by Rob Binkley
“You’ve hit on something there.”
“I did?” I was out of breath.
“We gotta hit the road to find our true freedom. Just like the Beats, man.”
I perked up. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. We could take a year just like we planned and backpack around the world. Backpacking is the new hitchhiking, right? We could find our souls on the road … Self-discovery is freedom—no ties, no guilt. All experience is good experience. Grace before God!”
Brian laughed. “Screw God, man. I just wanna test the limits of everything. I’ve been driving the speed limit for too long. Our lives are in flames—so what? We fucked up! Let’s pour gasoline on our open wounds. What do we have to lose?!”
“Yeah! ‘The Man, wants us to pay their fines? Play their games? Punch their clocks!?”
Brian yelled, “Yeah! Eff clocks!”
We heard the sirens of the Palo Alto Police Department. We shielded our eyes from their lights as they pulled into the parking lot and drove our way. Like good little boys, we got up and fled on our bicycles, but I don’t know why—we weren’t criminals, dammit.
At least not convicted ones.
The cops just watched us go. One of them yelled over their PA system: “We don’t want you here!”
As we raced away, Brian shouted, “‘The Pigs’ are right. They don’t want us here! Let’s go! The world’s gone bad—let’s go mad!” I pedaled like a drunken wino on a stolen bike. “No conformity, Dean Moriarty!!”
The next day I awoke on my front lawn to sprinklers going off around me. I was still locked out of my condo. I’d left my keys inside. The goddamned samba music was still playing inside. Brian was sleeping in his rental car.
The hellish sound of Brian’s cell phone rang in my head. After the fourth ring, I realized it was actually his phone ringing right by my ear. I picked it up. “What?! Is this you!?”
“Um, hello?” It wasn’t Elena; it was my lawyer. He told me I had called him at four o’clock in the morning and left an unintelligible message on his voicemail. The only thing he could make out was this number.
“Look, Rob, I just talked to the prosecutors. They’ll let you off with a slap on the wrist if you sell all your coffee houses and pay the back taxes in installments. They have bigger fish to fry than you.” I told him I’d think about it, then hung up.
I lay there trying to convince myself that my life wasn’t in shambles, and that a plea deal was the best option. Brian was now awake and siphoning gas from Elena’s car, which was parked in the driveway.
“I need to go sign some papers.”
Brian took the gas can and calmly filled his tank. He just smiled. “You’re right, man. The world tour was just a pipe dream. You aren’t ready to be free. I get it. They’ve already got you … I’ll drive you to your lawyer’s office.”
“Don’t judge me. I don’t need any of your crap right now.”
“No. I feel your pain. Just get in. We got plenty of gas now.”
Brian drove us off in silence, eating from a pack of chocolate mini-donuts. He didn’t offer me one.
When we wheeled up to my car, Brian finally fessed up. The lying bastard had already bought the tickets. He pulled them out of his backpack and gave me mine.
“You have to go now, Binkley. You can’t leave me hanging.”
“Okay, okay. Just give me a month to sort out my life.”
“Promise??”
I got out of the car. “I promise!” Then I slammed the door in his face.
I never took the plea deal. Instead, I spent the rest of December avoiding my lawyer while quietly liquidating my life. I hocked it all: my cars, my condo, all my earthly possessions. I even gave up my two cafés. But I didn’t tell my lawyer or the state of California … not yet. I stockpiled cash in a secret Cayman Islands account that I’d created when I opened the cafés.
Brian called me every day to make sure I didn’t cancel. He said he was kidnapping me, and if I didn’t come he would kill me. But truth be told, I wanted to burn my reality to the ground. I couldn’t turn over what was left of my life savings to a corrupt American judicial system. I had nothing to keep me here anymore.
I was dumping it all to be his willing captive again. Brian had been pulling these forced adventures on me since high school, these sneak attacks on the status quo.
I had no idea what was coming next. All I knew was I never wanted to see Elena or Palo Alto again.
