by Green, John
“ONE MINUTE!” Lacey shouts, and I panic. I’m turning in circles, my eyes darting around the store, trying to remember what I’m forgetting. I glance down at my list. I seem to have everything, but I feel like there’s something important I’ve forgotten. Something. Come on, Jacobsen. Chips, candy, turkey-that-looks-like-ham, pbj, and—what? What are the other food groups? Meat, chips, candy, and, and, and, and cheese! “CRACKERS!” I say, much too loud, and then I dart to the crackers, grabbing cheese crackers and peanut butter crackers and some of Grandma’s peanut butter cookies for good measure, and then I run back and toss them across the counter. The woman has already bagged up four plastic bags of groceries. Almost a hundred dollars total, not even counting gas; I’ll be paying back Lacey’s parents all summer.
There’s only one moment of pause, and it’s after the woman behind the counter swipes Lacey’s BP card. I glance at my watch. We’re supposed to leave in twenty seconds. Finally, I hear the receipt printing. The woman tears it out of the machine, Lacey scribbles her name, and then Ben and I grab the bags and dash for the car. Radar revs the engine as if to say hustle, and we are running through the parking lot, Ben’s robe flowing in the wind so that he looks vaguely like a dark wizard, except that his pale skinny legs are visible, and his arms hug plastic bags. I can see the back of Lacey’s legs beneath her dress, her calves tight in midstride. I don’t know how I look, but I know how I feel: Young. Goofy. Infinite. I watch as Lacey and Ben pile in through the open sliding door. I follow, landing on plastic bags and Lacey’s torso. Radar guns the car as I slam the sliding door shut, and then he peels out of the parking lot, marking the first time in the long and storied history of the minivan that anyone anywhere has ever used one to burn rubber. Radar turns left onto the highway at a somewhat unsafe speed, and then merges back onto the interstate. We’re four seconds ahead of schedule. And just like with the NASCAR pit stops, we share high-fives and backslaps. We are well supplied. Ben has plenty of containers into which he can urinate. I have adequate beef jerky rations. Lacey has her Mentos. Radar and Ben have T-shirts to wear over their robes. The minivan has become a biosphere—give us gas, and we can keep going forever.
Hour Five
Okay, maybe we are not that well provisioned after all. In the rush of the moment, it turns out that Ben and I made some moderate (although not fatal) mistakes. With Radar alone up front, Ben and I sit in the first bench, unpacking each bag and handing the items to Lacey in the wayback. Lacey, in turn, is sorting items into piles based on an organizational schema only she understands.
“Why is the NyQuil not in the same pile as the NoDoz?” I ask. “Shouldn’t all the medicines be together?”
“Q. Sweetie. You’re a boy. You don’t know how to do these things. The NoDoz is with the chocolate and the Mountain Dew, because those things all contain caffeine and help you stay up. The NyQuil is with the beef jerky because eating meat makes you feel tired.”
“Fascinating,” I say. After I’ve handed Lacey the last of the food from my bags, Lacey asks, “Q, where is the food that is—you know—good?”
“Huh?”
Lacey produces a copy of the grocery list she wrote for me and reads from it. “Bananas. Apples. Dried cranberries. Raisins.”
“Oh.” I say. “Oh, right. The fourth food group wasn’t crackers.”
“Q!” she says, furious. “I can’t eat any of this!”
Ben puts a hand on her elbow. “Well, but you can eat Grandma’s cookies. They’re not bad for you. They were made by Grandma. Grandma wouldn’t hurt you.”
Lacey blows a strand of hair out of her face. She seems genuinely annoyed. “Plus,” I tell her, “there are GoFast bars. They’re fortified with vitamins!”
“Yeah, vitamins and like thirty grams of fat,” she says.
From the front Radar announces, “Don’t you go talking bad about GoFast bars. Do you want me to stop this car?”
“Whenever I eat a GoFast bar,” Ben says, “I’m always like, ‘So this is what blood tastes like to mosquitoes.’”
I half unwrap a fudge brownie GoFast bar and hold it in front of Lacey’s mouth. “Just smell it,” I say. “Smell the vitaminy deliciousness.”
