The next morning, we drove southwest on a four-lane highway bisecting Florida’s middle. The garish beach gift shops soon gave way to miles of swamp-lined tarmac. We stared, dazed, out the window as we charged deeper into the rain forest.
We weren’t more than twenty minutes outside of Daytona before it was clear that something funny was happening with the Volvo; rasping, dry-heaving coughs echoed up from under the hood, and urging the car to even fifty miles per hour was becoming a chore. It lunged forward in mad bursts of energy before sinking into barely mobile torpor. The thought of what might be the problem, however, was so horrifying that we each privately vowed not to speak of it, as if we could vanquish the demon with our silent treatment—the strategy we’d each applied to our studies thus far at Hampshire to great effect.
None of us had slept much the night before in the cramped, suffocating tent, nor had we bathed that morning—the communal showers at the campground were too crowded for any of us to dare—and the quickie breakfast of three parts caffeine, one part grease had left us all a little aching and jittery. Perhaps, I thought, riding shotgun, I’m just getting the nerves about nothing. But very quickly it was clear that it wasn’t nothing, and that ignoring the car’s troubles wasn’t going to make them go away. About an hour out of Daytona, Zach was the first to speak up.
“Ayatollah, is this really the fastest the car can go?”
Tollah, at the wheel, stared straight ahead at the road. “Yeah. It is.”
“Does it have enough gas?” I asked.
“About two-thirds of a tank.” We inched along the road, now barely making thirty miles per hour. Traffic careened by, honking indignantly, a few giant trucks barely swerving away from a collision as they sped around us.
“Maybe we should drive on the shoulder?” Frank asked.
“Maybe you want to get this thing looked at,” Zach said.
Tollah nodded. “Yeah, maybe.”
At about eleven A.M., forty miles shy of Orlando, we pulled off the highway and into the first service station we saw. The man on duty took one look at our car chugging in and said, “You folks need a muffler!” We looked at each other and tried to nod in a knowing, just-as-I-thought agreement.
“Can you put one in?” Tollah asked.
“I think so. Don’t work on these Europeans very often.” We told him we needed to get it fixed up quick, saying this in the most overbearing, intimidating voices we could muster to show him we weren’t just a bunch of dumb nineteen-year-olds from an expensive but silly school in the hills of Massachusetts; we were seasoned motorists on intimate terms with our vehicle’s private regions. The mechanic seemed duly impressed, nodded, and went back to the bay without speaking a word to us.
We spent the rest of the morning and afternoon in his waiting area, drinking from the Mr. Coffee and leafing through his collection of sports and mechanical journals. A six-month-old copy of U.S. News and World Report sustained each of us for a spell. I read from the previous December about the problems President Reagan was having with his Supreme Court nominee. “Does anyone know what happened with this Bork character?” I asked. “Sounds like a kook. Is he in charge of the courts now?” The others shrugged listlessly.
An hour passed and we saw no sign of the mechanic. Tedious as it was, we felt relief knowing that the shadow that had loomed over our trip now had a name, “Muffler,” and a solution, and that in just a few minutes more, all would be righted and order restored to the heavens. Another hour passed, and another. In the midafternoon, Tollah and I crept over to the bay to see if he was still there. Indeed, he was digging deep inside the Volvo’s innards and brusquely waved us away when we asked how it was going.
“Is a muffler under the hood?” Tollah asked.
I nodded. “I’m pretty sure it is.”
As the sun was starting to set, and Carmella and Zach had passed out on the waiting area floor, the mechanic appeared. He was drenched from head to toe in grease and had a wild look in his eyes, as though he’d just emerged from battling a fearsome beast, barely escaping with his life.
“Well”—he panted—“the muffler is in.”
“Good!” We cheered. “That’s terrific!”
“But if you want to drive that car, you’re going to need a new engine and a new transmission.”
We gaped.
“How much?” I asked, abandoning all pretense of looking like I knew what I was talking about. “How much would that cost and how long would it take?”