By December 31st, Brian and I were drinking heavily on a morning plane to LA. Things were going as planned. We were on our way to our flight of destiny on January 7th. But first, we embarked on some preliminary debauchery.
Brian was already recruiting more members of his cult of personality. This one was a tall, redheaded stewardess. “We’re running men, Kiki. Running from the law … They’re watching us now. You’re not gonna turn us in, are you?”
Kiki backed away slowly.
I’d been listening to Brian’s pseudo-shamanistic insanity all morning, and it was making me crazy. What was left of my rational mind wanted to call off the trip and try to get back with Elena.
Brian just laughed. “That boat sailed a month ago, man.”
Then he turned to me and replied to my inner monologue like some telepathic mutant, his lips never seeming to move. “We’ll all be dead soon, Binkley. Time to take the ride.”
He could still read my mind, and I hated him for it.
I tuned him out and prayed I wasn’t making a terrible mistake.
I opened my eyes to a swirl of nauseous sunshine. Our breakfast of champions of six Crown and Cokes had me feeling less than chipper. Maybe it was just nerves, knowing I was slowly becoming a fugitive from justice.
Brian could sense I was a reluctant hostage, so he demanded I let him push me through LAX in a wheelchair to make sure I didn’t flee. He kept pushing me faster and faster until we were running through the airport. “Say hello to the City of Angels, Binkley! We got no time to waste. My LA people won’t pick us up cause I’m with your lame ass, so I’m looking into alternate vehicles! My license was suspended last week so renting a car is out, unless you wanna risk it. It’s New Year’s Eve, so designated drivers will be scarce!”
We were five minutes into the trip and I was already terrified by his manic energy. “I’m in no condition to drive!”
He sped up. “Me either! I’ll find us wheels!”
We raced out of the terminal into the toxic LA sunshine. The goal was to rampage through Hollywood on our way to attending the Rose Bowl—but we never got to Pasadena. He waved down a taxi, and we set out to see LA in a week before our international flight departed to who-knows-where.
Did I really want to go on a yearlong trip with this lunatic? Even though I had liquidated my life, I was leaving my options open. I still might go back and face the music—or defect in the night to Canada or Mexico where I wouldn’t have Brian’s insanity shackled to my hip. I still wasn’t sure.
We took a cab straight to a dive bar in Old Hollywood like two disheveled alcoholic drifters. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. I ordered pancakes and coffee. Brian ordered Irish coffee and stole bites off my plate. The joint was deserted and smelled like stale beer. I wanted to find a hotel but Brian refused. “Not yet! If you wanna sober up, drink coffee. If you wanna get clean, wash your balls in the sink.”
He pointed to the bathroom.
I stared at his stupid, smirking face. I wanted to slap him silly. I knew I should go home, I really did, and leave this delusional man-child in that dive bar in Hollywood. I went along with the idea of fleeing the country (mostly) to shut him up, but he never did. He never shut up. I also had a sneaking suspicion that if I left him high and dry I may never see Brian again. I could tell by the ever-present look of inspired lunacy in his eye that he was on a collision course with death, incarceration, or worse.
Brian started shooting pool badly. He tore the table felt and almost got us kicked out for launching cue balls into the air like Minnesota Fa
ts’s epileptic grandson. We spent the afternoon drinking Irish coffees while he laid out his “Around-the-World Bailout Plan” and all “relevant motives” to anyone who cared to listen.
No one else cared but me.
Occasionally I burst his bubble just to wind him up. “Don’t you think if we really wanted to change the world and grow as people, we should be more productive members of society? Build houses with Habitat for Humanity, or run for Congress, or join the Peace Corps or something?”
“All corrupt organizations. To put it in the parlance of our idiotic times, here in the soulless void, we have no affiliation to God or country; we’re living in the age of narcissism, soaking up bullshit from Hollywood and Madison Avenue and spitting them out like original thoughts. We’re slaves, man—conditioned little drones.”
