Gallup, NM to Kingman, AZ
I don’t identify myself as an Eagles fan but being in this setting it’s hard not to appreciate what they managed to conjure up in the vapid 1970s AOR scene. Conceptual southern smooth rock. Wow.
After seeing the drunken populace in the street last night and reflecting on the strict moralizing about drugs and alcohol in Amarillo, and getting a taste for just how severe a meth problem they have in this area, I got to thinking about drinking and drugs and the rest. I’m not too interested in the morality of inebriation but the social facilitation a little drinking provides and the effects of overindulgence.
I got my drink on early. Around 12 I started drinking and getting stoned along with most of my angry-to-be-alive hair metal peer group. These guys were the bad influence types where each kid would call their parents claiming to stay at the other’s house while we all went over to a third friend’s house (or garage or cabin, wherever was convenient). Ironically these guys were also the good influence types who kept me engaged in sports, art, and community activities. We were all altar boys which meant we tapped the priest’s chalice wine at the end of service. Thankfully none of us were subject to inappropriate sexual conduct. All that sex was somehow strangely appropriate…
The weekend routine of getting drunk and playing quarters and cashing kegs was stigma free. Instead drinking was more a contest than a social activity. Aye, there’s the rub—such intoxication would seem an age-appropriate socialization activity, an urban rite of passage where consumption-as-race was meant to show other maturing men just how manly a man I myself was maturing into. My taste for peppermint schnapps and Jack Daniels combined with my unfortunate choice of rock-and-role models got me to down a half bottle of Jack. I’m convinced that theatrics being what they are Nikki Sixx swigged iced tea, so good for Nikki but not for James…during the next eight hours I managed to vomit myself empty. Left exhausted with nothing left to give I felt awful. Many (I suspect most, though I haven’t polled them) kids and more adults have been through this at least once. At some point in my teens I finally swear off alcohol for life.
I made it to 21 and found myself in a dorm with quite a few liberal coeds. The temptation to make friends by supplying liquor was offset by my sense of responsibility as the math tutor so I never did and really barely touched a drop until I went to Madison where I acquired the required taste for beer. Cheap beer. And lots of it. The bar and restaurant liquor premium didn’t make sense to me until I started traveling for work and it became clear that you’re not buying the bottle of beer so much as renting the stool for the hour (or a couch in Vegas—$400 for bottle service on $25 worth of vodka is about the real estate). A beer with coworkers after a grueling day bears enormous social value; eight beers with coworkers escalating into a race to see who can catch the hotel’s domesticated ducks bear enormous social cost.
Outside of work I had even less motive to get smashed because Mieko had a low alcohol tolerance and would “go lobster,” turning beat red on half a glass of wine. That, I found, didn’t run in the family. While out drinking with her sister Miki we progressed from rice wine to Jaeger shots and I kept good pace, at one point downing a double in one big gulp. With this Miki’s eyes almost spring out of her head as she shouted “su-GOI!” a phrase when interpreted using my Japanese-to-English-Including-Intonation-And-Connotation Dictionary translates as, “It shocks my delicate Japanese sense of propriety to see this horse-deer put so much fire water into his enormous barbarian esophagus and continue to breathe!” I hold my liquor well and usually don’t drink to forget (usually), rarely black out, and don’t drink to go to sleep. My friend Tyson has blackout stories where he feared his Mr. Hyde had surfaced in is drunken stupor. I understand the fear of being out of touch with your self and feeling out of control. But I’m not sure we all have Mr. Hydes to conceal. For what it’s worth I’m a stupid and amorous drunkard but I’m a stupid and amorous soberian, I just get sleepier as I drink.
My love of sport drinking culminated in being named my graduate school’s co-captain of the most important club ever, the Thursday Night Drinking Club (TNDC), which was as best as I can tell the only intramural team in the university with a winning record. It was strangely rewarding to organize weekly bar hopping outings and participate-observe at a metered pace rather than lose all consciousness and accountability. Educators often talk about the “hidden curriculum,” some social or experiential aspect of school life that does not get explicitly instructed. My take on the unlimited supply of alcohol at graduate school is that it was part of the hidden curriculum and served to teach an adult socializing lesson experientially: if you’re going to mingle with clients and your boss you better learn for yourself when to say when because your mommy won’t be there to take away your twelfth bottle of Bud. Same with TNDC events: if you left with a stranger and did a “walk of shame” home…well, better to do it now and put that behind you than do it when your job is on the line.
