‘I don’t know,’ Gino said. ‘I haven’t made up my mind yet. But I damned sure don’t want to sit here looking at your face right now. See that taco stand down the block? Go wait for me in the parking lot. If I don’t turn up by noon-time, you’ll have your answer.’
At the taco stand, my grade-school Spanish lessons came in handy in a way my fifth-grade teacher, Miss Diaz, would never have anticipated, as I spent the next hour panhandling spare change from the mostly Mexican locals until I’d collected enough money for a breakfast burrito and a cup of coffee. I’m sure the sight of a blanco begging alms in their mother tongue was quite a novelty for everyone I accosted, and it was a novelty for me as well. Since leaving New York I’d occasionally bummed spare change from drivers I’d thumbed rides with, but until that morning in El Paso I’d never had the nerve to panhandle money out on the street. I’d always told myself I’d rather starve than suffer the humiliation of begging in public. But there was something about begging in a foreign language that made it less embarrassing than I’d expected – as though the humiliation I’d feared had somehow gotten lost in translation. Of course, dealing with naturally generous Mexicans made it that much easier. Even those who couldn’t spare any change wished me ‘buena suerte’ and smiled apologetically when they turned me down. Bienaventurados los pobres de espíritu, porque de ellos es el Reino de los cielos.
By the time Gino showed up at the taco stand, I’d been sweating it out beneath the desert sun for four hours and had just about concluded I’d been dumped. ‘I was starting to think you’d written me off, Gino,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t have surprised me if you did, but I’m glad you didn’t.’
‘Believe me, I thought about it,’ Gino frowned. ‘But that would have been letting you off too easy. Much as you’ve cost me, I might as well get some work out of you. I’ve got a ton of shit to load out of my storage unit in Tucson and I can tell you right now who’s going to be humping most of it into the U-Haul truck. If you bust your ass and earn your keep, I’ll consider taking you the rest of the way to Tacoma. That’s the deal. Take it or leave it.’
Naturally, I took it, and promised Gino that once we got to Tucson he wouldn’t have to lift a finger. And with that settled, we hit the highway again and were soon crossing the state line into New Mexico. For once, I was glad when Gino fiddled with the radio and tuned in a country station. Mindless music was better than the brooding silence Gino had lapsed into since we’d got back on the road – a silence he sullenly maintained for the next hundred miles. But as we approached the town of Deming, Gino spotted signs for a western wear outlet and his mood suddenly brightened. Next thing I knew, he was pulling off the highway to find the place. When we got to the warehouse-sized outlet, Gino left me outside in the sweltering parking lot while he took his time shopping for a new pair of cowboy boots. When he finally reappeared an hour later, he was all smiles as he opened the big shoebox he was carrying and showed me his new boots – a gaudy pair of hand-tooled snakeskin Tony Lamas. I whistled appreciatively and quipped that they must have set him back a few bucks. Gino admitted he’d laid out three hundred for the pair – and then couldn’t resist adding, ‘Which means they cost me only half as much as you did when you ran over that fucking mule deer.’
Six hundred dollars for new rims and tyres? I’d been wondering what the Goodyear bill had totalled but hadn’t dared ask. Now I knew. No wonder Gino was so pissed at me. I made a show of looking sheepish, but my heart wasn’t in it. I’d apologised enough already. It was hard to work up much sympathy for a guy who’d just spent three hundred dollars on custom boots, while my poor feet were still crammed into dead man’s shoes from the Oz. But at least Gino’s newly acquired finery had put him in a better mood, and he sounded almost civil when he proposed we grab something to eat and call it an early night.
Two exits down the interstate from the western wear outlet we found Deming’s fast-food strip and pulled off the highway for an early dinner at Burger King. Then Gino drove across the street to a Best Western motel and told me to stay out of sight while he registered for a single room.
The long Texas crossing had left me beat, and I was looking forward to nodding off the minute I had a place to lie down. But when Gino came back to the car with his room key he told me to make myself scarce until after sundown. What the fuck? I knew Gino was planning to save money by sneaking me into his room. I just didn’t expect he’d be too squeamish to try it in daylight. It pissed me off, but what could I say? His money, his rules. Which left me wandering the streets of Deming for the next three hours, until it got dark enough for the cottontail rabbits to emerge from their burrows in the sagebrush lot behind the motel.
