I am shaken up by what happened. It’s one thing to park on the wrong side of the street. It is another dimension to leave the driver’s side door wide open and your cell phone in the passenger seat. The cop was right to question my judgment.
I need to talk about it now.
—The cop thought my demeanor was strange. I think it is. I think I am wearing down here. It seems like a lot is going on, probably emotionally. I am tired, exhausted.
A map of Milwaukee has moved from Zach’s hand to his lap. He is peering into it. I look over at it. I see nothing but the crisscrosses of nonsense.
—I need to get a cup of coffee, Zach. How far is the school?
—Not that far. I think it’s . . .
He pauses.
—How far?!!
—It’s just up in Fox Point.
—Well how far is that?!!
—Yeah yeah make a left here then we’re going to make a right.
—Where is it?!!
—It’s not far.
—It is far!!
—Yeah yeah make a right here it’s after Calumet right after make a right here see Dunwood Road go straight.
He has found the Dunwood school after a fifteen-year absence. It was a school that catered to his special needs. It was a good place. We stare at it.
—Yup this is where I went to school.
—Yup, this is where you went to school.
I suggest that maybe we should get out and see if it all still looks the same.
It is a daycare center now, but the layout has been left largely intact. We walk along a linoleum-covered floor trying to find his homeroom. He remembers the number, 107. When we get there, he looks inside for a second or two. That is enough. He is satisfied.
—I remember the name of my homeroom teacher.
It’s ridiculous to have driven all the way here and spend all of thirty seconds inside. I force him to look at the rooms that used to be the gym and the library. He looks.
—Yup.
We get back into the minivan. It is a blitzkrieg now so I can just finish the list. An ice-cream store named Licks next to the Fox Bay Theater. The curio store Winkie’s, largely filled with ingenious trinkets, like the bottle opener playing the University of Wisconsin fight song. St. Mary’s Hospital where Caleb was born in 1991. The little Hayek’s grocery store that he walked to with the Carter boys who lived upstairs.
The exhaustion is overwhelming now. I climb into the front seat after the last stop like a battered old man. I don’t know where we are. I don’t have any sense of my bearings, driving around in a haze. I feel explosive. I am trying to contain myself, although some has already spilled out.
—You enjoyed all that?
—Yeah.
—That was exciting?
—Yeah.
—What do you think about when you go inside? What do you think about when you go to these places?
—What it looked like and what it was like . . .
—Do you really remember?
—Yeah.
I believe that when he crouched down to look through the grimy window at his classroom at Atwater, he saw all the other children who were there. I believe that when he went to the old house on Olive Street and ran into his room he saw every piece of furniture and every picture and Gerry in the bed across from him. I believe that when he went to Dunwood and walked into room 107, he saw his homeroom teacher and his speech teacher and the alphabet cutouts. I believe that every detail of those places, and a thousand more, remains alive in Zach’s brain with uncanny accuracy.
The meticulousness of Zach’s memory doesn’t reinforce the past. It reinforces his present, a living snapshot that never disappears because in a sense he is still there. No object or face has left him. There is no abstract extrapolation. There is no emotional attachment. Just those images so perfectly remembered they come alive like the loop of a film.
I see how his memory enhances his life, has in many ways become his life. But memory is different for the rest of us. Memory is as much emotional recall as it is physical recall. The details in some way become almost irrelevant. Memory can evoke joy or pain or sadness. The beauty of memory is what it makes us feel, a psychological tool far more than a literal one. It isn’t what we specifically remember. For my son it is only what he specifically remembers, what he specifically still sees.
I cannot do what Zach does. Few can, only those equipped with the “failure to forget.” But the vast majority of us do forget as we should. We remember what we remember because it signifies something, conjures up a certain feeling. That’s not the case with Zach. He wants to go to these places to replenish his hard drive.
But I don’t want to be here today. I don’t want to go back in time. I can remember barely a single physical element about the Atwater school or the Dunwood school. But my memories are nevertheless powerful, the memory of a lost little boy, the memory of facing the hardest reality of all for any parent that my child would always be different. That is what I remember, not the number of the homeroom.
