happy new year, rick & laura, wherever you are

.

funny how things work sometimes--a song comes up on shuffle just as the alcohol's starting to work its dark magic, a blogpost is born which sets off a train of thought... and thus, last night's post leads to this one.

since moving from austin to los angeles i've made that long, bleak drive back and forth across the desert many times, but never more memorably than the trip from hell that took place exactly 20 years ago this night.

i blame myself, of course--if i hadn't abandoned my GM ethos and bought a goddam ford, the whole thing never woulda happened.

whatever--here's the story:



after arriving in los angeles in the fall of 1989 with little more than my graduation-present bmw and the clothes on my back, i accept not only a job with a celebrity architect who would ultimately use and abuse me, but also the ungrudging hospitality of rick and laura, who freely offer up to me the couch in their small one-bedroom pacific palisades apartment until such time as i manage to get on my feet.

[rick's generosity i sorta understand, him being my best friend from architecture school and all, but his new wife laura loving me from day one is a total fuckin' fluke which in my idiot youth i accept without question.]

after almost two months of enforced proximity during which they never even once bitch about my intrusion into their lives, i save up enough money not only for my own place, but to haul all my shit from texas out to the west coast.

it's christmastime and we're all flying back to texas--i suggest that in lieu of their paying for a return trip, they save a little money and drive back with me in the bright blue ford truck i just bought long-distance to drag a u-haul full of my shit from texas back to california. hell, it'll be an adventure!

they agree, their only proviso being that i get 'em back in time for the new years eve party they're committed to down in redondo beach.

[idiots--if they'd only known.]

i fly back to texas, enjoy christmas with my family, pick up the truck, try to ignore that it doesn't look as good as it did in the pictures, rent the u-haul, load it up with everything i own, pick up rick and laura on the afternoon of the 30th--plenty of time, i tell them and myself--and we head west.

by the time we hit fredricksburg about 70 miles out, we know we're in trouble--the truck is smoking--but we're young and dumb and high-spirited so we press on.

halfway to el paso the oil light comes on and we're like, what the fuck? we stop at a 7-11 in some podunk west texas town and it takes six quarts into the smoking crankcase to even register on the dipstick so we load up a few cases in the bed, figuring that as long as we add a quart every hundred miles or so we'll be ok, right?

somewhere between el paso and las cruces it gets bad--it's dark and we're climbing in altitude and the truck's sputtering madly and losing power and not rising to the challenge and we all just know the thing's about to die, and laura [at the wheel, scared shitless], turns to rick and me and says, "should i pull over?"

shivering, huddled together for warmth [did i mention the heater didn't work?] we both yell, NO!, she floors it and the motherfucker somehow keeps going.

it was that way all across the cold, dark desert that night--white knuckles on the steering wheel, any minute that piece o' shit coulda died and taken us with it, and we all knew it.

but that wasn't the point of that night--or this post.

the point of this post--and what i've never, ever forgotten--is that no matter how dark it got that night, and no matter how cold and scared we each were, rick and laura and i stayed strong, gritted our teeth and smiled for each other, and that made all the difference.

[and in case you're interested: yeah we made it, and rick and laura ultimately made their new years' eve party in redondo just in time, while all i was capable of once we safely landed was kneeling down, kissing the LA asphalt and collapsing into their bed.]

this one's from back when cars and songs on the radio still meant something

[and because it came up on shuffle tonight]

it's sometime after midnight on a cold, starlit evening in 1990 and i'm flying westward at 90 mph across the barren new mexico desert in my brother's pristine '72 lincoln mark iv [why? don't ask].

cigarette in my left hand, big gulp between my legs and thoroughly sick of the three eight-track tapes that came with the car, i'm scanning the empty AM dial for something--anything--when the auto-seek locks onto some obscure country station somewhere featuring a song i'd never heard before but which has me from note one.

when the signal suddenly fades just as the guy's bringing it home, i slam on the brakes, slew sideways across three lanes of I-10 to a screeching, smoking halt and reverse at high speed back to where it comes in clear again.

if you're one of those people who has never understood country music, i urge you to listen to this track all the way to the end, because it comes about as close to perfect as any country song ever recorded.

and unlike me, you won't have to sit in the middle of a deserted freeway to do so.

notes on christmas passed

.

much as i love it, austin's always been artificial--it was this fun place where my brother and sister followed me down from east texas for college, and where i would spend eleven years of my life, but it was never supposed to be where my mother would end up.

* * * * *

when we were kids, she'd come in after a long day at work with her arms full of groceries and ask our slack, lazy asses sprawled in front of the tv what we wanted for dinner. we'd usually each come up with something different, and more often than not she'd accommodate us by whipping up three different meals with seemingly effortless ease, all served steaming hot at the same time. we naturally took this shit for granted.

this year as always, she promised to cook for christmas-eve dinner the full, traditional thanksgiving spread i rarely make it home for anymore. i'm a little concerned when i get in on the 22nd and realize that she hasn't yet commenced the usual preparations, and when the 23rd passes without much progress i wonder if maybe she's no longer up to the challenge.

i needn't have worried--by the time i rouse my ass outta bed on christmas eve, she'd been up for hours cooking and it was all done to perfection, complete with three different pies for dessert.

* * * * *

all my drunken good intentions to look up old friends went--just like the last trip, and the one before that--by the wayside; instead, shackled by the enforced sobriety necessitated by family proximity, i reverted to my normal shut-down self and stuck close to home and hearth for the duration of my time in austin.

it was ok--we had a good time.

* * * * *

watching some ironic i-hate-my-family holiday special, my mother snorts and says to no one in particular, "hell, i'd lay down across a railroad track if i could spend another christmas with my mother and daddy."

if life follows its natural order, i imagine one of these days i'll say pretty much the same thing.



sober update: good god, and to think alcohol used to cheer me up.