When we left at first light, Gino was in a foul mood again. He’d had to wake me three times during the night to complain about my snoring. I couldn’t wait to get to Tucson, just so I could finally do something Gino wouldn’t find annoying. Fortunately, he seemed to be in as big a hurry to start the load-out as I was, and he kept the Audi cruising at seventy the entire way. An hour down the road, we crossed the Continental Divide, and I was cheered by the thought that the Pacific Coast was now only a two-day ride away.
After a quick stop for gas and coffee in Lordsburg, we pushed on across the Arizona border and into the Sonoran Desert, where the sagebrush and creosote bush were dwarfed by monumental saguaro cacti, many of them thirty to forty feet high. I knew their multiple upraised branches were called ‘arms’ but, seeing them in person for the first time, they seemed to me more like giant fingers, and every time we passed one with its middle digit towering above the rest, I thought of Gino and his helicopter salute – a salute I was certain would soon be aimed at me, if I didn’t pull my weight once we got to Tucson.
It was late morning when we pulled up to the U-Haul depot across the street from Gino’s storage unit. The temperature must have been in the low eighties already, and over the next two hours, while I loaded hand truck after hand truck with mechanic’s tools and heavy boxes of household goods, it got so hot I had to strip to the waist. Meanwhile, Gino stood beside the truck’s roll-out ramp barking orders like a gunnery sergeant and gleefully watching me sweat. But I kept my head down like a good little slave and didn’t complain, and by the time the truck was finally loaded even Jarhead Gino was impressed.
‘Under two hours, start to finish. Not bad,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think you had it in you. Let’s get the Audi on the trailer and we’re out of here.’
Apparently, busting my ass on the loadout had gotten me back on Gino’s good side, because on our way out of Tucson he pulled into a Dairy Queen and treated me to a jumbo root beer float. I was so thirsty after my workout I chugged the first two gulps like an idiot and immediately gave myself a brain freeze. While I sat there moaning and clutching my throbbing forehead, Gino had a good laugh at my expense. Which was fine with me. Better to be a source of amusement than a target of scorn.
As it turned out, Gino had more laughs in store a few hours later, when a construction detour in Phoenix took us off the interstate and onto the local streets. At one point, we stopped for a red light in front of a gated retirement community whose sidewalks were lined with orange trees heavily laden with what looked to be ripe fruit, and I asked Gino if he’d mind me jumping out of the truck to snatch a few oranges. He told me to go ahead and grab as many as I wanted, so I hopped out and quickly picked a bunch before the traffic light changed. When I got back in the truck, I offered one to Gino, but he said he wasn’t hungry.
‘You think they’re ripe?’ I wondered.
‘Only one way to find out,’ Gino said, with a sly grin that should have tipped me off that something was fishy. But I was so pleased with my unexpected score I just blundered into his trap and peeled the rind from one of the oranges. Then I took a big juicy bite – and nearly gagged. I immediately spat it back out through the open window. Sweet Jesus, I’d never tasted anything so bitter!
Gino was laughing so hard at my puckered face I thought he’d piss h
imself. ‘Didn’t you wonder why all that fruit was hanging there unpicked? Those are ornamental orange trees, you dummy. They’re just for show.’
‘Now you tell me,’ I griped. What did I know about oranges? Betty Smith said ‘a tree grows in Brooklyn’, but I can guarantee you she wasn’t talking citrus.
‘Sorry, man,’ he grinned. ‘I was going to warn you. Then I thought, fuck it, why spoil the show?’
Leaving Phoenix, Gino turned onto I-93, heading northwest toward Las Vegas, and my long run on Interstate 10 finally came to an end – two thousand miles down the road from Baldwin, Florida. We were travelling through high desert country now, with the silhouettes of flat-topped mesas looming purple in the distance. As I stared out the window into that empty landscape, I saw nothing but sagebrush and boulder-strewn fields – and an endless montage of roadkill jackrabbits gathering flies and ravens along the roadside. On every long uphill stretch the overburdened U-Haul truck whined in protest, and our progress was dismally slow. The truck was a gas-hog, too, and before we got halfway to Vegas, Gino started looking for someplace to refuel.
