Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck, I think, far too early in the morning for this sort of thing. My car is going to explode.
A million different disaster scenarios have played out in my mind since I first planned this trip, but not long before leaving home, I concluded that the worst of all of them was the possibility of a car accident in the middle of nowhere. I imagined a cow wandering onto the highway in front of me, too late for me to avoid hitting it. The crumple zones in the front of my car would do their job, imploding the engine as the impact turned bovine into beef. I saw myself stranded in the middle of Texas, subject to the benevolence of passing truckers for a ride to the nearest town.
Obviously, I haven’t hit a cow1, but as I stare at the service center employee smoking a cigarette less than two feet from the stream of oil draining out of my car, I picture my whole trip literally going up in flames. The messenger bag at my feet contains all the essentials: laptop, digital voice recorder, notes, and so on, but my vehicle’s trunk holds everything else. The car contains most of my wardrobe, toiletries, and entertainment for the rest of this trip, not to mention the fact that it’s my transportation. If the car explodes, so does this whole endeavor.
Considering the stakes, I’m more than a little disconcerted to see this man smoking so nonchalantly. This is my car—this is my life—and this man’s nicotine fix should be able to wait until there’s nothing at risk.
I try to distract myself by reading, but the car remains in the corner of my eye, and I can’t focus. Instead, I watch the man gesticulate while he speaks with another employee, who seems nonplussed by the lit cigarette far too close to a flammable fluid. The whole scene makes me want to burst through the door into the garage and shout at them, but I don’t want to startle the smoker because it might cause the exact situation I fear. If my car is going to explode, at least the blame won’t lie with me.
My car does not explode.
The man finishes his job, and I hit the road once more, steering the not-aflame car northward on I-65. Miles outside of town, I cross the Mobile River into swamplands, and the highway bends ahead of me, creating the illusion that nothing but trees and blue sky await me ahead.
This does not impress me.
The hard thing about this trip, about driving from town to town, is that I am a fiercely urban individual: I don’t need to acquire pancakes at three in the morning every day, but I do need to live in an area where I know this could theoretically happen2. Post-midnight grocery runs frequently follow my nights out at the bar with friends, and I attend shows on whims as often as not.
I understand the beauty of nature in a conceptual sense, but I’m more impressed with concrete and steel than grass and leaves. Even so, I could possibly acknowledge this as the most beautiful stretch of highway I’ve driven on since Oregon, except the signs on the side of the road advertising attractions like Confederate battlefield memorials keep intruding on nature. This area obsesses so much over its beautiful present that it refuses to acknowledge its ugly past.
Around 2:30, my GPS’s screen displays that I have an incoming call on my cell phone. I don’t recognize the phone number or even the area code, but when I accept the call, I recognize the voice as one I haven’t heard in more than seven years: Joel B.
He and I belonged to the same youth group in high school, along with the Joel who now lives in Austin—back then, we referred to that Joel to primarily by his first name, while we called Joel B. by his last name, because his older brother graduated months before we joined, and he was known by his last name (probably for similar reasons).
The naming schemes of teenage boys is an area ripe for sociological study.
While Joel B.—hereafter, simply Joel—wasn’t one of my first friends in Memphis3, I have few, if any, older friends. In our elementary school days, when we bestowed and revoked “best friend” status according to various whims, he held that title more often than not, and I suspect that, if in sixth grade, we were told to write down our ten favorite things in the world, the lists would have been virtually indistinguishable4. At that time, we were both learning Magic, taking guitar lessons, studying for our bar mitzvahs, and going crazy over the same Super Nintendo games. Our paths diverged in middle school but reconvened in that high school youth group, where we both repeatedly ran for office, with little success.
More important than all of that is this: Joel was my friend at a time when even I didn’t like myself, through the roughest years of my childhood.
I was insufferable in my elementary school days, and not in the conventional way. Whereas Rob Fleming, the protagonist of Nick Hornby’s masterpiece High Fidelity, famously wondered “Which came first, the music or the misery?”, I can answer rather definitively: For me, the misery came first—I hated nearly everything about my life from the minute we arrived in Memphis. The music came second, coincidentally in the form of Soul Asylum’s 1995 semi-hit single “Misery.” I spent that summer obsessed with the song—the first time I ever loved a song that my friends and family were apathetic about—singing it on our day camp excursions over the constant protests of Joel and our friends. Despite this, despite all of my obnoxious tendencies, we remained friends until we went our separate ways for college. I’ve only seen him twice since.