“You’re going to make me fat.”
“Also zitty,” Ben said. “Don’t forget zitty.”
Lacey takes the bar from me and reluctantly bites into it. She has to close her eyes to hide the orgasmic pleasure inherent in GoFast-tasting. “Oh. My. God. That tastes like hope feels.”
Finally, we unpack the last bag. It contains two large T-shirts, which Radar and Ben are very excited about, because it means they can be guys-wearing-gigantic-shirts-over-silly-robes instead of just guys-wearing-silly-robes.
But when Ben unfurls the T-shirts, there are two small problems. First, it turns out that a large T-shirt in a Georgia gas station is not the same size as a large T-shirt at, say, Old Navy. The gas station shirt is gigantic—more garbage bag than shirt. It is smaller than the graduation robes, but not by much. But this problem rather pales in comparison to the other problem, which is that both T-shirts are embossed with huge Confederate flags. Printed over the flag are the words HERITAGE NOT HATE.
“Oh no you didn’t,” Radar says when I show him why we’re laughing. “Ben Starling, you better not have bought your token black friend a racist shirt.”
“I just grabbed the first shirts I saw, bro.”
“Don’t bro me right now,” Radar says, but he’s shaking his head and laughing. I hand him his shirt and he wiggles into it while driving with his knees. “I hope I get pulled over,” he says. “I’d like to see how the cop responds to a black man wearing a Confederate T-shirt over a black dress.”
Hour Six
For some reason, the stretch of I-95 just south of Florence, South Carolina, is the place to drive a car on a Friday evening. We get bogged down in traffic for several miles, and even though Radar is desperate to violate the speed limit, he’s lucky when he can go thirty. Radar and I sit up front, and we try to keep from worrying by playing a game we’ve just invented called That Guy Is a Gigolo. In the game, you imagine the lives of people in the cars around you.
We’re driving alongside a Hispanic woman in a beat-up old Toyota Corolla. I watch her through the early darkness. “Left her family to move here,” I say. “Illegal. Sends money back home on the third Tuesday of every month. She’s got two little kids—her husband is a migrant. He’s in Ohio right now—he only spends three or four months a year at home, but they still get along really well.”
Radar leans in front of me and glances over at her for half a second. “Christ, Q, it’s not so melodratragic as that. She’s a secretary at a law firm—look how she’s dressed. It has taken her five years, but she’s now close to getting a law degree of her own. And she doesn’t have kids, or a husband. She’s got a boyfriend, though. He’s a little flighty. Scared of commitment. White guy, a little nervous about the Jungle Fever angle of the whole thing.”
“She’s wearing a wedding ring,” I point out. In Radar’s defense, I’ve been able to stare at her. She is to my right, just below me. I can see through her tinted windows, and I watch as she sings along to some song, her unblinking eyes on the road. There are so many people. It is easy to forget how full the world is of people, full to bursting, and each of them imaginable and consistently misimagined. I feel like this is an important idea, one of those ideas that your brain must wrap itself around slowly, the way pythons eat, but before I can get any further, Radar speaks.
“She’s just wearing that so pervs like you don’t come on to her,” Radar explains.
“Maybe.” I smile, pick up the half-finished GoFast bar sitting on my lap, and take a bite. It’s quiet again for a while, and I am thinking about the way you can and cannot see people, about the tinted windows between me and this woman who is still driving right beside us, both of us in cars with all these windows and mirrors everywhere, as she crawls along with us on this packed highway. When Radar starts tal
king again, I realize that he has been thinking, too.
“The thing about That Guy Is a Gigolo,” Radar says, “I mean, the thing about it as a game, is that in the end it reveals a lot more about the person doing the imagining than it does about the person being imagined.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I was just thinking that.” And I can’t help but feel that Whitman, for all his blustering beauty, might have been just a bit too optimistic. We can hear others, and we can travel to them without moving, and we can imagine them, and we are all connected one to the other by a crazy root system like so many leaves of grass—but the game makes me wonder whether we can really ever fully become another.
