With exquisite deliberation, my father lowered himself into the kitchen chair. It was early evening, just after the ritual viewing of 60 Minutes, which had long ago replaced church as my family’s Sunday obligation of choice. All three of us watched with righteous pleasure as Mike Wallace showed hidden camera footage of dangerous and unsanitary conditions at a poultry-processing plant to a stammering, heavily perspiring executive who moments before had insisted that his company adhered to “the highest possible standards of safety and cleanliness.”
“The highest possible standards?” Mike Wallace repeated incredulously. “Those are your words, sir, not mine. Would you say that workers trampling on a chicken carcass and then putting it back on the assembly line represents the highest possible standards of cleanliness for an industry that feeds millions of Americans? Would you say that inspectors who regularly ignore high levels of salmonella and fecal bacteria—feca/ bacteria, sir—represent the highest possible levels of safety?”
“Ha!” my father called out. These were the moments that he loved, when the mighty were humbled. “What do you say to that, you pompous bastard?”
“I don’t … we can’t—” The executive held one hand in front of his face, shielding himself from the camera like a criminal on the TV news. “I must insist that we terminate this interview.”
After Andy Rooney’s closing sermon, my mother remained in the living room to clip and alphabetize coupons from the Sunday paper while my father and I retired to the kitchen to talk business. He opened a spiral-bound notebook and cleared his throat, but
instead of speaking he tilted his upper body to the right at a severe angle. In this awkward position, with the distracted expression of someone who’d just lost a filling, he mapped out the route and timetable I’d be following for the next two weeks.
“There’ve been a few changes,” he explained.
In fact, the new route was significantly different from the one I’d gotten used to over the previous summer. He’d picked up a couple of new stops—the Department of Public Works in Darwin and a big construction site in Springville—but had lost half a dozen. He exhaled slowly, raising himself into a position halfway between sitting and standing up, and spoke through gritted teeth.
“We don’t go to Union Village anymore.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” He worked his mouth into an unconvincing simulation of a smile. “Never better.”
“Can’t you put on some ointment or something?”
“They only go up to Preparation H. For the thing I got, you’d need Preparation Z.”
“Oh well,” I said, ever philosophical about other people’s distress. “Tomorrow morning it’ll all be a distant memory.”
“I don’t know if I can last that long.” He lowered himself back onto the chair as if onto a bed of nails. “I’m tempted to grab one of those steak knives and do the job myself.”
I followed his gaze to the phalanx of gleaming Sliceco knives arranged in ascending order of size along a magnetic strip above the stove. I’d been a Sliceco sales representative for a couple of months my senior year in high school, but hadn’t been able to close on any customers except my parents. The knives turned out to be too sharp to use and now served a purely decorative function in our kitchen.
“Be my guest,” I told him. “Just don’t ask me to assist.”
“On second thought,” he muttered, “maybe a pair of pliers would do the trick.”
“What’s that you were saying about Union Village?” I asked, pulling him back from the abyss of do-it-yourself surgery.
“It’s history.”
“What? Even Via Commercial?”
“Gonesville.” He mimed the act of crumpling a piece of paper and tossing it over his shoulder. “It makes it a lot easier to get to the rest of the stops on time.”
Via Commercial, the industrial park off Vauxhall Road, had been one of the linchpins of my father’s route. He’d serviced three of six plants laid out along the sinuous cul-de-sac, including Re-Flex Industries, where Cindy worked, and where I’d been expecting to meet my fate in the morning.
“What happened?” I asked, torn between relief on my own behalf and concern on my father’s. To lose three prime stops in a single blow was a bitter setback for the Roach Coach.
“The Lunch Monsters.” He spoke the name in a grim, matter-of-fact voice, as if there were nothing even remotely humorous about it.
“The who?”
He shrugged. “That’s what they call themselves. They’re a bunch of bodybuilders who’ve outfitted their trucks with those ridiculous monster tires. They’ve pretty much taken over the entire town.”