The mechanic stared at us for a moment and then, with a deep hound-dog-like sorrow, shook his head and said, “I have no idea.” He handed us a bill for four hundred dollars for the new muffler.
Despite the mechanic’s advice that we leave the Volvo to die with dignity, we took the keys and drove it fifteen miles per hour down the service road along the highway, retracing our tracks to a Jellystone Park Campground Carmella had spotted earlier. We checked into the Yogi Bear-themed facility and rented a camping plot, a little triangle of lawn next to a parking space. About half the campground was devoted to semipermanent trailer-dwelling residents, the rest to a collection of itinerant campers, most of whom could be loosely classified as “bikers.” On the plot across from ours a couple of shirtless, thin, rangy-looking fellows sat on the ground, leaning against the tires of their car, and snarled at us while we unpacked the car and spread our belongings across the lawn.
As darkness fell, we struggled to jury-rig our tent, erecting another dubious contraption of pulleys and misused stakes certain to collapse during the night. We glanced around for veteran campers who might advise us, but by this hour the neighboring plots showed no signs of life.
We dined by the light of a single yellowish bulb sticking out of the side wall of Jellystone’s hot dog stand. Beneath it I noticed a peeling mural of Yogi and Boo Boo running off with a pic-a-nic basket. The campground by night seemed deserted except for the surly teenager manning the snack bar. It was only eight o’clock, far too early to sleep. I wondered how we would pass the evening. Silence prevailed as we nibbled on our dogs, each of us deep in his own thoughts.
“Is there a town we could go into?” Zach asked.
“I think it’s about ten miles down the road,” Tollah said.
“We probably shouldn’t risk taking the car there. . . .”
“Probably not.” Tollah frowned at his hot dog with skepticism. “Not tonight, anyway.”
After a few more minutes of silence Frank suddenly got up, grabbed his guitar, and strode into the darkness. The Ayatollah looked around by the pool and found an old soggy deck of cards. He played Crazy Eights with Zach and Carmella, holding up their cards to the snack bar’s yellow bulb to see. Off in the distance, we heard Frank’s guitar strumming and his most sorrowful voice yo deling one of his songs. By the yellow bulb, Michelle Phillips explained how her affair with Denny of the Mamas and the Papas, Mama Cass’s love, had been inevitable. There was some errant strand in her relationship with her husband, John, she wrote, that preordained that she would sleep with all of his friends.
The next day there was no discussion of doing anything, or at least we avoided taking any concrete steps toward putting our Spring Break back on track. We avoided discussing where we would go next or how we might get back to school. The only clear plan anyone put forth was by Carmella, who around dinnertime suggested we walk the few miles back down the road to a Burger King we had passed. We laughed, brushing the idea aside as Italian foolishness. It would be a few days before it came to that.
We could’ve summoned a god of the credit card with a call home to our parents, which, after we absorbed a few hours or so of paternal bluster, would in all likelihood have yielded a wire transfer sufficient to get us bus tickets back to Massachusetts. But the humiliation of where we had ended up, combined with a growing grasp of the world-class imbecility that had gotten us here, kept us from making those calls. Instead, we waited it out, our bruised but still smoldering confidence telling us that a solution would yet pr
esent itself, somehow.
Our lives were soon stripped to their wilderness essentials, laid bare of all the basics of collegiate survival like the dining hall cereal bar, shopping mall video arcades, and the pill dispensary at the campus health services office—the raw elements on which we’d come to depend. With so few diversions to choose from, life at Jellystone calcified into a rigid framework. Mornings we awoke around five A.M., when the stench and heat of five people in the little tent functioned as a natural alarm clock, driving us forth into the day. We showered in the communal bathroom, relieved at least that the early rising meant we would not have to share the showers with our fellow campers. Frank, however, avoided the experience entirely, claiming our habit of daily showering was making us “soft.” He stuck to this all the harder as the rest of us insisted his roadly stench had become downright apocalyptic. By day three in the campground, he wore his odor as a badge of honor.