“So we’re both little drone slaves?”
“I suggest you start drinking heavily and stop thinking so much.”
After a day of boozy brainwashing, in my twisted-up mind he was starting to make some kind of sick sense again—way too much sense. Brian’s a master salesman when sober, but he’s even more convincing when drunk. He knew how to push my buttons, and he kept pressing mine until I gave up completely. And deep down I knew he was right. I had nothing to go home to now but humiliation and heartache.
My soul needed an enema.
That night, after we took baths in a bar sink, I checked my messages. I had three urgent ones from my lawyer, who was not privy to the fact I skipped town. He kept repeating my “time was running out.”
I hung up and turned to Brian, who was pouring way too much rum into a Coke can. “Attention to things isn’t fun, is it, Binkley?”
“Not in my current state.”
Brian wanted to go to more bars. “I know you’re having a crisis, but so am I. Answer all the vultures closing in around you with a smile and a hearty ‘screw you’ … Just have fun with it.”
“Just have fun with what? Running from failure?”
“Look at it this way: You got what—at least another week before they issue a warrant for your arrest—right?”
“This isn’t a criminal case—yet. I’m just evading back taxes. Temporarily.”
“So we’ve got plenty of time to make our escape.”
I will forever remember the New Year’s Eve I spent in Los Angeles as the night I finally decided to stop being angry and “just have fun with it.” It was New Year’s Eve after all. What else did I have to do?
Something inside me told me to show love for everyone I met, so I did. I was on some sideways mission to break down my carefully constructed American ego and be like Thompson and Kerouac—completely carefree. But it wasn’t going to be easy. I had no idea who I really was once I peeled all the surface layers away.
I was determined to find out.
I didn’t want to rely on alcohol and sex with strangers to make me feel like a free man, but I went on a bender anyway to keep my mind open and body nimble.
We roamed the Sunset Strip looking for trouble. Brian hooted at all the girls in short skirts. We drank rum from a Coke can to lube ourselves up to all possibilities.
Brian draped his arm over my shoulder. “Binkley, this gift I’ve given you is my way of proving we can handle a year with no structure! Can we navigate New Year’s Eve on the Sunset Strip going Mach 3 with our hair on fire??”
I smiled. “Let’s drive fast!”
All night, Brian kept saying this was a primer for the road, but I knew we were numbing out so we didn’t have to think. I was happy to play along. I had to forget Elena and my downward spiral of life. So for one night it was the Summer of Love in my own mind.
Under the influence of the Caribbean moonshine Brian brought with him from Palo Alto, I let go of all my hang-ups. It was the first time I’d let my guard down and opened up to the world since I don’t know—never? I showed love for all living creatures: men, women, dogs, cats—even some trees.
We went bar hopping and rang in the New Year I don’t know where. I have no idea who I kissed at midnight, but her lips were wet and willing. All I know is we heard Prince’s song “1999” about fifty times in a row.
After the bars closed, we meandered through the abandoned LA streets befriending everyone we met, including a group of transient hippie chicks that were in town from an ashram in Antelope Valley. They thought we were wandering hippies, too, since we were wearing backpacks and two-day-old beards. We became instant friends.
At three o’clock in the morning, we finally splurged on an actual room at the Safari Motel Inn on Sunset Boulevard, which cost forty-five dollars a night. We brought every freak we could find back to the room and had a party till dawn.
Brian had no female filter left by four in the morning. At one point, I looked at him surrounded by who-knows-what on this gyrating yellow floatie. All I could see was a mass of cavorting flesh in the middle of the pool. Brian saw me and yelled, “How’s the peeping? Every woman deserves some love!”
I shook my head. “Why do you have to be the one who gives it to them??”
“Stop thinking and take your clothes off, grab a beer, and get your ass over here. All you girls, meet your new leader. Join the cult of Rob!”
The girls cheered when I jumped in the pool.
