ELSEWHERE: The Tri-State Area. by Samuel Need

Before I could meet up with Adam and get the trip rolling in earnest, I needed to kill two weeks with my mother at her home in upstate New Jersey. Our relationship had been strained since she split from my dad and left town when I was in middle school, but things had been recuperating these past few years. She had found a new husband, a preacher man who listened to NPR and treated her with her respect. He was a better fit for her then my father or myself, for that matter. I suppose this is a strange thing to know with conviction. In any case, she is happier now, and that is always a nice thing to see with your family.
My mom lives in Ridgewood, one of the extraordinarily wealthy hamlets on the tippy top of the Garden State. One of the benefits of visiting her these past few years is the town’s extreme proximity to one of the truly wondrous destinations in America: New York City. NJ Transit runs a tenuously prompt train from the town’s central commons that takes you straight to Penn Station in forty-five minutes. Only costs $7 dollars round trip. It runs late too, till one or two in the morning, so you can get a real relaxed drink down in the Village but then still sleep in your own bed that night.
I did this routine a few times during these limbo weeks, visiting some friends in Manhattan that I’d made during my time abroad in Beijing. Two girls, young women at this point, I suppose I should say. They were six and seven years older than yours truly. One of them is an investment banker. Chinese heritage, long rich black hair; a face that is atypically beautiful but only from certain angles. Streamlined runner’s body. There is an air of dignity and composure that trails her as she moves, but she is always up for a rowdy drink, and the drink is always nice with her.
The other is in publishing. Twenty nine; another athlete. A rock climber in the Adirondacks on the weekends. Asian also. A short gal with a moon face, cute butt and that sort of particularly flat chest a weightlifter achieves. Always carried a generous smile and a pack of cigarettes. We mostly talked about books when we’d see each other. Kissed her against a wall in the Financial District a few years ago, on Pearl Street at midnight in the coldest part of winter, as time trickled to seconds and the snow rushed down upon us in droves.
It’s always interesting to see them both; at least it used to be. I viewed it like checking in with what life might be like when I get to my late twenties. This time however, talk about a buzz kill. Both of them did the job thing, the career thing, and now they are like burnt out like candlewicks. They can’t love anybody else because they have some moderate enjoyment of where they are and won’t compromise, but they despise being alone. Despite an instinct to do so, they won’t move because they enjoy the paycheck and cannot imagine even temporary poverty again. They are stuck — pleased with some acknowledgement of adulthood, but still spooked, empty, and without viable alternatives. Holy crap they brought me low.
All over the city we roamed in misery. One girl up near the UN building, where we walked and glowered at each other. Weird part of Manhattan, on the East River above 50th street. Not really any identity. Some Trump buildings. No activity on the street. As we walk, my rock climber friend tells me that she wants to come west and farm too, but I know she won’t do it. I ask her why she won’t and she can’t find a sentence to say.
I hoof across town in a way-too-expensive taxi to meet the other on the Hudson near Chelsea, on a frumpy boat full of the young, urban and wealthy. Burger and a beer and a lot of jostling shoulders. Nobody has a clue where the beef came from. Probably some sad sack feed farm down in Arkansas, no doubt. Stephanie and I sit at a metal wire table on the very edge of the front deck. She’s facing the water and I’m facing 11th avenue.
During the meal, she reveals to me that being “kind” isn’t important to her anymore. Being kind! Outrageous. “As long as I’m settled, I can be happy with that,” she says. “I don’t need to wind myself up with guilt about other people.” She says it as though it is an important lesson.
I look around wide-eyed, trying to commiserate with one of our dining neighbors, but no one is interested. If that is what this city is about, what being an adult in America is about, then check me the fuck out. I’ll never play that game well enough. Don’t want to play it well. Even if I dressed to the nines, they’d see something, some unbuttoned collar, some misplaced salad fork, to indicate that I was just a sheep after all. And then they would tear me to shreds. This isn’t what being adult is about. It can’t be. It cannot be. If it is, man, fuck.
Later that night, as I ride the New Jersey Transit home through the smog valley of Secaucus, Rutherford, Garfield, the great gaping asshole of the Garden State, I find The Tao of Pooh in my satchel and it calms my heart again. It reminds me that something more gentle can be grasped. Allow your fingers to loosen from around the edges of your grand purple dreams, and for select moments the entirety of the world’s rhythm will simply pulse in your arm without any pain in sight. The action will continue forward, undisturbed, and all you need do in worship is to blink, and blink, and blink.
The book is a library loan, and I find something written in pencil on page 32:
“Before you have said a single yes to some other, you have already whispered it a thousand times to a world that indulges your feet everyday.”
In the following hours, I encounter both Neil Gaiman’s Stardust and a Sigur Ros music video, both of which remind me that storytelling is more than just the narrative skeins of our identities. It cannot be shrugged off in such a manner. In it lies perhaps a measure of salvation, of peace, against the loamy tide that lies outside of our vision, attempting always to change us into something we did not agree to change into.
A story can bridge a big, wide fissure in your heart. And no paycheck can do that. Money is meager ointment. But the story - that is always there, I tell myself, after a day with the sad, downwardly spiraling adults of New York City. The story, the story, the story. It keeps my heart beating in some kind of sequence. It keeps the clouds above my head. The story, the story, the story.
I keep breathing, and then it’s the next day.

