“Gus. Gus, it’s illegal to text and drive,” I mumbled, terrified.
“Dude. I am not texting. I am using maps! Chill!”
“If we get pulled over by the cops, this jig is done, man. Cops will call our parents. We’ll get sent home or to jail or to juvie,” I said.
“You have no idea about how things work, do you, Felton?”
“No.”
Gus threw the phone onto my lap. “Okay. You guide me in. When we get close to downtown, we have to slide over to 65. The Basement’s off 65.”
“I seriously don’t want to go to a bar, man.” I said.
“Guide me in…”
Nashville is pretty big, Aleah. Have you ever been there? It’s kind of hilly and lush green, and it has lots of lights that were just beginning to go on as 9 p.m. sunset faded into 10 p.m. night, but I guided us in just fine, perfectly, because I’m not stupid.
Actually, at that point 65 and 24 were the same interstate and then 65 split to the right, so, boom, we just did that, followed 65. Then we crossed a river where you could see the lights of the city reflected and it was really, really beautiful. Clouds gone, sky dark purple, neon reflections…
“Eyes on the map, man! I need guidance!” Gus shouted.
Nashville is so good-looking, though, that I had to keep looking around. “Is there a university here? Is there a football team?”
“Vanderbilt. Ever heard of it?” Gus asked.
Just then we passed by signs for Vanderbilt University. “I think I might come here. I think this might be my destiny. Freaking Nashville. We’re in Nashville, man!”
“You’re star-crossed, brother. It’s just a big city in the dark.”
“You mind? Will you take this exit and head over to the campus?”
“Yes, you fool. Please. I love Hazard Mountain.”
So, we didn’t go to Vanderbilt, but I was pretty sure for the next ten minutes that Nashville was the place for me, Aleah. Maybe it still is? You could play your piano in a country band.
Gus rolled down his window, so hot, wet air streamed in over the top of the air-conditioning. It felt amazing. “I love Nashville, man.” I rolled my window down too, and that Southland air just swept in. (Funny how I don’t love that air right now.)
Even though I was staring around at everything, I did manage to guide us off the loop that circles the downtown and guide us farther south a little bit until we came to the right exit. And, in like a minute, we pulled up to a crowded parking lot in front of this brick house-like thing housing a music shop. A giant wad of Maddie-and-Gus-looking people (tight pants and weird hair with the sides all buzzed up or hair wads and plaid shirts and big glasses and crap) stood around in the front, all of them smoking and staring at each other.
“The Basement is in the basement of this place,” Gus said.
We found parking around the corner, and I started to sweat like the total gorilla I am. “What are we doing? This is a bar. Did you see how old everybody looks?”
“Yeah, they look twenty. Totally ancient.”
“Are you related to them? They all look like you.”
“Ha. Good taste transcends borders, my man.”
“Wait. Are we sleeping here? What do we…”
“We can sleep in that park.” Gus pointed. Across the street there were some lit basketball courts with some dudes shooting hoops and a stretch of dark green behind it.
“Dude. I am not sleeping in a park.”
“Just kidding. Let’s go. Holy shit, I hope we can get in.”
Yeah, holy shit, did I hope we wouldn’t, Aleah.
Whereas my size and general bigness and jockiness seemed to make the “redneckers” of our nation’s gas stations look away from me, something about my presence here among the young Gus-likes of our nation had the opposite effect. As Gus and I waded through the crowd of smokers in their tight pants, whispers arose, eyeballs fixated upon me, inaudible aspersions were cast (people called me names, probably gorilla, jockstrap, monkey, honky, etc., although I couldn’t hear), and the Maddie-like girls all covered their mouths and giggled.
“Looks like a crew of angry librarians, huh?” Gus leaned to me and whispered.
That made me laugh. It did. Yes, all these mean girls looked vaguely like librarians.
“Makes me very hot,” Gus whispered.
There was a short line actually waiting to get in. When we got to the front, Gus shouted, “Hazard’s not sold out?” at the very fat, totally bald dude with the very menacing long goatee and pierced tattooed crap everywhere on his face and arms.
“No,” the bald man said. “ID.”
Gus whipped out his fake, gave the dude money, then walked in.
“Hey!” I called after him.
He backed up. “Oh. Right. Sir, my friend here is from the Czech Republic and he doesn’t speak any English, so he had no idea he needed to bring his passport down from the hotel. We’d certainly be pleased if you would go ahead and show some mercy to him. He’s a great fan of Hazard Mountain, and this is his only opportunity to see them before he has to…”
The bald man turned to me and said, “Go home.”
“Qué?” I asked. (This is Spanish, by the way, and not Czech as far as I know.)
“No ID, you’re shit out of luck, Vaclav,” the bald man said.
“Look how big he is! He’s on the Czech national tennis team!”
“I don’t give a damn how big he is. There are ten-year-olds that big. You want me to let in a ten-year-old?” he spat at Gus. He turned back to me and said, “Go home, Vaclav.”
“Aw, crap,” I said.
“That Czech?” The bald man asked.
Gus paused, shrugged, mouthed Sorry, and then dove into the basement, leaving me there.