After wandering in a daze for a few hours or sitting on a curb and staring into space, we breakfasted on egg sandwiches at the snack bar. Typically the day’s activities included at least several hours spent trying to sleep in deck chairs by the tiny pool on whose surface floated candy wrappers and halves of old sandwiches, which fist-sized beetles used as rafts. Too much time by the pool, we soon found, raised troubling moral questions, as every hour or so one of the bikers would pummel a howling child into submission. Once the initial shock faded, we discovered how quickly we could entirely ignore the spectacle of unabashed child abuse. A two-hole putting green, with a couple little miniature turns, beckoned us for hours of tapping balls across gnarled Astroturf. We rented paddleboats on Jellystone’s little pond. Carmella and I took one out but found we could only paddle about fifteen feet before we were hemmed in by the thick crust of moss on the water. We sat there afloat at the moss’s edge, drifting while shooing away mosquitoes. I pulled a branch down off the tree and tried to carve my name in the moss, but it was too gooey to hold the etchings of complicated letters like R.
“This vacation,” Carmella said, “it really sucks, don’t you believe?”
I nodded yes, it did. I do believe. We paddled silently back to shore.
At five o’clock every day the children’s clogging class was held (clogging is a form of dancing indistinguishable from tap to the untrained eye), taught by a mustachioed instructor named Eagle with curly hair and a floppy tie-dye shirt. Every evening we gathered to watch.
By the end of the first day, I had finished California Dreamin’ . By the end of the fifth day, all the others had, too, and I started my second reading. We debated whether Mama Michelle really was doomed to sleep with her all her husband’s friends. From where we sat, Tollah pointed out, it was easy to throw stones, but the pressure of being a super-hot sixties rock princess was something we couldn’t understand.
Every other night there was a Bingo game in the Rec Room and some two hundred senior citizens flooded Jellystone. We were the only people under retirement age in the hall, a fact that we thought might endear us to the seniors, perhaps even leading to a dinner invitation or at least permission to come over and watch their TV for a couple hours. But instead our faithful attendance earned only shaken heads and looks of “You kids aren’t supposed to be here.” We had thought of Florida retirement communities as places where America stored the unwanted elderly, hiding them from the world of the living. But apparently, from the perspective of these seniors, they were here to hide from the young and they did not appreciate the intrusion. No one wanted to chat with us or know what we were studying back at our liberal arts college. We were the geeks of the seniors Bingo hall.
It was a Bingo custom to commemorate the moment when a number of personal significance was drawn with the sounding of noisemakers and festive whistles. For example, if your first child was born in 1921, when the number 21 was called, you blew a swallow-call whistle. After half a week in the campground, our badly frayed nerves were not prepared for the chorus of train toot-toots and silver bells that resounded after each number, throwing us badly off our game. In retrospect, this may have been the idea, because in a week and a half, despite the fact that we each began playing multiple cards, not one of us won a single game of Bingo. In a movie version of our trip, if you had cast a dwarf as the Bingo caller, it would be rightfully condemned as an over-the-top, hollow attempt at creating a macabre atmosphere. And yet Jellystone’s Bingo caller was a dwarf, an insufferable dwarf who, when he pulled B-2, could not pass up a single opportunity to call out, “B-two. Two-B. Or not to be.” I prayed he would let the joke slide just once, but a true showman, he knew this was his chance to roll out his best stuff and he never passed up his moment, not even once.
By day four, we had sunk our claws deep into each other’s nerves. We spent most of our days, before clogging class, in solitary wandering around the perimeters of the campground, cursing each other and devising fantasies of abandoning the group and getting back to school. My fantasies generally involved meeting a northbound team of down-home truckers with hearts of gold who would encourage me to write the memoirs of my adventures. But, fantasies aside, the solution to the mess we were in was snubbing its cue badly, and the days drifted on with no means of escape materializing.
