But fifteen minutes into lying there, my stomach started to twist. Then the bloated feeling moved lower. I thought it was diarrhea, so I started to walk to the bathroom. Before I was through the door, my spit got hot and my stomach wrenched like it had been sucker punched. I barely made it to the toilet before I threw up every last bit of food I had eaten—chunks of salami and cracker and cheese, each heave feeling like it would be my last breath. After my belly emptied, I just kept on throwing up, or trying to. Weston ran out to buy some water bottles.
“If you’re heaving, it’s better to throw something up rather than just to dry heave. That’s the worst,” Weston said.
He stayed up most of the night watching over me and lightly scratching my back. Mothering me. By the time the sun came up, I was asleep with my cheek on the toilet seat, holding the bowl like my best friend. But when I woke up in the bathroom, I felt better. Better but weak. Even standing up and walking back to the bed felt like lifting three hundred pounds.
I was too weak to ride, so we decided to stay another day. The hotel was more expensive than we could really afford, so Weston found some Wi-Fi in the hotel lobby and looked on Warm Showers. It’s an app that lets bike enthusiasts around the world offer couches or floor space and a shower—not necessarily warm—to people on trips like ours. Weston found just one user in the town—Erika—and messaged her. She replied almost instantly, and said she was excited to host us.
An hour later, Erika met us at the bank across the street and led us to her house. The main road’s pavement quickly ended, as nearly all the gridded side streets of Guerrero Negro were sand. The sand was too soft to ride over, so we walked our bikes behind her rattled old minivan. Erika was in her forties, and told us in soft, broken English that she worked in the office at the local high school. We were intrigued by her nonchalance at welcoming two strange men into her home.
After pushing the bikes through sand for what felt like an hour, we reached her small house to the fanfare of barking mutts. Then one, two, three teenaged sons walked out to greet us. Then her husband. Even though they lived in a desert outpost surrounded by salt flats, the boys dressed like they were from San Diego: skater-brand shirts, flat-brimmed hats, sneakers, two with baggy jeans and two with skinny jeans.
As we walked into the house, I asked Erika why she had accepted us for a stay. “I try at my English,” she said. “It is very bad. It is good Americans at my house from U.S., I practice my English. My sons, too. You want food?”
The house consisted of a living room with an old PC crammed into the corner, a kitchen, and two bedrooms closed off by sheets hung from shower rods. After the niceties of meeting her three sons and husband, I started looking around outside for a place to sleep while Weston carried on with our hosts. There were no trees to hang our hammocks from. I spread out my rain tarp in a shed and lay down for a second, fully aware of how rude I was being, but unable to do anything but sleep.
I don’t know how long it was, maybe one second, maybe an hour, but when I opened my eyes it was 2 p.m., and the father was standing over me, telling me in Spanish to come inside. It’s true what sociologists say: only about 40 percent of communication is in the words, and the rest is in the tone, gestures, facial movements. Once inside, he showed me that the couch pulled out into a bed. All I wanted to do was lie down on that bed and sleep until dawn, but with classic Mexican hospitality, the minivan was already running and he gestured to us to get in. He was taking us on a tour of Guerrero Negro and the miles of salt flats that support the town’s main business. My mind was numb and my body was ruined, but when he spoke I smiled, looking toward whatever he was excitedly pointing at.
The salt flats are huge pools of dehydrating seawater, lined with white crystal mounds separating them from each other. Everywhere, heaps of crystalized salt. In my hand, the crystals looked like jewels. He took us from there to town, where we saw a party going on with dancing horses, trotting and doing tricks with master cowboys. We saw a large aboveground cemetery with brightly painted mausoleums. My weakness dominated my thoughts. Weston did a good job of picking up my slack. I could hardly fake delight at all these things. My eyes were half crossed.
