Journal of the Dead

by Jason Kersten

  Raffi was more confident when it came to women. He’d dated several girls in high school, and his dark looks, wanderlust, and liberal sensibilities gave him a bit of a bad boy appeal. (It was the kind of image that Coughlin, a preppie when it came to style, would rib him about later.) Raffi had shoulder-length hair that he wore in a ponytail, and girls would often make envious remarks about it. He was also a good talker who quoted Shakespeare and Kerouac and loved foreign films, but he did more than talk when it came to his ideals. He’d worked for the Clinton campaign during his freshman year, and he’d gone to Armenia the following summer to help rebuild after the devastating earthquake.

  The next time Coughlin and Decou were in the city, they dropped in on Swan and Kodikian, and that’s how Raffi and Dave met.

  “We immediately took to each other,” Raffi would later say. “Very similar people, very similar senses of humor.”

  Dave was a big fan of the TV show Cheers, and when Raffi invited him up to his apartment, he was floored to see that Kodikian had every episode on tape. (Both of them were also huge Seinfeld fans, and they could sit at a bar, flipping their favorite lines and episodes back to each other.) One of Dave’s favorite things to do while listening to music was to play air drums, and he was also impressed when he saw that Kodikian had a real set, which he occasionally played in a local band. He also had a pair of exotic pets, two boa constrictors named Gizelle and Severrogh that lived in a pair of elaborate cages that he’d designed and built himself.

  There was no doubt about it, Dave thought after that first meeting, Raffi was a cool guy.

  Dave and Day broke up shortly after their visit with Kodikian and Swan. It was amicable; they remained friends, and Dave stayed in touch with Kirsten Swan. He’d drop in on her to see how she was getting along in Boston whenever he came down from Amherst. He was like a big brother, she’d tell people, the guardian angel who had helped her settle in Boston.

  Raffi found it impossible not to like it when Dave showed up. There he’d be in the doorway, a big, happy, Irish bear.

  “He had this customary greeting,” one of his friends remembered. “It was fast, like, ‘Hey-howyadoin’-what’shappenin’-what’sgoingon?’ Then he’d move on to something else before you could answer.”

  The trio would go out to a movie, a bar, or a party, and by the end of the weekend Kodikian was always a bit sad to see him head back to Amherst. He wouldn’t have minded seeing more of Coughlin, but geography simply didn’t permit it.

  That changed in the spring of 1996 when Coughlin graduated. He moved back home to Wellesley—only fifteen minutes away—and was coming into the city almost every weekend. He’d call Kirsten or Raffi, and depending on what their plans were, hang out with one or both of them. But as time moved on it was Raffi he called more and more.

  “Dave and Raf were always together,” said Jeff Rosen, a friend and co-worker of Raffi who had spent a lot of time with both Coughlin and Kodikian in the past two years. “The first time I met Dave was at Raffi’s house. He had fired up the grill. It seemed like Raffi had known Dave forever.”

  In the summers, they’d barbecue at Raffi’s place, go to Red Sox games, or take Raffi’s Jeep off-roading. In winter, they’d go snow-boarding or catch a hockey game. They went to movies constantly. Kodikian was a huge movie buff; he had a giant Pulp Fiction poster in his apartment and usually knew what to see. Dave was a voracious sci-fi fan who read books with the kind of stylized covers that might make Raffi shake his head, but he’d humor his friend. One time Dave talked Raffi into driving forty miles just so they could see the trailer for the long-awaited Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

  Most of the time they just hung out like any other college kids. There were literally a million students their age in greater Boston. They’d drink beers and shoot pool at the local pubs, all the while busting on each other over work or girls. Raffi was the more talkative of the pair, the man of words, and Dave was content to let him take center stage.

  “Dave would sit there like he wasn’t even listening,” Rosen remembered. “He’d be nice and quiet, then he’d get ya.”

  Nobody who knew both men would ever recount a single argument, not even a petty spat.

