Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey

by Colby Buzzell

  He looked me up and down and asked where I was from. Unimpressed, he asked if I had ever done any time in prison. “I was in the army for a couple years,” was my answer, and an enormous smile appeared as he told me that he had been a marine for eight years, afterward living on the streets for nine, and loved every minute of both. He loved hopping trains and even had a painting of a train up in his room, he loved it that much.

  In front of the hotel was a bike rack filled with shitty bikes, many of which I assume belong to folks who have received one too many DUIs. Chuck told me a story of something that happened a couple nights before. He was outside smoking, where the two of us were now, and a drunk he knows from the neighborhood came along and started trying to steal one of the bikes. Now, he would have, except that he was so drunk off his ass that he kept on falling down to the ground every time he tried to pedal away. So Chuck called the cops, and they came on down and arrested the guy. While the guy was cuffed and stuffed in the back seat of the police car, he yelled at Chuck that when he got released the next day from jail, he was going to find him and stab him. Since the guy was threatening Chuck, the cops asked him if he wanted to press charges. Chuck proudly told me that he told the cops, “I’ve lived here at this hotel for years. If the worst thing that ever happened to me was somebody stabbing me, well then, I’m a pretty fucking lucky guy.”

  Work the next day started at 9:00 a.m. At 9:30 a.m., Tyrone pulled a pipe out from his jeans pocket, and a bunch of the guys all smoked marijuana. At 10:30 a.m., the boss arrived on the job site with an eighteen-pack of cheap beer. At 11:30 a.m., during a break, Dave pulled out a roach from his jeans pocket and passed that around. At 12:30 p.m. we were already out of beer, and since we had been drinking on empty stomachs, we all had nice beer buzzes going . . . so the boss took off to go pick up another eighteen-pack for us to consume. At 1:30 p.m., with nearly half the second eighteen-pack already gone, we were all sitting around on the porch of a partially boarded-up house, drinking what was left of the beers. Tyrone again pulled out his pipe and passed that around, asking why I didn’t smoke. I told him I usually did, but I wasn’t going to today because I’d driven to work. “Where’s your ride at?” It was parked down the street under a huge tree for shade, and when I turned and pointed to it, he tapped his boss and said, “I told you!”

  Told him what? He explained that the previous night while they were out drinking, he told our boss that I had some 1950s greaser thing going on with me, and that he could tell I was the kind of person who would be into older cars like that. I loathe being categorized. Must be the tattoos.

  At around 4:30 p.m., the boss signed us out, logging 5:00 p.m. on our time cards. Tyrone was nearly passed out, lying on the ground like a beached whale. Dave and I headed back to the day labor agency. “Man, I’m fucking ripped,” he said. He gave me some advice, which was not to talk too much when we got back, since if we did, they would smell the alcohol on our breath—and that I should let him do all the talking. When we got there I followed his instructions, and the only talking I did was stating my preference for being paid in cash.

  I woke up in the morning the same way I had the past several days since working this job—hung over, with every single muscle in my body aching. I’m in my early thirties, in fairly decent shape, having worked out in the local YMCA every day for several months prior to this trip. Long hours in the driver’s seat, gas station food, empty calories from beer and whiskey, had all contributed to the extra inch or two on my waistline and overall poor health at this point. I really did not want to go to work that day, but since Dave and I had agreed to work, and he was relying on me for a ride, I had to go. After a cold shower, I left the hotel, picked up a cup of coffee, and left to get Dave. Since it was Sunday, the office would be closed, but he would be waiting for me there.

  It was Sunday, and early, so I assumed I’d be sharing the road with people on their way to church, since anybody who’d gone out drinking last night would probably still be in bed. I parked the car in front of the labor agency, sipping coffee, waiting for Dave. Finally, at 8:15 a.m., he showed up wearing his brown work boots, an old sun-faded Budweiser cap, blue jeans, and today a T-shirt with a huge rainbow trout on it. He also had a cup of gas station coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other. He got in my car, and we set off on our way. Taking a sip from his coffee, I could tell by the expression on his face that it did not taste good today, and he said, “This coffee ain’t cutting it for me this morning. You want to go to a bar and grab a couple beers before work?” I said sure, and when I asked where to, he guided me to the local VFW.