<>

It is later in the week. I am once again on the last NJ Transit train from Penn Station back to my mom’s house in Ridgewood. The time is one or two in the morning and it’s a Saturday night. Somewhere up ahead of me an enormous gaggle of teenagers mills about on the cement platform. No parents in sight.
A girl’s squeaky voice announces that she has, in fact, attended a sizeable number of Dispatch concerts. However, the songs that she proceeds to sing do not belong to Dispatch. I try to count them. Well, yes, there’s John Mellencamp, and yes, that’s Bon Jovi, although I suppose that sounds a little like…
I spit and smile to myself. The girl is not interested in Dispatch. She is interested in being interested in something. So it goes with teenagers. Trying so hard to be about something, not quite old enough to recognize the bells of life for what they are. In this case the subject is concerts, but it could be anything: food, clothes, political philosophies, drugs, ladies.
NY Jet’s fans are everywhere on the cement platform. “Hey Christa, doesn’t this town have a lot of whores?” one asks. Except, its pronounced, “Hoo-rahs.” His gums flap as he speaks. Christa is too drunk to respond. Baseball caps are everywhere turned backwards. The way these guys talk to women is disgusting. It makes me wonder after their fathers, almost certainly emotionally malicious individuals. I can picture them now, in front of their Tri State Area grills after some obligatory Catholic Mass, talking with other fathers about screwing their wives. “Who is the best at giving head? Who is the best at cooking? The best body?” The speakers perhaps did not expect to leave a mark, but a fossil of misogynist has remained in the aspect of their children.
These Atlantic City princelings milling about in front of me seem like such first class phonies. Silver spoons obvious behind their fierce glares. During the day, in suburban homes, they are doing push ups like big boys, imitating great warriors and urban slumlord kings; but all the while mommy is doing their laundry in the basement. Day turns to evening, and they hop into their sports cars, a daddy investment, and listen to rap tunes about killing innocents. As they speed towards the city, they roll down the windows and inhale the pure and non-toxic breeze of the suburbs.
Petulant, confident, handsome as statues. Everything underwritten by privilege. Not a one of them clever enough to feel ashamed.
One of them, their leader, standing directly in front of me, wears an Armani Exchange t-shirt with what appears to be a chain link fence rising to the middle of the abdomen. A not insignificant quantity of gel has been contributed to the scalp. Now he is not John Rockerford Gissupi. He is “John-neee” and he has blonde spikes instead of hair. And his friend is not Harold Drakenfold. He is, “Da Drake”, a man of legendary and scurrilous felatio tales.
Who knows where these kids go in Manhattan at night anyways? Some of them look like fourteen, fifteen, tops. And they are hammered – cheeks pale, foreheads sweaty, lips cherry red. How did this happen? Did Union Square catch on fire? Are all of the police asleep? How did this amazingly drunk ten-year old avoid bar security, NYPD plainclothes, a single bouncer?
I look around the train station, searching for some other adult to glance at, with whom I can share the acknowledgement that these kids are not where they belong. That the animals have taken over the zoo. But no one is around, and even over this din, I find a different voice in my head speaking.
“Since when are you an adult, a zookeeper,” it asks? “Since when is this not you, this drinking-late-night shouting-trying-to-kiss-that-cute-girl-on-the-back-porch-cacophany of youth, lust? Since when do you stand with the guards and not with the kids?”
I do not know how to answer.