“How? I mean, they just can’t just drive up and steal your stops, can they?”
“These guys don’t mess around, Danny.” My father lowered his voice. “Their boss is an Italian from Staten Island.”
“So? What’s that supposed to mean? You’re an Italian from New Jersey.”
“You’re not listening.” He looked away from me, taking a few seconds to peruse the simulated wood grain of the tabletop. “If these guys want your stop, you give them your stop.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My father wasn’t a tough guy, but he knew the rules as well as anyone. Lunch-truck drivers didn’t just hand over their stops without a fight. It didn’t matter how old or small or sick or peace-loving you were; if someone tried to take what was yours, you had to go after them. If you didn’t you were dead meat.
“They took over the whole town?”
He nodded. “You know Tito? Big red truck?”
“Tito the Snack King? The guy who drives around with the Chihuahua?”
“Drove,” he said pointedly. “They went after him first. He pulled into a stop—this warehouse he’s been going to for years—and these assholes were already there, doors open and everything. Tito’s been around the block, right? He doesn’t say a word, just walks over to the driver’s side of their truck, rips the keys out of the ignition, and throws them on the roof of the warehouse. It’s one of those flat roofs, you know, so the keys don’t slide down or anything. They just sit there. The muscleman driver comes after him, but Tito shows the guy his tire iron, and that’s the end of that. The driver slinks off and Tito goes on about his business. He said that when he pulled out, the asshole was up on the roof on his hands and knees, sniffing around for his keys.”
“Good for Tito.”
“waist. That’s not the end of the story. Same night, Tito takes his dog for a walk. He lives in Elizabeth, but not a bad area. Nice quiet street. Except that night two big white guys jump out of some bushes and work him and the dog over with baseball bats. They don’t take his money or anything. But when it’s over, they fish his keys out of his pocket and drop them down a storm drain.”
“Did they hurt him bad?”
“Bad enough. Broke one of his arms. Knocked out a couple teeth. Killed the dog, though. And you know how much Tito loved that ugly little mutt.”
“Jesus.”
My father tilted himself to the left for a few seconds, then back to the right. Neither adjustment seemed to do him much good.
“Listen,” he said. “They’ve got their eye on this construction site I just picked up. It’s right on the border between Union Village and Springville. These are bad people, Danny. If they come after you, just walk away. I don’t want you getting into a fight with them, understand?”
“They killed the Chihuahua?”
My father jumped up like his chair was on fire and began moving his butt around with both hands in a way that would have seemed obscene, or at least funny, under other circumstances.
“I’m telling you, Danny, these are not nice people.”
There was a phone in my room, but I only gave it a fleeting glance before flopping down on my bed and reaching for the copy of On the Road on my night table. I’d bought the book a couple of summers before, but for some reason hadn’t gotten past the first few pages. The previous night, though, I’d cracked it open again in a fit of restless anxiety, only to find myself startled by its raw hypnotic power. I stayed up until close to three in the morning, my mind racing along with the run-on sentences, the descriptions of driving that just went on and on like the highway itself, as if life were nothing but a perpetual cross-country road trip fueled by diner coffee, crazy talk, and whatever dope and liquor happened to be on hand. It made me want to pick up the phone and wake Matt in the middle of the night—he was staying with Jess in her apartment near Columbia—to find out if he’d ever read it, and how, if he had, he’d ever managed to stand living a normal life afterward, going to classes, eating three square meals a day, only studying the books some stuffy old professor with tuna fish in his beard insisted were the classics. Man, I wanted to tell him, let’s just get in the car and drive, realizing even as I fantasized about this conversation that neither one of us had a car.
