Novel Treatments / The Way South: Chapter 1 (Analysis)

Chapter 1

A few days before my 26th B-day, three Mexicans followed me into the bathroom at a local bar in my hometown, San Tana. I had been drinking vodka from a plastic bottle tucked in my pants and had gotten to the point where I was guzzling people’s beers and rubbing up against random
girls on the dance floor.

I don’t think anyone ever deserves a ping-pong ball bump on the forehead or the experience of waking up in the emergency room with stricken parents looking on. But in a way I had it coming. As I set my vodka on a urinal, I looked back over my shoulder just as a burly Mexican in a cowboy hat sent a bottle slamming over my head.

Lights out.

Vaguely remember an aggressive cop talking trash to me.

Me half-unconscious talking shit back.

Ambulance wailing.

Coming to the next morning in a throbbing fog, my parents at my bedside hands over their mouths, eyes wide with worry.

I remember some intern, probably younger than myself, cavalierly tossing off the expression: “He got a nasty bump on the head.”

No shit doc. Though that could sum up what had just happened to me, and in a strange way, I guess, what was about to happen to me.
Those first few days after being released from the hospital, I had difficulty focusing my attention on anything for a prolonged period of time. Luckily the diagnosis was only a minor concussion, though I did resolve never to touch hard liquor again. I’d a history of losing not only inhibitions but also all judgment, becoming an imp, as one of my friends put it. I figured if I stuck to beer, I’d only become somewhat impish. Maybe think twice about drinking somebody else’s beer.

This drinking thing probably wouldn’t have been too much of an issue had I just stuck around town and done my usual weekend bar routine. But I’d been getting very restless those days and I’d just about exhausted anything diverting in my hometown. (That was probably part of the reason I was guzzling down vodka in a Mexican cowboy bar in the first place. For my hometown, at least, that was pretty damn edgy.) I got to thinking that I had to take off for a little while. Take a break from everything. Go see the world.

Of course the bump on my head should have reminded me that it was probably best to settle down and not go wandering off, or at least not go wandering off and getting blackout drunk.

But when a notion lodges itself in my skull, it’s very hard for me to just let go of it. I have to see that notion through, whatever it maybe, to the end.

What had been missing was a crucial element—responsible for many people not following through on their extravagant fantasies—that suddenly presented itself in the form of a windfall.

I’d been toiling away more-or-less diligently at a software company for close to two years, trying to sell IT bigwigs a software that I would never use, didn’t know how to use, nor ever cared to use.

Much more diligently, I tracked the company’s stock price. Especially a week after getting knocked out, when I was even less able to focus on “making my number.” Trance-like, I lost myself in the stock as it went up and down like a faulty EKG reader.

Then something began to happen. I was not privy to the why, occupying one of the lowest rungs on the ladder, but I really didn’t care—our stock price began to surge.

“You think it’s going to break 30?”

I’d been caught looking at the ticker, but hardly felt guilty. This was March madness in late November for our entire office. Either way it didn’t matter. Ian was one of the lone people in the office I cared for.

“Actually, I was just waiting till it broke 50.”

“An optimist. How much would that make you worth? You’ve been here longer than most of us, right?”

“Two years. As for net value, I know the rough figure, but I like to weigh my profits in how long I can.”

“Long you can?”

I scarcely tried to whisper as Ian leaned up against the inner wall of my cubicle. “Get out of here for, how long I can take an extended break.”

I figured the adjoining cubicles could pick up every word, but I felt the louder I spoke the more I was committing an act of rebellion, a prelude to actually quitting Softtech as soon as the stock price could buy me a couple of months abroad. Or maybe such gall was attributable to the bump on my head.

Perhaps louder than he should have, given he was actually “going somewhere” in the firm, Ian confided.

“I’m not from this place as you can probably tell from my accent.” Ian was originally from South Africa but most people in the office assumed he was British.

He continued, “So I can totally understand what you’re saying. Remember though,” Ian looked down at his coffee, furrowing his brow, “it’s always a lot easier talking about leaving than actually leaving.”

“40. I’ll leave when it hits 40.”

“30 man. Don’t wish for too much.”

“That sort of talk is going to drive the price back down below 20, bozos.”

