the habit of being

(a rewrite of some entries from my hitch-hiking journal, 2002)

Here, in New Mexico, there are plateaus.

Back home, where the ground was flat, I learned what the outside world was supposed to look like from a diagram that crammed every possible geological feature into one neatly-labeled color-coded box. Mountain, hill, plain, valley, delta, fill-in-the-blank. The hardest vocabulary word was plateau, and judging from the awkward illustration, I thought they might’ve been made up, just to give public school children something to memorize in Social Studies class.

Though they’re advertised on license plates, billboards, and in roadside souvenir shops, I overlooked my first three New Mexico sunsets. Last night, my boyfriend kissed me under the fourth one. I think the kiss might’ve been staged so I’ll have something nice to say to my grandchildren about the time I dropped out of school and hitchhiked across the country. New Mexico sunsets are pretty, and there are plateaus here.

It’s early morning on sleepy I-25 South, surely one of the most seldom-used stretches of highway in the country. The cars don’t come and, when they do come, they don’t stop. For hours we sit by the side of the road, waiting. Far away there are mountains, covered all over with trees, no tree line. There’s a manicured RV park on the other side of the freeway, before the rusting piles of construction junk further on down. There are green Interstate signs, always, and the same well-known logos float in the sky: Texaco, McDonalds.

The light is relentless, and a broken-limbed black umbrella serves as my parasol. I’m the sitting girl, impossibly still, in my dirty, sweaty clothes. My patchwork sketch-palate jeans are ripped at the knees. A faded yellow head-scarf to hides my greasy, unwashed hair. A dog barks. The bark crosses the freeway from the RV park and settles on my shade umbrella. I try to see myself from a driver’s eyes, a speck in the distance, slowly coming into focus as this skinny, raggedy, overgrown child, rained on by the New Mexico sun. Surely I make for a queer, enchanting sight. Why doesn’t anyone pull over? Perhaps I pass as a mirage.

A few feet away, my boyfriend reads from our tattered, rained-on, duct-taped copy of War and Peace. In his other hand, he holds the sign: SOUTH TO ALBUQUERQUE. His long, matted hair drips over a black tee-shirt, where a gray wolf howls up toward a yellow moon near his left shoulder. On the bottom, the shirt says says “Texas.” It’s from a truck stop - 3 for $10.

He sees me staring and looks up from the book, which was attacked by a pack of dogs after I finished it and before he started, and asks, “When was the last time you remember having fun?” This is an accusation. Our trip was supposed to be a great adventure. We were supposed to be seeing the country. He sighs a lot. I feel like I shouldn’t be expected to be happy.

“Fun?” I reply, “I like playing checkers.”

Occasionally, we play pennies against nickels on a hand-drawn board. We do this in air-conditioned fast food restaurants, filling up the brightly-colored booths with our hiking packs, sleeping bags, water bottles. We sit and play checkers with our change until some stranger offers to buy us a pair of Value Meals. One such stranger complimented my boyfriend on my beauty. Another waited until he went to the bathroom to offer me $50 for a blowjob.

Checkers was a weak answer. I should have said, “When was the last time we had sex?” This is an accusation. We ran away for love.

Not only is he no longer able to view our sex life as a form of escapism, he avoids it specifically to make it easier for him to escape once this is over.

“It must be hard for you, doing this now,” he offers.

I want to say, “You have no idea;” I want to tell him all about it, how I cannot experience anything outside my own skin anymore. How every place we go is the same. I cannot. Instead, I complain. I complain constantly. I say that I am tired, I am dizzy, I am sick, I am hungry, I am afraid. I say these things even though they are obvious. We were supposed to be in love. We’ve been on the road for five months now, and we’ve finally passed the point where things could not possibly get worse.

Today is the last day I could’ve gotten the pill.