  “They were a good match,” Craig Lewis, a friend of Raffi’s from college, said. “There was never any conflict between them when I was there; I never heard Raffi complain about Dave. Actually, sometimes I was a little upset, because Raffi would be going off four-wheeling, and I’d be like, ‘Oh, dude, can I come?’ And he’d be like, ‘I promised Dave that he could come.’”

  In 1947, a twenty-five-year-old printer’s son from Lowell, Massachusetts, slapped on a rucksack, turned up his thumb to a rainy eastern sky, and hitched his first ride west on a journey that changed his life. He wandered back and forth across America’s vast road network for almost two years, a postwar Huck Finn adrift on an asphalt Mississippi he affectionately called the “superslab.” He kept a journal of his adventures, writing down everything he saw, everyone he met, and everything he felt in a breathless, jazz-inspired prose that echoed with the rhythm of the road itself. When he published a novel based on it ten years later, On the Road became an American classic almost overnight. It forever changed the way Americans thought of their highways, and, from then on, the road trip became more than the best way to see the country. It became a rite of passage.

  Raffi idolized Jack Kerouac. So much so that in 1997, after he graduated Northeastern with honors, he loaded up his Jeep and drove across the country himself, following the glittered exhaust that the father of the Beats had left behind fifty years earlier. Millions of graduates make the same wheeled vision quest every year—a final gift of freedom to themselves before returning to the real world and finding a job.

  Raffi, too, kept a journal, much of which he would later persuade some of the editors at the Boston Globe to publish in the Sunday travel section. In all, it amounted to over forty-five hundred words. His travelogue tended to be long-winded, a bit self-conscious, often focusing on the tedious details of his vehicle and the weather, but he was stretching his voice, and for a cub journalist fresh out of college they were an accomplishment—clips from a major metropolitan newspaper that he could use to get more assignments later.

  “My biggest fear when I began planning a two-month solo trip driving across the United States wasn’t that the journey would resemble a scene out of ‘Easy Rider’ or ‘Breakdown,’” his first dispatch began. “Nor was it that I’d get pulled over in Louisiana by a cop with a grudge, or that some crazy driver would run me off the road in Tennessee. My fear was this: that the road wouldn’t be everything Jack Kerouac had promised it would be.”

  To help him cash in on the promise, he had his black Jeep 4 × 4 and the addresses and phone numbers of Jeep enthusiasts he had befriended on the Internet. Kodikian speaks of off-roading six times in his Globe article, on some of the country’s most challenging trails. His very first stop was a Jeep gathering in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, where he and one of his high school friends, Kevin Guckaven, spent three days four-wheeling. “… Our biggest concern was making it back from the trails in one piece—and in time for the cookout,” he wrote. “After five years of worrying about due dates, class schedules, and grades, the lack of responsibility was a godsend.”

  After dropping Guckaven off at the Knoxville airport, Kodikian was alone, and he got lost almost immediately: “I spent that night trying to correct all the mistakes that my failing internal compass was causing me. Driving a Jeep with Massachusetts plates while lost somewhere in Tennessee wasn’t the most comforting thought in the world, and before long my eyelids were feeling about as heavy as my belly was light.”

  After that first night in Tennessee, however, Kodikian seems to have navigated the roads, at least, without much problem. He moved on to Nashville, Memphis, Biloxi, and New Orleans, where he made the leap across the Mississippi. And it was there, in Kerouac’s magnetic West, that he had his first encounter with New Mexico’
s desert.

  It happened at White Sands National Monument, which lies about 250 miles to the west of Carlsbad, not far from the fabled Trinity Test Site. The monument is one of the Chihuahuan Desert’s great wonders, 250 square miles of impossibly white gypsum sand dunes that lie over the land like an undulant sea of sugar. Kodikian pulled into the park on the Monday, July 7, with plans to tour the park and camp for a night. If he was expecting a campground with showers, bathrooms, and BBQs, he was disappointed. Camping at White Sands is organized almost exactly the way it is at Carlsbad Caverns: you get a permit, park along a scenic drive about six miles from the visitor center, then hike a mile down the trail, and pitch a tent. Raffi did all of this without incident. And then, after setting up camp, he went off to see the desert, an event he reported in his Globe article:

  Not long after leaving, I noticed a rainstorm coming, so I headed back to camp to put the top up on the Jeep and throw my stuff under the tent. On the way, I noticed the wind had started picking up. It wasn’t long before sand was in the air, and I knew I needed to move. I started to run, but by the time I was halfway there, all I saw in front of me was a sheet of white. The sand felt like a sand-blaster on my bare legs, and I had lost my sense of direction. I had to decide whether to lie down and ball up or move as fast as I could in what I thought was the direction of the Jeep. I opted to move, and when the wind let up slightly, and my legs could do it, I ran. For all I knew, I could have been heading straight into the desert. But as I came over the top of the next dune, I could barely make out the Jeep about 50 yards away. Thank God.

  When Kodikian returned to his Jeep, he realized that he had locked his keys inside, but he was able get in through the zipper window at the rear. The sandstorm passed, he returned to camp, and the experience became just another colorful anecdote. He headed on to Arizona, where Kirsten Swan flew in from Boston to join him, and the two drove on to California and up Highway 1 in what Kodikian called a “tour de romance.” In San Francisco, they both visited relatives and she caught a flight home, while he made a leisurely drive back across the entire country. The way back took him to more national parks in Utah, Colorado, and the Midwest. His sister, Melanie, joined him in Chicago, and the two drove on to Cleveland to visit a cousin before returning to Massachusetts.

  “My trip has been caked on my tires, dripped on my boots, and seared into my memory as one of the greatest experiences I could have imagined,” read the final lines of his Globe article. “And God willing, I’ll get the chance to do it again.”

  That’s my buddy, Dave Coughlin had told anyone who would listen. He’s a real writer for the Boston Globe. He’d bought copies of Raffi’s article and followed his adventures with pride—and envy. Kodikian’s life had seemed a lot more interesting than his own in the summer of 1997. He had finished college two years earlier, and gone on to learn that the roads we take toward our dreams don’t come with well-marked turnoffs and fast lanes.

  “Environmental policy, Coughlin’s chosen field, was completely inundated when he graduated,” said a coworker who worked with him at Wellesley Town Hall. “It was rough. There was nowhere for him to go, so he came home and worked here for next to nothing.”

  His four years of struggling for a college degree earned him a distinguished and exciting position answering parking complaints. Quite often they were from citizens already unfairly burdened by million-dollar homes, summers in Cape Cod, and charity balls. The final outrage always came when they discovered a $25 ticket beneath the wiper of their $60,000 imported European vehicle, parked in a trash pickup zone.

  “People would call and just scream at him, and I mean screaming. Profanities, the whole thing,” said Arnold Wakelin, who was a selectman at the time. “He’d just sit there on the phone and smile, polite as can be. He never lost his cool.”

  It always amazed Dave how much perspective could be lost in the town where people seemed to have everything. Nobody in this town realizes how good they have it, he’d tell people. And as for himself, he had it good enough at first, living at home and getting free meals and laundry service, courtesy of Mom. Boston was right next door, and he spent most of his time there, hanging out with Raffi and Kirsten at the bars and parties, driving back to Wellesley late at night after his folks were already in bed. He knew he was spinning his wheels, but couldn’t see where, or how, the change should come.

  His father eventually gave him a push. According to a close friend, the two had a minor run-in over Dave’s future—or lack thereof. He needed a plan, or at least his own place. He couldn’t just go traipsing off to Boston every other night and come slinking back in the wee hours to the Coughlin Inn. Even though he’d expected it, his dad’s criticism had stung, first because he thought he’d been making the best of it, and second because he knew his old man was right. He could do better.