The biting voice of my district manager, Spackmann, burst out from a couple of cubicles over. “And you’re not going anywhere till you bring me some frickin’ leads, Phillips. So start dialing.”

David Spackmann was the office hotshot, almost doubling the sales of the second most prolific rep. This success pretty much gave him carte blanche on whatever came out of his mouth. It also permitted him, I suppose, to exhibit a childishly demented part of himself. I dreaded when he’d come behind me and put his finger under my nose.

“Stinky pinky, Phillips. You like that?”

In reality, I don’t think I really helped him too much and almost felt that management’s faith in me had dwindled by the time they’d assigned me, two weeks after my start date, to Texas under David Spackmann, the last rep who needed any support.

As far as the firm and I went, there was a mutual ambivalence. I’d grown up in San Tana, California and only returned after graduating four-years on the East Coast for college because the job market here was sizzling. Now I was back, working at Softtech, and I could not stop thinking of a way to leave. For some reason I tied geography to progress, believing that if I was living in another city, even doing a job I didn’t care for too much, I was in someway progressing.

Other times, I came to believe it wasn’t just San Tana, that there was something else pervading most of America, some homogenizing force that was lock-stepping us into place, a force that promised us the world but made us roughly the same in our misbegotten fantasies.

Or at least that’s how I began to talk, spending weeknights at a strip mall, at the Pink Taco, a gaudy chain with a meth-ed up smiling taco as a mascot, and, more importantly, 2-for-1 drink specials.

I stuck to beer and would continue on about how I felt I was missing out on the world everyday I spent on the phone. Luckily, I had grown up here and had friends who were kind of enough to indulge me my gripes (though I’m sure some they were beginning to wonder if the bathroom blow hadn’t knocked some screws loose in my head.)
But with each beer I drank, the more I came to believe I was on to something.

“I want more, anything more.”

It was two weeks post-knockout and I was with my friend Jonas and his wife Kathy. They’d already had three children though they were only 25 and 26-years old. This comment didn’t seem too convincing to either of them.

I tried again. “I’m looking for some more out of life. A little adventure. You know, where you feel like you’re having an experience that nobody else is having. I don’t really get that driving to work each day.”

Like many of my friends in San Tana, Jonas was on a different career trajectory. He usually offered similar counsel whenever I was having one of my recurrent mini-crises. This time wasn’t much different.

“You just need to settle down with the right girl.”

“Why not go to Africa and help out some orphans,“ Kathy offered, perhaps a bit more realistically.

I pictured these bedraggled orphans huddled around me as I constructed flimsy shacks on some sun-scorched savannah.

“I am not thinking Africa. But if someone had told me five years ago that I toiled away all those years in college just to answer some sales line at a software company, shit maybe I would’ve gone to Africa.”

Jonas looked at me skeptically.

“Probably would have joined some militia group though. I’m not an orphan guy,” I added with a shrug and a gulp.

Thankfully, I wasn’t alone in this feeling of being stifled by my current circumstances. My friend Salvador, who’d grown up part of his life in Panama, then traveled about the U.S., before settling down in San Tana (the market was sizzling) vehemently, and stylishly, refused to give in to any homogenizing forces.

He’d drive about in a 1970’s Grand Marquis, one of those boxy sedans the length of an aircraft carrier, blasting Latin pop music and crooning with the windows down.   Despite profuse chest hair, he swore by brightly colored silk shirts. During the week, he slaved away as a web designer. Come weekends he would drink too much, become impish and regret it Monday morning. We got along well.

That said, he still agreed to meet me deep in the suburban wasteland of The Pink Taco. But not without a quick rant.

“Man, this place is everything I hate about America. People here think they’re going native by ordering quesadillas” (He pronounced both ‘ls’ derisively.)

“And don’t forget the lemon wedge in your Corona,” he added.

But I think that’s exactly why I chose the Pink Taco; it provided easy fodder for our diatribes. He roundly took the bait. “The true irony is I bet this is the only place that doesn’t have Mexicans in the kitchen.”

“Yeah and that smiling taco is just creepy.”

With a smirk, I bought him a bottle of Corona, and he settled down next to me like a conspirator. “I’m just trying to save up some money. Maybe buy some property here. But I got to get out of here.”

