Nights In Baltimore

Everything waits for you, at home. Old lives are like suits: easy to hang up in the closet, under plastic, with promises that you’ll shake them out again when the occasion calls. It’s surprising to see, coming home, that everything works just as it should: the dog still sleeps with his tongue out, Mom still sneaks wine coolers on the deck, and the sink still drips, unless you bear down on the handle and wrench it to the right.

I wasn’t gone long enough to invoke that old truism: that you never really can go home. It’s true: my brother grew bigger, my parents slower, and the dog is starting to shuffle hesitantly down the stairs. But it was only really a few weeks in Perú, so life in general is toddling along just as it did before I left, and just as it did while I was gone. The only thing that really changed are the thoughts I let rumble around upstairs.

For one thing: I can no longer see jumbo SUVs without gawking. They’re huge, and lumbering, and while they can seat at least six squirming kids (or twenty Peruvians), they’re usually just manned by one Suburban mom: captain and crew for a good two tons of hurtling steel. Also, I sometimes excuse myself in Spanish, muttering “permiso,” to unknowing backs in supermarket lines or under my breath as I squeeze past a red light. I no longer think of soil and rocks in the same way, I take shorter showers, and I’ve begun to cast around for a pepper sauce that’ll ape ají well enough. There’s a little bit of Perú left in me yet.

And don’t let me tell you about all the hairy, horrible, hellish times we had in the Andes. God knows there were a lot of dopplegänger days, carbon-copied from some silly archaeology fable, but I’m glad we did it all. We climbed Machu Picchu, and got seriously fucked-up in Cuzco, and lived and ate and spent every last sol without an eye over our shoulders at our bank accounts. We peeled off, one by one, popped sleeping pills over Lima, and looked forward to the land of red-meat and Obama and strip malls and, thank God, Stanford.

You’d think I beat the traveling out of myself, one plane ticket at a time. And, for the most part, that’s true. I could go a long time without the squeaking leather and British lady announcers and knick-knack shops that pop out across airports like a rash. I wouldn’t cry if I had to stick to well-paved roads, and well-filtered water, and internet everywhere, all the time, at hyper-speed. Sound the anthem: America is swell.

But I still have a little grit in my shoes. I still have an itch behind my eyelids, to leave everything in the suitcase and book a Greyhound to somewhere where electrical power is seasonal thing, maybe the desert or the South or at least somewhere where they talk funny -- because goddamnit, we’re all starting to sound the same. Or maybe, fuck the ticket -- maybe it’s time to pull a Kerouac and wad up all my cash under my sock and stick out my thumb for Tucson, hop into the cab of a trucker named Jimmy (who goes by Kilo-2 on the radio), cower and munch my sandwich behind his seat at he hauls ass across the Plains; stomps the clutch and grinds the great gears and leans back and screams, screams in the red light from the dashboard, “we’re going to pull thru’ clear a’ Colorado by mornin’!” And I’d be off.

These are the crazy thoughts I think to myself as I run up and down the interstate, helping Bob with errands. These are the crazy plans I yank out of radio, high on rock riffs and the soulful shimmy-shake of Good Time Oldies. Sometimes, because I don’t have too many people to talk to, the thoughts turn back on themselves, gnawing at their own tails, like that two-headed, always-hungry snake, and I start to wonder why I’m wondering why I’m wondering. Maybe this is a lick of crazy, and I need to toss this lollipop; maybe I’m tired and could use a dinner-time catnap; maybe I need school like everyone else my age. One thing is for sure: these last two weeks are pulling every lever I have upstairs, and if I don’t get back soon to start telling stories, they may just slit me open and crawl out themselves, shaky on dreamtime legs and breath.

Someone tossed an anchor my way, though: my old friend Dawn Maxey is living on the north edge of Baltimore, pulling a post-grad at JHU. Her house is a beautiful old brownstone with bare-brick artistic walls, snappy modern chairs, and a loft bedroom with maple-honey wood floors. She is a queen of real estate. I visit her because we miss the West and our friends who are too much fun off their meds. I tour her about the north country, show her home, family, friends. We are stopped by well-meaning soccer moms who stab at the air with their fingernails and flap wrists and ask about my summer and “why am I not at school yet?” and do awkward chuckles when they remember our school’s cachet and say, nervously, “school is school is school.” They are right. And they are wrong.

On the way to visit Dawn tonight, I think of three new rules for the year. That is one of my new hobbies: reducing life to rules. When do I hit the blinker? Only when the angle of turn exceeds 70˚. Also, when do I stop on a run? One point two miles. Any more isn’t fun. The cars slide along the lanes like beads in a prayer wheel, tickling away at the distance. The truckers light their rigs in the night, slumped asleep on the road’s shoulder. I tip my non-hat to Jimmy (Kilo-2?), my imaginary Semi Savior, and think of those big blustering beasts in America’s night, rocking in the northern wind or thick in swampy air and rattling their jake-brakes like foghorns, swelling America’s roadways like incandescent ticks, a load so great that maybe one day the belts across the land will all snap and flutter in that northern wind. And then how will I get to Dawn’s house? New rule: no more crazy-people thoughts.

Here are my three rules, then: 1) Spend less on things. Spend more on experiences. I bought a sweater the other day in West Virginia, and only realized later that I did not love it six times as much as the $5 movie I watched earlier that day. I should not have spent six times that much. I should have saved it to go sky diving. 2) Listen more. People are interesting. I mean, really goddamn cool. And I haven’t yet learned how to talk and listen at the same time. So, I’m picking just one of the two. 3) Fall in love again. Don’t laugh at this one: this one’s the most fun (and, you know, the least). Straying from familiar shores will be tough, but there are always other adventures; other ports. There will be a purpose in it. Not all who wander are lost.