A little liquor to grease the social skids. A little peyote to see what secrets the mind keeps locked away. A little coke to pull an overnight drive from New Mexico to California. Or a lot of these. Is it that the drugs and the alcohol are themselves good or bad, or that drugs just are? Is it that our use of them is good or bad? What might we mean by the good use of drugs? Healthy? Self-revealing? The press like to call ecstasy the empathy drug. Sometimes I think it’d be neat if we could be empathetic without the need for drugs. Other times I think they should ecstasize the water like they fluoridate it.
Judging from some of the teeth in these parts I’m not so sure fluoridation technology has made it this far south. Ouch, there I go judging again…
My reformed Southern Baptist pals informed me that us (lapsed) Catholics got it all mixed up. According to them Jesus drank unfermented wine at the last supper and communion should not involve alcohol. I’d have thought even the New Testament writers would have been able to tell wine from grape juice but who am I to comment on the culinary sophistication of impoverished fishermen from two millennia ago. At any rate, smoking and drinking (not to mention drugs) constitute sufficient grounds for immediate ostracism. It occurs to me that such extreme values would take root as a reaction in a community where excessive consumption is the norm. So if the area presents a transient labor force wasting time getting drunk instead of building roads, a native population without the “moderation gene,” and a legitimate concern about slippery slope indulgence…well, if I were a populist governor or budding capitalist I’d want my labor force sober and productive. I might push for dry counties, public nuisance ordinances, maybe a constitutional amendment. I might welcome and sponsor a religion that reinforces the temperance ethic, however extreme. I might play up the fear of being raped and killed by wild out-of-control alcoholics to promote my agenda.
Hell, it might take a hundred years for me to even consider treatment programs and destigmatized social consumption and creating economic hope for a destitute populace instead of strict intolerance. Maybe even more than a hundred years.
I get up around 7:30AM after spending the night at an Economy Suites motel in Grants. The sign out front reads “American Owned – Veterans” clarifying the non-East Indian operating arrangement one should expect to find inside. Ironically it's staffed entirely by Native Americans. Getting in the night before around 2:00AM I make small talk with the guy working the front desk. He tells me the place is old and being remodeled. There used to be a pool but they filled it with concrete (he mentions this because my external door doesn’t lead anywhere exciting and I see what he means as I get ready to leave). I mention that it seems kind of busy for being so late and he tells me they have a 24 hour kitchen. “Is the food any good?” I ask. “Not bad,” he answers, then lowering his voice, “A little pricey.” I get the feeling a ten dollar dinner would break the median family’s bank.
Getting on road around 8:30AM I truly start to feel the desert heat. Cruising through the Arizona morning this doesn’t feel like Kansas anymore and I noticed the feeling of leaving the Midwest behind somewhere in New Mexico. It’s hot. Even my 460 air conditioning (that’s four windows down and 60 miles per hour) isn’t helping much…instead it’s just ruffling the maps and papers and vehicular detritus. I’d turn on my freshly charged air conditioner but it puts a quite load on the engine and I’m more concerned about Cherry overheating than I am about my getting sweaty. She’s been running hot and the desert is no help, no ma’am, no help at all.After passing a number of roadside distractions (a knife outlet, a native blanket wholesaler, and dinosaurs dinosaurs everywhere) I finally get to Henry’s complement. Remember Rich Henry from the Rabbit Ranch? Well, “Here It Is!” The Jackrabbit Trading Post in Joseph City AZ. One of the early roadside destinations featuring the iconic black rabbit silhouette, for more than ten miles the Jackrabbit Trading Post advertises itself as a fill station and wayside oasis in the middle of the desert. Now I’m getting the picture. Imagine forty years ago the family going west on their California-or-bust vacation and being smack in the middle of the Arizona desert. There ain’t much for gas or refreshments in these parts, so a budding entrepreneur gets a brilliant idea: turn a convenience stop into a full-fledged destination! Hype it so that along the way the kids get excited, the adults get curious, and the exhausted traveler finds relief. Charge a fair price and collect a comfortable premium for a few souvenirs and you got yourself the classic American business plan. So I’m excited as much as anything by the anticipation of being at one of the best known spots on the Route and witnessing Rich Henry’s source of much inspiration.
