebook he'd pulled from his bag. He kept glancing over at Richard as he wrote. Finally Richard said, “You drawing a picture of me or something?”

Vance looked down. “No.”

“What then?”

“Just recording the moment.”

“You go around taking notes all the time?”

“Don't you? How do you remember things for later?”

The fire danced in front of him, and he was thirteen again, hunting with his father for the first and last time. Scared shitless of killing a deer, and—equally—disappointing his newly returned father. Holding the .22 in his arms like a snake that might bite him—even then he'd had no taste for firearms or shooting things. He liked reading about people shooting things, but that was as far as it went. Silence later around the fire, after a fruitless hunt that had culminated in a clear kill shot he'd refused to take. The deer had bounded away in a graceful, ungainly seesaw. His taciturn father drank something from a bottle like the one he held now, a brown sloshing liquid, probably whiskey, though he didn't know for sure. Unlike him, the old man hadn't seen fit to share—he hadn't earned a drink. Men got a drink. “I have this thing called a memory,” he said. “Other than that, mostly I make shit up.”

Vance shrugged and continued writing, and Richard scooted closer to the fire. He lay back in the rocky dirt and looked up at the pin-pricked sky. The sky was better than the sea, he thought, infinitely more vast, yet humble—not crashing and clamoring for constant attention. The sky was the real God, fit for worship; the sea was a small god, jealous and mean. He shouldn't have been a sailor—he should have been an astronomer, stationed in Greenland. His mind wandered to the Dutch one, or was he Danish, with the golden nose. What was his name? One of those things that he'd heard as a child and had stuck with him. He feared losing information like this to the ravages of time and alcohol, and so he closed his eyes as he strained to remember. The name was there and then not there in the same instant, an afterimage of itself. He couldn't get it by brute force and began going through the initial letters. Would one light up as he scrolled through?
T
seemed right; it had a soft glow. As he lay there his mind wandered further, an image of the table of Henry VIII, who died from overeating. Was that true? Or poisoned by his own urine, that was someone. Burst stomach either way. Those were the days—maggots festering in the caked-on makeup of courtesans, the writhing painted faces of the ladies of the court. Rampant venereal disease. He'd had VD when the clap was still called the clap. Three horse pills cured it. The good old days—going around with a gold nose on.

When he opened his eyes again, Vance was inside the tent, and the campfire had died down to embers. The kid had covered him with a blanket before going to sleep. He sat up drinking the last of his whiskey and shivering in the wind. Going back to sleep seemed unlikely, given the cold and the strangeness of the surroundings. He watched the dark water, half expecting some terrible, slavering monster to rise out of it.

In the sparse woods to the right of their little campground, something moved. The sound of the ocean did not quite mask the crackling of branches. Before he had a chance to get properly terrified or wake Vance up to see what it was, something ambled out of the woods into the moonlight. In his misty, smoked-glass vision, he could only tell that it had four legs, but that was enough to reassure him they weren't about to be murdered. Likely a deer, of course. Could he shoot it now? he wondered, seeing the doe from his youth—bob-tailed, with walnut spots on the white ruff of her chest—chewing a leaf with a look of nervous distraction. Probably not. He wasn't that different now than he'd been then; so much time and energy spent going nowhere. From inside the tent Vance snored innocently, a soft glottal sigh. Whatever it was out there moved away, grew fainter and fainter, at some point melting back into the smudged darkness of the trees. It had sensed his presence and moved away—embarrassed and unsettled. You are the monster, he thought. It's you.

Tycho Brahe.

T
hey woke with the break of day, as well as an infestation of some kind of sand flea. Swatting themselves like penitent Sufi mystics, they unpitched the tent and clambered back up to the road. Climbing into the car, Richard looked down at his arms, swollen with little red bites. “This is why I never do anything,” he said. “Doing something is always a mistake.”