—Now where are we going?
Zach wants to go to some place called Kopp’s, or maybe it’s Copp’s, for lunch. I don’t know how to spell it, much less where it is located.
—How the fuck are we going to go there if we don’t know how to get there?
—We don’t have to go there.
—No, that’s where you want to go.
—It’s all right we can go somewhere else.
—No, if that’s where you want to fucking go, then that’s where we’ll fucking go.
I call directory assistance to at least figure out the spelling and get an address. The silence separates. I am increasingly finding the entire trip pointless, a vain exercise in molding Zach into something he cannot be, fantasizing that the open road would lead to a greater sense of togetherness and understanding, that in our intimate privacy I would be able to bore into his soul and pull out a string of sparkles. I want a different son at this moment. I deserve a different son. I glance over at Zach and fill up with familiar self-hatred. I realize the cop was right: I do have an impairment, an emotional impairment, the anger of what happened, the helplessness, the forever haunt of watching my newborn son through a hospital window bloody and breakable.
The restaurant is on Port Washington Road in a town called Glendale. I feel obligated to find it. But I’m just driving in wider and wider circles.
Zach peers into his map and finds Port Washington Road. I try to gather myself together.
—You think I’m in a good mood or a bad mood?
—A good mood as long as I find the place.
He brushes my hand with his.
—It will be all right Dad.
—You’re being very supportive of me.
—Yeah.
—I’m out of it.
—Yeah.
Zach spots a sign for Glendale that I missed.
—It’s good we’re on this road.
We drive a little farther and spot Kopp’s on the right, a saucer-shaped building out of the 1950s serving burgers and malts and fries. Zach found it.
He guides me to a parking space in the overflowing lot.
—Yup we got a spot!
We sit on a rounded ledge outside and eat Buffalo chicken sandwiches and thick onion rings. I suck down a malt, and he sips a Diet Coke.
—Dad can I have some money so I can get some ice cream?
It is a question he asked me when he was five. It is a question he will ask me as long as I am here with him.
He gets his ice cream with its ooze of hot fudge creasing over the plastic cup. He eats in the complete wash of his happiness. At this moment, I feel neither pity for him nor self-pity. I feel gratitude. Zach knew how to save me.
8. Cardinals and Cookies
I
WE ARE SUPPOSED to spend another night in Milwaukee but our hotel, the squirm-sounding Pfister, built in 1893, is infested with gloom. Our suite appears to have been robbed of most of its furnitur
e. There is a pullout couch in Zach’s room, a scarred coffee table once used to play tic-tac-toe with a penknife, a corner armchair that sags like flabby flesh. There is a bed in my room and a scuffed side table without an alarm clock. The bathroom is best approached sideways.
The Pfister is supposed to be Milwaukee’s leading hotel, but staying there only casts a pall over the rest of the city. Milwaukee is ninety miles from Chicago and feels the shadow of those bigger-than-ever shoulders, the unshakable reputation of a sickly little brother. It is known for beer, once the largest producer in the world. But the industry has largely subsided. Pabst is gone. So is Schlitz, along with the slogan that became synonymous with the city, “The beer that made Milwaukee famous.” The area is also known for wholesome white TV and film characters from a bygone era, benign buffoons who spend an inordinate amount of time bowling—Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley. But in the past fifteen years since we lived here, the downtown has remade itself with new condos and restaurants. There are other places to eat now beside Mader’s with its leaning towers of sauerbraten and potato pancakes. The Milwaukee Art Museum on the edge of Lake Michigan, whose Quadracci Pavilion was designed by world-renowned architect Santiago Calatrava, makes the museum the most eye-popping in America. Lit up at night, the Calatrava addition shines upon the lake like a thousand white sails.
A sight such as that, the unexpected discovery of a diamond-encrusted necklace, is what makes a cross-country trip cathartic no matter what route you take, even one as hideous as ours. Milwaukee proves that the American city, lost for so many years, can reinvent itself with originality. It still has the feel of a careful place but not a stodgy one. It doesn’t take itself with strident seriousness, the best show in all of sports the race around the bases in the seventh-inning stretch at Brewers baseball games where five lucky fans get to dress as sausages—brat, Polish, Italian, hot dog, and chorizo.
