Saturday, December 31, 2022

Uncomfortable Places I Have Slept 2

 

Not my vehicle

Chilcott’s Mechanics, Route 32, north of New Paltz, NY

 I spent a week at a retreat put on by Direct Centering, the cult I was involved with in the middle 80s. I’m likely to write more about this in the future, but this is what led to a morning spent at a garage.

I’d driven down two friends, and while I remember their faces, I don’t remember their names. When we returned to New York from Florida, I also gave a ride to Shelley, my occasional friend with benefits (although we didn’t call it that back then). The four of us left Florida, where the retreat had been, and drove the east coast home, dropping each person off on the way. One lived in northern Jersey, one in Brooklyn, and Shelley was staying in Riverdale with her mom. It was a long drive, and only two of us, Shelley and me, had driver’s licenses. I don’t remember how often we changed drivers but at one of them Shelley ordered me to drink a full cup of coffee.

Now, here is the place to talk about my complex relationship with coffee. Growing up, my parents had regularly downed cups of what they called coffee each morning, and it wasn’t for decades I realized what they were drinking was Sanka or sometimes Kava. The liquid smelled terrific, but the actual taste was like a brown crayon dipped in tepid tap water. I vowed never to become a bean head like them. To reinforce this, the coffee Shelley had me drink was from a pot of late-night percolated stuff on the back shelf of some station where we gassed up. It went down like moist grit.

Years after this, I was at a Rainbow Gathering where I was introduced to Cowboy Coffee at an off-trail kitchen called The Mud Hole. [Kid to the guy hunkered over a pot on an open flame: “You got any water?” The guy, from somewhere in the recesses of his gut: “Nope, got mud.” Kid: “Oh, I get it. You got any coffee?” Guy: “Nope, got mud.”] My reaction to drinking this black distillate was like The Simpson’s Barney Gumble chugging his first beer: “Where have you been all my life?” And by now, I am a fully confirmed java-head, whose father was unable to drink more than a quarter cupful generously laced with water when I made it.

Anyway, it may have been the effects of that cup that made me refuse Shelley’s offer of a nap at her mom’s place, telling her, “I’m an hour from home, I can do this.” It was also bravado, which I had in great supply.

The retreat was in mid-winter and while we were south, New York had a couple snowstorms, none very heavy, but there were a couple inches on the ground. I was renting an apartment in New Paltz then and was kinda anxious to sleep in my bed. Most of my drive was uneventful, I was holding steady at about 60 on the Thruway, a little slower than most traffic because there were patches of black ice here and there. But I was a New Yorker, had driven in snow and sleet all my life, and I knew how to avoid them.

Up until between the exits to Newburgh and New Paltz. I passed a car going slower than me and fishtailed, first to the right, then left, then careened out of control, between two other vehicles, and over the embankment rear-first, sliding through about ten feet of snow, ice, and slush to come to rest at an angle where I had no choice but to look at the sky.

My first impression was amazement that things I knew belonged in the back seat were on the dashboard. My second was that the music, in the silence now of snow and my car rattling like a tin toy slowly dying, was all too loud, so I switched the car and the radio off. The tune was Sting singing “Russians," a song I was familiar with from dozens of anti-nuke rallies. It’s funny to me when I think back how clear like window glass this memory is.

I was unharmed. I had a car with no airbags but my seatbelt held firm, and in the sudden quiet, when I turned to discover my window was broken—for days I was shedding glass shards from my long hair—I could hear the wet snow landing on the car and the drifts now beside me.

The woman whose car I’d careened past stopped and called from the side of the road to me, asking if I was all right. I’m certain the first words out of my mouth were “I’m all right!” This is a thing for me, that when I am in an accident where I ought to be hurt, I hurriedly assure whoever is around “I’m okay!” It’s a way to convince myself of my own safety, my ability to survive.

I disengaged my seatbelt and trudged up the bank to the woman’s car, my sneakers and pants cuffs soaked. This part is outside my memory: I’m certain we spoke for a while and she was very helpful to me, but I genuinely can’t remember what we said to one another and, in this decade before the first car or cell phones, can’t remember how she contacted the state troopers so quickly. Because, in my memory, a patrol car was there within minutes. I suppose I was in shock, because really the rest of my memory of this incident involves my car being pulled out of the snow and then towed, with me in the cab, to the next exit and eventually to the mechanic’s shop, a nondescript block of connected garages along the highway between New Paltz and Kingston. 

Shortly after arriving I made several phone calls to find someone who could pick me up. I found someone who could do so several hours later. In the last moments of this memory, I settled on the lounge couch, an old, overstuffed, dusty thing that reminded me of the couch in the three-season porch of the home my family moved to in the early 70s, where I spent most of my summers reading yellowed comic pages and pulp novels from the 30s and 40s. Despite my uncertainty about whether my car was repairable and how I was going to pay for it, and despite the commotion—many others had been sliding off the roads—going on around me, the couch was familiar and calming and I fell into a deep, comforting sleep.

Monday, December 26, 2022

Uncomfortable Places I Have Slept

 

US Interstates 41, 24 and 75 Between Terre Haute, IN and Atlanta

I've decided to focus my current writing on the places I've slept in that were not comfortable, physically or otherwise. This is the most recent. Our family, my wife, her mother, and I, made a very sudden decision to move from the Midwest to Macon, GA to both avoid the cold and the Seasonal Affective Disorder from which we all suffer. This involved my retirement so I could collect social security and selling our home by Lake Michigan, packing two homes’ worth of belongings and furniture, buying a new home in Georgia, and preparing a new and more southern mindset.

I donated 900 books from my library to a friend who had opened a used bookstore in the city. We gave away hundreds of dollars in clothing, appliances, equipment, as well as throwing away a lot. At one point, we hired a company to haul away junk from our garage. We segregated what we were tossing and what we were keeping and Jayne, who was home when they came by, pointed out the corner of the garage where the toss pile sat. But they took everything, including wheelbarrows, tools, bicycles (fortunately the ones we were moving with were in the basement), even shovels and rakes. Who takes shovels and rakes?

The weeks between our decision, finding an appropriate new home and selling ours seemed very, very slow but in retrospect they went incredibly quickly, and the day we closed on the sale of our house the company moving our belongings was packed by about 3, we loaded all 11 of our dogs and cats in my wife’s larger car, signed the papers, and drove 17 hours to make it to the signing for our new home in Macon at 10 the next morning. We made it there at exactly 10.

My wife doesn’t much like it when I drive so she did most of it, sleeping only when she felt exhausted. I was crumpled in the front seat, but as I’ve proved over and over, I can sleep nearly anywhere and in any position. Once the sun went down and we’d passed through Illinois, I slept off and on with a few waking periods. The photo above shows my wife driving with one of our dogs on her lap throughout the journey. Because I had the greater freedom, I rode with 2 of our dogs on my lap, only to discover, about the time we reached the northern outskirts of Atlanta, that one of them had been incontinent in his sleep. I attended the closing on our home in a pair of pants with a long dark pee spot down the left leg, which was indicative of our new journey as possible.