We needed a bridge over the river Kwai to build, an activity to draw us together. Every day we lay fallow on the fields of Jellystone we were playing Russian roulette with our remaining scraps of sanity. The Ayatollah suggested we revisit Carmella’s idea and trudge down the highway to Burger King. No one thought the idea was a very good one, but as we had nothing better to suggest, we all signed up. We shrugged our shoulders and followed the Ayatollah out the Jellystone gates, marching apathetically down the dusty service road alongside the highway.
We pushed off after breakfast and made it to Burger King just before noon. After devouring consecutive trays of Whoppers and Double Whoppers, we sat outside in the parking lot and gazed around to see if there was any other activity in sight. There wasn’t; only the highway streaming by, like the wide Missouri, warbling melodies of escape.
“You guys,” Carmella said, “I’m thinking maybe we need to do something now.”
“I could see heading back to school,” Zach said. “I think we’ve made our point.”
We listened to the sounds of traffic. I almost said, “At least we’re not stuck in Daytona!” but then thought better of it and kept quiet, tossing pebbles at a bike rack
Back at Jellystone, a man dressed in a Yogi Bear costume was sitting on a deck chair by the pool chatting with the biker parents. In a desperate attempt to keep the meager esprit we’d conjured alive, we decided to play a round on the putting green. We listlessly tapped our balls along, no one bothering to keep score. Until, suddenly, out of nowhere, we were struck by a bolt of entertainment.
I stood in front of Carmella as she took her turn putting. But driven by some mysterious foreign instinct, rather than putting the ball toward the hole eighteen inches away, she decided to drive it, pulling her arm back and swinging with all her might. Her stroke missed the ball, but connected directly with my mouth. Before I could understand what had happened, my head was vibrating like a bell, and I looked over and saw first Carmella and then the others doubled over in laughter. As I spat up blood and bits of tooth, I joined in with them. Now, that, at last, was entertainment.
The notion gnawed at us all that somehow we still had to get to Disney World, which loomed just twenty miles away, an obsession that overshadowed questions about how to get back to school. Our potential options for returning to campus in five days remained: Plan A—wait for some magical solution to appear, or Plan B—have more faith in Plan A. So we fixated on getting to Disney World as the solution to our immediate spiritual needs. For Zach and me, native Angelenos who grew up with ritual quarterly trips to the Anaheim wonderland, stepping even for a few hours under the Disney umbrella would be a surefire balm for our scorched souls.
After a number of nonoutlandish travel options (bus, tour group, hitchhik
ing) collapsed under the weight of such road bumps as not being able to figure out how to find the bus schedule, we seized upon the nearest, and stupidest, solution at hand—to take the Ayatollah’s Volvo for one last hurrah, rolling it down the highway at whatever speed it gave.
The night before we set off, tensions came to a tragic break in the tent. Once I had finished my second reading of California Dreamin’, the only luxury left in my life was a foam pillow I had brought from school. In a moment of inexplicable good sense while leaving, it occurred to me that the hard ground might take a toll on my delicate neck and I grabbed the pillow off my bed before rushing out the door. Through the long days at Jellystone, the thought that my pillow awaited me at day’s end gave my life a faint taste of joy. That night, however, when I climbed into the tent, the breath flew from my chest as I looked down and saw Frank lying on my pillow, smiling up at me.
“Give me my pillow . . . ,” I hissed.
“No.” He smirked. “I want to use it tonight.”
“You can’t. It’s mine.”
“Hey, you gotta learn to rough it now and then. About time you saw what life is really like.”
“What does a Man of the Road need with a pillow!?”
“I want it!” I lunged at him and we wrestled for it. Eventually, I won it back, pulling it away from him as the others stared on, more terrified that we would rip a hole in the tent than that we might hurt each other and no doubt, silently grateful for the excitement. The next day, throughout our visit to Disney, Frank and I avoided making eye contact or speaking to each other.
The Volvo drawled over the service road, shaking as though it were about to come undone as it pressed toward its limit of twenty miles per hour. Cars whizzed past and their drivers hurled obscenities unintelligible beneath the rumble of the dying beast’s engine. We all stared at the RPM gauge, pushing deep into the red zone, and wondered how long it could go on like that.
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