When we got back to the house, I crumpled onto the couch. Nearby, the thirteen-year-old son sat at their PC with a Casio keyboard, watching a piano-lesson video on YouTube. He had headphones on, and his playing made no sound. The other two boys sat cross-legged a few inches from the TV, watching soccer, but I was hypnotized watching the boy learn piano all by himself. I remembered my own piano lessons as a kid, and how begrudgingly I practiced for fifteen minutes a day, with my mother watching me like a hawk to make sure I didn’t sneak off to watch TV or eat BBQ potato chips. How inconvenienced I was in my roomy house with so many entertaining distractions. And here was this boy, a lover of music, using the free music lessons posted by some random person in Ohio to learn to play on his busted-up Casio, in the middle of a desert town with one paved road. What if he becomes a great musician? I bet he will. I can still see him sitting there, focusing harder on that YouTube video than I’ve ever been focused on anything in my life. One of life’s secrets is tucked away in that moment. I know it is. It has something to do with contrast.
I slept well and felt better in the morning. The kids were up and off to school, and after breakfast, we said our sweet goodbyes and reluctantly got back on the road.
* * *
—
BY NOW, the charm of being in the wilderness was completely gone. My clothes were stiff with sweat and my white T-shirts would never be white again. My bike felt heavier than before. Weston’s bike seemed more tattered, flimsier. The new wheel squeaked, and I saw it as a warning siren for the next breakdown in the middle of nowhere.
Cutting inland from Guerrero Negro, we lost sight of the Pacific for good. While plunging ever southward, we had to cross Baja to reach the coast of the Sea of Cortez. I was constantly nervous about running out of water, rationing and taking tiny sips. We went full days without seeing a town or hardly a human, all the while steeping in the anxiety of not knowing what lay ahead. Ride. Keep riding. Don’t complain. Stay positive. Don’t snap at Weston. You’re not mean. You’re just hungry and tired.
I fantasized about a real town, with real stores. A place where I could buy fresh T-shirts and underwear. I would stare at the map and see hundreds of miles in all directions with no civilization, and I’d meditate on misery. On my stupid choice to be here. I started plotting a guilt-free escape. What if I claimed I had terrible knee pain and couldn’t go on? No one expects me to bike in pain, right? Or maybe I could just do the trip in doses. I’d go home for a month, and hit the road for a month, come back home and write about it, and then hit the road again for another month—all the way down to South America. I could do that, and never be gone long enough to hate myself or the trip.
But if I did that, wouldn’t people think I’m a pussy? A fraud? Not a real adventurer?
But the true despair came from my head. California was gone. My home and my friends—the community I had built for a decade—were gone. I wouldn’t see any of them for the next year and then some. Maybe a twenty-one-year-old could take this trip and explore the world without worrying about what’s happening without him at home. But by thirty, I had built a life good enough to miss. To fill the time, I spun fantasies about being back home in LA with my friends, with a beer and a good laugh and a TV show marathon. I could marinate on that one image for hours, the way being in love fills your thoughts with the beloved. I was in love with the thought of home.
In central Baja, alien-looking trees began showing up on the barren landscape. Trees or cactuses or Dr. Seuss creations. I came to find out they were called boojums. They grow mainly in central Baja and reach up into the sky fifteen feet or more. They look like tall, spiny green road cones and often have no real branches—the kind of plant you could imagine populating Mars—or like the tails of cute d
ragons sticking straight in the air, burying their bodies to beat the heat. At night, we lit fires by burning the bones of dead boojums. We hung our hammocks from them. Weston would cook in his single crusty pan while I played episodes of our favorite podcasts, Radiolab, This American Life, Freakonomics, on my portable speaker.
One night it got so cold I couldn’t sleep. We had found an uncharacteristically lush river meadow in the midst of the dry and barren landscape, and made camp there at sunset. The ground was green, covered in tiny white wildflowers. I changed my clothes, hung my hammock, got in my sleeping bag, and fell right asleep—but by 1 a.m., the temperature had dropped from 100 to 45 degrees. The air beneath my hammock chilled my core and I couldn’t get warm again. I just lay there for hours, cursing the world. After unpacking every piece of clothing I had and layering it, I gave up. I thought the ground must hold more heat than the air. I put my Wal-Mart windshield reflector on the grass, stuffed my sleeping bag with my clothes, and finally fell asleep on the ground, either because it truly was warmer or just from total exhaustion.
