Journal of the Dead

by Jason Kersten

  I can’t, he told Coughlin. I have no vacation time left.

  It was agonizing, because Dave’s offer came right when Raffi felt as if he was spinning his wheels, and looking for his own next move. Thirty years ago, Raffi’s starting point after college might have been one of Boston’s large newspapers, the Globe or the Herald, but a bachelor’s degree in journalism—or even a master’s degree—carries little weight these days when it comes to landing a starting position at a first-tier publication. Major newspapers almost never hire anyone without at least five years of experience, no matter how educated they are. After graduation, the only way Kodikian could have worked in journalism would have been if he left Boston for a smaller market, which would have meant leaving his girlfriend, the town he loved, and many of his friends. Instead, he took a job in the correspondence department of Massachusetts Financial Services, one of the biggest corporations in Boston. After an adventure on the road that he shared with hundreds of thousands of readers, he had found himself writing letters to people curious about mutual funds. After two years, it was taking a mind-numbing toll, and he was eager for new direction.

  To get things moving, he cut off his ponytail and met with Jerry Morris, the Boston Globe editor who had worked with him on his road-trip piece two years earlier. “He was not at all happy with where he was,” Morris said of their meeting in the Globe’s cafeteria. “He wanted to quit his job and become a travel writer. He took lots of notes. He sounded serious about it. He later e-mailed me that he was thinking of doing a story about a cruise on the Great Lakes. He never pitched any other stories. He was taking notes during our whole conversation. He even taped our conversation.”

  Morris warned Kodikian about some of the pitfalls of travel writing, mainly that it pays almost nothing, especially for beginners. Kodikian had been paid about $350 for his road-trip story, which translates into about 8 cents a word. Newspapers are infamously cheap when it comes to paying freelancers. Magazines, on the other hand, pay anywhere between 50 cents to $2.50 per word, and at one point Kodikian also arranged an interview with an editor at Boston Magazine, John Marcus, who had talked to one of his classes at Northeastern.

  “He mentioned wanting to write something in the spirit of On the Road,” remembered Marcus, “I told him, well, that’s the story that every kid just out of college wants to write, so he’d be better off pitching something else.”

  Moving was also another option Kodikian was mulling over. He told his friend Jonathan Pape, who he had interned with at the Globe, that he was thinking about heading off to Denver—the same town that Sal Paradise, the character that Kerouac based on himself, is inexorably drawn to in On the Road. But unlike Coughlin, he had not reached a decision.

  If Raffi couldn’t accompany Dave on his adventure, he could at least help him plan it, and the two mapped it out over beers and games of pool. The route Dave decided on ended up being almost identical to the one Raffi had taken in ’97, a swing through the South.

  A week before Dave was to leave, Raffi, Kirsten, Sonnet, and a few of his other friends took him out for a going-away dinner at an Italian restaurant in Boston’s North End. It was a bittersweet occasion, as Dave realized that he wouldn’t be seeing his friends for a long time. He fought off the sentimentality by rallying around the adventures he would have on his trip west. Raffi listened while Dave talked about visiting Graceland, New Orleans, and Austin. The excitement in his friend’s voice piqued his wanderlust.

  What the hell, he told Coughlin. I’ll ask for some time off. At such short notice, it’s a long shot, but they might just let me take some unpaid leave.

  A few days later, he called Dave at the town hall. He had talked his supervisor at MFS into letting him go.

  “David was ecstatic when Raffi called to say he was coming with him,” said one of Coughlin’s coworkers. “He put the trip off two weeks just so Raffi could come.”

  4

  The friends reached the outskirts of Philadelphia at about ten o’clock. Since Boston, there had been “traffic out the yin-yang,” Kodikian would later write, but the congestion of the seaboard’s weekend traffic dissolved as they passed the city and approached their first night’s destination: Raffi’s hometown of Doylestown, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

  Bucks County has some of the greenest land in America. It lies about fifteen miles northwest of Philadelphia, in a region filled with luscious farms, riparian forests, rolling hills, six wineries, and twelve covered bridges that give Madison County, Iowa, a run for its money. Every fall, newspapers and magazines all over the Mid-Atlantic pick it as one of the top places to see fall foliage, and tourists from across the country drive through by the thousands, charmed by hot-colored elms and dogwoods. The county was originally named after Buckinghamshire, England, which has a similar terrain, but it’s a running joke in Pennsylvania that the name comes from all the money of its residents.