The manic buzz of Kerouac had stayed in my blood all day, making the thought of calling Cindy even more impossible than it already was. I mean, what was I supposed to tell her? I wished she wasn’t pregnant; I hoped she wouldn’t have the baby. The idea of fatherhood seemed like a kind of insanity to me, a nightmare on the level of paralysis or imprisonment. I actually knew one guy at Yale—Stew Johnson from Burlington, Vermont—who’d had a kid freshman year with his high school girlfriend. His parents had
money, and were paying to support the kid and his mother while Stew finished college. Every now and then the kid came to visit, and whenever I saw Stew pushing the carriage around campus in his untucked paisley shirt and state trooper sunglasses, smirking like the whole thing was some absurd prank played on him by the gods, I smiled politely and averted my eyes from the spectacle of his misfortune.
But as difficult as it was to imagine turning into a hard-luck version of Stew—after all, my parents didn’t have money and weren’t going to be supporting anyone while I finished college—it was no easier to imagine going the route of Larry Messina, this guy who’d graduated Harding High a year ahead of me. Larry was the long time boyfriend of Monica Brady, one of the smartest girls in my class. Monica had received a full scholarship to study engineering at Bucknell, but her plans changed when she got pregnant the night of her senior prom, supposedly the first time the two of them had done the deed. Her father was a bigwig in the Knights of Columbus, and he refused to even consider the possibility of allowing his daughter to get an abortion. Instead a quickie wedding was arranged for late that summer, on what turned out to be a beautiful breezy Sunday afternoon, though the auspicious weather couldn’t quite compensate for the inauspicious absence of the groom, who had allegedly gone to a Grateful Dead concert the night before and disappeared into a two-tone VW van with Oregon plates. Nearly three years later, Larry was still at large in the Deadhead underworld and still spoken about in hushed tones by the people who’d known him, as though he were a draft dodger or fugitive from justice, someone who’d brought nearly unspeakable shame on himself and his family. Meanwhile, Monica had taken a part-time job at Stop & Shop, and whenever I shopped there I tried to avoid getting on line for her register, to spare us both the awkward conversations we always seemed to have about what a great time I must be having in college.
If someone had put a loaded gun to my head, I thought I’d
probably choose Stew’s route over Larry’s, though I wasn’t sure if this was a sign of decency or cowardice on my part. I couldn’t imagine embarrassing my parents the way Larry had. and I couldn’t stand the idea of people I’d grown up with thinking badly about me, especially since a flattering consensus seemed to have developed around town that my life was shaping up pretty well. I’d rather have them feeling sorry for me, like I’d given up the world to pay for one stupid mistake, which was the way everybody felt when they saw Monica Brady biting her lip, trying to remember the price code for eggplant. On the other hand, the last thing I wanted was for Cindy to know that I felt this way, for fear that it would encourage her to actually put me in a position where this hypothetical dilemma would become horrifyingly real, and God only knew what I’d have to do to save myself.
Oddly enough, Cindy and I hadn’t really managed to discuss the situation on Friday night, despite the fact that she’d driven all the way up to New Haven to bring it to my attention. The words were barely out of her mouth when she rose from the couch and walked calmly out of the common room with a dramatic flair I hadn’t known she possessed, turning sideways to slip between me and Polly on her way to the door. I stood paralyzed in her wake, everyone’s eyes on me in the stunned silence that accompanied her departure.
“Holy shit,” I exclaimed, grinning the stupid grin I reserved specially for moments of crisis.
If it had been left up to me, I would have just gone into my room and laid down for a while, but it was clear from the intensely interested gazes of my audience that something a little more dynamic was required of me at the moment. I touched Polly lightly on the wrist.
“Don’t go anywhere,” I told her. “I’ll be right back.”
She pulled her hand away as though I were a stranger who’d accosted her in the elevator, rather than the guy she’d just been
making a spectacle of herself with on the lawn behind the drama school.
“What a night,” she muttered, loud enough for everyone to hear.
It was misery to plunge back into the chattering mob on the stairs, squeezing my way through the press of bodies like a salmon struggling in the wrong direction, away from where I wanted to stay toward a destination I didn’t want to reach. When I finally managed to force my way to the ground floor and fresh air, I walked straight into Max, who was standing outside the entryway in his bare feet and skintight pajama top, squinting skeptically at our third-floor windows.