But the reconstitution of Milwaukee has not filtered down to my own reconstitution. The events of yesterday have not subsided. My mood. My meltdown. My ambivalence in being with my son. My unexpected resurrection from the pit of frustration because of him. It continues to be a muddle. Zach, despite his limits, has been steady and true, while I have been volatile and inconsistent. I am volatile and inconsistent. But I thought I would do better, hold my feelings in check for my son. I also realize all too well what this behavior signifies beyond my intrinsic personality. I am not at peace with my son. I am still not at peace with how he came into the world and what he became because of it. I don’t know if I ever will be and I do what I do when in conflict—take it out on someone else, too often someone I love. My sniper attack.
We could order room service for dinner but the Pfister is beyond faith and we want our food before midnight. We could go out to eat but I don’t want to suffer through one of those meals where I ask Zach simple who-what-where questions and he gives one-sentence answers until, after about three minutes, I bury myself in smartphone minutiae. We could play tic-tac-toe on the coffee table but neither of us brought a penknife. I feel pent-up, caged, like I did at the very beginning of the trip. I decide suddenly that we need to get the fuck out of there.
—We’re done in Milwaukee. Time to move on. Let’s just leave now.
—Yeah.
—Hit the road, right, Zach?
—Yeah.
—I’ve been very depressed. I don’t know why.
—The zoo is only nine miles away Dad.
We hurriedly pack and head downstairs to settle with the clerk. It is 8:00 P.M. I acknowledge the oddity of checking out at such an hour. She looks at us like it happens all the time. She avoids asking the standard unctuous question of “How did you enjoy your stay?” because she already knows the answer.
Even Zach is depleted by Milwaukee. He has refreshed all the snapshots of memory he felt were important for his hard drive. He has found closure with the people he has seen while squeezing out new bits of information. He has said goodbye to our friend Nancy, who owned the duplex on Olive Street. He asked after her daughter Lissa, whose name I would not have remembered had I been waterboarded for a year. Nancy gave Zach a picture of her. I watched as he so gently slid it into his wallet like a written verse of Keats, a keepsake of a girl he has not seen forever. He keeps it to stay close to her because she is still there, still in his heart, where all good relationships persist regardless of time or distance, the truest beauty of his failure to forget. He will keep that picture in his wallet forever, and even if he doesn’t look at it for another thirty years, he will always recall the exact day and circumstances in which it was given to him.
He has said goodbye to Lois, whom he has known all his life and to whom he feels a special attachment. He has given her a hug, dropping his head into his favored spot, the nape of her neck, and letting it linger as she places her arms around him. Oh, Zach . . . We have gone by the streets where we lived one final time, the shade trees in front of the tiny lawns with their bounty of limbs, sentries in the still night. “Goodbye Frederick,” he whispers, the street where we first lived when we moved here in 1989. I try to decipher his tone. At first, I think it’s wistful. But then I realize it’s simply a thank-you to a place and a moment that once was there for him and always will be, an anchor in the moonlight as we roll down the road.
It was in the house on Frederick where I wrote Friday Night Lights in 1989 and 1990 in a tiny second-floor study with a computer on one side and a corkboard filled with index cards on the other. No Internet. No smartphone. No Google. No distractions except those inside my own mind. Every day I put on headphones and juiced up the music of Bon Jovi and Tears for Fears and the Alan Parsons Project to stimulate and write with the head-spinning frenzy of Schroeder. It was about the work then, not the commercial prospects and the book tour. It was the most creative joy I ever felt, the only sustained time I woke up not with the dread of writing but with the exhilaration of it. Zach’s whisper of farewell is also mine.
Goodbye, Frederick . . .
We both know we will never see it again. But we both carry our memories. The right memories for each of us.