We have $65; we need at least $300. The signage blitz isn’t working. TRAVELING AND HUNGRY, ANYTHING HELPS. It was for food, once. We were even happy, in the beginning. We flashed peace signs at the SUV’s waiting at busy intersections on their lunch breaks. We believed the stories we told the strangers who picked us up. But the charm wore off, even before we found ourselves worse off than broke. We fake it now, and maybe the intersection strangers know they’re being duped. Not that there are any intersections to try here. We’re in the middle of nowhere, trying to get to Albuquerque, running around in circles.

“Do you have a better idea?” he asks. “Do you want to try something else? Do you want to call your parents?”

No. My parents haven’t heard from me in months. I ran away for love.

When my mother was pregnant with me, she dreamt she gave birth to a kitten instead of a girl, and after bringing it home from the hospital, she accidentally left it in a dresser drawer, where it died. I haven’t dreamt of children or of cats, only of becoming huge. I am scared I will just wait and wait, until I’ll have no choice.

I want to rest. I want to sleep in. I want to eat something that isn’t from the 99-cent menu, that isn’t peanut butter sandwiches or oatmeal. I want to get away from the sun. I want to wipe out the red, the orange, the yellow. These New Mexico colors are everywhere: on the ground, in the sky. My skin is splattered with this paint. I am tan and I am fire and I am burning and I feel like I’m going to vomit up a sun-baked baby.

I’m sitting on a rolled up sleeping bag. He’s sitting on his pack. A Jeep just passed us by, with talk radio spilling out its windows. If I stood up, I would fall down. One of the floating signs says there’s a Holiday Inn at the next exit. I want. Our water is tinted with Hawaiian Punch, from the soda fountain where we filled up our dented plastic bottles last. It tastes bad and I don’t want to drink it, but I’m so thirsty and my yellow piss says I’m not drinking enough.

I take down the umbrella to write in my diary. The sun squints my eyes and muddles my thoughts. My nose is stinging. My arms are stinging. Sweat drips slowly down my neck, leaving trackmarks in the dirt. Next to me on the concrete shoulder are a small pelt and a smear that used to be an animal. On the entrance ramp, I saw a mummified dog, a grotesque version of the sheepskins that sleep on the parlor floors of the rich, with their heads still on. If I never moved from this spot, this highway’s next rug could be me, frozen in time, melted, the remains of a girl who ran away for love, climbed her first plateau, and died trying to see the country.

I climbed out of the plastic lawn chair I’d flopped into, hitting my head on a short curtain of bent wire clothes-hangers, dangling from a low tree limb above. Two of them fell to the ground, next to a pile of broken glass that might’ve been a table lamp.

The doorway wasn’t quite in line with the three wooden steps I climbed to get through it. Perhaps the same God who dropped down the first trailer we’d passed on the way picked this one up and gave it a little shake, like a snow globe.

“Jus’ call me Lyn,” said the old woman, motioning to three saggy armchairs with cigarette burns and blobs of stuffing sticking out. “Ain’t much, since the vandals got to it, but it’s a roof over yer head. We got five trailers and ‘leven cars on the property, two of ‘em runnin’. Here, have a sandwich. All we have’s buns for bread, but it’s quick, you two mus’ be plum starved.”

In addition to the chairs and a TV set, the living room contained a washing machine (or maybe a dryer) with boxes piled on top of it, a cassette tape that had vomited up a couple feet of ribbon, a hammerhead with no handle, small white feathers of the sort that fill pillows, an alarm clock blinking noon, and two striped dress shirts with buttons. There were curtain rods, folding chairs, dead houseplants. There was an awful student’s painting of water lilies, a box that had once contained frozen State Fair brand corn dogs. A clock on the wall ticked too loudly. Big plastic sheets billowed as the wind came though glassless windows and doorframes. There were holes in the walls.

I could hear the raven squawking squawking from the kitchen. His newspapers hadn’t been changed. He was hidden away in a corner, where the flies plagued him. She didn’t explain where he came from. I stared at the sandwich that had been handed to me, half-wrapped in a wrinkly napkin. Brown and purple mush escaped the gap between two bottom halves of a hamburger bun. Peanut butter and jelly. The sight of it made me feel nauseated again. The old woman was already on her second peanut butter hotdog.

