For You, The Stars
Chapter Eleven: Installment 4
I was spending fewer evenings in Marin but I was still going up most weekends. Cecilia was spending a lot of time with Sheena. She kept hinting that they were going to fool around some time or maybe pick up a guy and experiment and I kept telling her to let me know if it happened because I wanted to hear all about it if I couldn’t be there for the main event. Cecilia was still basically a full time babysitter but she did get her application together for the community college and there was no reason to think she wouldn’t be able to start there in the fall.
“I need to get my degree,” she said.
“You should,” I said. “You’re a smart person, but what do you want to study.”
“Maybe fashion design?”
“Does College of Marin even have a fashion major?”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Maybe you should check?”
With my new job I was less inclined to make excuses not to work on Monday and Fridays and I didn’t even know if there was a way to get to Emeryville from San Rafael by public transportation. I was starting to think that I should get a car. I didn’t really have a great track record with cars. I didn’t need one, growing up in Manhattan, and I didn’t take driver’s ed in high school like most normal people did. In the spring of my senior year of college when Hopper and I were planning to drive across the country, he taught me how to drive using his new Accord, which he called Fenry Honda. He was a pretty good teacher and I learned the basics pretty fast. Of course I’d been watching people drive forever, but as a permanent passenger I tended not to remember directions and I didn’t have a lot of confidence. I remember being really young and watching my grampy drive and being amazed when he’d take both hands off the steering wheel to amuse me. How did the car keep going? I wondered. He explained that the wheel wasn’t making the car go. We drove fast down a hill. I was sitting on my grammy’s lap. She went “wheeee!” I turned to her and said, “Why do we say whee?” and she said “Because it’s thrilling.”
I tried to explain to her that I knew why she was saying “whee” just now but that what I was trying to ask was why “whee” was the word we said when we felt that vertigo, but I was only about five years old or less and I didn’t know how to make my question any clearer so she just ended up looking at me with a puzzled expression on her face. I was an odd child and I often consternated the adults this way.
Hopper and I had planned this elaborate camping trip across the country. I flew down to his parents’ home in Florida, which we used as a staging area. His parents were definitely dubious about me driving their son’s new car, with good reason it turned out, of course. His dad was also an incredible noodge. We were packing our coolers for the trip and we included some half and half for our coffee. He was worried it was going to turn. “It will be fine, dad!” said Hopper. They got into a serious argument about it. Finally his dad gave in, saying “I wouldn’t drink it” over and over.
Driving Fenry Honda across country was a luxury. The car had cruise control for those long stretches of midwestern interstate and a new CD player with a great sound system. Hopper’s taste and mine diverged a bit: he was more into his live Eagles album than I was, but we agreed on the bootleg tapes and the live Dead albums, like Reckoning, the acoustic one. Cruising down the open road across America with the Grateful Dead or, yes, I admit it, Steppenwolf, blaring felt at times like the epitome of being twenty-one and dumb and not minding it one bit.
We had two sleeping bags and one tent that we thought would be big enough for the both of us. Hopper is tall and lanky and I’m short and squat but it did seem big enough. We even set it up and the mall store and got in it to be sure, but my snoring kept him up all night so in return he kept waking me up to get me to stop it. Hundreds of times a night, it seemed, I would wake up from a deep sleep as Hopper shook me. My eyes would focus on his face and he’d say, “dude, you’re snoring.” Then I’d turn over and fall right back to sleep. It became nightmarish for me at least, probably for both of us.
One night in the middle of nowhere we set up in our camping ground and walked down to a nearby lake, or pond really. We had one little joint we had brought with us and hoarded thus far and we smoked it all the way down, looking at the stars that I never used to see in New York, nor he in Miami. “This is the life,” said Hopper, “isn’t it?”
“You got that right,” I said.
As we trudged back up the slight slope to our tent it was just beginning to rain. During the night the storm whipped up and eventually tore the fly off the tent and pulled some of our weakly planted stakes out of the ground. The heavy rain started coming in through the mesh and puddling in the corner of the tent. We woke up soaking wet and ran over to his car. Fortunately, he had a few towels in the back seat and we were able to dry ourselves off roughly and then lay them down on the driver and passenger side seats, recline them, and spend the rest of the night in the car. After that we rechristened Fenry “the comfort pod” and we stopped using the tent entirely.
Hopper was very protective of the car, hence the towels on the seats, and he didn’t even like it if I put my foot up next to the glove compartment and left some mud drying there, so that just made it all the more tragic when I ended up driving the comfort pod off the side of the highway down a thirty foot incline into that ditch in Wyoming.
I’m not sure Hopper ever fully forgave me for that. I’m sure his parents didn’t. I eventually repaid him for the repairs but a new car just isn’t new anymore after it’s been in a serious body-jarring accident like that, and of course we were both lucky we hadn’t been killed or maimed. There were plenty of other stretches of Montana and Wyoming where losing control of the car at night could easily have been fatal.
So I was a little gun-shy about cars but I was starting to think I needed one anyway. Spending more time over in Berkeley and Emeryville and other parts of the east bay was showing me another side to this part of the world. San Francisco can be a bit like a little fairytale Manhattan. Even with all the hills you can get pretty much anywhere on Muni or BART or one of the buses. Oakland and the rest of the east bay is a sprawl, more like southern California in that regard. You can’t just walk down the street to buy a paper or get a cup of coffee, let alone shop for used books or records.
I mean, there are all kinds of little neighborhoods all over the east bay, like Rockridge and Lakeshore that have the Peet’s coffee shops and the Noah’s bagels and the Walden Pond bookstores and the movie theatres and so on, but they are islands separated by long stretches of highway or overland driving. Or I guess not really long stretches in terms of miles but long in terms of traffic. Even back then the bay area was choked with traffic and I was starting to realize I’d need to face up to the legendary California car culture.