SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE 69
Year of the Car.
“I was driving across the state at the time, very fast. There were signs along the approaches to town advertising cheaper and cheaper motel rooms. The tone was shrill, desperate, that of an off-season price war. It was a buyer’s market. I began to note the rates and the little extras I could expect for my money. Always in a hurry then, once committed to a road, I stopped only for fuel, snake exhibits, and automobile museums, but I had to pause here, track down the cheapest of these cheap motels, and see it. I would confront the owner and call his bluff.”
— CHARLES PORTIS, MOTEL LIFE, LOWER REACHES
My favorite magazine had come calling, having read my mind, wondering if I was up for “an on-the-road piece following in the footsteps of Townes Van Zandt that would get to the bottom of the twisted yuppie shithole known as Austin, Texas.” Why, yes, I certainly was. There was just one hitch: I had no driver’s license, and though that had never stopped me from driving the white Lexus I’d bought at an estate sale all through said yuppie shithole (three years ago, another lifetime), it now presented certain issues in the realm of “rental cars.” Through various forms of abstention and evasion, I’ve arranged my life in such a way that it runs smoothly, despite the fact that I am not, in the administrative sense, a capable woman. So when it came to cars — machines requiring arcane maintenance and incomprehensible papers (like what exactly do they mean by “License and registration?”) — it seemed better to just walk.
But over time, this refusal of responsibility becomes outlandish — a shameful imposition upon the people around you, a totally pathetic unreadiness for life. And the more I entertained the thought of being a driver, it became the only thing in life that seemed to matter at all. I was ready to admit that my truest motivation was not success, love, or stability, but freedom; that I related to the “Ride Monologue” more than a woman closer to 40 than 30 probably should. (“Every night I used to pray that I’d find my people... and finally I did, on the open road...”) And so I found myself at the Elston DMV on a rainy day in late December 2023, where a frowning Czech man well into his 70s lowered himself angrily into my sister’s car. “This DMV shit is for the birds,” he grumbled. “Take a right outta this lot.” “Why do you even want your license?” the man asked me, so I told him: to chase some dead musician around Texas hill country. “You’re a decent driver,” he allowed. “Keep your nose clean and you’ll be alright.”
With my new license in tow, I arrived in central Texas just in time for its annual freeze, where unremarkable events in capable societies (temperatures in the 30s, or half an hour of icy rain) send the self-reliant cowboys into a total Dark Age meltdown. Nevertheless I commandeered the borrowed Lexus, so-called the LoveMobile (back in 2021 I’d affixed a bumper sticker, “I CAN’T HELP IT, I’M IN LOVE!”, which its now-owner was unable to scrape off with a key), from motel to motel, Austin to the Gulf Coast. Outlines of offshore drilling rigs glowed orange in early sundown as I parked outside a motel butted up against the sea; the rooms were made of cinderblock, giving the experience a certain institutional flair. How very apropos: if someone had “gone to Galveston” around the 1950s, it meant they’d lost their marbles and were seeking psychiatric treatment down at the UTMB, where Townes had been committed in March of 1964.
I’d booked my third motel on the advice of Charles Portis (“I always try to get a room in a cheap motel with no restaurant that is near a better motel where I can eat and drink”) but the weather back in Austin had hit the single digits, which meant the “better restaurants” were closed. I’d taken Charlie for sushi to thank him for the use of what was technically my car, but never mind. What had made us start to argue in the room an hour later? Something I’d said to the effect that it was, well, egomaniacal to bang on about how great he was now that he was two weeks sober, for which he’d labeled me an enemy of health and self-respect. “You are a deeply troubled woman!” were the last words from the hallway just before I slammed the door. “You’re surrounded by disaster! There’s a reason you’re alone…!”
The accusations struck me as a matter of opinion; an hour on Twitter usually left me with the sense of being the sanest person that I knew, or was even aware of. Life was great back in Chicago, where one day in February I came upon a Craigslist post from a man selling his grandfather’s 1993 Cadillac DeVille — blood-red on the outside, the dashboard, the leather seats. The old man had mostly kept it in the garage, leaving its mileage at an unthinkable 14k. In all my years no car had moved me whatsoever, but in the instant, I was crazily in love. I withdrew enough cash to cause the bank teller to whisper, “Is everything okay?” and arrived at a brick bungalow near Old Orchard Mall, where a disheveled Polish man searched madly for a pen while his girlfriend’s bichon frise yapped her head off at my heels. I drove off with the feeling that I’d gotten away with something, though in reality I’d probably overpaid. But for the first time in my life, I had a driver’s license and a sickeningly cool car, here in the Land of the Free.
As a first order of business, I chauffeured my sisters to Racine, WI, for pork chops, onion rings, and gravity-defying Grasshoppers and Brandy Alexanders at the Hobnob Supper Club.
I don’t drive much that first month, what with my custom to spend the dreary month of February on my “Eat, pray, love” shit. On day #2 of my three weeks in Vietnam, I am enveloped by a sadness I have never felt before, a sadness that shapes the landscape and and infects my electronics, which all die at once day #3. In Hanoi the sky is white, the air hangs like wet curtains. The rest is green. In the streets the stream of traffic never ceases for a moment, you step into it, move with faith, you part the stream, two hundred motorbikes move around you. If you lose faith then it’s over. I take a boat to “Women’s Island,” the Vietnamese name for it. Three women washed up on the beaches centuries ago. Fishermen found them. That’s what they say. For thousands of years people lived in the caves. Soldiers built hospitals there in the wars. The sound of a hospital cave; the chill inside.