Hearing Salvador talk like that as I sat at the Pink Taco, scanning the nearby tables of chubby types with chubby tykes, I had difficulty suppressing the urge to jump in the Grand Marquis with him and start barreling down all the way south to border and on and on until the tires were worn to hubcaps deep in some jungle town in Nicaragua.

I took a long swig and listened as he went on.

“See the thing about you and I is we’re free spirits. And we’re also young. There is this large nipple,” (Salvador didn’t care much for social graces and mimed a gigantic breast above his face), “and we need to suck it for all it’s worth. San Tana,” he said, looking back down at me, “is where you come when you’re done sucking and want to have kids.”

“Our kind,” Salvador continued, “usually never come back.”

“Then, let’s just get out of here. Get on a bus or take a car and just go south. Hitchhike if we have to.”

I was hoping he’d suggest the Grand Marquis. Instead he said, “And end up where?”

“I don’t know, just keep going.”

Salvador’s eyes burned briefly. “Sounds good…but you know we got to have some destination, something to look forward to.”

“Let’s go all the way to Panama. You’ve got family there still, right?”

“My mother lives there. And I’ve been meanin’ to go back. Can never find the time though. Always working.”

Salvador tossed back the rest of the Corona in one gulp and glared out into the restaurant as if all the patrons were directly responsible for denying him time off from work.

I kept pushing. “We could just head out in a few weeks and keep on going. Maybe get there in a couple of weeks, in time for X-mas.”

I saw myself X-mas day on beach drinking the best coconut (sufficiently diluted with pineapple juice as to not get too impish.)

“But both of us would have to get a lot of time off work.”

Salvador hadn’t drunk enough beer and was thinking practically. Still, he was right. There was no way to pull this trip off with the allotted time the typical corporation feels is enough to recharge the batteries.

I massaged the bump on my head again.

“I’m going to quit. And do it.”

“Do what?”

“I’m just going to quit my job, cash out my stocks and get on a bus headed south. Blow past the border and head straight into…” I paused for a moment as though realizing I suddenly couldn’t account for where I’d put my keys. Then my finger came to rest on my forehead as though pointing at the answer. “Me-xi-co.”

“What do you mean by Mexico?”

I thought of the cowboys and my drunken idiocy. “Well I want to go straight south, but I’d planned on staying away from Mexicans for awhile.”

“Oh yeah, you’re little incident. Well, I’m guessing the Mexicans in Mexico are a little less aggressive. Unemployment has gone up lately here. People are on edge.”

“I’m on edge, just thinking about crossing through Mexico.”

“Why not fly somewhere?”

That made sense, and was the easiest way. But I felt getting on a plane, shutting your eyes and waking up eight hours later was cheating. Traveling over land and having the terrain unfold before you, each ridge hiding something beyond it, was a personal voyage, something profound. You could think of where you were going, where you had come from, and at each point you were intimately connected to the land. You could stop when you wanted to and live at the exterior of towns, hanging out in places foreigners seldom lingered.

That was when the idea of just heading south began to take place in my head. I read up on Mexico and Central America, tracing bus routes with my fingers, possible cities of interest. Mexico was no longer Acapulco, Cancun, and Mazatlan. Names like Atitlan, Tegucigulpa and Veracruz beguiled my imagination. But as adamant as I was on getting away, I wasn’t sure if I was prepared to go at it alone. I’d probably get robbed and taken advantage of, or worse yet, bored.

Though Salvador would not keep me out of trouble, he’d make good company. And with him, even if we just took an hour trip into Los Angeles, I felt a boundless sense of possibility about what could happen at each moment. Extrapolating this upon entire different lands and cultures made me giddy with excitement.

I was ready to propose this to Salvador when he picked me up later that week for to go to a Karaoke Wednesday, down at a dive bar. Salvador was dressed in a leopard skin blazer and purple slacks. He was clearly in his David Lee Roth mood.

The Marquis was a mess. Her floorboards were littered with beer cars, empty potato chip bags, computer magazines with torn pages and what looked like crumbed leaf matter. But with Salvador bellowing out the window in Spanish, I had no difficulty imagining us driving through lonely coastal towns, the locals coming out to greet us and skewering a pig on the beach to honor our arrival.