“Aha,” he said. “Just the man I wanted to see.”
“Jesus, Max. Where the hell have you been?”
“Around.” He gestured vaguely at the wider world. “Killing time.”
“Your mother’s pretty upset.”
“They still up there?”
“Yeah,” I said, wondering where you could go to hide out for nine hours looking like an escaped mental patient, even at Yale. “They’ll probably still be there in the morning.”
He shook his head. “Bastards can’t take a hint.”
“They came all the way from Colorado. The least you could do is say hello.”
“No,” he observed, improvising a little dance to protect his naked feet from the cold slate. “The least I could do is a lot less than that. Where you off to anyway?”
“Tell you later.”
I patted his shoulder and looped around him on my way to the York Street entrance, where I found Cindy standing like a prisoner with her face and hands pressed against the bars of the locked gate. I jingled my keys to let her know the cavalry had arrived.
“Need some help?”
She turned slowly. From the look on her face, you might have thought she knew dozens of people at Yale, any one of whom would have been preferable to me at that particular moment.
“What’s it look like to you?”
She let me walk her to her car, which was parked right in front of WaWa’s. Three homeless guys hit us up for money in the half-block it took for us to get there.
“It’s not as pretty as I expected around here,” she observed. “You made it sound like heaven or something.”
“It’s better in the daytime.”
“Princeton’s a lot nicer,” she said, snapping open her purse and fishing around for her car keys. “I thought this was going to look more like that.”
“Princeton?” I scoffed. “Princeton’s a country club.”
“Well, this looks like downtown Elizabeth.”
“I like being in the city. It’s not so much like being locked in an ivory tower.”
She’d gotten too engrossed in her search to answer. She kept pulling things out of her purse—a travel packet of Kleenex, a silver whistle, a squeeze tube of Vaseline—and shoving them back in with small sighs of exasperation.
“Damn,” she said. “I hope I didn’t leave them in your room.”
She pried the purse open as far as it would go and pressed her face into the aperture, like an animal trainer peering into a lion’s mouth. I struck a pose of pensive waiting, rubbing my chin and pondering the night sky. It felt like we were on public display, lit up like movie stars in the fluorescent glow spilling out from the plate-glass windows of the convenience store, which just then seemed to be the dazzling hub of all New Haven. Behind her I could see a pack of local kids gathered in front of Demery’s, shouting at passing cars, and farther down, a big silver tour bus parked in front of Toad’s. Branford was having a Motown party that night, and you could hear the muffled voices of the Jackson Five rising above the hum of Elm Street traffic.
“I give up,” she said finally, turning the bag upside down and dumping the contents onto the hood of her car.
Her purse was normal size, but it disgorged a bewildering torrent
of stuff, including about forty sticks of Juicyfruit gum, a battered issue of TV Guide with Peter Falk on the cover, an unopened deck of cards, maybe half a dozen film cannisters, a few stray jujubes, the obligatory container of Tic Tacs, and the two letters I’d written her the previous fall. It was odd to see the envelopes tumble out with the rest of the junk, my familiar scrawl staring back at me like an old friend. I had to suppress an urge to reach down and claim them as my own.
“I’m such an idiot,” she said, straightening up and laughing. She reached into a slash pocket on the side of her jacket and produced the keys with a bashful flourish. “I can’t believe I’m so stupid.”
She handed them to me for safe-keeping—like my own, they were dangling from one of my father’s souvenir sneakers—and began jamming the mess back into her purse, muttering all the while about what an unbelievable ditz she was. I was taking a moment to admire the contours of her ass in the snug jeans, drawing encouragement from the fact that she didn’t look the slightest bit pregnant, when a car pulled up alongside hers and honked twice. The sound itself was high-pitched, almost toylike, but there was something urgent and imperious in the delivery, and I snapped to attention as if my name had been called. The driver’s side window descended in jerks, revealing Peter Preston’s agitated face.
“Where is she?” he demanded.
My instinct was to play dumb, until I realized I didn’t have to.
