agerasia: quality of not growing old
For example: “This road trip of my life is specifically designed to achieve agerasia: to outrun, outdistance, outlast The Three Fates who stalk my every move.”
I floor the accelerator of my parents’ gold Plymouth Savoy. I abandon the immaculate green lawns of Glen Rock, New Jersey, looking for action. Soft vowelly suburban teenage boys—Joey, Bruce, Howie—diminish in the rearview. As does a future that would also be diminished by starched shirtwaist dresses, primly flipped hair, Ivory-soaped skin. I seek other names and places to discover and define who I am and what I want: more or less to live forever.
In high school my definition of “life,” of “action,” of “forever” is modest—to hurtle up and down Route 17—blaring the Supremes, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles. Here, I’m free, electric, invincible. To survive death I must be invincible, just like Route 17, where acidic rain and lightning illuminate “Eat Here” signs atop diners. The limitless wet sky thunders my car to the pavement. Route 17 shivers intensely, embracing me in its rumbling sounds. At dusk, when the rain stops, I roll down the window and inhale a bouquet of diesel fumes. Coppery strobes of sunset reflect off car bumpers. Where else do I want to be? Nowhere, is where.
When streetlights and neon ignite, I, underage, sneak into bars and play foosball and pinball. I plunk spare change into the jukebox. I dance with anyone who asks—Rick, Steve—guys skulking hard-edged consonants. Camel cigarettes are tucked in the sleeves of their white T-shirts like small packets of death. But we’re safe here with all the power of Route 17 keeping us alive.
Or these guys and I hang out in parking lots. We barely speak, mesmerized by Ford Galaxies, Chevy Bel Airs, Plymouth Furies finning down the highway. I love the bars, the boys, the parking lots, the smell of asphalt, smoke, sulphur. Soot smudges the sky like charcoal kisses that last longer than dime-store Raspberry Heaven lipstick. I lean against my car, heat from the engine rising up my spine like warm toxic sap.
Soon I’m back behind the wheel steering toward midnight. I pass Esso and Sinclair stations, drive-in movie theaters, bowling alleys, stores selling Rheingold and Bud. Wind from trucks scours the pavement. Clanking trains blast down the tracks. Creosote from factory chimneys trails after me, clotting my lungs with indestructible chemicals, Route 17 seeping into me with its industrial lust.
Some weekends, however, I stay home in my quiet suburb. I awake as if hungover: too much Route 17 to absorb on any given night.
Glen Rock days I sit on the spotless curb in front of my house, summer slanting over rooftops of identical brick ranch homes. How can you not love the perfection of such order: wall-to-wall carpets; rectangular windows unsmudged by exhaust, the always sunny days reflecting off glass; spotless stainless-steel kitchens. All the stop signs freshly painted red.
I pluck clover and weave stems into delicate chains. At the swimming pool, I’m groggy with chlorine, a mist of summer I want to believe will last into infinity. I suck Kool-Aid ice cubes until my tongue is the color of cherries or blood.
So isn’t the suburb too stifling, too perfect, too deadly to be in the running for “Best Place Never to Die, Ever”?
The suburbs are like mercury enclosed in glass: always measuring a too-cool, nondescript, barely alive temperature. Route 17, on the other hand, is splintered glass, quicksilver spilling across a feverish, macadam night: enough artificiality to survive nuclear attacks, plagues, an “F” in home economics.
Which location is my best bet to keep me alive forever? I put my money on Route 17.
I particularly need Route 17 now, about to leave Jersey for college. Again, again, the Plymouth and I are tugged to its asphalt force field. The bottoms of my thighs, in pedal pushers, sweat against white vinyl. Sun burns my left forearm pressed to the chrome window ledge. The car smacking into potholes keeps me awake. It all does: the heat, the sweat, the jolting, the metal. I love that the Plymouth is a Savoy. I am the sole occupant of a mobile hotel swinging through the bass beat of Jersey.
When I reach Deadman’s Circle, I hit the gas. I spin around the circle once, twice, as if driving an amusement park bumper car, daring death to catch me in this never-ending cycle. I swerve to avoid an unamused driver inching into the roundabout from a side street. He honks. I wave, smile, and press on, driving faster.
Although deathless itself, Route 17 assists in murdering the northern New Jersey wetlands. The Meadowlands is a lab test. The refuse in landfills steams all day, all night. Pesticides simmer in a slow flame. Iridescent rainbows oil the irradiated surface of evaporating puddles, leaving behind a suicide note written in neon and perfidy.
My father, a banker, funds loans for such development. Visiting his bank located off Route 17, I enter air scented with money. A few years later my father also becomes a member of the Meadowlands Commission that helps develop Giants Stadium.
Route 17 will never die. Development will never die. Nor will the memory of all this nonbiodegradable beauty.
Do I recognize that then or only now? How does memory preserve itself? Is it like a postcard of a scenic overlook on personal history? Wish you were here! Yes. But memory also preserves itself by rippling through time, reinventing itself: a new postcard with a different sentiment every year. Memory is magic: both static and fluid.