We soon spotted a sign for a trading post ten miles up the road and, as we got closer, more signs appeared, all of them touting the trading post’s big attraction: ARIZONA BABY RATTLERS! I was curious to check them out – I’d been a great collector of garter snakes and milk snakes in my Long Island youth. So while Gino was filling the truck’s tank, I followed the arrow signs to a teepee behind the trading post building, where the ‘Baby Rattlers’ Cage’ was housed. I had to laugh when I saw that the rattlers were like the orange trees in Phoenix: not what I’d expected. Oh, they were rattlers all right, but none of them were snakes. Instead, the wire cage perched on cinderblocks inside the teepee held dozens of cheap plastic baby’s rattles, all dangling from strands of fishing line and rattling softly as they swayed in the draught blowing in through the open doorway. I had to admit, it was a clever ploy for luring gullible tourists to the trading post. A bait-and-switch with a sense of humour. Desert humour. Dry as the sunbaked landscape.
The sun had been down for hours by the time we approached the Nevada border and my eyes had grown accustomed to the dark – which made what happened next even more dazzling. We rounded a bend in the road and suddenly there it was, Hoover Dam, radiant in the megawatt glare of a hundred floodlights. Even the water cascading from the spillways far below the dam’s massive face was brightly lit. I was glad Gino was doing the driving so I could just sit there and gawk at the spectacle as we descended from the hills onto the causeway that crossed the dam.
The last time I’d seen anything so impressive was on a whirlwind trip to Niagara Falls with my family when I was in grade school. The trip was my mother’s idea, but my father was the only driver in our family, and he seemed anything but enthusiastic as we all piled into his Studebaker early one Saturday morning for the five-hundred-mile trip from Long Island to Niagara. For the next twelve hours, my dad drove like a man possessed, allowing us only two five-minute pit stops along the way, and when we arrived in Niagara after dark we were treated to a twenty-minute stop at the illuminated Falls before he hustled us off to the cheapest motel he could find – a motel located next to a chemical plant, whose acrid fumes permeated the motel’s rooms and no doubt explained its low-budget rates.
My brothers and I christened it ‘The Stinky Motel’, and we were all complaining of sore throats when we checked out at dawn the next morning and hurried back to the Falls for one last visit. In daylight, they were still awesome, though not as magical as they’d seemed under the coloured lights the night before. My father posed us all by the overlook and took a few snapshots to prove we’d been there, and then quickly herded us back into the Studebaker for the long drive home. By the time our ‘family adventure’ was over, we’d spent twenty-four hours on the road and less than an hour visiting Niagara Falls. But I was glad I’d gotten to see it, and I felt the same about Hoover Dam that night.
We rolled into Las Vegas – another dazzling light show – a little after eight o’clock. Gino stopped for gas and snacks at a service station on the north end of town, and I got out of the truck to use the bathroom. When I stepped inside the convenience store, I was surprised see the entire back wall lined with slot machines, all of them being pumped with quarters by travellers who looked just as road weary as Gino and me. I knew Vegas was a gambling town, but I’d never imagined the prevailing vice was so pervasive that its reach extended even into the gas stations. Gino had told me the locals referred to the town as ‘Lost Wages’. Now I understood why.
We were thirty miles out of Vegas, still travelling north on I-93, when Gino’s energy gave out. He’d been doing all the driving since we’d left Deming and now he was finally tired enough to risk turning the wheel over to me so he could catch a few hours of sleep. When we swapped places, Gino instructed me to just keep going straight on I-93 and to wake him when we reached the town of Ely, two hundred miles up the road. This time, he didn’t warn me to watch out for deer. I guess he figured the rental truck was heavy enough to mow down any mulies that might cross our path.
Not long after Gino nodded off, snowflakes began drifting through the headlight beams, and I cursed my luck. Still, I wasn’t really worried. The snow seemed to be melting as soon as it hit the roadway, and there was hardly any traffic to contend with, so I kept my foot on the gas and we lumbered on steadily through the pitch-dark night. I drove for the next three hours without incident, but thirty miles outside of Ely, as we began climbing into the Ely Springs Mountain Range, the snowfall got heavier and now it was definitely sticking to the road surface.