  Doylestown sits right in the middle of the county. Like Wellesley, the town is prime real estate; the houses along its wooded lanes represent some of the highest average home values in the state. Its citizens, too, have strategically embraced their main street, shoveling out the funds to replace cement sidewalks with brick and granite promenades, restoring it to the exact moment it arrived at the Norman Rockwell nexus. On Main Street, the refurbished County Theater hawks era movies such as Rebel Without a Cause in bright red letters, while parking meters still charge a quarter. The town is filled with art galleries, antique shops, bed-and-breakfasts, fine restaurants, and Victorian-era architecture. It’s easy to see at least part of the reason why David and Raffi were friends; exchange the Charles River with the Potomac, switch Boston with Philadelphia, and you almost have the same town.

  Like Dave’s father, Raffi’s is a businessman. When people in Doylestown need to rent something—party supplies, Halloween costumes, power saws, almost anything—they go to his dad’s store, Rental World. Harold Kodikian, or “Hal,” as he likes to be called, played his cards right. He opened up his first store in the nearby town of Lansdale back in the early seventies, and now runs two branches. When people come into the store, they recognize Hal by his gray, well-trimmed beard, falconlike brow, and the same dark and penetrating eyes he passed on to his son. Raffi’s mom, Doris, is of slight build, with short gray hair and a warm smile.

  The friends pulled into Doylestown at about ten-thirty Friday night, driving the day’s last mile down a shady and narrow gravel road called Dogwood Lane, or The Lane, as the locals called it. The Kodikian house lay at its very end, receded among some of the same trees that give the street its name. Unlike the house Dave grew up in, Raffi’s childhood home is spacious and contemporary, a two-story with wood paneling and a large deck.

  The boys came in through the back door, hoping to surprise Raffi’s parents, but Hal and Doris had been waiting up. They greeted the boys warmly and chitchatted about the drive, but the friends were back out the door in minutes. They were hungry and eager to take a spin in Raffi’s dad’s car, a BMW Z3.

  They met up with some of Raffi’s old friends from high school at a local Friday’s Bar and Grill, then finished off the night by shooting a few games of pool at one of the town’s few bars, Kellys, an Irish pub on Main Street. “We left around 1:30,” Kodikian later wrote, but as they stepped out of the bar they were still jazzed up from finally being on the road. Downtown Doylestown was mostly empty now; beyond Main Street, quiet lanes ran off into the night. Raffi swung the BMW onto a back road and stopped the car.

  They knew that getting squirrelly in his dad’s car was a high-schooler’s game—but there they were, out in the boondocks in a high-performance luxury vehicle, a car they wished painfully they could take with them on the trip ahead. Raffi got out of the driver’s seat and let Dave take the wheel, directing him into the farmland outside of town. After the lights of the town were no longer visible, they switched seats again, and Raffi opened up the engine. They raced home through the darkened farmland, seeing only the road in fron
t of them, reveling at the thrill of speed in a void. “Had a ball on the corners,” Kodikian later wrote.

  The rest of the journal entries Raffi made on their road trip were brisk, as fast as the pace they kept. “Got up around 7 & jumped in the shower. Mom & Dad had coffee & toast waiting for us. She also picked some cherry & offered us pretzels—two kinds. We took the fat ones. She offered chicken but we declined,” he wrote of the next morning. Raffi’s parents wished they would stay longer, but almost as soon as they were finished eating they were back in the Mazda, on their way to Coughlin’s sister’s house just outside Washington in Gainesville, Virginia. That afternoon, reunited with her little brother, Kathleen and her husband, Mike, took the friends on their first tourist stop: Arlington National Cemetery. “It was hotter than hell,” Kodikian wrote, “but good to finally see it. Afterwards we got the kids food at McD’s, then got take out from Olive Garden. Picked up some rum & made Daiquiris at Katty’s.”