Vance scratched his long neck, leaving red trails from ear to collarbone. He U-turned and pointed them south in the gray light, the rising sun still obscured by the eastern forest's edge. Richard burrowed into the crook of seat and door and was just feeling the first welcome tendrils of reclaimed sleep when the car coasted onto the shoulder and stopped. Smoke billowed from the hood in thick, healthy plumes. “Shit,” the kid said.

“What happened?”

“Something's wrong.”

“Oh really? It's not supposed to be doing that?”

Vance got out and opened the hood, releasing a gust of black smoke directly into his face that bent him double in hacking convulsions. Richard waved at a passing car, which accelerated. But after three more tries, someone with a sufficient shred of conscience, or else nowhere important to be, pulled over. A very fat man—fatter than Richard, an increasingly rare and gratifying occurrence—got out and stood by his car. “You fellas need a lift?”

“Thanks,” said Richard. Vance was still bent over the car, as though he might be able to fix what was wrong by sheer force of concentration. “Come on, Vance.”

The man dropped them off at a service station a few miles down the road, in a town named Eureka, an unfortunate name for a place that no one would ever be happily surprised to find. It was a gray, dismal village, like a patch of Ohio rustbelt transplanted to the Pacific coast. A surly guy in coveralls gave them the once-over, as though he suspected they were somehow up to no good, then ferried Vance away in his tow truck. Richard waited in a plastic chair in the lobby, soaking in the atmosphere—wood paneling, linoleum, grease, a Samantha Fox calendar on the wall from 1988, two mechanics in terse conversation aggressively ignoring him. Why did all auto mechanics hate non–auto mechanics, he wondered. Hadn't they been nonmechanics first?

The truck reappeared, Explorer in tow. Coveralls told them it was something to do with oil pressure, or maybe something else, and that he could go ahead and fix it, but it wouldn't be cheap.

“What a surprise,” Richard said.

“Well, you want me to or not,” said Coveralls.

“I don't have much money,” offered Vance.

“What a surprise,” Richard said. “Yeah, go ahead. We'll take in the sights.”

At eight in the morning, Eureka seemed to be mostly inoperative, as though the entire town was sleeping off a miserable hangover, which it probably was. They walked down to a rusting industrial harbor overrun by seagulls. The birds stood together on concrete stanchions out in the water, fluttering their wings in what seemed a lot like anticipatory glee. A small boat called the
Big Sir
bobbed in the unhealthy, greenish tide, its bow very close to the waterline. They turned around.

On the walk back through the middle of town, things improved somewhat. A quaint little strip with candy-colored storefronts featured a row of hopeful businesses that it was hard to imagine succeeding here: a first-edition bookseller, a gourmet wine store. And a small café, just turning its sign to
OPEN
. They entered, surprising a young waitress who seated them by the window. After waiting for her to stammer out the specials, Richard ordered a black coffee and eggs and bacon and also sausage, and Vance ordered the quiche of the day.

“Real men don't eat quiche,” said Richard.

“Sure they do,” said the waitress, taking their menus with a fetchingly inadvertent smile that revealed braces. She returned, still smiling, with their drinks, reentered the kitchen, and Richard said, “She likes you.”

“Not this again.”

“You should ask her out.”

“We're leaving town in an hour.”

“Ask her if she wants to come with us. She'd probably jump at any opportunity to get out of this dump. I'll ask her for you.”

“Don't,” said Vance, looking genuinely frightened.

“I'm just kidding, loosen up.”

“Why do you care?”

“I don't know.” He took a drink of his coffee and thought about it. “I guess it's just you'd be surprised how fast it goes. A pretty girl smiling at you happens like twelve times in your life.”

Vance shook his head and addressed himself to his phone. In a few minutes, the waitress returned with food, and Richard appended a Bloody Mary to his order. Mouth full of quiche, Vance said, “It's nine in the morning.”

Richard sighed. “Not this again. And nine in the morning is exactly when you're supposed to drink Bloody Marys.”