II
The normal route for a cross-country trip would be to continue west, through the lush grain seas of Wisconsin and Minnesota and then onward through South Dakota and Wyoming and Utah and Northern California. That route would show you the Black Hills and the Corn Palace and Wall Drug and Yellowstone and Zion and Bryce and the Grand Canyon and Yosemite. Because I had promised Zach that we would spend time only in places he has been before, our trip assiduously raises its most evocative finger at all of that. Instead, we will now veer south from Milwaukee to Missouri and then west through Oklahoma into Texas. Our next stop is Odessa. We have to go a thousand miles out of our way to get there and still make it to Los Angeles.
Outside of Milwaukee we finally get onto highways I have never driven on before, which does offer relief. For the first time, I feel the On the Road abandon of the unknown, humming into a night that will never end, no idea of where we are going to stay because we don’t really know where we are going to go, Zach and I just two bad-to-the-bone born-to-be-wild boys in bandannas and biker boots and studded belts pushing pedal to the metal on the minivan so it gets all the way up to sixty-two miles per hour without shaking, flipping the bird at every truck and car and bicycle and kiddie scooter that passes. In reality we are dressed in shorts and T-shirts, gently passing a bag of Cheetos back and forth, each of us taking respectable handfuls without undue piggery. But we still feel the liberation. We feel the badness. We are bad.
Our interim stop is Branson, Missouri, tomorrow night. There is some cheating involve, a serious violation of the trip rules. But I have always wanted to go since it represents a distinct hue of America and we need something to break up the monotony of the death march. Branson has its reputation of being a holy-roller Las Vegas, wholesome entertainment without fishnets squeezed into corpulent thighs. I also promised Zach we would go to an amusement park every day. It was a g
ood intention and, so far, a bad delivery. But Branson has a good one, creating yet another incentive, particularly after Zach once again brings up the already very sensitive subject of mode of transportation.
—I have an idea Dad maybe you’ll like maybe we should drop off the minivan and fly to Odessa.
—Don’t you like being in the car?
—Flying is always faster.
—Yeah, but flying’s for pussies.
—Why?
—Because you see things when you drive.
—What things?
—Since we’re not going anyplace beautiful, Home Depot.
—I’ve been to Home Depot.
The amusement park in Branson is called Silver Dollar City. There are thousands, if not millions, of websites that have done very meticulous studies of amusement parks—the wait times, the force of gravity, the pitch and grade and velocity and speed. On all these scales, Silver Dollar City ranks high. It has WildFire, a multilooping roller coaster with speeds up to sixty-six miles per hour. It has PowderKeg, zero to fifty-three miles per hour in 2.8 seconds. It has Fire-in-the-Hole, an indoor roller coaster where a gang called the Baldknobbers sets the town ablaze as you rumble through it. It has American Plunge, where you climb more than five stories into the Ozark sky and splash down in a log flume at speeds of more than thirty-five miles per hour. For all these reasons, it is Zach’s definition of heaven. But the distance to Branson turns out to be longer than I thought; we won’t get there until tomorrow night, by which time the park will be closed. We will need to make a change in plan and route. I have not told Zach the possibility we won’t be going to Silver Dollar City after talking it up endlessly. I cannot bear to keep disappointing him.
We head south on 43 near Lake Geneva. We pick up the Chicago Cubs–St. Louis Cardinals game on WGN, the ultimate On the Road romance, the terse beats of the announcers’ voices like old-fashioned Western Union telegrams. Here’s the two-two to Ramirez. Ground ball to short. To his right is Eckstein. Gloves. Throws from the edge of the outfield grass and just gets Ramirez for out number one. The 0 and 1. Swing and miss. 0 and 2 to Fontenot. Takes outside for ball one. And the 1-2 to Fontenot. Swing and a miss. And the inning is over. We hear the I-can’t-believe-this-is-happening-again groans of Cubs announcer Ron Santo as the Cards take a 10–1 lead on a three-run homer by Albert Pujols and a grand slam by Chris Duncan. I can’t help but feel sorry for Santo, as he gives voice to ninety-eight years of Cubs World Series–less futility. He loves. He loves too much.
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