At around 11:00AM I take exit 274 (“Here It Is!” really can’t be missed) and follow the underpass, pull off to get a few pulling-in shots of Cherry, and reach the parking lot. The place is closed (it is Sunday after all) and all is quiet. I quickly get the attention of a grey tabby cat that seems to be in charge of the outpost and she takes a shine to me (her crooning and rubbing suggest more that she’s in heat than that she’s a friendly kitty). A nearby penned horse finds us very curious and pushes the limit of the wire fence to check out the car (mustangs love Mustangs too). Now if I had been a more conventional tourist I think I’d have found myself worked up by finding the trading post closed. But remember I have no must-see agenda, no particular destination, and no deadline. If I had inflated the Jackrabbit Trading Post into some kind of urgent experience I’d be wickedly disappointed. Instead I’m pleased to get a load of some of the increasingly familiar images, billboards, and giant rabbit statues I’ve seen in so many guidebooks, photo journals, and travel maps for so long. It’s the journey, not the destination.For some of us, though, the Jackrabbit has a pragmatic purpose. As I’m ready to leave a minivan pulls in nearby and the two women inside are visibly and vocally frustrated at not being able to fill up. They roll down their window and ask if the station is open. I tell them it looks closed as I mock-welcome them to the trading post, an historic Route 66 landmark (I have this odd habit of welcoming people to places for no reason…like when someone tells me they aren’t native to Chicago I’ll welcome them and ask how long they’ve been there, and when they say 10 years while I’ve been for two my welcome wagon wheels sometimes come apart). They laugh and ask if I know where the closest gas station is.
“It’s a few miles up the expressway eastbound,” I recall.
“Just a few miles? Here do you think we’ll make it,” the driver asks, beckoning me to look at the car’s gas gauge.
I don’t see the indicator light, gas is low but there’s plenty to get the nine or ten miles they need to go. “Yeah, that should be enough. It’s really not far. Where are you headed?”
“New Mexico! My son’s in school there!” Her passenger chimes, “We’re coming from Phoenix!”
“Cool,” I remark, “I love Phoenix. Is this your first time at the trading post…” Just then the grey tabby cries and strolls toward us, interrupting the pleasantries.
“I think she runs the place.”
“Looks like it. Nice car by the way! Did you drive that all the way from Minnesota?” the driver asks, I assume reading my plates.
“Yeah, and I’m taking the old route to California. God willing, of course.”
They both laugh and I ask for the favor of taking a picture of me in front of the car. Asking for a picture has become an easy way to talk to strangers, and if they’re talkative they often gush (and if they’re older they tell me they had a ’65, or their brother drove a ’66 Charger…none of which is surprising since these cars were wildly popular in their day, just more scarce now). I get my shot and thank them, they wish me well and split fast enough for me to half think I should offer to follow them in case they run dry. I know they’ll make it but so belt-and-suspenders sometimes just helps people rest assured. But that might be a little much. There’s a fuzzy line between the kindness of strangers and the creepiness of stalkers. Sometimes I get that feeling at the odd gas pump or wayside rest, or from the Missouri hitchhiker.
It’s a short ride to Winslow, AZ. I exit the main road around noon and take it easy down 3rd street, the main westbound drag. I stop a few times for pictures, mostly of the decaying gas stations and convenience stores that once served cross-country commuters who now skip passed town on I-40 in favor of a Flying J or Loves travel plaza (I didn’t see which one had staked its claim on Winslow). About a mile from the exit I find what I’m looking for: at Kinsley and 2nd stands a life size statue of a fellah a bit shorter than me with his guitar and a plaque that misquotes, “Standing on the corner.” On the building behind him is a painted mural showing the rest of the setting to the Eagles song. I pull Cherry in front of the statue to get a few action shots, you know, over the guy’s shoulder, from the car window, and so on.