After breakfast and further desultory rambling, they were summoned back to the garage. The comical total was $678.85 for a new oil filter, replacement t-rings, and the towing. Richard retrieved his billfold, un-Velcroed it, and pulled out a personal check. The guy at the register waited until he'd filled it out, then chortled. “No checks.”

“That's all I have.”

The guy looked backward at one of the mechanics and gestured toward the door, saying, “There's an ATM somewhere down the road, down there.”

“I don't want to go somewhere down the road, down there. I'm right here. And I'm pretty sure you're overcharging us by about three hundred dollars, okay? Just take the damn thing.” The guy seemed like he was trying to decide between calling the cops, tearing up the check, and vaulting over the counter to beat in Richard's face. “Listen,” Richard went on, “it'll cash. I'm famous, look me up.”

The guy took the check and grudgingly made his way to an ancient desktop computer in the corner, into which he laboriously pecked Richard's name with one hand while holding the check three inches from his face. He eventually nodded, and they were on their way. In the car, Vance said, “Thanks. I'll pay you back.”

“No, you won't,” Richard said, again burrowing into the door. “It really doesn't matter.”

They made San Francisco in the early afternoon. It spread out in front of them, reclined and made up in bright colors like a beautiful but slovenly whore. Vance gaped at it with awe as they crossed the Golden Gate. “Amazing.”

“Just wait until you see a hippie taking a shit in the street.”

“How long did you live here?”

“Not long. I got here summer of 1971. I had met this guy in Vietnam who was from California and talked nonstop about how great it was here. I thought the second I got across the Bay Bridge, I'd be getting a mescaline-flavored tongue bath from some chick named Rainbow. Talk about disappointing. I spent three months living over a Chinese place in the Tenderloin, walked around smelling like egg foo yong and not getting laid. Closest I came was at a bar on Valencia where I got beaten up and rolled by a drag queen. There's a reason people talk about the summer of 'sixty-seven and not the summer of 'seventy-one. I missed the party.”

“That bothered you?”

“Hell yes, it bothered me. I grew up outside of Knoxville on a turd ranch. Maryville, Tennessee.”

“I read the book.”

“Yeah. In 1967, I was sixteen. Spent my nights drinking RC Cola at the Kiwanis Club, where they had square-dancing, just on the off chance of kissing this bucktoothed redhead who I'd heard was loose.”

“That sounds nice, actually.”

“It wasn't the Summer of Love, I'll tell you that much. And by the time I got here, it was all junkies and burnouts. I got on with a construction crew in Oakland as soon as I could, did bids all the way down the Central Valley.”

Still, Richard couldn't help but feel a wistful pleasure as they drove through the Presidio, as postcardish in real life as it was in his memory—emerald grass and white-bone villas with red-tiled Spanish roofs. He and Eileen had picnicked there twice, on day trips to the city, during the early time in their relationship when he could be convinced or bothered to do things like go on picnics. He thought he could see the exact spot from the car, an old tree—birch? maple?—which stood alone in the middle of a shadowed field. Of course, he knew he was probably imagining it, remembering what he wanted to remember.

They arrived at the Providence, a chichi place in the financial district near the Transamerica Building. Outside, the hotel was a ten-story sheath of dark glass. Inside, it felt as though it had been built five minutes before they arrived, and they were the first people to stay in it. It was a decided improvement on the Comfort Suites and Quality Inn, and Richard made a mental note to thank Stan the next time they talked. The only arena in which it lagged was the absence of an Andes mint on his pillow.

“It really is the little things,” he said.

“What,” called Vance over the sound of his own pee in the bathroom.

“Nothing.”

They lay on the plush beds, and Richard turned on the TV, clicking zestlessly from one channel to the next. Vance was reading a book that it took Richard a minute to recognize as his own.

“I thought you'd already read it,” he said.

“I did. I'm rereading it.”

“Why?”

“Why do you think? I like it.”

“Yeah, but why?”