When the sun came up, all my worries had melted away. Brian and I were floating on stolen rafts with the ashram girls, who were telling us how they’d recently contracted the same eating disorder from a celebrity guru. Words had ceased to have meaning.
Who knew what was true anymore. We were all lying to each other.
Needless to say the rest of it got weird. We busted out a new “cock candle” in the room, and someone woke up wearing a zebra-striped thong. And it wasn’t me. (Probably. I can’t remember.)
After spending a day in bed, Hunter S. Thompson–style, we kept the room for one more night and ventured out for another sophisticated evening on the town.
We looked like a couple of homeless miscreants. I was glad I had packed a few articles of decent clothing but it was clear to anyone who looked too closely that Brian and I were two dudes in desperate need of tetanus shots.
Not a lot of people go out in Los Angeles on New Year’s Day Night, but we did, and somehow came across a party that seemed to have never ended from the night before. We found ourselves out in front of the Bar Marmont on Sunset, trying to get into more trouble and forget all the randomness of the night before.
We’d come down to meet my old friend Johnny, who was this lunatic ex-Mormon I knew as a kid. He was supposed to meet us the night before, but got lost at a house party in Toluca Lake. I barely recognized the guy. It had been years since I’d seen him last. Johnny had morphed into some LA performance artist. He had a giant red beard and wore sunglasses at night. He gave me a bear hug the second he saw me, and proudly proclaimed that he was the “Pied Piper of the Sunset Strip—a great goddamn LA guide” and to follow him.
Johnny showed off his skills immediately by putting the “Jedi mind trick” on the doorman at the Bar Marmont. Somehow we walked in without having to pay the insanely expensive two hundred dollar cover for the private party going on.
On the way in I asked, “Do the girls have solid gold vaginas in here?”
“Something like that,” Johnny laughed.
Inside, the place smelled of high-caliber sex. Soft lights and shimmering bottles of exotic elixirs lit up the main bar; butterflies were all over the place, as were women—lots of them. It was surreal.
The gyrating hips of a brunette wearing a short skirt and a white scarf caught my eye. She was dancing by herself with a “come hither” look. I leaned into Brian: “The best thing about Los Angeles is girls on the prowl who make themselves so obviously available. They’re impossible to miss.” We watched “Scarf Girl” flirt with the room like she was auditioning for an invisible camera.
We moved in. Brian brazenly fondled her scarf. “Hermès?” She said nothing. “Did I see you at Starbucks this morning
drinking a Mocha Frap?”
She stopped dancing. “Are you for real?”
Brian smiled. “I think so … wanna pinch me to see?” Scarf Girl walked away. Her words said “Piss off,” but she had those permanent “F-me” eyes; it was very confusing to the average man.
I walked over to Johnny, who said, “These girls only come out at night. During the day, they won’t even talk to you.”
I had to pee.
In the men’s room, I heard giggles coming from the closed stall. Some girls had sneaked into an empty stall to do drugs; I could hear them sniffing. Eventually one of them peeked over the closed stall. “Hey … we’re making a coffee table book called Hotties Pissing in Dirty Stalls.”
“Cool.”
They asked if they could “take a dick pic for the book.” “Go ahead,” I said and—Snap! Snap!—my flaccid junk was immortalized. I signed no release form. They asked if I had any coke, but were sorely disappointed when I said no. I had a solution.
I led the girls back to our table and told Brian to hook them up with some shots from his private reserve of 120-proof moonshine he had in a flask. Brian obliged.
“What is this?” they asked.
“Don’t worry … it’s good.” They knocked back their shots, then coughed like a thirsty pair of Merchant Marines on shore leave.
It didn’t take long for the party to start bumping after that. I waded through a maze of dancing girls and got Johnny’s attention. “Man, these women are really into us. It’s like a room full of sexual predators … in a good way.”
Johnny roared. “That’s cause they’re all hookers, strippers, and porn stars who’ve been up for two days! This is a Vivid afterparty!”
I looked around at all the silicon in the room. No wonder.