I’m there a minute or so and a biker couple strolls by. Funny how expectations are what they are: I thought the sun-reddened complexion was a give a way to some hard-core Alabama good ol’ boy. The guy remarks, “Nice ride,” and his girl adds, “Would you be so kind to let us have a picture?” in the most lilting leprechaun Irish accent I’ve ever heard. Of course I get a picture, I invite the guy to take the driver’s seat and get comfortable, then ask their favor for the same. We chat briefly and I find they’re part of the British Bikers road tour and they travel the whole route. Like Leif from Denmark. For some reason the American old west cowboy mythos resonates with a surprising number of Europeans—tourists at any rate. More about that in Seligman. Here I’m reminded to check my expectations at the door since Harley Davidson chaps do not a good ol’ boy make. Hell most hog riders are weekend warriors who do my taxes during business hours. You’d think I’d learn the lesson, but…
When I’m through with my little tourist photo op I take a U-turn to get moving back to the expressway. Midway through my turn the car dies. Fine, fair enough I figure, the carburetor doesn’t like the desert air and I need to pump it, it’ll be fine. As I turn it over it’s as if the electrical system is fried…the lights go out, the radio cuts out, and it stays that way until I pop the hood and jiggle the battery wire. Try again and same story. And again. No starter cranking, no mechanical signs of life, just a dead short somewhere. Well now I’m attracting the attention of the British Bikers’ friends and others coming and going on Winslow’s most famous corner. Specifically I attract the attention of the local sheriff. I’m blocking the intersection and he’s been parked literally just across the street. So he turns on his cherries and pulls his squad car alongside. Immediately this picture of me as a no-good drifter and the sheriff as Buford T. Justice, a la Rambo, springs into my head. Great, I’m going to have a confrontation with the law in Nowhere, AZ.The sheriff strolls out of the car and stocks the line, “What seems to be the trouble?” before radioing in my license plate. (My tabs are current right?!? Yes. I don’t have speeding tickets right?!? Not for Cherry at any rate.) I explain that I think the starter solenoid is shot and he strolls around to the front of the car to get a peek under the hood. At this point I’m noticing the guy can’t be older than me, maybe 30s, and has much less a rugged attitude than the uniform conveys.
“You relocate the battery to the back?” he asks noting the empty battery tray.
“Yeah, in the trunk.”
“Better for balance. These cars are weighted wrong comin’ out the factory,” he notes. “Here, let’s try this.”
Next thing I know he brings a charger from the squad car to jump the car. “You have AAA in case this doesn’t work?” he asks, more genuinely concerned about my car’s (and my) well being than about clearing the intersection. I say I do and he hooks the charger up bypassing the relocation wires. “Try it now,” he tells me and the car fires off without a hitch. I thank him and move the car to the curb. I go back to thank him and introduce myself. Turns out Charlie has a 1970 El Camino and a 1975 Ford pickup, so he knows a thing or three about cars. When he saw the starter solenoid was clicking when I turned it over he figured the battery relocation must have been shorting. He told me the best thing to do would be to move the battery back from the trunk and check the circuit with a ohmmeter. “Or you could call triple-A. But moving the battery is the cheapest and easiest.” He notes. “Cheapest and easiest sounds like best to me.” I take his advice and in three minutes the car is powered of her own device.
Now what gets me about all of this is…remember the broken window regulator? I fixed that before. The speedometer cable? I fixed that before. The battery relocation…that was my wiring handiwork. I realized my ground cable must be poorly connected and for most city commuting it doesn’t matter. But this long-haul trip put just enough shimmy and shake into the body that the ground wire became touch-and-go. What’s the word for when you have the opposite of the Midas touch on mechanical things…oh yeah, mindnumbingly fucking frust-fuck-strating.
Fuck. The only other major mod I made was to replace the points in the distributor cap with an electric firing system. Watch that blow up and leave me stranded dead smack middle of the desert.