  I don’t think you necessarily have to be a veteran of a foreign war to drink at a VFW bar; all you need to be is an alcoholic. Dave had been in the army, enlisting after Vietnam, so he was a veteran, but not a veteran of a foreign war. Even though I was late on my membership fees, I am a proud card-carrying member of the VFW. I’m noticing that every midsize town has a VFW. You can hopscotch across this great country of ours, and never have to drink alone.

  When we got to the VFW, the back parking lot was completely full. At 8:25 a.m., every single bar stool was taken, so we ordered a couple tall Bud Lights, bringing them out to the back patio, which was also a smoking section. I’m super paranoid about drunk driving, so I told myself that I would only drink half a beer, and then after that guzzle some coffee to cover up the smell in case I got pulled over. When my beer was empty, I looked over at Dave, and his beer was empty, too.

  “Fuck it.” He grimaced. “Do you really want to work today?” I didn’t, and I could tell he didn’t either. “No,” I said. “I’m way too beat.”

  “Me, too. Fuck it, it’s bullshit, we ain’t getting paid shit. It’s Sunday, and I’m a goddamn union worker, busting my ass all day long and then coming into the office afterward and ain’t getting paid shit for it. Fuck ’em!” I nodded my head in agreement. “Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll call them up and tell them that after you picked me up this morning we drove . . . all the way to Colorado . . . to buy lottery tickets! And the fucking car broke down! And we’re stuck!”

  Maybe he was still drunk from the night before. “You think they’ll believe that?”

  “Yeah! Check it out, Colorado is only about seven miles away, and you can’t buy lottery tickets in Wyoming! The only place you can get ’em around here is Colorado!”

  This guy was fucking awesome. Seriously, Dave was great. I could never have made that shit up. So I picked up the next round while he pulled out his cell phone to leave a message telling them that we were broken down somewhere in Colorado purchasing lottery tickets at eight fucking thirty in the morning on a Sunday. On my way to the bar, I stopped by the bathroom to take a piss and noticed two jittery Mexicans, one in full cowboy garb, the other busy taking a long piss in a urinal. I could hear a long “sniff” going on from the stall next to me.

  Back where Dave was, I sat around and chatted with a guy who rolled up to the VFW on his mountain bike. He said that his profession was freelance tree cutter. We talked shop for a bit. I told him about my job, he told me about his, and I noticed that several of the discussions around me were about DUIs. I was shocked to find that almost everyone around me had at least one or two stories, many times beginning with, “My first DUI, I was . . .” I had suspected that was why a lot of them rolled up to the VFW on bicycles. This made me nervous again, and after about five or six beers each, I thought it’d be better for me to grab a bite to eat. I stepped downstairs, where they served breakfast, and purchased a breakfast burrito with a side of hash browns for six bucks. I scarfed that down, and went back up to the smoking section. I told Dave that I was exhausted and was going to go home to take a nap—if he needed a ride, I’d give him one. He borrowed ten bucks from a friend of his, and on the way to his motel—taking side streets, since there’d probably be fewer cops—he asked if I could do him a huge favor and pull into a liquor store real quick. I said sure, and while I waited f
or him in the car, three guys sitting outside the store drinking and smoking stared long and hard at me. Finally, one of them, a guy wearing a mesh hat yelled out, “What engine you got in there?” I got out of the car, motioned them over, and lifted up the hood, showing them the engine, and we talked cars for a bit. When Dave showed back up with a bottle in a brown paper sack, he told them, “You gotta love them California cars, huh?”

  When I dropped Dave off at his motel, he told me that on Monday, when I showed back up to work, I should give him my number, so that we could hang out more often. I told him sure thing.