The next morning, I awoke stiff as a fossil, and we packed up.
“Wow, that was one of the worst sleeps of my life,” I said, going for commiseration.
“I slept fine. I was cold, yeah, but I was out.”
Ugh. Damn him. Sometimes it hit me that his “man-of-the-earth” schtick wasn’t a schtick. He really was tough and principled and strong. I think the fact that he wasn’t flawless in this gave me ammunition to poke holes. To disregard him. I remembered what his mother said. This happens a lot with people who espouse idealism. We want to feel better about our mediocrity, so we look for the holes.
That day, we had another forever ride through nothingness. Hoping for a tienda where we could buy a cold Coca-Cola. For a place where we could buy lunch. For shade.
It was October, and it killed me to think I’d still be on this trip in October a year from now, only so much farther from home. Each time we crested a hill and saw yet another vast valley of emptiness, this feeling hit me with more force.
This is what you wanted, I told myself. To be free. Out here. Living the dream at thirty. And for what? To be uncomfortable? Well. You got that. But who cares? What are you really here for?
Through all that relentless heat and emptiness, my thoughts were cursing me. Nostalgia for my life in California progressed to the point where all of the imperfections, all of the things that sent me on this trip—my dream of a free life, of self-discovery and adventure, of doing hard things and writing about them, of bucking the system and being wild—evaporated. Home seemed like paradise, so fulfilling and lush. How foolish was I to want to leave it? All to go on some stupid, vacuous, self-absorbed man adventure.
I thought about my boyhood in green suburban comfort, about how I got to California in the first place. And, eventually, had a moment of clarity.
I am on this bike, on my spirit quest, in the desert wilderness, I thought. This is where people have revelations. This is where I must learn.
Chapter 6
SOME BACKGROUND AS I LOSE MY MIND
(Baja and My Childhood)
As I cycled, Weston ahead of me, I stared at my tires. I worried they were deflating. But as they spun, I couldn’t make out if they were getting flatter. My eyes played tricks on me. Too much movement, and you can’t see minor changes. Until it’s too late.
I had changed in little bits my whole life. Never all at once. I thought about growing up, about what got me to California, about my mom, my faith. Weston was far enough ahead of me. Some absurd notion of him overhearing my thoughts was quieted by his distance.
My mind left the desert. It reached all the way back. For comfort and understanding.
* * *
—
I GREW UP IN Nashville, Tennessee, a place with almost more churches than houses. I realized I was gay at twelve years old. At least, that was when I discovered there was a word for it.
In third grade, I guess I was eight, I learned something was off. I was sitting on the school bus one day, all the way in the back, and the fifth graders in the next row were laughing and talking about something called a “boner.” They were huddled three in the seat and laughing. Gregarious and friendly as a kid, I leaned in to their hushed conversation and spoke up: “What is a boner?” They cackled at my question and, excited, turned to me. “It’s when your penis gets bigger.” I exclaimed, “Oh my gosh, I get those, too!” I was so excited to share something with the older kids. They said, “Yeah, so what makes you get them?”
“I do from my dad’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit magazine,” one kid said.
“I do from magazines, too. Girls in bikinis,” another kid said. I thought I was getting the picture. Yes, I know exactly when they happen. They asked me, “What makes you get a boner?” I blurted out with joy and zero hesitation, “Body builder guys on ESPN!”
They pulled their heads back like confused birds and furrowed their brows for what felt like a minute, but must’ve been two seconds, and then burst into laughter. “That is so weird!” They laughed and laughed. They never called me “gay” or “fag,” they didn’t call me anything. They just laughed and then turned back to their own conversation. I think I laughed, too. I can picture myself, my eyes panicked, my mouth pushing out a laugh. I didn’t talk about it again.
Nashville in the nineties was a tricky place to be gay. Evangelical Christianity was the dominant culture, although it was so insular and convinced of its rightness that it didn’t see itself as a culture. It saw itself as normal, the way things were. I knew my desires were weird, but I didn’t know they were gay. I didn’t know the word. I’m sure I heard sermons and saw things on television about it, but it went right over my head. It was such a private embarrassment, such a shadow I was afraid to examine, that I truly didn’t. I gave my stuffed animals girl names. I cuddled them and thought I was doing the right thing.
