by Dave Tomar
“Just a little more,” Felix said.
I just shook my head no.
“Yeah, just back up just a little bit more.”
The edge was maybe eight feet away. That was good enough. I shook my head no.
“C’mon, baby.” Bree was holding my hand.
“I think I have to go. We have to get out of here,” I said calmly. Felix could see that I was freaking out a little bit. My feet were planted into the floor, and everything was rubbery.
“Yeah, man. We’ll get out of here. Just back up a couple more steps. We’ll just get the shot and get out of here.”
“Fine,” I said. Exposure therapy. I tried to shuffle my feet back a few more steps. Nothing doing. All I could think about was that we had to pass over that platform again. That was exactly when I was going to die. Felix flashed a couple of pics. He looked at them on his digital screen. He looked back at us and back at the screen.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
“OK, just—”
“Yup, I gotta go. Gotta go now.”
“It’s OK, baby. Everything’s fine.” Bree had seen this before, but maybe never quite this bad.
“I have to get out of here. I have to get out of here now.”
Felix could see that he was getting nothing but abject horror from me. This was not the feel we were going for. He could see there was no use being up here.
“OK, OK. Let’s go. I’ll go first,” he offered. I rushed past him, passed over the platform, and plunged into the warm embrace of the stairwell, relieved at the decay around me. If I fell now, I’d just need a tetanus shot and a hot bath.
That’s what I got for practicing psychology without a license.
By contrast, my course work was going swimmingly. As is always the case, I was doing loads of other work at the same time. I was pulling from the typical grab bag of papers on supply chain management, Marcus Garvey, OPEC, and APEC; stuff on Bloom’s taxonomy, Leonardo’s Last Supper, O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, and Geraldo’s mustache; a design paper on a low-back Spanish chair from Ikea, an analysis of the fireworks business in China, and a brief overview of great clarinet players through history.
My life was the normal interdisciplinary jumble. But RP remained a constant.
Whatever his doctoral studies in psychology were doing for me, clearly this arrangement was working for RP. He returned to me after every filed assignment without critique, complaint, or correction. RP was clearly satisfied with the ongoing results of our transaction. I suspect he was getting pretty good grades. And even though RP’s fraud was taking place across multiple semesters, in more than a dozen classes, and throughout countless personal interactions between him and his professors, at no point through this duration, it seemed, had RP’s academic standing been threatened, nor had he even been given pause by the suspicion of a professor, such that he might reconsider so enthusiastically continuing to pay for my services.
And of course, RP really had no choice at this point, lest he should suddenly have to hand in an assignment in his own words. People would think he’d suffered a serious head injury.
So RP continued ordering pages by the dozens right through midterms. Stress disorders, anxiety-related insomnia, repressed trauma, and panic attacks floated in and out of my consciousness while Bree and I drove out to potential wedding venues and discussed floral arrangements.
Then I had a dream one night in which some unrecognizable person was driving and I was in the passenger seat. We came up on a curve and took it too fast. I could feel that we were taking it too fast, and I said something to the driver, but it was too late. We busted through the guardrail and into the wild blue yonder. I got a zero gravity sensation in my balls as I awaited the inevitable.
When I woke up and pieced it back together, I had an epiphany. I recorded the following vignette.
Highway 1 is beautiful and precarious. One can only imagine the carnage that went into its construction.
At the end of college, Donovan Root and I flew out to San Francisco to visit our buddy Dead Bear. It was the last time I ever flew somewhere without the fear of god inside me.
Dead Bear was an old buddy from Jersey, now living in Haight-Ashbury and working as a lawyer. We slept in his living room and did bong hits for breakfast.
We made the decision that we were going to drive up the coast on the 1 and the 101 to the town of Eureka in Humboldt County, renowned the world over for the excellence of its marijuana. We were going to find out for ourselves.