<>
After an innocuous week, Adam arrives from South Jersey and it is suddenly the eve of the first drive. We pack his car in the afternoon, adrenaline coursing through our veins. It is a 2000 Jeep Liberty, named Bruce after the alter ego of that famous batty superhero with whom Adam is obsessed. It gets terrible gas mileage, but it has four-wheel drive and will save our butt more than once along the mountain roads to come. At this point I’d never driven an SUV before in my life. By December, I will know it like a sibling.
Our aim on this Jersey afternoon is to bring as little as possible, but when packing for four months, there is only so much one can do. We end up using about every square inch of room, leaving only twin caves of seats at the front of the vehicle into which Adam and I will wedge ourselves.
In addition to a long bag of clothes, I pack work jeans, flannels, boots, and old, stiff leather gloves – all hand-me-downs from my father’s days of travel. A shoebox filled with band-aids, hydrogen peroxide, flashlights, Neosporin and scissors. Toiletries. Shampoo, dental floss and a bottle of conditioner that becomes superfluous after one day of work. A boxy, industrial rice cooker that takes up as much room as a bag of clothes. This is easily the thing I regret bringing the most. We will use it on the trip a total of two times. I had this idea beforehand that we would be eating pounds and pounds of white rice every night, over various campfires, cut free from the world and those chefs who might offer us some calories, but I neglected an important fact. Campsites do not have electricity, and the rice cooker is a machine. Shame, shame.
Adam brings five pairs of casual sneakers and I give him the meanest look. I know that he is only bringing them to match the outfits he plans to wear when we visit the various cities on our agenda – San Francisco, LA, Chicago, Seattle, Portland. However, because we will only spend a total of about ten days in these locations, I balk. Fashion is not a good enough reason to be claiming valuable square footage in the vehicle. I complain at his vanity, and chortle about work and not play, but he slips them by me.
The items that characterize the two of us the most are the sheer number of books we bring. A boggling amount. Four stacks of paperbacks on the floor in the back, leaning off balance, each tall enough to reach the lip of the seat. I bet we bring between 35 to 40 books total. On a trip where we bring two medium density woolen blankets, no matches, no long johns, and go cold on far too many nights, we bring a freaking library.
Up front, we deck out the console for long distance travel. Wrap a plastic bag around the gearshift and call it a trashcan. Jam a book with the farm information and a soon-to-be-holy red journal where we will be recording expenditures in the glove compartment. We bring a road atlas but don’t really need it. Adam’s mom purchased him a GPS for the car before he left North Carolina. In the coming days, we will decide to give it the name of an old British woman. Phyllis. As we are setting her up, I think about what a device like this truly does to the human experience of travel, and I imagine a fortune cookie prayer for the 21st century.

“Thou shall not wander or stumble
upon the jewels of a spontaneous afternoon,
for thou shall never be lost,
even in some strange land,
far, far from home.”

Ah, how things have changed since my father’s day, when callow New England youths would set off for the Rockies with a pocket map and three or four baloney sandwiches in their back pocket! Adam and I have ten times the material goods, and we still forget some of the bare necessities. None of the superfluous items, the books or fancy sneakers. Those we remember, of course.
Blankets though, or matches? Long underwear?
Nope.
I told you we were green.


I finish packing the trunk of the jeep for the first of many times, stacking oblong bags and bags of cookery like Tetris pieces. This is one of the tasks I will be responsible for during the next few months.
Over the course of the trip, Adam and I split work as it arises, assuming various collective jobs without needing to ask or declare ownership. It’s nice that we don’t need to talk much about it. With old friends you can do this, can just slip into the right roles without much hullabaloo, because it is so abundantly clear to both individuals what sort of person their friend is – what sort of jobs he is going to want to handle, and which he would rather shirk.
Feeling completely known in this way, planned-for and correctly estimated without having to bark or apologize or tiptoe around the prickly shape of another’s pride – it’s one of the nicest results of being friendly with people at all. Sometimes they can figure you out, and it can still be safe.
My jobs on the trip are as follows: I handle cold introductions, pack the jeep on moving days, oversee directions, tackle the long desert driving shifts, and wash dishes. Adam cooks, shops, calls ahead to guarantee farms, drives the extra windy mountain roads, and generally keeps me from bolting the whole trip.
We’re a good team, the two of us. We fill in certain deficiencies in the other’s character. What’s more, we are perceptive enough to recognize all of this, and because of that there is mutual respect.

After I finish packing, we are jittery for a time. We try to wander the hamlet to cool off, but the energy is too tight and the Garden State never exactly serene. Eventually we return and go up to the attic, where we share some last minute thoughts about the colossal event that begins tomorrow.
“I just want to travel man,” Adam says. “I have been at this camp all summer, making money and listening to these middle school kids have their little dramas, but all I could think about was this thing that’s coming.”
He is sitting cross-legged on the bed. He is an extraordinarily skinny guy, Adam. A true ectomporh with a genuine, Scots-Irish heritage from the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. The first in his family to go to college. A fighter in that way. Wears denim colored Converse sneakers, flannel shirts and a head full of curly yellow hair. A young director and artist.
“I want to see the West,” he continues. “The Pacific. The time zones that are not this time zone. Thank you so much for doing this with me.”
“Yes, yes, I hear that man,” I reply.
“What about you? What are you looking for?” he asks. “If you can put it into a word or phrase.”
I think for a second. “Salvation. Escape.” To problem-atize the ordinary path. Yes, that’s it.
“Salvation? What do you mean by that?”
I know I won’t explain it well, can’t ever quite explain my spiritual inclinations to him, so I just smile and wave him off.
“Nothing man. I’m just excited to go. The west, the west…”
“Yes.”

Together we step to the window, smoke a joint, look at the Atlantic stars for the last time, pump fists, then nod off for a long night’s sleep. The trip yawns ahead, unfinished and wild, ready to kill and to dazzle, dressed in a coyote’s crazy drunk grin.