  When the friends said their farewells to Dave’s sister and nephews the following morning, in a way their trip was only then just beginning. No more family stops lay ahead. From then on, it would be only them and the explorative possibilities of a thousand towns.

  The lure of the road is the same as it was in Kerouac’s time, but the road is not. The America Raffi and David saw whisking past was arguably less innocent, and much more predictable. One of the revelations on the road today is not so much that America is wonderfully varied, but that it is so overwhelmingly the same.

  Lined up near the off-ramps of almost every town they passed were the same signs: McDonald’s, Cracker Barrel, the Olive Garden. It was a forest of the familiar, with the same exchangeable architecture, the same procedure everywhere. At times it felt as if they weren’t really moving at all, but stuck in idle while a giant conveyor of road circulated the identical town past, again and again.

  The only way to break the monotony was to leave the superslab and take some of the older highways and roads, which often still carry surprises. The small towns that we still equate with the American Dream still exist, just beyond the monolithic rind of chain restaurants, retail outlets, strip malls, and tract housing. Whenever they’d take a moment to get off the highways, they’d turn a corner and suddenly there it was, Main Street, with its old brick bank and square block of park. Too often part of its charm lay in its own decay. Every third building was boarded up, its mom-and-pop business long ago strangled by the interstate, or the population it once nested gone elsewhere. The little towns that have survived usually have one thing in common—the preservative balm of money—or they’ve had the fortune and foresight to position themselves successfully as a historical niche.

  While the road is less arbitrary, it is much faster and infinitely more convenient. Most of the time they just bypassed the towns altogether, happily leaving their secrets indecipherable within constellations of halogen and sodium lamps that breezed past in the night. They knew that if they suddenly became too tired, there’d be a Motel 6 near the next off-ramp, or if they were too exhausted to search for a decent restaurant, there would also be a KFC, where the colonel’s chicken was as reliable it was a thousand miles ago. It was a wonder in its own right, the idea that they knew what they were getting wherever they were. Getting lost was next to impossible, even on the older routes, because it was only a matter of time before they’d cross another highway.

  Raffi and David didn’t spend much time on the scenic routes. After leaving Dave’s sister’s house, they headed for Nashville as fast as they could. “The ride wasn’t too eventful, save a rain that was bad enough to make us pull over,” he said of Sunday’s leg. “We got into Nashville around 6:00.” If his reckoning was accurate, they motored a distance of about 650 miles in only ten hours—good time when you factor in gas, food, and rest stops. Not the kind of time you make on a back road, but by sticking to a major highway, like Interstate 81, and keeping the speedometer pegged above seventy.

  By the time they pulled into Nashville, they were eager to leave the car. Like always, it didn’t take them long to sniff out a local pool hall, where they ordered some Guinesses and food. “Immediately didn’t like the bartender,” Raffi noted. “He poured the beers half way to let them settle & dropped $2 on the bar. He then stood around for 5 min, far longer than necessary. One of my biggest pet-peeves.”

  After shooting a few games, they walked around downtown Nashville, then drove to a campground just outside of town. “I was glad that Dave liked the city as much as I did,” Raffi wrote.

  They kept up the dizzying pace. The next day, Jeff Rosen, Raffi’s friend from work, got a phone call from Raffi and David. They were at a bar in New Orleans.

  “They called me up to make sure I was having fun at work,” he said. “They were about to cruise Bourbon Street.”

  That morning, they had raced out of Nashville, headed for Memphis. But instead of stopping in the city they had driven straight to Graceland and taken the obligatory tour, tarrying just long enough at the colossal gift shop for Dave to buy a postcard, which he later sent back to the folks at the town hall. With the rest of the afternoon in front of them, they decided to barrel on down Highway 55. The entire state of Mississippi had gone by in a blur of oaks and off-ramps—miraculously without a single speeding ticket. They had pulled into New Orleans in the late afternoon, found a youth hostel, and decided to call Jeff and rub it in.

  In the background, Rosen could hear a television, Bob Barker’s voice setting the stage for the Showdown Showcase during the final minutes of The Price Is Right. He quickly picked up a pen. “Whenever one of us was out of work, he would watch The Price Is Right and we’d bid against each other in the Showdown Showcase. We’d do that for beers. Whoever was closest without going over won beers off the other guy.”

