She headed toward Indiana.
Chapter Thirteen
The day John chose for his walkout, he didn't wake up in the morning knowing that would be the day. Rather, he felt a twinge — 10:30A .M. in the Staples parking lot, while closing the door of his Saab under a rainless sky — and realized the time was now. His soul creaked just a bit, like a house shifting off its foundation just ever so. It felt to him like the moment once a year when he smelled the air and knew fall is here; or like the moment when a tamed animal bites its master's hand and reverts to the wild.
He shut the car door, and the annoying sonic blinks from inside stopped. Cindy and Krista had liquidated his chattels and were off once again to pursue their acting careers. He had $18.35 in his wallet, which he placed in the Muscular Dystrophy can by the cashier's till at Staples. He tucked his wallet, containing his driver's license, his credit cards, his various unmemorizable access code numbers, as well as home and studio security card swipes, discreetly inside a littered KFC box, which he dropped in a trash bin.
He was wearing a blue cotton button-down dress shirt, a previously unworn pair of cocoa («Never chocolate,» as twin Cindy had informed him) slacks and a pair of shiny black loafers Melody had given him on a distant birthday. He removed his wristwatch and placed it on a bus stop bench. He wore no jewelry.
He remembered his vision of Susan, its clarity and conviction. This reminded him of how he felt when he'd been called up onstage to receive his high school diploma. It had been years since he'd been sick or weak. Beneath his robe he was almost acrobatic with good health as members of the good-looking-girl-clique in the crowd behind him gave him cheeky squeals of reassurance that he was in fact a new person crossing a new line. He had the giddy sensation that came with knowing a part of his life was absolutely over and something assuredly more marvelous lay ahead.
He walked east, and an hour later was soaked in sweat.Food.
It was time to eat and rest. Some blocks ahead was a Burger King, and once inside, it dawned on John that he was moneyless, so he asked for and received a glass of water while he tried to make a dining decision. A quick glance at his reflection in a counterside mirror reminded him that he hadn't shaved that day, and was now entering that small pocket of time in which he would look raffish, and soon after that, unmedicated.
«Can I help you, sir?» asked the manager with an air of understaffedness.
«Not just yet. Thanks.» Staying any longer was pointless. In his enthusiasm to run away, he'd skipped over the subject of food, assuming that it would somehow just appear. Walking away from the restaurant's chilled cube of air, he couldn't help but notice the colorful composts of uneaten food that filled its numerous cans, and as he continued his eastward trek, he realized he'd have to quickly invent some sort of nutritious idea.
The sun peaked and quickly fell to the horizon. The thrumming of cars was constant. It grew dark. The neighborhoods he passed through were consistently deteriorating, and soon even the fast food and gas outlets vanished. He was sweaty and thirsty and knew that by now he must be looking rather strange. He wondered how long his $150 haircut would keep him looking like Joe Citizen. His stomach cramped with hunger and dehydration.
A mile farther, at a road junction he spotted a McDonald's. At least there he could shit and wash and devise a food plan. Knowing this, his steps resumed their earlier bounce, and in the McDonald's men's room he sploshed his deranged face with tap water and then entered the main dining area, occupied by a few seniors, three borderline homeless cases and a sullen clump of Asian teens busy flouting California's nonsmoking laws. The counter staff were almost medically, clinically bored, and listened to John's request for water as if he were a dial tone. But he received a glass of water, which bought him time, and then,eureka! — the teenagers took off, and in their wake left a Yosemite campground's worth of meal trash. Quickly, under the guise of muttering his moral outrage, he took the food trays and their remnants and stuck them into trash bins, carefully leaving behind the juiciest chunks of burgers, fries and nuggets, which he placed onto a paper place mat, folded up, and carried out of the restaurant like a disco purse.
Outside, he scoured the vicinity looking for a place to eat and chose a small concrete piling behind the restaurant, by some rangy oleander shrubs overlooking the dumpsters and utility hookups encased in wire fencing.
A helicopter flew overhead. He ate his food and then found a place to lie down, behind the oleanders, a spot free of urine, scraping together a pillow of bark chips that made his forearms itch. He smelled something oily. He felt the heartburnt wooziness of having taken the wrong carnival ride.
At midnight the McDonald's lights went off. John watched two staffers come out back, fill the dumpster with plump white bags, and lock up the caged area. Like a coyote, he caught himself looking for any stray bits of food they might have dropped. Before he fell asleep, he figured the night staff would still be sleeping when the morning employees arrived to open up, and so wouldn't recognize the mumbling transient with a Fred Flintstone five o'clock shadow.
John was a noble fool. His plan to careen without plans or schedules across the country was damned from the start. He was romantic and naïve and had made pathetically few plans. He thought some corny idea to shed the trappings of his life would deepen him, regenerate him — make him king of fast-food America and its endless paved web.
Each day John felt dirtier and more repulsive. He stank. He'd tried to wash his underwear in a gas-station sink using granulated pink industrial soap, and he'd put it out across the top of a fence to dry, but it had blown onto a mound of sawdust on the other side.
He learned how to avoid the police. He slept in hedges. He continued wandering east, neighborhood by neighborhood, out into the fringes of Los Angeles County. He came to hate dogs because they recognized him as a roamer and announced it with their barks.
He scraped together aluminum-can money to buy — and he laughed as he did so — bourbon — cheap booze! Nice and sweet, and just as delicious and unsophisticated as the first time he'd tried it in his teens.
In Fontana, a dead steel town sixty miles inland, he fulfilled Ivan's prophecy and stole laundry from a clothesline, a UPS delivery man's uniform which fit him surprisingly well. He scanned the house, and nobody was in. He jimmied the lock on a flimsy aftermarket side door. Inside, he showered, washed his hair, shaved and donned his new uniform. He bundled up his old clothing and wedged it between two plastic stacking chairs on the rear patio as he left.
The UPS uniform was his ticket to respectability. With it, he was able to go almost anywhere in public, regardless of hygiene, with almost no scrutiny. It made him appear casual, industrious, sober, a charmed messenger.
He made no friends, but to his surprise scored with a few women turned on by his UPS togs. He hated himself for having the experiences, not so much for their tawdriness, but because such flings felt as if they were against the rules — which made him suddenly realized he had rules, not something he'd expected. He felt moral, a distinctly new sensation. Maybe the road was changing him after all.
His first tryst was with a woman — twenty-nine? thirty-two? — tense as an overstretched guitar string. She was reading a copy of Architectural Digest in the BP gas-station convenience mart. They locked eyes.
John said, «I'd say the magazine started to go downhill when they shifted their focus from pure architecture to that of Homes of the Stars.»
And off they went to her place nearby. She was terrifying in her need, and bayed like a stampeding elk when she saw that John wasn't wearing underwear. That night was his first sleep on a mattress in weeks, but he was promptly booted out in the morning when she left for her job processing spreadsheets at a Dean Witter office.