But we weren’t prepared for the majesty of the drive itself. We were delayed at every turn by the stunning expanse of shimmering ocean, the rolling hills, the prehistoric enormity of the Pacific Northwest. To explain for those who haven’t driven this stretch of highway where it bends and twists north of the Golden Gate Bridge, the 1 is a two-way road, one lane going each way, dynamited into the side of the mountains.
Looking to our left as we traveled north, we could see the Pacific Ocean rolling in below, crystal blue and intoxicating. I was raised on the Jersey Shore. I always just assumed the ocean was brown and ridden with medical waste.
To our right was an alternating scene. Lush moss blankets cropped up into mountains, cast their shadows on us for a mile, then dipped back into valleys. Valleys were dotted with cows and farms, shrouded in forests and sometimes a million miles below us. Sometimes there were guardrails. Sometimes there weren’t. Sometimes there were signs that warned of rockslides. Sometimes there were rocks but no signs.
We paid our respects to the highway, taking many stretches as slowly as fifteen miles per hour, occasionally being passed by locals familiar with the intricacies of the snaking road. At one point, a cow wandered in front of our car. We stopped to watch it casually amble down the side of the mountain at a seventy-degree angle. The cow knew what it was doing, which was more than I could say for us.
Valleys would produce tiny towns, comprising only what we could see immediately in front of us on either side of the highway. We were so enchanted by the panoramas, charmed by the eateries, riveted by the adventure, that we stopped every few miles to play.
We stopped to get oysters from a shack perched precariously on a cliff. We stopped to buy strange objects from local merchants. We stopped to smoke a joint under a big tree. We stopped at a winery to watch the sunset.
Then we got back in the car, and suddenly it was getting dark. And then it started to drizzle. And we looked at the clock and we looked at the map and we looked at where we were. Suddenly, it was night, and we were hours from our destination in Eureka.
Donovan Root took over driving. Dead Bear had taken us much of the way in his car, Cosmic Charlie. Cosmic Charlie was getting tired, and everybody inside was getting tense. The road that had been so inspiring just an hour before was now a harrowing and endless thing. There was no way out of this. Valleys became chasms and vistas became abysses.
At one point, I watched our tire roll across the white line and brush the empty space of air where a bit of highway had fallen out. I gasped.
“What’s that?” Donovan asked.
“Youuu… really don’t want to know.”
We had listened to the Grateful Dead most of the way. There are few bands or musicians who have so evocatively summoned in sonic textures the brilliant colors of Northern California. But now it was night, and it was time for a change. We put on Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and proceeded on our journey, holding our collective breath and hoping for a happy ending.
Dylan had gotten no further than “Pledging My Time” when the car that had inched along all day and into the evening suddenly started to pick up speed. It was an alarming sensation. I was in the backseat. Dead Bear was in the passenger seat. Bob Dylan carried on. “They called for the ambulance and one was sent. Somebody got lucky, but it was an accident.”
The car was going into a steep decline with a guardrail directly ahead and a hairpin turn right after. Here, the road twisted back on itself while continuing its
decline. Suddenly the guardrail was coming on in a hurry.
“Donovan! Slow down!” Dead Bear shouted.
Donovan couldn’t even form the words to tell us he couldn’t. His mouth was frozen, his foot pumping the break, the break responding by doing nothing at all. We were in free fall. It was an agonizing second, not nearly long enough for us to say good-bye. And suddenly, time stood still.
The car jammed to a halt. Bob Dylan stopped singing. Nobody moved a muscle.
“Donovan! What the fuck, man!” Dead Bear screamed.
“I… I don’t know what happened.”
“OK, OK,” I said. “I think we’re OK, right? Everybody’s OK?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
“OK, good. Let’s get out and assess the situation.”
The situation was that Cosmic Charlie’s front bumper was hanging over the edge of a cliff. The guardrail was bowed below it. A patch of dirt roughly the size of a healthy bull turd, used to lodge the guardrail in the embankment, had grabbed one of our tires and held us back from the great unknown ever after. Our tire was jammed into the mud, and we couldn’t back it out. We were stuck.
