AIMLESSLY IN MASSACHUSETTS AGAIN. Nobody had told you to watch for wildlife. Deer. Elk. Bears. Moose. Backwoods, you'd learned to flash your high-beams—ghostly silhouettes tearing across fuzzy, greying darkness. Disappearing off Route 9.
But I grew up on unlit roads, I think. I can remember crash-collisions, bloody grilles in a reddening-yellow sheen; gravel blinking, pooling, mangled limbs of a crimson-matted white-tailed deer on Route 35. Dibs on its carcass. Dragging it with Dad, lifting it, tailgate tarps to roll it up in.
Eventually you'd see North Dakota—Bison trampling by your Civic; flatlands forever unraveling around you. Cows for as far as you could see in Texas. Farmhouses decaying along Route 82, Route 287, Route 180. It held a harmlessly eerie suspension; unperturbed, untouched, unshaken; dusty roads from Fort Worth. West. It didn't scare you necessarily. You'd never been allowed to watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre, remember?
(If I had, I probably would've been terrified.)
But no, and deserts didn't necessarily scare you, either, not like deep, dead-end wilderness. A headlight out, only a single blurry pinhole in a flat-black screen, unrelenting nothingness going North again. Woods. Wildlife. Darkness. It's so easy to disappear.
I couldn't tell you why I was back in Massachusetts. It was crisp; a bite in the air, nostalgically dry. It had been months since I'd left New England, I think. Homesick? Maybe.
Homebound? Never.
Looking for a McDonald's to crash at? Yeah.
Golden Arches, Mom used to say. Find them! Ollie and I would scramble to spot a weathered billboard—or better: Golden Arches—looming over I-95. An Exit for an immediate off-highway fix, somewhere in North Carolina. Mickey D's. McDanks. McDaddies. Ollie always had new slang for it. Mostly, stopping for McDonald's or Burger King ended up being a long, manic detour with Mom.
God, we had had our share of detours with Mom. Directions printed from MapQuest, and yet, getting... lost in The Bronx. Queens. Or Manasses, Virginia. Abandoned shacks by the Canadian border. Driving through D.C. accidentally. Florida. Fuck... Florida.
Every road trip, growing up down the east coast to Naples. Gramps and Gram. It could feel like a separate journey through The Sunshine State. Keep going for the Keys, Mom used to joke. Keep going. Something about Kokomo. An old song by The Beach Boys.
Baby why don't we go...
Once, Mom had kept us in Florida so long past February vacation I missed too many band practices; I'd had to drop out. School called about a few weeks of absences, wondering where Ollie and I were. Dad called. Mom didn't want to go back North. Ever.
I remember talk about home-schooling, but I didn't understand it. I don't remember how old I was. Eventually Mom did drive us back North. And we never went back to Florida.
I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin' about half past dead...
Dad used to say, "Mom is afraid of you getting your driver's license and driving off, never coming back," because Mom used to do it.
Whatd'ya know? I did it, too.
It's genetic; every fucked up thing your parents did, you'll do, too, as if in prophecy of I-told-you-so's from distant family members. Everybody a black sheep in your immediate family: drifters, confused and unbalanced, trying to find a place to belong.
...I just need some place where I can lay my head...
Except I avoided Florida. It was an easy trap into the Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana nearly did me in; I wasn't fucking with Florida.
Hey, mister, can you tell me...
...where a man might find a bed?
I was always exhausted, always casing places to sleep for a few hours.
Take a load off, Fanny...
Dad always had Oldies on in his garage, all night long, to scare away squirrels and chipmunks living beneath it, but I'd lay awake and hear them. I'd never stop hearing them. Midnight would roll around, uninterrupted blocks of Classic Rock. I grew up a musical misfit; abandoned Britney Spears, replaced her with Lynyrd Skynyrd. Something subtly telling you to go South.
I'm as free as a bird...
Now on 98.9 FM, skittering into a fizzing fading...
Disquieting when you're off-the-grid, so far off-road you're unmarked, you're merely pulp in a worn, folded map of Massachusetts.
Google Maps couldn't have found you.
You needed to go South again.
But not yet.
Some dump in Western Mass you'd already seen, been to over and over and over, across New England. Everything identical, a slew of dark-grey blotted buildings, lights left on, a glowing-red strip of a closed CVS, a green-glazed haze of a locked TD Bank, a golden arch in a black sky from a 24-hour McDonald's.
I remember an icy prick of fear in my fingertips as I realized I'd been dozing again; I'd crossed from wilderness to pseudo-suburbia again, again, again. Seamlessly. Its icy glass windows, foggy in filtered moonlight, oddly unnatural angles jutting from a distorted darkness. Vacant. A deserted play area hovering above, awash in a gold tint—a glint of burnt-out arches, iconically old-school in my sluggish, sleep-deprived memory. If it wasn't lit, I'd have believed it was closed permanently.
My stomach lurched.
Dirt Nasty kicked up a dirty growl behind you, sputtering through a quiet intersection lit by a haunting green glow. Go. Go. Go. GTFO. Hard, a left into a nearly empty parking lot, breathing heavily, and I tried to brake, I screeched to a halt when I found an abandoned Saturn behind the greying, dimly lit McDonald's. It was off, dark, frosty beside a dumpster, and you glared at it cautiously, gauging its reality. It was a deep blue; scratched paint and rusty wheel wells, doors duct-taped, a single wiper poking from a pile of dry leaves and dirt on its windshield. Everything suspiciously suspended, a paranoid pitstop, a vehicle you'd never seen. A Mass plate hanging off a scuffed bumper, boasting Obama Biden '08. Old.
Fumes. Cigarettes. Sleeplessness.
Remember, your mind kept playing tricks on you.
Human error can be imitated.
How alone were you? Where were you?
Would anybody have ever known... if you disappeared?