Salvador cracked open a beer and began to sing:

El un ciudad en el norte
Yo me fui a trabajar
Correr a mi destino
Por yo no llevar papel

The song came to an end. “Look around us, everything is becoming the same. They’re not giving us any choices. You can drive thousands of miles across America and there will still be a Starbucks next to a Jamba Juice next to a Bed Bath and Beyond.”

We drove by a new plaza the local paper had been touting for months as a boon to the area sure to create many jobs. I understood the direct financial, and I guess, social benefits for the community, but with pretty much the same sequence of stores as Salvador had just listed, I saw little actual community. That fact aside, the plaza glowed promisingly under a few lights.

“Yeah Sal, but you got to like how they’re killing the landscape in style. I mean back east, Starbucks aren’t made out of stucco walls and surrounded by palm trees. It’s pure California.”

“No, they’re just killing the landscape and California. When I first moved here, it wasn’t all corporate chains. There was this one ice cream shop I used to go to ran by an old Chinese couple. They would have a TV in one corner with really bad Chinese soap operas, but in the other corner they had Street Fighter 2. Now you just have these bright light places with their fancy ice cream names.”

“Yep, America is killing the ma and pa.”

I paused for a moment, sensing my opening. “And that’s part of the reason I want to just get in the car and start driving. I want to see something new. We’ll just take the Grand Marquis down. I’ll pay for most of the gas.”

“Yeah, man. Sounds good. I’ve wanted to do just get the fuck out of here for awhile. Got to get some time off work first.

“Well, it’s the holiday season. I say just squeeze out two weeks.”

“That’s not enough to get to Panama. Remember, we’d have to drive back.”

“We can bus it down, or even hitchhike and then just plane it back.”

Salvador looked at several CD’s near his feet. His head ducked below the dashboard as he foraged below sending the Marquis floating off to the side.

I quickly grabbed the steering wheel.

“Sorry man,” Salvador said recovering, “but this occasion calls for some good music…see, I’m thinking maybe I’ll be able to get some time off and we could make it to Mexico City for New Year’s. Gotta an ex-girlfriend who moved back there.”

Salvador started fiddling about with the CD player before landing on his favorite track.

  “If I don’t get out of here soon I’m going to go crazy.” Salvador pulled at his purple blazer as though trying to shake off some bugs.

“And, I’m serious about quitting work,” I continued. “About not turning around and just heading south. I’ll find a place where I want to stay awhile. I’ll try to learn some Spanish, fall in love with a beautiful senorita…”

“Yeah”

“…and start a new life there. Everyday will be an adventure. And if I need money, I’ll just teach English.”

I felt I had a pretty good momentum building so I got to the point. “But I need a partner in crime.”

“Por supuesto, amigo.” Salvador cracked a big smile, slowly nodding his head. “That’s the life. I should just quit too, but I got to make payments on the house. One of these days, man. One of these days I’m going to…”

Before he could finish his sentence, I saw two blood orange bars pop up in the rearview mirror. “Slow down—we got company.”

I was trying to be funny, but Salvador knew he was screwed.

“Pinche Cabron! I can’t believe this shit!”

I could feel the car move under me as it accelerated and the engine roared. For a second, I thought Salvador would start our trip a little prematurely with us blazing through Tijuana border control, a sea of red lights behind us.
But as quickly as he stepped on the gas, he stepped on the brake and brought us to an uneven stop along the side of the road. Still gripping both sides of the steering wheel tightly, he dipped his head lower and began spewing the most venomous sounding torrent of Spanish I’d ever heard.

With the Marquis docked near the light posts of another strip mall, I couldn’t help notice the junkyard of empty beer cans collected near his feet.

The police car had stopped right behind us. An officer had gotten out and walked to Salvador’s open window. A second officer shone a flashlight from behind the car.

“Sir, do you know why I stopped you?”

“Well, I was obeying the speed limit and I was just getting a CD and I accidentally swerved. So no, I don’t know why you stopped me.”

“Can I please see you drivers license, registration and insurance?”

I saw Salvador’s sneer as he reached over into the glove compartment. He shuffled frantically in the dark and knocked loose a couple of empty beer cans that had been stuffed into the glove compartment.