I stood for another second, sort of waiting for Gus to bounce back out, tell me he was joking or whatever, until Fat Baldicus said, “Move, kid. You’re holding up the line.”
Let me pause here to say something, Aleah: This situation is proof that Gus can be a huge, gigantic asswipe. Am I right?
What was I supposed to do?
I turned and walked slowly back toward the car, except I didn’t have a key because my “best friend” took it with him into a bar.
I waded through the Gus-like people who stared and tittered, and I thought, I wouldn’t come to this crap town for college if you paid me a million dollars.
According to my phone, which was totally low on battery, it was 10:12 p.m. Hazard Mountain was supposed to play at 11 p.m. That meant I had like fourteen years to kill on the mean streets. I tried calling Gus to set up a plan, but he didn’t answer his phone, which is also not nice. So, I went over to the park to watch the dudes shoot hoops.
Think of me out there, Aleah. Czech dude named Vaclav. Watching dudes play basketball for no apparent reason.
Cursed. Czech. Dude.
I am simply cursed. I’m on the road to nowhere.
• • •
I don’t want to type anymore. I am so tired.
August 16th, 9:20 p.m.
Orangeburg, South Carolina
We just stopped for like ever in a place called Orangeburg, South Carolina. I ate a chicken sandwich. Zombie Girl, Renee, thinks I’m too negative. I’m not the one wearing all the black, I pointed out to her.
While she stood outside the bus smoking cigarettes (it’s like everyone I meet has forgotten how bad cigarettes are for you), I told her about Nashville, and she asked, “What do you have to complain about? I have friends who sleep in boxes. You played Frisbee.”
Do you think she really has friends who sleep in boxes?
The truth: Nashville, after I got away from Gus, was actually fun, Aleah. Actually sort of great. Ultimate Frisbee is sort of who I am. Motion.
If you’re standing around a basketball court staring at people playing basketball, which was what I was doing after I left the bar, either they’re going to invite you to play or they’re going to start staring back at you, and generally not in a friendly way.
The latter was the case in Nashville. The longer I stood there, the longer the six guys playing took to get the ball in play. They shuffled their feet. They looked over, one by one. Eventually, they were mumbling at each other and turning around en masse to look at me. So, I walked off. One of them shouted, “See yaaaaa,” as I headed up the street.
If I could’ve gotten in the car, maybe I would’ve changed out of my jeans and done some running. No keys. I looked at that great stretch of grass to my left and thought, Take off your pants. Nobody will notice you’re in your boxers. Do something…I couldn’t get myself to pull my pants off. I’ve done that in the country (spring air in boxer peephole).
Not in Nashville. Someone would actually see me stripping down.
Oh yes, I cursed Gus’s jerk-off name and wished him the worst time of his life in that terrible bar.
To kill time, I walked up around this giant sewer-treatment-looking place, then took a left onto another street that was lined on one side with pretty thick woods.
Big woods right there in the middle of the city, pretty cool.
All I’ve ever heard about Nashville is that it has a bunch of country music stuck in it someplace. I’m not a big a fan of that. (Grandma Berba is, by the way.) Anyway, who knew there were Nashville city forests and Nashville people with Gus-like hair wads and basement rock music venues that discriminate against big, young Czechs named Vaclav?
At the end of the city forest, houses started on one side, and the other side opened up into a gigantic park, even bigger than the one by the Basement. This park had all kinds of lit spaces. I was sort of drawn to it—like a mayfly to a purple bug zapper, I suppose. Rose Park.
People were playing tennis on weird-surfaced courts that didn’t look like Bluffton’s cement courts. Sort of rubbery or clayey or something. And, there was a huge pile of people watching teams in uniforms play baseball on a pretty big field with a fence that had to be close to 400 feet out. These dudes could seriously play too. I saw a couple of guys absolutely jack the ball.
And then there was an odd spectacle that really drew me to it. Something magical. Something I’ve never seen exactly (although sort of in a flimsy Bluffton way). On the outfield of a smaller baseball diamond that wasn’t in use, these hippie-looking people had set out traffic cones and they were sort of playing football or soccer except with a Frisbee.
Deep in my mind’s terrible recesses, I vaguely remembered having seen Bluffton college kids playing this game too, but it was from when I was younger and couldn’t have given two shakes of the shit pot about any sport.
It was seriously freaking incredible, though. The red disc hung in the air and then some hippie dude would explode from the ground and sail into the sky and grab it down and immediately whip it sidearm up the field so that some sports-bra hippie girl with pigtails could catch up to it and find herself in the end zone where she’d scream, “Yeeeaaahh, boyeee! That’s it! That’s it!” They were Southern sounding and muscly and excellent, so much better than the Gus-ly smoker people in those tight pants.
I was so psyched about this game that I barely knew what I was doing. I almost wandered right onto the field but figured out kind of where the sidelines were, even though there was no chalk. I watched with my mouth open, I’m sure, for like twenty minutes.
Then the magic really happened. A big guy with no shirt on and a red bandanna tied around his hippie head said, “I gotta run. My kids’ll be up at the ass cracker, and I’m on duty tomorrow.” Ass cracker! That’s what I call dawn too! “Sorry to break it up.”