My mother, after I give Frank McCourt as an example of someone who had “transcended his class” (a topic that came up with a discussion of dog breeds) replies:

“He wrote a book like that.. about his own family… you call that transcending?”

I know then that I am not off the hook after all. I never will be. Might as well be a lawyer. Might as well just give up right now, because I’ll be hiding my writing forever.

A few days later, I also know that all people are basically the same, when an eight-year-old trust fund boy (a child who mumbles in four foreign languages between of telling me how bad my skin is and trying to convince me he’s brushed his teeth when he hasn’t in plain English) lays in his bed before falling asleep at night and says, “The worse thing in the world to me, worse than going to hell, is when my mother cries.”

“Me too,” I tell him and turn out the light. It begins to snow outside.

The next day I’m watching it though the window at the coffee shop, surrounded by people studying for their LSATs.

. . .

It is winter. I work my week and fall into my routines. I wake up automatically at 8:30 AM, but stay in bed until 9. I go to work, I make my to-do lists, I do them. I may stay for a yoga class. I often spend my nights here at the bookstore, reading, or trying to write, under the bright flourescent Buy Something lighting, until closing at 11.

Ever so often, it strikes me how different things were once, and I cannot get over how allowed I am. I look around at the other people in the store, and see that they do not question my presence, do not even see me. I do not think of them, or wonder what they are thinking of me. I am just another customer.

When I was on the road, shop lighting meant sanctity from whatever domestic dispute was happening in the tent, a momentary escape back into the Rest Of The World, a sigh of relief. Shop lighting was my vice, my secret pleasure. I took refuge in Barnes and Noble, in Target, even in McDonald’s, whenever I could. These were places I could pretend to still be my old self. These places were the same in every city we came to.

Ironically, I complained about this to the people who gave us rides, how these megacorporations were quickly killing of all trace of individuality, landscape, local color. But in a world where I had no home and no security, I took comfort in any familiarity I could find.

To me, the stores represented the old world I’d left behind, but it was obvious to everyone inside them that it was not my world anymore. It was plain to see that I wasn’t there to Buy Something, and this threw everyone off. People stared at me. People smiled at me. People would see my gear, my torn up clothes, my dirty hair, and ask if I was travelling.

There’s something very powerful about being “travelling,” as opposed to just being “homeless.” Travelling implies some sort of conscious choice. It implies politics, along with stories. It implies that the person bearing the title is in one way or another the enemy of the customer, the middle-class consumer, the whole store. A traveller in a franchise is a very odd thing. (It’s not just that I can’t afford to be here, but that I shouldn’t want to be here.)

An employee would walk up to me, hold out a bill, saying “one of our other customers wanted me to give you this.” Employees would also try to come up with veiled ways to ask me to leave. It is only a testimony to how nervous and stressed out I was on a regular basis that all the stress of being such an outsider barely even registered with me. I curled up in the big comfy chairs at Barnes and Noble with everything I owned situated all around me on the floor and read Tropic of Cancer, wrote page after page in my journal, took notes from What to Expect When You’re Expecting, breathed easily for a while.

And now, instead, I sip my lattes and carry around my Coach pocketbooks, the meat on my bones, all the elements of my Buying Something passport, making me quite invisible. The lighting isn’t comforting anymore. I worry about losing myself in the routines, the alarm clocks, the inflow and outflow of money, and it’s still kindof scary, even knowing that while living outside of it all was very “real,” is was also rather awful.

Everything was sun-colored as we walked into the desert to die. Sick dusty shells, we were delusional with anguish. Our breath stank. Our knotted hair flew in our faces. Our packs were heavy. The wind was heavier.