“How should I know?”
He scrutinized Cindy for a few seconds, apparently trying to determine if she was Polly in disguise, then resumed glaring at me. His voice was more tentative now, though still aggrieved.
“They said she was with you.”
“I guess they were wrong.”
He closed his eyes and nodded slowly, trying to get hold of himself. It struck me then with surprising force—saddened me, almost—that Cindy’s Civic was a lot nicer than the professor’s dirty yellow Rabbit. I wondered if he was making some sort of statement
about materialism, or if he simply couldn’t afford a better car. The least he could have done was wash the one he had.
“Okay,” he said, more to himself than to me. “All right, then.”
By the time he drove off, Cindy. had finished repacking her purse. She unwrapped a stick of gum and carefully folded it in half before tucking it in her mouth.
“Who was that?”
“Polly’s old boyfriend.”
“Is Polly—?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s pretty,” Cindy said, with the tone of melancholy objectivity girls often struck when pronouncing verdicts on their rivals.
I nodded without enthusiasm. Cindy risked a smile.
“Sorry to mess up your night.”
“That’s okay. I guess I deserve it.”
She extended her hand to me, open palm up. There was a shy, expectant look on her face, almost as if she were asking me to dance.
“It’s really nice to see you again,” she told me. “I’ve been missing you a lot.”
I opened my mouth to say something similar but couldn’t bring myself to mouth even the blandest pleasantry. You were a mistake, I wanted to tell her. Is that so hard to understand? In mv embarrassment I looked away, pretending to be distracted by the bright interior of WaWa’s, full of Yalies loading up on bags of Doritos and pints of Häagen-Dazs. Completely by chance, I found myself locked in goofy eye contact with my dishwashing partner, Eddie Zimmer, who was standing on line with three rolls of toilet paper balanced on top of his head like a smokestack. Lorelei, was standing next to him, shaking her head in mock disapproval of his wacky antics. I took a deep breath and turned back to Cindy.
“Your car looks nice,” I told her, dropping the keys into her palm. “Do you still wash it every week?”
She hesitated, as if she hadn’t heard me correctly.
“I worked hard for this car.” There was an edge to her voice, as
if she were trying to suggest that I’d been handed things on a silver platter. “It’ll be a long time before I can afford another one.”
“I’m so far from being able to afford a new car, you wouldn’t believe it.”
“Yeah,” she said, “but when you do it’ll be a lot nicer than this.”
“I’ll keep you posted.”
“You do that,” she snapped, whirling away from me with startling abruptness, as if she’d just realized she was late for an appointment. She had trouble with the lock, jabbing the key at the target three or four times before hitting the bull’s-eye. The button popped with a solid thunk.
“Yo, Danny,” a voice called from the doorway. “Heads up.”
I turned just in time to see a wobbly missile spinning toward my face. Acting with admirable autonomy, my hands flew up and snagged what turned out to be a roll of toilet paper.
“Nice grab,” said Eddie, who was busy shoving the two remaining rolls up and under his Penn sweatshirt in what my George Eliot professor would have called “an act of gender transgression.” Lorelei seemed to interpret this gesture as some sort of challenge, and promptly pulled open her army jacket like a flasher to exhibit her own breasts straining against the fabric of a too-small Mötley Crüe T-shirt.
“Mine are still bigger,” she said, giggling with drunken pride. She smiled at me, and I felt a sudden jolt of electricity, as if our bodies were tuned to the same frequency. “Don’t you think?”
“We’ll have to make a more thorough comparison back at my place,” Eddie told her, thereby earning himself an affectionate punch in the arm. “Hey, you guys wanna party? We still got half a bottle of tequila left.”
I glanced at Cindy, who was staring at Lorelei as if she knew her from somewhere. For a second, in spite of everything, I felt like saying yes. Maybe that’s what we need, I thought, a night with Eddie and Lorelei, a lesson on how two totally different people can hang out together and simply enjoy one another’s company, free from expectations or recriminations. But then I admitted to myself that what I really wanted was to trade places, to slip off and get
drunk with Lorelei while Eddie figured out what to do about Cindy.