And we were nowhere. Our cell phones were inoperable. What’s more, we were huddled up together on a slick pile of grass inhospitably located at the bottom of the first steep decline and at the top of the whole rest of the world. We conferred and concluded that there was little to guarantee that another car wouldn’t make the same mistake we had and finish the job that the mountain had failed to complete on its first swipe.
So when a car passed after about five minutes, Dead Bear boldly volunteered to get in. As he pulled away in a minivan, Donovan and I watched, quite certain that this would be the last time we ever saw him.
When he returned twenty minutes later in the cab of a California Highway Patrol tow truck, our reunion was joyful. He had been taken to what would probably better be termed a settlement than a town, where he had been left to a pay phone and his own resources.
When he called 911 and they asked for a landmark, he replied, “The phone booth is the landmark.”
Now please understand that as a resident of New Jersey, famous for the corruption and racial profiling of its police officers, I have always been skeptical of law enforcement, and of people in general. But god bless the officers who were dispatched to us that night. They yanked our car out of the mud, they comforted us, and they told us that we were lucky. This was the worst spot out here, they told us. The guardrail had been replaced only that month after a previous accident.
“We fished that guy out of the ravine with a helicopter,” they told us. One of the cops pointed his Maglite down into the valley. Nothing but treetops below.
Cosmic Charlie had sustained minimal damage. A headlight was hanging out of its socket. One of the cops grabbed some twine from his car, rigged up the headlight, and scraped the dirt from Charlie’s grill, an act of decency unlike any I had ever seen in all my years of being pulled over and illegally searched on the New Jersey Turnpike.
The car was running fine, but now there was the whole new dilemma of still being stuck out on this godforsaken highway without a place to roost for the night. One of the cops said, “Head on down the highway for just another ten miles or so. There’s a bed-and-breakfast up in the first town you’ll hit. You can’t miss it. Go in and ask for Terry.”
“Ummmm, OK,” Dead Bear said as we got back into the car. We were a bit shell-shocked from all the unsolicited kindness.
Dead Bear drove at the speed of a shopping cart for that ten miles, until we got to a place with a little wooden sign that read “No Vacancies.”
We walked in anyway. A slim middle-aged woman welcomed us into a tavern that doubled as the reservation desk. Terry.
“You the boys that lost it around the curve?” she asked. Apparently the officer had phoned ahead on our behalf.
“Uhhhh, yeah,” said Dead Bear. “Yeah. We, uhh, we saw that you had no vacancies, but we’re kind of stuck right now and…”
“OK. That’s OK. We’ll get to that. First things first. Have you boys had anything to eat?”
We all shook our heads no. She led us to a table and sat us down. While we were waiting for her to come back, a gentleman with an Australian accent approached us and introduced himself as Geoffrey. He regaled us with stories about his half-wolf/half-dog, about chicken-thieving coyotes, about mountain lions, about the storm brewing in the clouds. We were silent and enraptured. This guy was straight out of Tolkien.
Terry came back with a basket of bread, a bottle of red, and three bowls of clam chowder “fresh from the ocean out back.”
As we drank and ate and came to our senses, it became clear to us what had transpired. We were safe now. But we had almost died, and less than an hour before this meal. Without words, we sat and shook our heads and exhaled brazenly. We were alive, but we had almost died. A patch of dirt had been the difference between our lives and the obvious alternative. A patch of dirt. A piece of the earth several inches wide and freshly packed less than a month prior, but not nearly so heroic to the last poor bastard to hydroplane on a killer hairpin turn. It really is all up to chance, now, isn’t it?
Incidentally, the chowder was transcendent. As we ate, Terry came back and said, “Here’s the deal. We have a cottage with three beds, but the lock doesn’t work. So we want you to stay the night free of charge. Breakfast will be on your porch in the morning. Just be sure to tip your chambermaid generously.”