Hour Seven
We finally pass a jackknifed truck and get back up to speed, but Radar calculates in his head that we’ll need to average seventy-seven from here to Agloe. It has been one entire hour since Ben announced that he needed to pee, and the reason for this is simple: he is sleeping. At six o’clock exactly, he took NyQuil. He lay down in the wayback, and then Lacey and I strapped both seat belts around him. This made him even more uncomfortable, but 1. It was for his own good, and 2. We all knew that in twenty minutes, no discomfort would matter to him at all, because he would be dead asleep. And so he is now. He will be awoken at midnight. I have just put Lacey to bed now, at 9 P.M., in the same position in the backseat. We will wake her at 2 A.M. The idea is that everybody sleeps for a shift so we won’t be taping our eyelids open by tomorrow morning, when we come rolling into Agloe.
The minivan has become a kind of very small house: I am sitting in the passenger seat, which is the den. This is, I think, the best room in the house: there is plenty of space, and the chair is quite comfortable.
Scattered about the carpet beneath the passenger seat is the office, which contains a map of the United States Ben got at the BP, the directions I printed out, and the scrap paper onto which Radar has scrawled his calculations about speed and distance.
Radar sits in the driver’s seat. The living room. It is a lot like the den, only you can’t be as relaxed when you’re there. Also, it’s cleaner.
Between the living room and the den, we have the center console, or kitchen. Here we keep a plentiful supply of beef jerky and GoFast bars and this magical energy drink called Bluefin, which Lacey put on the shopping list. Bluefin comes in small, fancily contoured glass bottles, and it tastes like blue cotton candy. It also keeps you awake better than anything in all of human history, although it makes you a bit twitchy. Radar and I have agreed to keep drinking it until two hours before our rest periods. Mine starts at midnight, when Ben gets up.
This first bench seat is the first bedroom. It’s the less desirable bedroom, because it is close to the kitchen and the living room, where people are awake and talking, and sometimes there is music on the radio.
Behind that is the second bedroom, which is darker and quieter and altogether superior to the first bedroom.
And behind that is the refrigerator, or cooler, which currently contains the 210 beers that Ben has not yet peed into, the turkey-that-looks-like-ham sandwiches, and some Coke.
There is much to recommend this house. It is carpeted throughout. It has central air-conditioning and heating. The whole place is wired for surround sound. Admittedly, it contains only fifty-five square feet of living space. But you can’t beat the open floor plan.
Hour Eight
Just after we pass into South Carolina, I catch Radar yawning and insist upon a driver switch. I like driving, anyway—this vehicle may be a minivan, but it’s my minivan. Radar scoots out of his seat and into the first bedroom, while I grab the steering wheel and hold it steady, quickly stepping over the kitchen and into the driver’s seat.
Traveling, I am finding, teaches you a lot of things about yourself. For instance, I never thought myself to be the kind of person who pees into a mostly empty bottle of Bluefin energy drink while driving through South Carolina at seventy-seven miles per hour—but in fact I am that kind of person. Also, I never previously knew that if you mix a lot of pee with a little Bluefin energy drink, the result is this amazing incandescent turquoise color. It looks so pretty that I want to put the cap on the bottle and leave it in the cup holder so Lacey and Ben can see it when they wake up.
But Radar feels differently. “If you don’t throw that shit out the window right now, I’m ending our eleven-year friendship,” he says.
“It’s not shit,” I say. “It’s pee.”
“Out,” he says. And so I litter. In the side-view mirror, I can see the bottle hit the asphalt and burst open like a water balloon. Radar sees it, too.
“Oh, my God,” Radar says. “I hope that’s like one of those traumatic events that is so damaging to my psyche that I just forget it ever happened.”
Hour Nine
I never previously knew that it is possible to become tired of eating GoFast nutrition bars. But it is possible. I’m only two bites into my fourth of the day when my stomach turns. I pull open the center console and stick it back inside. We refer to this part of the kitchen as the pantry.
“I wish we had some apples,” Radar said. “God, wouldn’t an apple taste good right now?”
I sigh. Stupid fourth food group. Also, even though I stopped drinking Bluefin a few hours ago, I still feel exceedingly twitchy.