  So he moved out of the house and in with a friend of his, Keith Goddard, who worked at a local gas station. They got an apartment in the nearby town of Millis, and if Dave still wasn’t sure where he was going, at least he was independent. Things slowly got better for him. He settled into his job at the town hall, where he was extremely well liked. He’d take whatever offhand projects needed work, and often put in long hours. One of his biggest inspirations had come just a few months before leaving. The town hall wasn’t exactly the most technologically savvy place, and his boss, Arnold Wakelin, asked him if there was anything they could use to streamline the annual town meeting.

  “He brought in a laptop computer and did a Power Point presentation,” says Wakelin. “It was the slickest thing. There he was running the whole thing from this little computer. He was a smart, resourceful kid.”

  They promoted him after that, and got him a raise. It wasn’t much, but he had begun to find his place. He talked about staying at the town hall for a long time, if only he could find a way to secure a position less at the mercy of a city council budget.

  A friend of Dave remembers that one day he showed up at his house with a videotape, coolly put it into the VCR, and grinned proudly as he watched himself jumping out of an airplane, tied tandem to another skydiver.

  “I was blown away,” said the friend. “He never once mentioned that he wanted to skydive. But he was like that. He didn’t talk much about doing things, he’d just do them.”

  California was the same way. When he took a week off work in May of 1999, he told his coworkers at the Town Hall he was going out west on vacation, but it was, in fact, a well-planned scouting expedition.

  He’d heard about the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management through some of his old professors and classmates. It was a brand-new school, attached to the University of California at Santa Barbara, and its two-year master’s program promised the kind of hands-on, field-oriented training that got students jobs. The fact that it was fifty yards from the beach, housed in a space-age building surrounded by palm trees, didn’t hurt, either.

  But there were some catches: to be eligible for the program, he needed to establish California residency first, which meant that he’d have to live in the state a year before starting classes. There was also money. His parents could help him out a little, but he’d still need to work and save as much as possible. He talked it over with his dad, who suggested that he fly out and take a look. He caught a flight out west on May 18, booking it in the evening so he could catch the afternoon opening of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

  Coughlin didn’t go to California on his scouting expedition alone; Kirsten Swan, who had relatives there, went with him. She and Raffi had moved into an apartment together on Boyleston Street, not far from Fenway Park, but as often happens with college romances, they grew apart after graduation. During the rougher patches of her relationship with Raffi, Swan had occasionally turned to Coughlin for advice and consolation, and by the time she and Raffi finally broke up, she and Dave were closer than ever.

  I’ll distance myself from her if you want, Dave told Raffi, but Raffi said he didn’t have a p
roblem with it. Coughlin, after all, had known her first, and the breakup was amicable. Raffi moved into an apartment in West Roxbury, and he and Kirsten had agreed not to see each other until they’d both moved on emotionally. By the end of 1998, they were all hanging out together again, as friends, and the three of them even took a trip down to Philadelphia in December to spend New Year’s with Raffi’s family and watch the annual Mummers Parade, a rollicking procession of twenty-five thousand costumed celebrants that’s Philly’s answer to Mardi Gras. Raffi’s sister, Melanie, would take a memorable photo that day; in it the three of them lean into the street as if blown back by a happy wind. Raffi and Kirsten fill the foreground while Dave peeks out from behind Kirsten’s hair with smiling eyes.

  In California, the only ones in the picture would be Dave and Kirsten, but Raffi knew about the trip and so did Dave’s girlfriend, Sonnet Frost, and neither of them voiced any concern. Dave and Kirsten had been good friends—and nothing more—for as long as they could remember. She would be an assuring anchor for him as he surveyed the palmy landscape and tried to envision how his future would play out there. And sometime during that week, as the two toured the Western Riviera and talked it over, Dave tasted a life he wanted more of.

  He came back a week later and immediately gave notice at the town hall. The dream of the West had caught him. In two months he was moving to California.

  Packing up his car, quitting his job, and speeding off toward the setting sun was precisely the type of the adventure Raffi would approve of, and Dave immediately suggested he come along for the drive. “God willing, I’ll get the chance to do it again,” were the ending words to Kodikian’s Globe article, and now here was that chance, with his best friend. But Raffi wasn’t as free as he’d been back in the summer of ’97.