As I continue driving, we set tentative plans for dinner over speakerphone, and he asks me to call him once I arrive at my hotel. I tell him I expect to be there in a couple of hours.
I turn out to be quite wrong about this.
An hours’ drive outside of Atlanta, the highway turns into a parking lot, thanks to construction closing two of the road’s three lanes. I could walk faster than traffic right now, and since I’m in the right region for an R.E.M. moment, I’m tempted to reenact the video for “Everybody Hurts,” even though that would only get me nowhere faster. My leg begins aching as my foot remains planted on the brake, but, every so often, I lurch forward a couple of car lengths.
Then, traffic clears.
As soon as I escape the construction zone, the highway returns to its normal width and speed, and not much later, it grows even further. Before I can say Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, I’m driving through the South’s most bustling metropolis, among seven lanes of traffic each way on I-85.
Atlanta traffic terrifies me.
I’ve missed the bulk of rush hour, but the sheer width of the highway boggles my mind. For years, I’ve thought Manhattan’s gridlock would be the scariest American environment in which to operate a motor vehicle, and while that may still be true, at least I’m smart enough to know not to try it. I suppose the parallel is more obvious than I think, though, because two hours from now, over dinner, Joel will tell me how much he loves living here. “It’s the New York of the South,” he will say to justify his love, and I will feel somewhere between offended and exasperated.
New York defies comparison.
Once I check into a hotel near Emory University, I give Joel a call. He attended Emory, so he knows the area, and suggests a nearby pizza place for dinner and drinks.
He’s waiting outside when I arrive, and we greet each other as though far less than six years have passed since we last saw each other. Inside, the restaurant’s wall-mounted TVs show various Opening Day baseball games, and a glance at one tells me that Yankees’ big offseason acquisition, C.C. Sabathia, has taken a beating in Baltimore.
All is right in the world.
Joel and I have a lot to catch up on—I congratulate him on his several-years-old marriage, and he replies by informing me that a) his wife is pregnant, due in September, and b) that they just bought a house, with a closing date this Friday. I repeat my congratulations twice more, and I feel weird about pretty much everything.
Growing up, Joel and I lived remarkably similar lives, but he went to college in Atlanta while I went off to Seattle, and now, seven and a half years later, our lives bear little resemblance. After he finished at Emory, he attended grad school and became a speech therapist working with stroke victims. Meanwhile, I spend less than ten hours a week doing anything remotely worthwhile, and zero hours a week doing anything that pays me.
Oh, and then there’s his home life, his marriage.
The last time I saw Joel, I had reason to believe he still hadn’t so much as kissed a girl.
In our teens, Joel’s guitar talents surpassed anyone else we knew by a wide margin. Off-stage, he was the kind of dork who repeatedly asked out girls who were light-years out of his league, but when he was on stage, those same girls would call him a sexy bitch (and only sometimes ironically).
Now, Joel is married, and hopes that his kid will be born a couple of weeks early so his birthday can be 9/9/09. I ask about guitar, and Joel tells me he no longer plays, at least not in a band. He serenades his wife sometimes.
His smile broadens when he tells me that last bit—in fact, his smile broadens every time he mentions his other half. The idea that he made a lifetime commitment in his mid-twenties scares and confuses me, as I have a hard time committing to social plans days in advance.
I can’t imagine myself living the life he lives now.
I don’t know if I can imagine myself ever living this kind of life.
Fortunately, the rest of our conversation doesn’t affect my demeanor like this, and we laugh quite a bit. We remember inside jokes that only he and I and two other people would get—skipping three on the count—and the time the police picked us up for a drive-by mooning that our friends pulled on a suburban Memphis McDonald’s. I tell him that Joel from Austin says hi, and pass along the gossip that I picked up there.
After several hours, Joel receives a call from his wife and says he has to go, since he has chores to do before she gets home, so we go our separate ways once more. He tells me to give him a call the next time I’m in Atlanta, and I suggest he does the same if he’s ever in Seattle, but I doubt that either of these things will ever occur.
As he hops in his mid-size sedan and I climb in my convertible, I’m content in the knowledge that one of my oldest friends appears to have all that he wants in life. But then, I think of what his life entails, of how he stopped playing guitar and settled into a life of domesticity, of how he no longer exists as “I” and more as half—and in a few months, one-third—of “we.” As I realize that, my thoughts shift once more, from happiness for him to sadness, as I project my own values upon him.
Poor Joel, I think as I drive away from him for perhaps the last time. He’s grown old so young.