In church I would draw spaceships and battles and dragons and monsters on the bulletin board. Never looking up, never listening. If I made sound effects as the lasers hit an enemy spacecraft, my mom would shush me, or sometimes lean over and ask, “Why can’t you draw something nicer than demons?” I didn’t have a good answer.
In fourth grade my friend Ryan slept over. He said, “Have you ever seen people having sex on TV? It’s like this—” He crawled on top of me, both of us in our pajamas, and wiggled around. Something like butterflies and fireflies and the thrill of the roller-coaster drop rushed through me. I loved his weight on me. He laughed as he crawled off. “Can you do that again? That was so funny,” I said. He did it again. I may have asked for a third go-around.
I discovered my “condition” had a name when I changed schools in seventh grade. The new school brought new faces and new boys. I noticed their butts in their khakis, and I noticed that I noticed. Then, on some television show, I heard someone talking about being “gay,” and the whole universe rushed through my mind at once. I thought back on everything I’d heard in church, and realized I was the thing they had warned against. I was immoral and bad.
This is a wild thing to conclude as a kid. It’s not like the moral lessons everyone learns in the course of growing up—like when you call someone a name, see them get hurt, and your conscience teaches you the power of words. Those lessons sting then move you to better behavior. This revelation was different. I hadn’t done something bad. I was something bad. The only you that you know—everything you’re becoming—is bad, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s a horrible and complicated headspace to grow up in. (This, in my opinion, is why so many gay people turn to art, music, fashion, or comedy. As the world around them grows hostile, their spirit becomes obsessed with the meaning of it all. Straight people, finding the world designed to suit them, don’t need to explore its meaning in quite the same way. But gay people don’t have that luxury. We must study it, dissect it, reject
it, or reshape it. We do this with the thing that was rejected: our heart.)
When I realized this in seventh grade, I decided that it must be a phase and that I would never speak of it. In that moment, I traded total honest self-expression for observation, for social anthropology. What I mean is, I knew I couldn’t be myself, so I had to watch and figure out how to be. On my first day at the new school, a kid picked on me. My voice was too high, and he said that I was a girl. I was so angry at him. His name was Timothy Rogers. (You always remember moments like these, the kind that put into words some private fear, and the full name of the person who made you feel that way.) I remember standing in the hall, in one of those zoom-out sequences from a John Hughes movie, and seeing an angel on one shoulder and a demon on the other. The demon said, “Just call him out, yell at him, hate him, be mean, scare him. You’re bad now, you’re a bad person, embrace it…” But the angel said, “He doesn’t know you. You’re a nice guy. Make him see that there is no reason to be mean to you, because you are a good person.”
I know I just said that I felt bad for my feelings, that my desires made me bad. But therein lies the war I fought inside me. I was told that I was bad, but I felt like a good kid. I didn’t feel the sin in me, I just recognized that I was supposed to. Existing in this tension became my normal. So it came down to feeling. I am not mean, I said to myself, so being mean will be acting, and acting makes me tired. So I decided to win Timothy over by being friendly. I decided to be a nice person because it felt easier.
Between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, I got good at fending off the insults of other people with my sense of humor. I could cut someone off before they’d finished their basic joke about my voice, my limp wrists, or my hands waving in the air. I’d have their friends cackling. I remember a big kid named Geoff Warner stood over me in eighth grade and said, “You’re a faggot.” In retrospect, I kind of like the way kids insult one another. There is rarely any cleverness. Just raw reportage. I think I shot back something existential like, “Well, that came out of nowhere. Yes, I know I talk like a girl. But girls love it. I speak their secret language. All I know is that all the cheerleaders like me, and I’m going to Meredith’s birthday party on Saturday. If you were nicer, you would be, too.” That’s probably revisionist history, but I just remember him being surprised by my answer. From then on, I beat them to the punch. I made fun of myself. I mocked my own voice. I exaggerated my silliness to show that I did it on purpose.
To Shake the Sleeping Self Page 10