  The next morning, I walked over to Room 101 and knocked on the door. Joe answered, and I told him that I was leaving. Joe handed my $5 deposit back. “Where you off to next?” he asked.

  “Denver.”

  Chapter Seven

  Life After Last Call

  “There’s no place like home.”

  DOROTHY,

  The Wizard of Oz

  He started off by asking me three questions:

  “Do you have a valid ID?”

  “Do you have any warrants out for your arrest?”

  “Are you a registered sex offender?”

  I answered no to two out of the three, handing over my driver’s license. He handed me some paperwork to fill out, which I did on a chair in the lobby next to half a dozen garbage bags filled with clothes. He told me I could have whatever I wanted out of those bags. It was clothing from people who had moved out of the hotel without paying or saying good-bye, which happens a lot. “People just leave,” he told me. “You can sometimes find some good stuff.” I looked through a couple of the bags to see if there was anything in them that I could possibly sell over at Buffalo Exchange, which I saw was a couple blocks away; I could use the money for gas. There wasn’t anything worth taking, or selling, or even donating.

  After handing him $33 for the room, I was given keys and a new location to call home. The room was a bit more than I had been paying in Cheyenne, but this was Denver, a city with a slightly higher cost of living than the cities I had been visiting. The room was definitely bigger, equipped with a small television, a chair, and a table with, of course, an ashtray. Like Cheyenne, no bathroom or shower; those were communal and located somewhere down the hall. No art was hung on the walls.

  There was also something missing. This hotel felt as if there was no soul; it felt dead. It didn’t feel as lively as the hotel in Cheyenne, and I got the impression that it was just another building with rooms with beds in them, nothing more. While sitting on the bed, I wondered what I should do. I looked out the window, and across the street was a bar. The patrons all appeared to be young and well-dressed. It was like every other bar, in every other city, scattered across the country.

  Somebody dropped a bottle, it smashed on the ground. People reacted by applauding and cheering.

  I made my way over to my bed, a quick prayer to the Lord Almighty that the bed I rest upon tonight be minus bedbugs. Closing my eyes, I went to sleep.

  The next morning, I made my way to the airport. After dropping the mistress off over in long-term parking, complete with farewell kiss good-bye, I stepped onto a white shuttle van. The driver asked me what airline. I told him United. He closed the door behind me, I took a seat. Staring out the window, I watched as the driver navigated through the lot. I wondered what the chances were of my plane crashing on the way to my destination.

  Chapter Eight

  The North Will Rise Again

  “If you speak of the tiger, it will come.”

  KOREAN PROVERB

  While on this adventure, we had agreed that my wife would take our newborn son back to where she had grown up in southern Ohio, where her parents would be able to spend time with him and help her through his first few months. Now that I’d been gone for a while, it was clear she needed me, and I wanted to see my son.

  When I arrived, not only did she look just as dangerously beautiful as before, but I noticed immediately that my wife had changed, dramatically. She seemed numb, thousand-yard stare, thick bags under her eyes. She seemed somewhere else, and it didn’t take me long to find out why. That first night was spent with my son waking screaming, crying, every thirty minutes. She breastfed him, handing him off for a diaper change as needed. If he was still screaming postmeal, my job was either to rock him to sleep sitting in the rocking chair or strap him into a BabyBjörn, walking him around the room until he was able to calm down. Now, it’s not that easy. Just because he falls asleep, or even stops crying, doesn’t mean he’s going to stay that way. You have to continue rocking or walking him for a good thirty minutes until he’s pretty much in a coma, and then, gently, like defusing an IED, slowly place him back into bed. If he wakes up at any point in this process, you have to start over, completely. In those rare times he did end up asleep, it wasn’t long before he would wake up, ready to start the entire cycle all over again. That first night, I would be surprised if I had slept two hours total.

  My wife likes to cook, that’s her thing. She had planned to cook up an Italian dinner, needing some prosciutto for the particular dish she had in mind. We drove a good thirty minutes away to one of the only Italian stores in the area, only to find out that they didn’t have any. Frustrated, my wife told me that this was why she could never live here. Back in San Francisco, you could find this easily. Here, in southern Ohio, you can’t find shit.