On the island, in the room, I weep loudly without reason. The sound of the crying penetrates the dusk, making it darker, joining with the insects and the dogs, the creatures of the caves. I weep hard until I finish; then dress, head into town. The dog, Gung, looks but doesn’t move. The moon is full, it lights the path. There’s just the sound of walking, then the maudlin karaoke of a nearing wedding party. The music always comes from long ago and far away, even when it plays next door.
I ride the bus to Tam Cốc, arriving at sunset, which happens here like sleight of hand: the gray sky barely deepens, then in an instant drops to black. Here it’s like you’re at sea, but on land. Limestone mountains rise like islands from the flooded rice fields, a soggy, sultry, melancholy landscape whose sensibility I share. Back on the island I had gone a bit insane: what had once been logic was replaced by dull hysteria as each tie to my old life broke off one by one; very soon, I was certain, all that I once knew would be gone. But here I am revived. The cool night has the smell, the feel of a stone rolled away from the mouth of a tomb. The weepy strains of karaoke, the yellow glow of lanterns from distant billiard halls — paired with the right music, the evening’s elements conspire to draw from me a perfect ache of morbid lust. That Marguerite Duras mood — am I horny, or shall I kill myself?
“When they were very little, in the dry season their mother sometimes took them to see the night,” Duras wrote in The North China Lover (‘they’ are her young self and her brothers). “She told them to look hard at that sky, as blue as in full day, that lighting of the earth as far as the eye could see. And to listen hard to the sounds in the night, the people calling, laughing, singing, and the howling of dogs haunted by death; and you had to listen to them, too, all those calls that spoke of the hell of solitude, as well as the beauty of the songs that spoke of that solitude.”
In spring, I took the car out on her longest journey yet: six hours to the Northwoods, where I was to report on the joys of supper clubs. The drive north through Wisconsin on U.S. 51 is a fine place and time to consider the afterlife, if that’s what you want to call it. All 316 miles of highway between Beloit, on the state’s southernmost edge, and Hurley, its northern terminus, insist that you reflect upon such topics as Heaven, Hell, and at which moment life begins. And that’s just the billboards. Along the periphery every few minutes are relics of the moment life ends: messes of turkey, smears of raccoon, roadblocks of big, bloody deer. Long ago I was convinced that Heaven and Hell are places on Earth; so it’s a bit much, the endless warnings of John 3:36 studded between casinos and sex shops and prisons. “HELL IS REAL!” the billboards scream. Well, duh.
I arrived at McGregor’s Blink Bonnie Supper Club a few minutes before it opened, lining up outside the doorstep alongside two shaky couples of the Silent Generation, with whom I shared a preference for dinner in the afternoon. The low-slung log cabin restaurant sat just off WI-70 across from my quiet hotel, where I’d arrived an hour before to find a terrier manning the front desk, and down the highway from the Snowmobile Hall of Fame. The place was painted farmhouse red, its neon sign (“COCKTAILS FINE FOOD”) dim in the daylight. Inside was Northwoods Heaven: a knotty pine bar lit up in lantern red, framed by windows to the surrounding woods, wet and green in early spring. The walls were maximally adorned with stuffed bobcats and pine martens, felling axes, bear traps, wooden skis, waxy three-foot muskies and a giant elk head trophy mount at least as tall as me. “And where is your date this evening?” asked my waitress, Carol, bright eyes rimmed with thick mascara. “I’m not insinuating that you need one. But you might not leave alone.” She winked and took my order: broiled walleye with almonds, side of hash browns, salad, and a brandy old-fashioned, sweet.
Hours later, after an early evening rainstorm, the sky burned silvery-red as I parked among the pines outside of Clearview Supper Club. This far north in early May, the sun wouldn’t set til after 9. Outside, the dark wood lodge was done up in Christmas lights and Miller High Life neon, giving me a sense of déjà vu, though that couldn’t be. The front door jingled as I stepped into the bar, a paradise with walls of knotty pine like Twin Peaks’ Great Northern Hotel, with dim Tiffany lanterns hung from archways of gnarled branches. Beyond them in the dining room, a display case six feet tall was crammed with mounted butterflies: monarchs and viceroys, swallowtails the size of dinner plates, blood-black wings of mourning cloaks. The childish melodies of video slot machines babbled from the corner, and the television showed a simulation of a crackling bonfire in a lakeside scene much like the one framed by the lace-curtained windows. It all felt so familiar. Had I been here before?
That night, long after all the other customers had gone, I danced with the bartenders, flinging old clothes from a donation bin into the ceiling fan. Nobody seemed to notice as I slipped outside and drove into the darkness, tense with anticipation of a sudden flash of wild red eyes, but no one was out there but me.
Flinging myself upon the bed of my room at the Whitetail Lodge, I got a call from my dad’s girlfriend. He’d had what we’d learn later was a pulmonary embolism. The ambulance was on its way. Where was I? How soon could I be home?