“Sir, have you been drinking tonight?”

“Officer, I’m just trying to look for my registration.”

“Sir, I’m going to have to ask you to step out of the car. Now.”

He turned on a flashlight, illuminating the bevy of beer cans with one sweep of his hand.
For the next fifteen minutes, Salvador went through a variety of field tests and what looked like mini-interrogations with two officers flanking him closely. I had put my head down in my hands, waiting for this to end, when the same police officer tapped the window. I hoped he wouldn’t turn out to be the police officer from the night at the Mexican cowboy bar, the one I’d cursed at through the fog of drunken semi-consciousness.

“Have you had anything to drink tonight?”

Luckily, I hadn’t been in the mood for beer, so I just told the truth and handed him my license.
He was heavy set and looked at me with a trace of disgust as though he were holding up a fruit and looking to see if there was a rotten spot. “I’m going to need you to step out of the vehicle.”

I looked in the rearview mirror at a handcuffed Salvador, his lips working quickly in what looked like the same aggressive Spanish from when he first saw the lights in Marquis’s rearview.

After having me touch my nose and count backwards by eleven from some prime number over 100, the cops quickly determined that I was sober and allowed me to call my parents.
My parents found me in the Crosstown strip mall, using the Starbucks as a shelter from the blustering wind. The way my father quickly looked away from me in disgust, made we want to remain outside in the chill night air under the unlit icon of the green mermaid.

And the diatribe I had to hear about how I was wasting my life getting in trouble with drunkards almost made a ride in the backseat of a cop car with a handcuffed Salvador seem enticing. In his anger my father drove the car as erratically as Salvador had just a moment ago and I tried to not laugh at the idea of my father and Salvador in the same drunk cell. That wasn’t too difficult though—I ended up having my Dad tell me how I was wasting my life and taking advantage of living at home at the age of 26. How it was about time I started taking responsibility of my life.

As his tirade revisited this same pointed several times, I thought back to those first few seconds, when Salvador had accelerated and the prospect of south seemed right before my reach.
Salvador ended up in the drunk-tank, sleeping on an unforgiving floor until 10 the next morning. The cops impounded the Marquis, and cleared the empty beer cans, I presume.

Along with the bump on my head, I saw Salvador’s DUI as an omen. Our plan, just as it was being birthed, had had a serious miscarriage. Salvador was hit up with massive lawyer fees and fines, and wouldn’t be able to drive for six months as this was his second DUI.

Trip over. Back to work.

I stopped looking at the ticker, even though it had hit 32. I kept thinking about what my father said, that I should grow up and plan on moving out, and not go running off and causing trouble. Wanting to take off south was some manifestation of this, I guess—some grand, misguided scheme to flee inevitable responsibility.

I figured I could at least pay homage to the idea of south and maybe put up some tacky postcard in my cubicle—palm trees and powder white sand, a few empty wooden boats beckoning from the shore. Though I sensed whatever it was I’d wanted entailed far more than just sitting on a beach.

In the end, not wanting to concede defeat to Ian (nor Spackmann, who probably knew what my designs were), I put my head down and started making more calls than ever. I even began taking a perverse, almost rapturous delight in touting the benefits of a web content management system that alleviated the gridlock plaguing web developers today. We deliver convenience, ease-of-use and an incredible return-on-investment. (Let it be said, my prospects didn’t find my pitch too convincing.)

When I called Salvador about a week after his arrest, he sounded resigned.

“I don’t think I could have gone traveling with you, anyways. Too much work to do. Looks like I’ll be here awhile. But it’s not too bad. I can always take the train into the city.”

“And you still got Karaoke Wednesdays.”

“Exactly. Anyways, I have to see my Mom in Feb. it’s her B-day, DUI or not.”

I could hear him exhale deeply into the receiver. “But there’s no life here, no energy. Where I’m from you live, man. Each day.”

I felt he was being melodramatic, and over the next week, I began to think that all this complaining about home while dreaming of some wonderland abroad was only a balm to make our dull lives here a little more palatable.

Though I had a feeling it would be just a matter of time before I ended up drinking hard liquor out of a plastic bottle again.

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