What, I now wonder, remains of that gold, sadly mortal Plymouth? Surely in some landfill outside Passaic one ingot of this car still exists shining from beneath mounds of refuse. Route 17 at least will always continue even though, unlike Route 66, it will never have a hit TV show or a popular song. It only has me—Miss Route 17—to sing its praises.
After a local newspaper advocates for the elimination of Deadman’s Circle, it is replaced by a conventional intersection controlled by traffic lights. A thirty-mile-long barrier replaces the grass median in the 1970s, the same decade the highway north of Paramus becomes eight lanes. In the 1980s, an overpass condemns the last traffic light.
But that hasn’t happened yet. And Route 17 still thrives, anyway.
I swerve, without signaling, into the parking lot of a diner, curved and silvery as an Airstream trailer. I slam on the brakes. Almost dusk, dyed-to-perfection rose-gold sunlight reflects off the metallic surface. A boy and girl kiss in a car parked a few spaces down from me. He wears Army fatigues, and I know, or imagine to know, he’s shipping off for Vietnam in the morning. Their windows are closed, the air-conditioning running.
I sit in my car waiting. For something. For the moment when the essence of Route 17 will rise up around me, when I become one with the highway, embody it. I rest my head on the seat back and close my eyes. Horns, air brakes, tires. A siren in the distance—sounds of emergencies—reminding me I am the one still breathing.
I cross the parking lot and push open the door to the diner. The sudden blast of cold feels like brain freeze behind my eyes. I order a burger, fries, chocolate milk shake, food with enough preservatives to transmogrify my iffy human cells into an immortal New Jersey goddess.
After eating I hit the road. A mile down the highway, the neon sign on the bowling alley outlines a ball rocketing into pins over and over. It beckons. Inside, I slip into rented shoes, scuffed and worn, smelling of sweat. How could I be happier, what with my hair teased and sprayed to an impermeable Aqua Net helmet? Eyelids shadowed. Lips opalescent pink. Red-and-blue neon beer signs flash. The jukebox rocks. It rolls. The lanes swirl with solider-than-solid bowling balls. Pins clatter. The setup racks rattle into place. I love all the clanking, the thudding, the huzzahs. After securing a lane, I slip fingers and thumb into the holes of a turquoise ball. I hug it to my chest. I step onto the polished wood floor. I fling the iridescent ball down the alley. It wavers and wobbles to the end knocking down three pins. My next ball gutters. Who cares? There’s always another rapturous swirl down the alley.
A guy at the intersection of juvenile delinquency and ruin slouches over offering beer and a jaundiced smile. I smile back. My crush on him is immediate and hard. I see him the next night and the next in the bowling alley. During the day waiting for him, lost in the mirage of heat shimmering off asphalt, I feel jaundiced, my throat parched with dengue-like fever, teenage drama to the nth degree, energizing me.
The crush lasts all summer. Until fall. When the fever finally breaks to a fine blue stubble of desire. Only then do I realize it’s a lesser crush than my one on Route 17. Or maybe he was only metonymous with Route 17. He’s part of my fever—a form of limerence, acute longing, haunting thoughts and desires—to possess all the gaudy, everlasting artificial life it offers. Route 17, all lit up like Vegas, is better, because it’s real.
After saying ’bye to the boy in the bowling alley, I, once again behind the wheel, reenter the stream of headlights and taillights. No actual stars are visible—which eventually burn out anyway—only neon. I vibrate in all the flowing, blinking, streaming, twinkling as the Jersey night smears past.
Hemingway said all true stories end in death. But he wasn’t from Jersey, so what did he know? Or maybe Jon Bon Jovi was right when he said heaven looks a lot like New Jersey. Regardless, in this moment, whether Heaven or Hell, the Plymouth is my current means of transportation for surviving it, outdistancing it.
Who knows what’s possible when you undertake a road trip mapped to discover a route with bridges and tunnels, detours and alternate byways, to circumvent death—driving through Time not just Space—steering among past, present, future peregrinations without end.
Don’t live or think or remember or drive as the crow flies. Live like your memories, which exist in loops and mazes and circles within traffic circles.
Surviving death is labyrinthine. Every stop along the way, every scenic overlook, is part of the story of survival: every word—resurrected archaic or current slang—every discovered memory, every off-and-on-ramp, every exit and turnoff. Every entrance. Nothing is insignificant.
I pull my glittering Plymouth time machine to the side of the road near an outdoor movie screen. The engine idles. Giant movie stars, night after night, hover godlike over the awed assembly: Paul Newman, Elizabeth Taylor, Warren Beatty, Natalie Wood. Their starry faces glow, projected against the backdrop of night. The movies end. Cars roll from the lot. Tinny voices, through speakers knocked from their posts and dangling on frayed wires, call out: Come back, my darling.
Call out: My God, it’s alive!