  Rosen couldn’t remember who won the beer that day, only that afterward, Raffi told him he had to go. “He was gonna go smoke a cigar on Bourbon Street,” said Rosen. Jeff was glad that his friends were having a good time.

  By the end of the next day, they were in Austin, Texas, and exhausted. They wanted a real bed, so they booked a room in a Motel 6 not far from the center of town, then called a cab. They were sick of driving, and wanted to knock back a few drinks in the Southwest’s college capital.

  Over beers at a local bar, they talked over their itinerary. They’d been making great time—they were a whole day ahead of schedule—but the pace was starting to get to them. The trip was more than half over, but all those miles seemed disproportionate to what they’d actually seen, which really wasn’t much more than a few streets, bars, and tourist traps in five different cities. Their plan for the next day was to swing northwest to Amarillo and the Texas panhandle, then west toward Santa Fe. From there it would be a straight shot west to the Grand Canyon, which they were planning to see on Thursday.

  As they discussed what lay ahead, Dave remembered something he’d heard during one of the many going-away conversations he’d had in previous weeks. “If you have a chance, check out Carlsbad Caverns; it’s pretty incredible,” an uncle of his had told him. The caverns, Coughlin now realized, were almost due west of them, which meant that seeing them wouldn’t put a big dent in their Grand Canyon plan. They could simply head north on Thursday instead, swinging through Phoenix. He ran the idea by Raffi.

  Kodikian thought it over. The only drawback to the plan was that it meant he would have forgo a large chunk of his (and Jack Kerouac’s) favorite highway, Route 66, the famous “Mother Road,” which in the Southwest lay withered and abandoned alongside Interstate 40, like a molted snakeskin a thousand miles long. He had been looking forward to seeing it again since ’97, but he couldn’t ignore the excitement in his friend’s voice. It was, after all, Dave’s trip.

  Yeah, that sounds good, he told Dave. Let’s check out Carlsbad Caverns.

  5

  Water is the ink of history in the American Southwest, and Raffi and David were now approaching a region whose story was written by a nine-hun
dred-mile-long river. It runs the length of eastern New Mexico, down into Texas, where it merges with the great Rio Grande. It was none other than the defining artery of the Old West, that muddy ribbon of water a cowboy was always either east or west of—the Pecos River.

  Prior to the Civil War, most cowboys and settlers stayed far east of the Pecos, especially the part of it that ran through southeastern New Mexico. The surrounding desert was controlled by the Mescalero Apache, who resisted Spanish, Mexican, and later American colonization with as much ferocity and guerrilla expertise as any tribe in North America. The Chihuahuan Desert was the center of their world, their very name derived from a cactus that grew there. They knew the locations of every water pocket it harbored, and fighting them in their own desert was suicide. Anyone willing to venture into southern New Mexico needed to be bold and well armed, and have a very good reason for being there.

  There were two such men: Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving, Texas cattlemen. At the time, hundreds of thousands of wild Spanish cattle roamed Texas, and making a fortune was a question of rounding up a herd and driving it to market. Comanche and Apache Indians controlled most of north and west Texas back then, so the traditional routes had always been east to New Orleans, or a riskier ride north into Illinois. By 1866, however, the markets in these states were saturated and the trails crowded. The markets in Colorado and Wyoming, however, were ripe for the picking, thanks to newly discovered gold fields near Pikes Peak. Goodnight and Loving knew that whoever could drive a herd to Colorado stood to make a killing.

  The problem was that, come spring, the standard route into Colorado—the old Santa Fe trail—would be clogged with herds belonging to competitors. They needed a different route, one with a reliable water source, and decided that it was worth the risk to head due west to the Pecos and follow it north. They struck out in the spring of 1866 with eighteen armed men, successfully avoided Indians, and made a fortune. Afterward, their route was known as the Goodnight-Loving Trail, and in its wake, determined settlement in the Pecos Valley was under way. A year later, after Loving died from a Comanche arrow wound, Goodnight teamed up with the legendary cattleman and fellow trailblazer John Chisum, and the pair began grazing eighty thousand longhorns along the Pecos not far from what is now the town of Carlsbad.