  So on the way back we decided to stop by Walmart, compromising on our dinner ingredients. In the parking lot, I noticed that the vehicle parked next to us had two baby seats in the back. That’s just insane to me, having one kid right after the other. I put my son into the BabyBjörn, and as we made our way to the entrance, I saw a teenage couple, child in tow. I asked my wife if she thought that was their kid, and she told me that people around there like to have kids really young. Once inside, we passed another teenage couple who had two kids with them. What was strange to me was that me and my wife, both in our thirties, probably looked like the old couple who decided to have kids way later on in life. Back in San Francisco, we look like the misfits having kids way too early.

  For whatever reason, I am intrigued by Walmart. I understand the attraction to a large superstore, I do—shoppers can rely on both diversity and availability of product, and can count on a certain level of service, these things not varying all too much across the country other than satisfying certain regional expectations. Like whole aisles of tortillas in California. Personally, I prefer to support mom-and-pop operations, but that’s sometimes hard when you don’t know where to find them, or just need to know that when you walk in, there will be the opportunity to buy not only a cooler, ice, and beer, but toothpaste and diapers. I understand why America shops here—it’s easy.

  I’ve noticed this in other Walmarts, too, but if you look at their salad dressing selection, the fat-free or low-fat dressing always seems to be fully stocked, like nobody has ever touched them. The full-flavor, full-calorie, full-fat salad dressing is always more picked over. As I was pointing this out to my wife, a hefty lady wearing sweats pulled her cart up and grabbed two large containers of regular ranch dressing. None of the items in her cart gave any indication that she was on any particular diet. Walmart gives the option of fat-free, low-fat food, but if the consumer chooses not to purchase it, whose fault is that?

  As my wife and I were discussing that over by the produce section, she spotted her prosciutto. Walmart had it.

  Summer in Middle America means county fair season, and what I’ve come to find is that these fairs are the very last place in the world you’ll want to go if you’re on a diet. Trying to recover from some of the damage I’d done the past few weeks traveling, I was unable to eat any of the food that they were selling, since they all seemed to be in the million-calories-per-serving category. Figuring that despite its sugar content it was still a better choice than a couple of deep-fried Oreos, I bought some lemonade off a bl
ack man working a stand. I looked around and realized that he was the only black man there, and that everybody else, except me, was white. We were the only minority “brothers” at the county fair.

  My wife reminded me, again, that I’m not a “brother,” and that this was also one of the reasons she had left home as soon as she could, and why she could never move back, nor ever choose to raise children here. There is no diversity. Everybody is white. She had a point, but the trade-off, I told her, was that if I was a kid, I would have loved this county fair. There were farm animals all over the place, a roller coaster, junk food, and everyone looked like they were really enjoying themselves. We have county fairs in California, but there was something different about the vibe here, only miles from West Virginia.

  Passing by a souvenir stand, I noticed a cool mesh cap with the Confederate flag embroidered on the front of it. I noticed several other people at the county fair had on Confederate flag hats and T-shirts, and I thought it was kind of odd that people here in Ohio were wearing them, since the last time I checked, Ohio is a little north to be considered the South. I picked up one of the hats, looked at the label—“Made in China”—and put it on to see how it fit. While I was looking in the mirror, my wife, who was checking out all the T-shirts on the wall with silk-screened deer, turned around in horror as she saw what I was wearing. She immediately told me to take it off and put it back on the rack.

  “Why? It’s cool there, and the people are nice. What’s wrong with a half-Asian combat veteran from California wearing a Confederate flag mesh cap? I like the South.”

  She then explained to me that the Confederate flag means something entirely different around these parts, that it’s a redneck thing and that the people here who wear Confederate flag merchandise made in China wear it for redneck pride, and that a lot of them have probably never been to the South, ever. “It’s a symbol of ignorance and racism,” she said.