Vance tented the book on his chest and said, “I don't know. I guess I feel like you used to be like me. You came from nowhere, you didn't know what you were doing. And you made it through, somehow.”

“Did I?”

“Yes.”

“Says the guy who rescued me from Snoopy's Lounge a night ago.”

The kid untented the book and resumed reading, and Richard closed his eyes. Perhaps, he thought, for once in his life, he could stay very still and behave like an adult. His phone buzzed in his pocket, and as it could only be two people, he pulled it out and took a blind guess.

“Stan.”

“It's Dana.”

“Hi, Dana.”

“You make it to San Francisco?”

“Yeah.”

“You remember the interview at five?”

“What interview?”

“Public radio.” She sighed. “
Cool Breeze,
with Mary Koestler.”

“Shit.” Dana gave him an address, which, turning on his side, Richard jotted down using the hotel stationery and pen on the nightstand. “I'll cab it down there in a little while.”

She perfunctorily scolded him about a couple of things and then signed off. Richard pulled himself up and sighingly thumbed his orthopedic old-man shoes back on. His feet, having become accustomed over the last year to near immobility, were outraged at his recent dynamic lifestyle leap to the realm of mere inactivity. He waved backward to Vance and slumped down the hall to the elevator.

The hotel lounge was a sleek affair, all brushed steel and dim track lights and monochromatic color fields behind the bar. The only other people there were a couple sitting in the corner with hands clasped on top of the table. A slinky, digital bossa nova emanated from invisible speakers. Richard hoisted himself onto a stool. On his own petard. By? The bartender approached, an unsmiling bald man who looked like an East German villain in a 1980s movie adaptation of a John le Carré novel. Richard ordered a martini, which was delicious and very cold, with a field of ice crystals on top.

“That's twenty-two,” said the bartender.

“Jesus Christ. Charge it to room three thirteen. How do people live in this city?”

“You got me. I'm up in Sausalito.”

The bartender went into the back, and Richard allowed himself to enjoy or to try to enjoy, for a little while, a feeling of achievement. Here he was, a not-entirely-unknown author on a book tour, put up in a snazzy hotel, drinking an exorbitantly expensive drink. The imagined generic version of this moment had been, for many years, the pulpy grist for his fantasy mill. Of course, in his fantasies, there had been a woman with him (beside him, below him, on top of him), but this was close enough. He wondered, then, why the moment felt so thin and false, why it seemed he could poke his finger through the papier-mâché wall of the hotel, push the entire edifice over like the flimsy scene dressing it was.

He drank his drink and ordered another—not as delicious as the first, though equally expensive. It wasn't only that he felt he didn't deserve success, though he didn't. It was the feeling that it had all happened too late—like his first time around in this city, he'd gotten there after the fact. The party wasn't just over; the party had been over so long that the food left on the table reeked, and the punch bowl crawled with flies, and the hostess was passed out in the corner, her face smeared rosy red with clownish lipstick. What remained were the dregs and remnants of the life he'd always wanted and never had. Getting it now felt, in a way, like cosmic punishment for his bitter, selfish resentment over not getting it the first time around. Of course, he'd already been punished with the loss of his wife and child, but then when has God ever passed up a heavy-handed joke? Maybe he should have just stopped writing altogether. Maybe he should have been a sailor.

“You don't choose your life, Rich, it chooses you.” He could still see his father saying that, the morning he'd received his draft notice. Standing there in his boxer shorts on a cold Saturday morning, running his finger over the embossed eagle at the top of the paper. He'd failed out of college and allowed it to happen, thinking it might please the old man, too chickenshit to just enlist. He wasn't sure if his father was right about your life choosing you, but the first part had been spot-on—his entire life had been reaction, fleeting spasms of need, desire, and shame.

Vance slouched through the lobby, hands in pockets, looking fearful of being thrown out for trespassing. He noticed Richard and stopped beside the bar. “I thought you were going to that interview.”