Happy to be back on the road I reached Flagstaff at around 3:00PM and duck into the first AutoZone I find. Explaining the problem to the guy at the counter he raises an eyebrow about my sloppy ground wiring like I’m a teen Asian hotrodder. Fuck you, I leave off, Just fucking tell me “Where are the battery wires?” He shows me and I get my $20 worth of wires and coolant and basic provisions. AutoZone has become like a second home, I work in the parking lot and clean up in their bathroom, and with their loyalty card each time I spend $20 in one purchase I get points for…you know, I’m not sure what the points are for. But I get points. I must like points. In ten minutes I have the battery back in the trunk and the faulty ground is repaired. Reminds me of any complex system—a piece of software, a computer, a car, a workflow process, the law—where one little glitch can bring the thing to a halt. Designers call “robustness” the quality of continuing to function even when a piece breaks. Think about your body. You have extra parts (kidneys, lungs, glands, etc.) that can do a pretty good job making up for the failure of one, should it ever come to that. And your eyes. It’s cool to have binocular vision, useful to perceive depth and for viewing old-timey stereoscope slides, but you lose one eye and the other sorts out most of that information for you. Robust. Redundant. Belt and suspenders. That’s not such a bad design.
By contrast my ground problem was a “single point of failure,” where an intermittent short brought the whole car to a screeching halt (in this case it’s more simply a non-starter). You only have one brain and one heart and one external genitals (though curiously two reproductive glands), presumably because they’re so important that to lose any one would simply not do. Though I often pray for a backup brain to correct for frequent and severe failure. Designers prefer redundancy but it carries a cost: more energy, more weight, more material, because now you have two factors (a primary and a backup) handling one function. This is what I had in mind with my brakes, the jam jar design is a single point of failure whereas the split master cylinder is robust. A problem in the brake lines doesn't necessarily mean you die.
With clouds in the air and a brief sprinkle while fixing the car I figured this was as good a place as any to get a late lunch, so I packed up my tools (I carry a complete set while driving, usually tucked neatly under the trunk liner but on this trip they’ve been out way too much) and followed the Historic Route markers until I came on some giant motel signs protruding from the downtown blocks. Finding the internet cafes all closed (at 4:00PM in Flagstaff on a Sunday I’m not expecting it to be bustling) I located a nice little ski-themed Fridays clone and asked the waitress to keep my coffee cup full I had the presence of mind to bring my map and guidebook with me so I could plan the rest of my day. How far to California, how far to L.A.? One day or two? I checked the distance on the route and looked for must-see stops. I find myself moving faster and stopping less. I’m not sure that it’s because the novelty has worn off on me as much as the novelty has worn off on the route. I get the feeling that the vast stretches through New Mexico and Arizona featured more Spartan attractions due simple to the vast distance and thin population in the desert. Not sure that I’m right but that’s how it’s starting to feel on the long desert stretches.As the bartender offered up buck kamikaze shots (we’d been talking a bit and she knew I was on the road so from a distance she gave me a thumbs up/down to opt out…I was in) I struck up a conversation with her and the waitress about Flagstaff attractions and the ghost town I’d heard was nearby. Just by asking I seemed to have rung a bell in everyone’s collective unconscious. You probably have friends who’ve lived their whole lives in New York and have never been to the Statue of Liberty, or San Franciscans who’ve never been to Alcatraz, because they reason it’s available any time and it’s not going anywhere so what’s the hurry? I’ll get around to it. For this little group the ghost towns were a little like that. My waitress called over a few of the other staff to work out directions.
“I’ve never been but I’ve always wanted to go,” she tells me. “Is Jerome south on seventeen? I bet it’s by Sedona!” Before long we had a general plan and a recommendation.
“You know the Haunted Hamburger is where everyone goes, but go to the Asylum. My friend’s family owns it. It’s a few more dollars but so worth it.”
By this point there is a pretty heavy downpour outside and the bartender comments that it always rains whenever Journey gets into the CD jukebox rotation. I’m suddenly aware that “Don’t Stop Believing” has colored my whole take on cruising down to Jerome for the rest of the day and a patron at the next table informs me it’s better to get going before noon, “…if you wanna actually see anything.” I turn to the back of my travel guide and add the Jerome ghost towns to the list of things to catch on the way back, along with the Floating Mesa, the Arizona dinosaurs, the Albuquerque Old Town. Time and weather and interest permitting of course.