“I still feel kinda twitchy,” I say.
“Yeah,” Radar says. “I can’t stop tapping my fingers.” I look down. He is drumming his fingers silently against his knees. “I mean,” he says, “I actually cannot stop.”
“Okay, yeah I’m not tired, so we’ll stay up till four and then we’ll get them up and we’ll sleep till eight.”
“Okay,” he says. There is a pause. The road has emptied out now; there is only me and the semitrucks, and I feel like my brain is processing information at eleven thousand times its usual pace, and it occurs to me that what I’m doing is very easy, that driving on the interstate is the easiest and most pleasant thing in the world: all I have to do is stay in between the lines and make sure that no one is too close to me and I am not too close to anyone and keep leaving. Maybe it felt like this for her, too, but I could never feel like this alone.
Radar breaks the silence. “Well, if we’re not going to sleep until four . . .”
I finish his sentence. “Yeah, then we should probably just open another bottle of Bluefin.”
And so we do.
Hour Ten
It is time for our second stop. It is 12:13 in the morning. My fingers do not feel like they are made of fingers; they feel like they are made of motion. I am tickling the steering wheel as I drive.
After Radar finds the nearest BP on his handheld, we decide to wake up Lacey and Ben.
I say, “Hey, guys, we’re about to stop.” No reaction.
Radar turns around and puts a hand on Lacey’s shoulder. “Lace, time to get up.” Nothing.
I turn on the radio. I find an oldies station. It’s the Beatles. The song is “Good Morning.” I turn it up some. No response. So Radar turns it up more. And then more. And then the chorus comes, and he starts singing along. And then I start singing along. I think it is finally my atonal screeching that awakes them.
“MAKE IT STOP!” Ben shouts. We turn down the music.
“Ben, we’re stopping. Do you have to pee?”
He pauses, and there’s a kerfuffle in the darkness back there, and I wonder if he has some physical strategy for checking the fullness of his bladder. “I think I’m okay, actually,” he says.
“Okay, then you’re on gas.”
“As the only boy who has not yet peed inside this car, I call first bathroom,” says Radar.
“Shhh,” mumbles Lacey. “Shhh. Everybody stop talking.”
“Lacey, you have to get up and pee,” Radar says. “We’re stopping.”
“You can buy apples,” I tell her.
“Apples,” she mumbles happily in a cute little girl voice. “I likey the apples.”
“And then after that
you get to drive,” Radar says. “So you really gotta wake up.”
She sits up, and in her regular Lacey voice, she says, “I don’t so much likey that.”
We take the exit and it’s .9 miles to the BP, which doesn’t seem like much but Radar says that it’s probably going to cost us four minutes, and the South Carolina traffic hurt us, so it could be real trouble with the construction Radar says is an hour ahead of us. But I am not allowed to worry. Lacey and Ben have now shaken off their sleep well enough to line up together by the sliding door, just like last time, and when we come to a stop in front of the pump, everybody flies out, and I flip the keys to Ben, who catches them in midair.
As Radar and I walk briskly past the white man behind the counter, Radar stops when he notices the guy is staring. “Yes,” Radar says without embarrassment. “I’m wearing a HERITAGE NOT HATE shirt over my graduation gown,” he says. “By the way, do you sell pants here?”
The guy looks nonplussed. “We got some camo pants over by the motor oil.”
“Excellent,” Radar says. And then he turns to me and says, “Be a dear and pick me out some camo pants. And maybe a better T-shirt?”
“Done and done,” I answer. Camo pants, it turns out, do not come in regular numbered sizes. They come in medium and large. I grab a pair of medium pants, and then a large pink T-SHIRT that reads WORLD’S BEST GRANDMA. I also grab three bottles of Bluefin.
I hand everything to Lacey when she comes out of the bathroom and then walk into the girls’ room, since Radar is still in the guys’. I don’t know that I’ve ever been inside a girls’ bathroom in a gas station before.
Differences:
No condom machine
Less graffiti
No urinal
The smell is more or less the same, which is rather disappointing.