“Maybe some other time,” I told him.
“No problem. We’ll be over at the Taft if you guys change your mind. Apartment seven-B.” Eddie glanced at Lorelei. “If her brothers don’t kill me first.”
Lorelei nodded to confirm this possibility. “They want to kick Eddie’s ass.”
“Really?” I said. “How come?”
“They’re greasers,” she said, as if this were a term that people still used everyday. “They think it’s funny.”
“Nick ratted me out.” Eddie shook his head. He was a shaggy-haired Applied Math major who looked like a wiseass even when he was trying to be sincere. “Now Ronny and Tony want to beat the living shit out of me. It’s just so primitive.”
“So what are you gonna do?” I asked.
“I dunno,” Eddie admitted, cupping his hands beneath his toilet-paper breasts. “Guess I’m gonna get my ass kicked.”
Lorelei snickered. “My hero.”
They headed off down the block, laughing as if the whole thing were a big joke. By the time I turned back to Cindy, she had climbed into her car and shut the door. She cranked the window down a couple of inches, looking up at me with a familiar scrunched-up expression.
“You okay?” I asked. “You sure you’re all right to drive?”
“I’m fine.”
She started the engine and released the brake, staring at me the whole time, waiting for me to say something else. All at once the tears just started dropping out of her eyes and sliding down her face like a special effect, one perfectly formed droplet after the other.
“I’m sorry,” I finally managed to stammer, but by that point she’d already pulled away, leaving me alone at the curb with a roll of toilet paper in my hand.
I was still deep in a Kerouac trance when my father knocked on my bedroom door a couple hours later. Dean and Sal were zooming through Nebraska in a borrowed Cadillac limousine, going “a hundred-and-ten miles an hour straight through, an arrow road, sleeping towns, no traffic.” He shuffled into my room in flannel pajamas and an old plaid bathrobe he only wore when he was feeling sick or downhearted.
“You still up? It’s after eleven.”
“Reading.” I set the book down next to the legal pad I’d been using to copy out my favorite sentences.
“Schoolwork?”
“Pleasure.”
He gave me a look I was beginning to recognize, the one that often took up residence on his face when the conversation shifted to matters that could broadly be termed intellectual. His eyes narrowed and he leaned forward a little, concentrating harder than usual, as if he hadn’t paid proper attention to me in the previous two decades of our acquaintanceship and now had to play catch-up.
“You even take notes on your pleasure reading?”
“Not usually. This is a pretty amazing book, though.”
“Oh yeah? What is it?”
“On the Road. By Jack Kerouac.”
“On the Road?” He studied the ceiling while gently ministering to his ass with his left hand. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“You sure? It’s a pretty famous book. Published back in the fifties. This is the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition.”
“Hmm,” he said, moderately impressed. “What’s it about?”
I picked up the book and read from the back cover. “‘On the Road is a saga of youth adrift in America, traveling the highways, exploring the midnight streets of the cities, learning the vast expanse of the land, passionately searching for their country and themselves.’” I left out the part about the book being … an explosion of consciousness—a mind-expanding trip into emotíon and sensation, drugs and liquor and sex … and jumped right to the
end. “‘It is, quite simply, one of the great novels and major milestones of our time.’”
“I wasn’t much of a reader back then.” He shook his head, as if saddened by all the major milestones he’d missed out on. “Maybe things would be different now if I was.”
“You should check it out sometime,” I said, an invitation I would never have extended if I’d thought there was the slightest chance he’d take me up on it. I couldn’t quite imagine him reading sentences like the ones I’d scribbled in my pad—The madness of Dean had bloomed into a weird flower, say, or To Slim Gaillard, the whole world was just one big orooni—and feeling like he was making productive use of his time.
“Maybe I will,” he replied, smiling to let me know he was only kidding. “By the way, did you remember to turn on the coffee stoves?”