As the Journey CD ends so does the rain and I thank the waitress for her tip. Relying on the knowledge of locals and their good nature to keep me on track gives this trip a feeling of adventure that would have been a bust if I set out to execute some kind of plan. Nothing wrong with blueprints and maps and schedules, just that they work better for some people and some contexts than others. These ideas of “one right way,” “one size fits all,” “one best practice” in doing just about anything evaporates with the recognition that I don’t need to minimize or maximize some key performance indicator. I’m in it for the experience, and in that sense I can do nothing wrong. You know what I mean? There’s no wrong way to “just experience” this trip. Or for that matter, life. We’re each granted on brief taste of the pleasure of being human—do with it what you will.
I make good time out of Flagstaff to Seligman, the origin of Route 66 and now a strip of very eye catching tourist chachkis and eateries. Of course the profound nostalgic quality of the old road is hard to miss; at the same time it’s evolved to suit the needs of the modern traveler. Conservation gives way to combination of old with new. Seligman caters to European tourists and I notice that quite a number of the restaurants advertise their German fare…in German, no less. Find a market and meet the need. That’s what started the Mother Road, that’s what grew it, that’s what killed it, that’s what keeps towns like Seligman alive. The west end of town is stocked with Chevron and Phillips gas stations alongside souvenir stores, and the general store (seriously, who has a general store?!?) sells Mustang gas…and I pay the exorbitant price just for the poetic satisfaction of putting Mustang gas in the Mustang. I debate whether to take I-40 or the scenic route and ask the cashier whether it’s worth the extra drive. She defers but tells me the guy outside is a truck driver and he’d be good to give directions. I introduce myself and ask him his advice, and Pat (his name is Pat) tells me that the drive to Kingman is scenic, past that it’s worthwhile to stop in Oatman to see the wild donkeys. Asking what I’m all about in that old car, I explain that Cherry and I are cruising the route. “Oh, yeah, in that case you really want to take Arizona 66. Don’t do the expressway. It’ll be worth the drive.”I take Pat’s advice. For an hour I drive the two-lane original alignment away from Seligman. I notice there’s an awful lot of space. High plains and plateaus in all directions. It’s vast and wide open. I’m struck by how much open, unused, unutilized land there is. The road is a tool to move bodies in machines, mostly westward, as quickly as possible. Makes me wonder just what taming the roadside frontier would have been like. I imagine early-century Americas and the sheer opportunity all this nothingness provided. Someone in Podunk, MO or Passedby, AZ had a family chicken recipe, hung a shingle and started to serve weary travelers. That little place becomes the café with the world’s ugliest pie crust or the world’s hottest chili or the world’s tallest neon cactus. Then someone knows people who know people and can come by gas cheaply so they add a few pumps out front, and as travelers routinely ask where the closest motel is they scrape a few dollars of hard-earned savings to start their own little ten room with a sign you can see for a mile and a bargain on rooms: dark and clean and quiet. What more could you want? And they fall victim to the road’s success. All this traffic, all this bustle, all this weekend congestion…maybe we better build a bigger better road. The interstate hurries the already-hurried travelers around the little towns, a rush to the destination with no reason to stop and rest a while.
Around 8:00PM I suddenly notice the sun has set and I’m overcome with a feeling of ecstasy, independence, and freedom combined with total exhaustion. Speed, solitude, sonoran desert. I’ve drunken two and a half gallons of water today yet my throat is dry. The moon follows me and I’m compelled to pull over at the next road stencil and get a picture in a vain effort to capture the fleetingness of the moment. There’s dimming light on the plain and jagged mountain shadows stand long. It’s shockingly beautiful and vast and will last so much longer than me. Black wispy clouds form tangled lace nests resting on a velvet-red cushion of sky, the last bit of sun wishing the world a good night through the thick atmosphere. The composition of the fading horizon suggests a woman in repose, mountains forming curves, with some more gentle and some more aroused than others before the last flickers of light disappear.Right as I’ve adjusted to the solitude of darkness driving and am on the edge of succumbing to road hypnosis the lights on the horizon tell me Kingman isn’t far away. The sodium-arc lights mix with the reds and blues and yellows to define a sense of civilization in the valley and soon the horizon is speckled with long bands of same shade dots, the grid of the city almost perceptible. For a moment I’m unnerved to find myself back in traffic after driving in the seclusion of the inky black night; the feeling soon yields to the comfort of being in the company of other California-bound travelers. It’s not long before I find the familiar Flying J and fill up for two and a half bucks which at this point seems a steal. I ask the cashier what’s between here and Barstow because I’m thinking about stopping for the evening before too long.