Soon I began to feel the truck’s tyres losing traction on the mountain’s switchback curves and out of caution I slowed down to twenty miles per hour and flipped on the hazard lights to warn anyone coming up from behind that we were travelling slower than the posted minimum speed. Meanwhile, Gino continued sleeping peacefully beside me, oblivious to the deteriorating road conditions, and I was reluctant to wake him. I was still confident I could make it over the pass and down into Ely on my own, but my confidence disappeared a thousand feet short of the summit, when the truck’s tyres began to slip so badly that I had no choice but to stop on the highway and wake Gino for help.
‘What’s going on?’ Gino demanded. ‘What’d you hit this time?’
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘But the road’s too slick, and the truck’s too heavy to climb this grade. I think we’d better unhitch the Audi to lighten the load or we’re not going to make it to the top of the pass.’
Predictably, Jarhead Gino was too gung-ho to take my word for it and insisted on getting back behind the wheel himself so he could prove I was just being a pussy about driving in snow. I had set the parking brake when I stopped, but, despite that precaution, the instant we jumped out of the cab to swap places the truck began sliding slowly but inexorably downhill, and the two of us went into panic mode.
‘Holy shit, you weren’t kidding!’ Gino shouted. ‘Quick, grab some big rocks! We need to chock the wheels before this sucker goes over the edge!’ Both of us started frantically scrabbling for rocks in the snow beneath the guardrail and managed to chock the truck’s rear wheels before it could gain any more momentum. Then Gino jumped behind the wheel of the Audi and immediately backed it off the trailer and parked it beside the guardrail. Disaster averted.
My hands were shaking as I climbed back into the truck, but as soon as Gino kicked aside the rocks we’d used to chock the wheels I was able to drive the lightened load safely the rest of the way over the pass and down into Ely, with Gino tailing cautiously behind in the Audi.
‘Talk about a close call!’ I said, as we hooked up again in the parking lot of an abandoned gas station on the edge of town.
‘Yeah, that was some hairy shit all right,’ Gino agreed. ‘Good thing you woke me when you did or it could have been a lot worse.’
‘Now aren’t you glad you didn’t dump me in Tucson?’ I grinned. For a change, I’d g
iven him no reason to bitch.
‘I suppose,’ Gino conceded. ‘But when you’re done patting yourself on the back, how about giving me a hand loading the Audi back on the trailer so we can get the fuck out of this snow and find someplace to bed down. There must be a motel in this hick town.’
Unfortunately, the only two motels we spotted on the way into town were already flashing ‘No Vacancy’ signs, and in the end Gino had to settle for a room in the Hotel Nevada, a six-storey red brick relic from Ely’s pre-Depression glory days. Gino left me out in the parking lot while he registered for a room, and when he returned to the truck to grab his overnight bag he gave me the bad news. The lobby’s layout was too open, and there was no way he could sneak me in past the night clerk on duty at the desk. I had no choice but to rough it outside in the truck.
‘Don’t worry, you won’t freeze,’ Gino assured me. ‘I’ve got plenty of extra moving pads you can use as blankets, and there’s room enough for you to bed down in the box if we shift a few things around.’
I wasn’t looking forward to bunking in the back of the U-Haul, but it was one in the morning and I was too tired to argue, so I said nothing as Gino unlocked the roll-up door and fished out a flashlight to light my way. Once I’d cleared enough space to lie down at the front of the box, I spread some moving pads out on the cold steel floor. As soon as Gino saw I was settled, he handed me the flashlight and rolled down the door. Hours later, when my bladder woke me, I tried pulling the door up so I could jump out and take a piss, but the fucking thing wouldn’t budge! The paranoid bastard had locked me in the box without my realising it! Now I was trapped until he deigned to return. Cursing Gino did nothing to relieve my bladder, though, and I started scanning the contents of the truck with the flashlight, looking for any kind of empty can or bottle, with no success. Then I spotted a chainsaw whose plastic gas well had been drained for transport. I had my solution. And felt the satisfaction of imagining the unpleasant surprise Gino was in for the next time he tried to cut firewood.
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