“Damn,” I said. “I’ll go do it now.”
“Don’t forget.” His face turned serious. “Maybe you should get some sleep when you come back in. Believe me, four o’clock’ll be here before you know it.”
Prosaic and dependable by day, the Roach Coach took on a more alien aspect at night, the silver storage cube haloed in moon-glow, as if lit from some internal source. Sometimes it seemed as startling to me as a lunar module parked in one of our neighbors’ driveways might have been. I tiptoed across the dewy lawn in my flimsy corduroy slippers, unlocked the back door of the cube, and pushed it up on its groaning hydraulic arms to expose the familiar flat faces of the coffee urns and sandwich oven.
Making coffee for a lunch truck isn’t anything like making it at home. You can’t just flip a switch and expect piping hot coffee to come pouring out a couple of minutes later. The Roach Coach was outfitted with two twenty-two-gallon double-spigot tallboy urns, each divided into two chambers—left side for coffee, right for hot water. The last thing you did at the end of the day was fill the two
right-hand tanks almost to the top with water from the garden hose (it’s important to use a black hose; water from the green ones tastes like plastic). Then, ideally around ten at night, you lit the propane stoves under the urns to heat the water overnight. While you slept, the ten gallons of water heated to the optimum temperature of two hundred degrees; eight gallons would be poured through a flannel coffee bag containing two pounds of GoldPak restaurant-quality coffee first thing in the morning. The remaining two gallons of water would be held in reserve for the occasional tea drinkers and Cup-a-Soup fans among our clientele.
Aside from failing to extinguish the pilot lights before filling the propane tank—an oversight that could be potentially fatal or at least hazardous to the eyebrows—probably the single stupidest mistake a lunch truck operator could make was forgetting to turn on the stoves before going to bed. Every driver had a cautionary anecdote on the subject—never autobiographical—about some bozo in Bergen or Hudson County, or maybe someone his cousin had heard about in western Pennsylvania, a fuck-up too stupid or hungover to realize that his urns were dispensing cold water coffee to the biggest, meanest, most unforgiving construction workers around (ironworkers, usually, though some guys substituted pipe-fitters, apparently for variety), who retaliated for this outrage, depending upon who was telling the story, by 1. dumping cup after cup of the undrinkable stuff on the head of the hapless driver until he was thoroughly marinated in the juice of his own error, or 2. teaming up to push the truck on its side, or, most simply, 3. beating the living shit out of the guy, who absolutely deserved it, because people need hot coffee in the morning, and lunch-truck drivers have undertaken a sacred trust to provide it to them wherever they might be.
So I lit the stove and averted these potential humiliations, at least for the time being. My task complete, I lowered and locked the door and headed back across the lawn and up the steps, fully intending to take my father’s advice and try to get some sleep. At the last minute, though, I let go of the doorknob and turned around
to look again at the truck. It seemed to be shining a little more brightly than before.
A voice spoke in my head.
This
is it, it said.
I waited for clarification, but the voice didn’t return. I gave a short, uncomfortable laugh and closed my eyes, thinking I must have been more tired than I’d realized. But when I opened them, a strange feeling of lightness filled my body.
I can do this, I thought. I didn’t have to be Joe College or Jack Kerouac. I could just be myself, my father’s son, living out my life in the town where I was born, growing old among people who’d known me as a kid. I could accept the world I’d unknowingly volunteered for the night I started a new life in Cindy, learn to love her the way my father had learned to love my mother, learn to be content with the things other people learned to be content with. What was in front of me right now—the anonymous suburban street, the silent trees, the truck glowing with its hidden fires—all that could be enough.
“I can do this,” I said out loud, and admitting it was such a mighty relief that I might have sunk to my knees there and then if our next-door neighbor, Mrs. deFillipo, hadn’t stepped out onto her own porch at exactly the same moment and begun chanting, “Muffin, oh Muf-fin,” into the night in such a plaintive, melodic voice that it seemed like prayer enough for both of us.