“Shug’,” she coys, “ain’t much here much less between here and Barstow. If I was you I’d get a room and call it a night.”
I take her advice, and upon walking back to the car get a shout from a straggling smoker.
“That’s a ’66 289 V8,” he confidently asserts rather than asks. “It stock?”
“Mostly,” I relish the chance to explain. “Repainted, interior was redone, messed with some of the electrical.” I’m almost feeling guilty about the battery fiasco this afternoon.
“Used to race ‘em. Not just Mustangs, all kinds of cars. My daddy and I worked on ‘em,” he informs me. “Won a hell of a lot of races, too.”
“Cool,” I enthusiastically respond. “In Arizona?”
“No, I’m not from here originally, I just follow my girlfriend. She’s a traveling nurse,” he informs me. “Dad ran a shop called Simonex in New Jersey. Remember that name. Used to work there, then moved out to Phoenix. I seem to keep coming back to Phoenix.”
“I love Phoenix,” I find myself repeating. “Your dad drive?”
“No, he was a builder. It’s the driver and the crew chief that get all the glory. And the money. But dad broke records. Invented the Boss head,” he tells me.
“Really? That wasn’t done inside Ford?” I ask surprised.
“No, Ford wasn’t interested in what he’d been telling them. So he built the heads, and the Ford engineers caught wind of what he was up to. What they saw was that performance shot up! So they want to know how he did it. His shop was overrun with Ford guys trying to make sense of his design,” he bragged. “A week later Ford writes him a check for half a million bucks. Seems like a lot, but it was just enough to get the shop out of mortgage and cover the cost of races.”Capital intensive business, my inner business consultant said to myself. We talk a little bit more and I learn my new friend’s name is James, he doesn’t drink but smokes like a chimney, and he’s got woman problems. Sounds like just about every other strange guy I’ve met at every other truck stop I’ve been along the way. I like James, there’s something spirited and strong in his demeanor. As we part I wish him well, and tell him a fellow namesake is always bound to have luck on the road.
Across the parking lot I spot an American owned economy motel with wireless internet so I get a room, unpack the car, take a shower which feels amazing after being in the desert all day, and get online. The internet is flakey and won’t stay connected. To hell with it, I think, I need a solid night’s rest anyway.
As I fade off to sleep I think there’s something beautiful in the variety of different lifestyles I’ve seen so far. Whether people lead hermitic lives in the empty stretches of desert or remain faithful to their small-town values in a small southern town or seek out one of the major metropolitan areas, each has its own particular beauty. They’re all different, and in their way, each seems right. Maybe not a fit for me, not a fit for everyone there, but nevertheless somehow right. Observing the differences among people and lifestyles not as a contest and not as a threat but as a chance to extract the benefit the variety of human experiences. What if I could set aside my dislikes—the things that split me from other individuals, ruin relationships, get me hating “the other party”, into cliques—and box them up as unshared values, just differences of taste, different preferences? Not better or worse, just different. Not right or wrong, just different. I don’t think this to be nice, not to find higher common ground, not to collapse complex moral issues into black or white, not for some undeserved and smug sense of making peace, but so I can quite literally extract the benefit of perspectives other than my own. To know more, to see more, to feel more, through lenses less clouded by the filter of my own upbringing and ego. What if I could respect, or understand, or just let things be? I think I’ve mastered my capacity to inflict my will on other human beings. More and more I’m coming to see it carries a price.
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