This just kept getting weirder.
Terry sold us a six-pack of beer from the microbrewer the next town over. Geoffrey told us about a little hidden trail just down the road, said that it led to the beach.
After a meal and bottle of wine for which we were not charged, Terry led us to our cottage. It was beautiful. It was a one-room house with a claw-foot tub and a potbelly stove in the middle. We weren’t, the three of us, looking for a romantic getaway together per se, but this was the sweetest place we’d ever been. We thanked Terry profusely, told her we’d be happy to pay for a room like this. She refused.
Then there was silence as we tried to register this generosity. We stood confounded, looking at one another.
“All right,” Terry said. “All right. Come here.” She beckoned Dead Bear forward and hugged him. Then she hugged Donovan and me and departed. The whole thing really shook me up.
After she left, we cleaned ourselves up, rolled a few joints, grabbed the six-pack, and left our cottage. As to the name of the town, we were sworn to secrecy in exchange for its bounteous and beautiful hospitality. But I can say that it was one of those that exist for only a half mile on either side of the 1 and that I’m not even really sure it would actually be there if I went looking for it today. That night, we walked back up the highway that only a few hours before had tried to kill us.
We wobbled along the yellow line, ensconced in warmth. Bullfrogs croaked, and the smell of lavender was thick in the air. We pondered the possibility that we had in fact died and that this was what had awaited us on the other side: a magnanimous innkeeper, a six-pack of beer, and everything for free so long as you tipped generously. We found Geoffrey’s trail and stumbled down to the moonlit beach. We made a bonfire and climbed up on the giant redwood stumps that were washed up all over the beach like dinosaur bones. We watched the ocean and wondered if we were still alive.
So, that’s what I got from my doctoral studies. This had been the last time I had faced a height without fear, a moment upon which I had reflected endlessly in the years since but which I had never previously identified as traumatic. But by god it had been. Chance is a hairpin turn and a pile of dirt, and now I knew that. It was a lot to absorb.
On the other hand, that I should have lived, and not only that, that I should have lived to marry the woman I’d loved since I was just a dumb sixteen-year-old kid, that was a lot to absorb too. For all the questionable things I’d done, to what did I owe my great fortune? And what h
ad I done to live up to it?
I have to admit, RP’s course of study helped me to face these questions, to identify my fears, and even to begin making peace with my more encompassing anger and sense of displacement. For all of its concrete challenges, even growing up is just a matter of perspective. My fear, my anger, and my alienation remained powerful forces, but ones that I was beginning to understand and even control. And to these accomplishments, I can say that RP’s course of study was a major contributor, that my years of postgraduate study in general had been a major contributor, that the educational experience that had so cruelly eluded me in school and that had been readily available to me in my profession had been a major contributor.
RP would be committing fraud every single time he introduced himself as Dr. So-and-So. But me, I was learning, I was growing, and I was grateful for it.
15
Graduation
After a long day of paper writing, suddenly it was the evening, and the Phillies game was starting, Doc Halladay taking the mound. I picked Bree up from work, we threw our bags in the car, and she drove us down the shore. Larry Andersen and Scott Franzke called the game on the radio. I wrote a five-page paper about the scriptures of the Sikh religion on the way.
Once there, we unpacked, and I wrote a four-page paper about how music makes me feel. As I did, I pitied the jackass who couldn’t write that one on his own. But great for me. Work was scarce, and I had a wedding to pay for. It took me all of ten seconds to write a paper about why the Beatles are awesome.
It was the end of the month again, and since my company paid monthly, I was getting in everything I could. I was planning on spitting out another three-pager about the administrative skills required to be a good elementary school principal over the course of the next twenty-five minutes, getting some sleep, and popping back up at seven for a couple more papers. We had a nice day at the beach planned, so the goal was to finish everything before Bree got up.