On the horizon, there were brown mountains, sienna lumps, and it was impossible to tell how far away they were. Very far, a million miles. One road stetched forward. We would never get there, but we imagined ourselves melting into the waterless ground that stretched between, dried out and tongueless, sitting silently on rocks, watching the life blow out of us and away. We could watch each other die, but we could not get too close. Closeness was forever over. I could not even walk near him. His mind was full of misery, disgust and nothingness.

He’d removed my hand from his chest the night before, as we feigned sleep in the bunk of a big truck’s cabin, on the bumpy ride into California. He’d silently, quite deliberately, put the offending object off of his person. In the morning, he told me he did not love me anymore. He said this resolutely, frustratedly, as someone hard and cruel, but yet somehow dead, given-up. He said other things too, mercilessly. It was the worst it had ever been. I was frantic; I was numb. I hadn’t had much sleep, and it was all too real.

I was ready to go die with him, and as I struggled against the wind that threatened to blow me under the wheels of each passing car, I mumbled under so many breaths “I hate you.” His back was before me, curled over and bracing against the wind with the heavy blue cross of our failure on his back, as on mine. It was the first hate - it gave me strength in my exhaustion. With every step, I looked at his hiking pack ahead of me; “I hate you.”

We were going noplace now. We were going “that way.” We were going “away.” Away from the greener hills and science fiction herds of windmills. Away from the truck stop where we sat, frozen, glued to our plastic booth, listening to “Tainted Love” over the intercom. Away from the highway, and all the other places we’d come from. Away from our false adventure.

There was sand. There was orange, and tan, and dust. There was flatness. It was hot and freezing at the same time. It was March. It was almost Palm Springs. It was the end of the world. The second end, and there would be more. It didn’t matter. He didn’t love me anymore and, in all my love, I hated him for the first time. I was so hysterical, I was almost serene. I wore myself slap out and just kept on walking. I wanted to collapse. To collapse would be dignified and horrible. It was not possible to walk in a straight line, because of the wind. It was not possible to stand up straight. It was not possible to cry, but it was impossible not to. I was crying and not crying. I was breathing heavily.

There was a store. It was small, of the earth. Inside, there was no wind. We got bananas. We got water. The shopkeeper spoke to me. I don’t remember what he said. I don’t remember what happened. I remember fruit. I remember sitting outside the store on a wooden log, a parking space bumper. I remember being silent or shouting, or both. I remember a car pulling up and making everything worse. I remember remembering every detail about the people in that car. I remember symbolism I’ve now forgotten.

The wind in the desert makes you raw, and we were already raw. We were so raw we were not even really there anymore. I don’t know what happened to make us turn back. I don’t remember deciding. I don’t remember relief. I remember that we were not so far from where we’d started. We could see the truckstop still, and the windmills, and the highway. We were going back to cooler colors.

Then, vaguely, I was thinking about pills. I was inventorying what we had with us, counting them in my head, with my breath, like sheep. I was breathing, forgetting the desert, trying to distance myself, trying to see myself separately. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was still walking. I was desparate. I did not know anything by the time we came upon the highway.

The truckstop was on the other side. It was grey. The highway was busy. There was no crosswalk. We ran for it. Our packs were heavy. Our packs were blue. I did not mean to fall down. When I tripped, I tripped in slow motion. After I realized I was going to fall, I just fell. It took a long time to fall. I twisted my ankle. I landed on my side. My pack was on top of me. My pack was strapped on. I couldn’t get up. After I realized I couldn’t get up, I just didn’t get up. Somewhere close, an eighteen wheeler blared its horn. I lay my cheek on the asphalt.

Somewhere, he turned around. Somewhere, he said “shit.” I was so glad to stop walking. I was so glad to lie down. He ran back to me and dragged me over to the shoulder, out of the way of the truck. It hurt.

It was a long time before I moved. I lay curled up on the side of the road. It was the longest minute. It was the calmest. He asked me if I was okay.

Only a day or so later, I’d take the pills, but this was the closest to death I ever came.