Then someone pointed at me and the hippie-bandanna-dad man said, “You wanna jump in here, bud?”
I didn’t even think. I was all like, “Uh-huh.”
The hippie sports-bra girl who kept outrunning everybody said, “You know how to play?”
“Not exactly.”
“Main thing: you can’t run when you have the disc. You gotta stay put and throw it. And, if the disc hits the ground, it’s the other team’s, okay?”
“I can intercept, though?” I asked.
“’Course you can, boy!” a chubbier guy in a cutoff sweatshirt shouted at me. He had a blond Jewfro, which made me really like him.
And so I played. At first not that well, especially because I didn’t really know how to wing a Frisbee sidearm. (I know now, I’ll tell you that, because I got a big fat disc when I got home and started winging it around my yard.) When I’d catch it, I’d often blow it for my team because I couldn’t get it fast up to the next player.
Then I started seeing crap develop in front of me, just like in football, and I started streaking out and taking the Frisbee out of the air and dumping it off to teammates and shooting down the field and jumping high off the ground to haul in big-time scores.
Someone said, “Intensity just got turned up a notch, hey?”
Another said, “Nice, man. Nice. You’re a natural!”
Another said, “You play in the NBA or something, kid?”
I just said, “No. This game is awesome.”
Best of all, there wasn’t rest like there is in between plays in football, so I could just run and run and run—and I did run and run and run until an older guy wearing longer shorts said, “Too much youth talent on this field for me. I gotta call it or I’m gonna puke biscuits.”
The guy with the blond Jewfro said, “Beers, anyone?”
Several raised their hands.
“You’re a bit fresh for the bar scene, I imagine, aren’t you, boy?” he asked me.
“I’m sixteen.”
Then that fast hippie girl just bolted over to me. “You’re sixteen? How is that possible? You’re dang near the fastest mother I’ve ever seen in real life. Jesus, kid.”
I nodded and totally blushed.
“You big-time?” she asked.
“Football and track,” I said.
“Beautiful,” she said. “I did field hockey at Vandy.”
“Cool,” I said. I blushed a hell of a lot more.
What a great night. I seriously might move to Nashville and just play Ultimate Frisbee for the rest of time. It’s like distilled Felton poured into a game. I could be totally happy just flinging a disc and living among those country-sounding hippies. Listen to me, Aleah. I, Felton Reinstein, don’t enjoy racing track anymore…I’m not sure I can enjoy football with everyone staring at me, but I seriously wanted roll all over the ground and make out with the hippie field-hockey girl to celebrate, because I was so happy playing Frisbee. It’s weird.
I don’t really mean make out. Just celebrate.
I said good-byes and walked off back toward the bar.
If I’d had a scissors, I would’ve cut my pants off right there because I was so damn sweaty and gross.
My phone had gone dead while we played, so I had no idea what the time was. But when I got back to the car, Gus was in there and he started honking the horn and he rolled down the window, and he flipped me off and screamed, “Where the hell have you been?”
“Playing some Frisbee.” I walked up and pulled off my shirt and threw it in the backseat.
“What the hell?” he shouted.
“Yeah, I found this crew of running hippies. Unbelievable, huh?”
“Unreal, man.” Gus glowered.
“Good show?” I asked, getting in.
“I only watched the first set—which was awesome by the way—because I felt sorry for you having to sit out here on the car waiting. Of course you weren’t here. Why didn’t you answer your phone, Felton?”
“I called you before it went dead
, but you didn’t answer.”
“Whatever. We have to find some place to sleep.”
“You ever play Ultimate Frisbee?” I asked as he pulled out of the parking space and up to Eighth Avenue.
“Jesus, Felton. Shut up.”
“It’s pretty awesome.”
“You stink,” Gus said. “Literally smell terrible.”
“Not as bad as your cigarettes.”
“Shut up.”
“Is there such a thing as professional Frisbee?” I asked.
Gus didn’t answer and then he drove way too fast all over the place.
I felt bad, but I wasn’t sure why. (I guess I figured it out soon enough.)
• • •
Zombie Renee just told me, “You had a really fine time in Nashville. Your friend sounds like the problem.”
I don’t know about that.
No, that’s not really true.
Oh man. I have to do it. I’m going back to the fugly, smelly, poo-crusted bus bathroom, Aleah. So freaking gross.
August 16th, 11:10 p.m.
Beaufort, South Carolina
It’s dark as Bluffton out here, Aleah. The bus went way off the interstate and then we crossed a bunch of water. I have no idea where the hell we are, but Zombie Renee said Beaufort, South Carolina, is close to the ocean. She told me I’m a complicated person too. She wanted to know why Gus wasn’t the jerk for going into that bar.
“Our history,” is what I told her.
Gus and I stayed pretty close to Nashville that night, at a place called Murfreesboro. (I like that name—Murrrrrfrrrrreeeeesborrrroooo.) We stayed in a Howard Johnson Express, “Because you’re a total Johnson,” Gus said.
“Wisconsin’s biggest Johnson,” I said.
“Not funny,” he said.
I thought it was funny.
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